Homestead, State, and Migrant Labor in Colonial Swaziland

Abstract

During the past few years, a number of researchers have begun to address the ways in which the rural periphery in southern Africa responded to its incorporation into the regional capitalist economy during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their analysis has focused increasingly on the ways in which the agrarian structure and production of rural societies have both exerted influence on and been transformed by this incorporation.4 With the significant exception of Rhodesia5 (and of course post-Land Act South Africa), most of these studies have dealt with areas where the Africans were able to hold on to significant blocks of consolidated land. But this was not the case with Swaziland, which, like Rhodesia, was subjected to extensive land (and in the case of Swaziland, water) alienation consequent to white concessioneering and settlement.6 And like Rhodesia, this introduced a new dimension to the history of the area.