"How Beasts Lost Their Legs": Cattle in Tswana Economy and Society

Abstract

In this chapter, the authors demonstrate that the changing salience of livestock can only be fully grasped with reference to that total economy and its encounter with the forces of colonialism - a critical aspect of which was played out in the relationship between cattle and cash. In the early nineteenth century, the Tshidi lived on the Molopo plain, along the present South African-Botswana border. As a focus of everyday activity, cattle were the epitome of social and symbolic capital; the capital, to paraphrase the authors' opening statement, that linked a material economy of things to a moral economy of persons, and so constructed a total economy of signs and practices. Growing rates of male migration drew the chiefdom into the subcontinental political economy as a reservoir of labor, and ensured that money became the prime medium of exchange. In the early nineteenth century, the Tshidi lived on the Molopo plain, along the present South African-Botswana border.