Land, power and class in the Thaba ‘Nchu district, Orange Free State, 1884–1983

Abstract

This paper offers a parochial illustration of the complex and inter‐related processes of dispossession by which Africans were first deprived of their own lands; then deprived of independent productive opportunities on white‐owned land; and finally concentrated in grotesquely small, over‐crowded and impoverished reserves. On the one hand, the story of Thaba ‘Nchu further illustrates a dominant theme of modern historiography: the dissolution of a relatively independent peasantry into an agricultural proletariat on white farms and a migrant wage labour force domiciled in the African reserves. On the other hand, by comparison with processes of dispossession elsewhere on the highveld in the late 19th century, the story of Thaba ‘Nchu arguably represents a peculiar variation on the theme: for here political incorporation was accompanied by the formal constitution of a black land‐owning class. Alienation of land took place to some degree directly through conquest but more significantly through the conversion of ‘traditional’ administrative rights into freehold titles and the consequent vulnerability of these to successive incursions of speculative capital. Nevertheless, within the confines of political incorporation and direct subordination to the South African state, there has been a striking continuity of dominance by a local black elite. All the inhabitants of the district were incorporated within the political structures of ‘separate development’, which gave rise to vicious ethnic antagonisms in the 1970s with a massive influx of Basotho refugees in the ‘land of the Barolong’.