Hands up who knows where Roossenekal is. Yes, you at the back of the hall, you’ve got it: in Mpumalanga, a one-horse town and the horse is a 1960s Ford Mustang on bricks. But what I deeply suspect you don’t know, is that one of the most crucial battles in SA history took place there.
It happened almost exactly 140 years ago, during the first violent subjugation of a black people by the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek (ZAR), after which their land was dealt out in a Kimberley-style claims rush and the two tribal leaders sentenced to death. One was hanged in Pretoria, at a spot where the Kgosi Mampuru high security jail now sprawls, named after him. The other was jailed for 17 years, the Nelson Mandela of the 19th century.
Twelve more campaigns followed the same pattern: rural tribes on the fringes of the republic were goaded into rebellion, they were declared treasonous and broken up in scorched earth sieges and their land taken over. The survivors were slapped with war fines, which they could pay with years of pass-controlled labour on white farms.
In British colonies around the ZAR similar strategies were followed. By the time the Brits turned on the Boers and applied the same to them, in a land grab aided by the 20th century’s first concentration camps, and ultimately ending in the establishment of the Union of SA, all property bar about 7% belonged to whites or the state.
The problem with this potted history is that while there is extensive documentation of the individual campaigns, many of the overarching aspects remain unresolved. There are plenty of pointers that there was a systematic strategy of ethnic cleansing agreed upon by the British and the Boers, but nothing definitive. All we know for sure is that there were many secret meetings of which parts went unrecorded.
Thirty years ago the Rapport Prize was awarded for Die Derde Oorlog teen Mapoch (The Third War against Mapoch), my study of hundred years of war against the Ndebele peoples, ending in the apartheid security police’s persecution of the royal house in the 1980s. It started as a project of Taurus, the anti-apartheid Afrikaans publisher of which I was also a director.
It had been part of the battle against censorship, and when SA changed almost overnight with the unbanning of the ANC and others, I thought we had won too. Though it was the country’s most lucrative literary prize at the time, the censorship continued, albeit in other, softer ways. Rapport newspaper, where by coincidence I worked at the time, reduced its own marketing exercise to a tiny picture instead of devoting the usual full page to the prize.
As for the English translation, publishers were relucant. Anti-apartheid stalwart Ad Donker loved the book, but when he died and his firm was taken over by Jonathan Ball, the latter reneged on my contract. Ball came with the same reasoning used over the years by others: nobody is interested in homelands anymore.
Yet 30 years later not only do I see KwaNdebele’s story as still deeply relevant, the initial treatment the book got seems to have been equally prophetic of the way we deal with our current crises — a dichotomy of overexposure and shutting people out at the same time.
KwaNdebele itself was a “weekend special” homeland. It was not originally on the National Party’s list, as the Ndebele peoples — consisting of the Ndzundza and Manala — were regarded as too small and their territory not rooted in traditional sites after being scattered from the Roossenekal area, or Konomcharelo in Sindebele. They were the quintessential refugees, the surplus among the surplus people of colonialism and apartheid.
But the distinctive patterns used by a handful of creative women artists on the walls of their modernised square houses, were appropriated by Nationalist propagandists as proof of deep-seated ethnic difference among black people and so they got last-minute homeland status on properties around the “royal kraal” at Siyabuswa. Except that the royal house declared the territory open to anyone fleeing apartheid, and refused to accept independence.
A puppet homeland government was installed and security police put onto the royal family. Dissidents were jailed and persecuted in a horrifically violent campaign of terror by a homeland militia, which only ended when strongman Piet Ntuli was assassinated by a police death squad, probably the only state-sanctioned murder that could be chalked up as “good”.
Phrases and incidents stick out from all the archival research I did those three decades ago, nights and days spent in KwaNdebele and dozens of interviews. There was the puzzle of support for the homeland government. The Ndebele king was a deeply revered man and his sons, the “two princes”, widely lionised, and in 1988 in SA’s first election in which ANC supporters openly took part royalist candidates scored a landslide. Yet before this happy ending homeland MPs kept voting in the puppet regime. I came closest to an understanding when my chief informant, Mighty Mgidi, explained: One day you see this guy coming past on his bicycle, and the next day in a Merc and you know....
His sketch pointed to the huge gap that existed between the unsettled, permanent refugee existence of the homeland denizen and the enormous carrots dangled by the apartheid state. It was open in its desire to create a black middle class by hook or by crook as bulwark against dissidents and traditional groups still dreaming of ancestral lands.
The corruption cut both ways. White entrepreneurs set up front companies in the homelands and laundered money by the tens of millions, often using channels and connections facilitated by secretive Afrikaner and English organisations. I visited a highveld vineyard where the wines were still in secret vats, unavailable for viewing let alone tasting and the office consisted of several male managers and dozens of female typists clacking away at mysterious tasks.
Complete understanding only arrived, though, when I took a deep dive into the shallow waters of the smallest homeland’s politics, to discover the well from which much of the SA political economy was sourced. And the royal house’s story was an analogy for the situation in other homelands too, as the representatives of the old order in which all land belonged to black people and whites were land-seizing settlers.
In the 1880s at Roossenekal the new order was being installed through military conquest disguised as policing, in the 1980s the Afrikaner-led government used administrative sleight of hand for its future of balkanised states. This time land was being returned, through expropriation of white-owned farms with handsome compensation, another engine of corruption. More crucially, though, the royal house, like traditional structures elsewhere, was restricted to the constituencies on its own land in elections for the KwaNdebele government.
“Civilians” from expropriated land made up most of the election candidates eligible for the “parliament”, and creating suitable specimens was really the object of the “grensnywerhede”, the subsidised enterprises set up in areas bordering on white-owned land. BEE, meaning co-opting entrepreneurs and corporate officers into fulfilling the transformation signalling needs of the existing system, was not invented by the post-1994 ANC and its big business advisers, but by the National Party.
The KwaNdebele middle class did arise, but they hotfooted it across the veld to clandestine houses in townships such as Vosloorus and Mabopane, and not many years later they formed a resource for cadre deployment by the ANC. The Nats rightly believed there would be a measure of antagonism between the middle classes and the royalists, but miscalculated the former’s mobility. Similarly some of today’s black economically empowered do not appear to care much for their roots or for SA and now hotfoot it abroad to fulfil the diversity signalling needs of white institutions in the West.
During my project, I smuggled myself inside the heavily guarded department of bantu affairs in Pretoria, but reached a dead end with a senior official who refused to give me certain documents. Disappointed, I threw an anti-apartheid tantrum, but instead of calling security, he asked me what the title of my book was going to be. When I used the word “war”, he admonished me: why didn’t I say so from the start? He thought I was just another Nat-supporting student trying to get an easy PhD.
Yes, he said, the actions against the royalists were a war, but he couldn’t dare call it out, as he would be sidelined and shut up. He proceeded to procure a confidential “blue book” from the 1930s from special archives. Up to that time, various union governments had been trying to expand tribal lands, in the realisation that 7% was just too little to make any separatist policy work. But the various maps from across the country showed how they were stymied over and over again by one fatal flaw: the many ersatz chieftains and even whole invented tribes who laid claim to ancient lands.
This was rooted in those land conquests of the British and Dutch republicans. Crown prince Mampuru himself had fled from Sekhukhuneland after his extended family was wiped out in clashes over royal succession. The Ndebele regent, Nyebela, refused to hand him over to the ZAR, and war ensued. It was fought with guns and trenches and tunnels on both sides and the first armoured car on SA soil. Neighbouring black groups were co-opted with promises of cattle and land and many false chieftains were installed, also after the other wars of subjugation.
Fast forward to the 1980s and these further divisions among homeland citizens were cynically exploited by the apartheid planners in their divide and rule tactics. Fast forward again to today and the clashing claims of false and genuine clans and their leaders, leading to expropriated land occupied by people not suited to farming, is one of the main reasons for the failure of land reform.
I firmly believed the dire history of the Ndebele group would become part of the mainstream narrative, as it encapsulates the injustice of colonialism so well.
In these surroundings of falsity stretching back for generations the smarter people from KwaNdebele had no compunction in switching allegiance to and from the homeland government. It had always been a refuge for gangsters too, not only because of the royals’ open-doors policy but because as a dumping ground for haphazard forced removals from all over the then Transvaal it was hard to trace anybody.
Almost everybody in KwaNdebele had a second or even third identity. One youngster doubled up as toyitoying “comrade” and SABC propagandist. Someone asked me in all earnest whether I was really an Indian doctor. The king himself was a truck driver in his youth. White police and military began acting clandestinely in the royal house cause. When the hated Brig Hertzog Lerm was appointed police chief a death squad was put on to him and his policeman son — but they confused them with another father and son and assassinated those two.
The king was called the Inyanga, the Great Crocodile; the big boss by law of them all, then president PW Botha, who took a direct interest in the homeland, was known as the Groot Krokodil. One provisional title for my English translation was The Wars of the Crocodile Kings. KwaNdebele became known for the follies of its government.
One minister spoke of the homeland one day growing to such stature it would be able to launch space missions — there was going to be an Ndebele on the moon. Another told lurid tales of the royal house slitting the throats of dozens of independence supporters and turning a dam in the area red with blood. When the national government refused to arm a huge contingent of “kitskonstabels” with mere weeks of training, Lerm ordered them to carry pickaxe handles.
Today I see KwaNdebele all around me. SA is governed by ministers even more comical than those of the erstwhile homeland. The shifting identities necessitated by apartheid are now prescribed by the internet and social media; one can argue that it is a new phase of Western colonialism wreaking similar devastation through division of societies.
Instead of SA having become an equalising, opened-up republic, divisions just seemed to have solidified and new ones to have arisen. The irony is that the Ndzundza royal house is not recognised by the ANC government, even though it was one of only a few to have resisted co-optation by the Nationalists. And whereas battles of succession rage among many others, KwaNdebele’s seems to be among the more stable.
KwaNdebele really was an enormous labour dormitory camp, the exhausting travelling workers had to go to Pretoria and the Rand was captured in David Goldblatt’s famous book of photographs, The Transported, and Joseph Lelyveld’s reportage in Move Your Shadow. Numerous reporters, activists and politicians repeated the journey in what today would be called virtue signalling, including Mac Maharaj, who as ANC transport minister declared that subsidies for bus services would be suspended.
Every now and then another ignorant politician will try to wish the homeland away, as in apartheid times. But the subsidies are still being paid, and Moloto Road now carries so much traffic it is called the Road of Death due to the horrific accidents having accumulated.
I firmly believed the dire history of the Ndebele group would become part of the mainstream narrative, as it encapsulates the injustice of colonialism so well. But the 1880s wars and their aftermath are still barely mentioned, let alone taught in schools. All that seemed to happen was that their culmination in the Anglo-Boer War has also been relegated to a few paragraphs in text books.
Perhaps the Parsons inquiry into the KwaNdebele uprising of the late 1980s gives a clue. Whereas the actions of the homeland government were exposed daily in horrific detail, faction fighting was given as the cause in the final report. The active interference and provocations of the national government were underplayed or simply ignored and the deeply embedded corruption, from which top members of the establishment profited, was neatly bracketed and dealt with in a separate report, which then proved extremely difficult to get hold of.
Something similar is happening today. The enormous gap between the haves and have-nots still exists, but now on a national scale everywhere. On the one side survivalist communities exhausted by hunger, on the other an elite into which a little English and command of new shibboleths, this time vulgar-Marxist instead of ethnic ones, earn you entry and lucrative rewards as a cadre. That gap still drives an ethics in which preventing your family, clan or identity group from sliding back into debilitating poverty, easily trumps abiding by the austerity codes of a political economy run from afar. Fronting has been transformed into BEE and exploitation by apartheid’s white vultures has become outsourcing extended to “consultants” by bribed cadres.
In these circumstances it is not wise to refer too much to you or your family’s origins in places like KwaNdebele. Or even use the word “homeland”. In those areas 25% of SA’s population may still live, but they do not count, like in the past they are surplus people, about whom we know very little. And neither do the people in the squatter camps on the edges of our cities count, many of them coming from latter-day KwaNdebeles such as Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Malawi.
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