3.1-De la Independencia a los noventa

In the mid-twentieth century anti-urban ideologies were widespread in southern Africa. Amongst settlers, an anti-urban ideology was strengthened by the linking together of ideas about urbanisation, environment, health, cleanliness and morality.31 Environmental decline in the countryside was seen as the root cause of an urban drift that was leading to the degeneration of both European (the ‘poor white’ problem) and African (‘detribalisation’) society. In 1938 one of the foremost conservationists in South Africa noted that:

All will agree that the greatest social problem confronting South Africa to-day is the drift of both European and Native populations from the country to the towns.

The further complications that must inevitably arise as a result of this competitive association of races in the struggle for existence do not concern me here, but my present interest lies in the root cause of this country-to-town exodus. The root cause is not far to seek. The condition of the people tells its own tale and the state of the country speaks for itself. Poverty and hunger are indelibly written on both.... Land that formerly produced virile whites and healthy and contented natives no longer continues to do so. The original valuable vegetal cover has been removed, the soil has lost its fertility, and much of the precious land has been

30 Maloka, ‘All Chiefs are Shepherds’.

31 Dubow, S. ‘Race, Civilisation and Culture: the Elaboration of Segregationist Discourse in the Inter- war Years’ in Marks, S. and Trapido, S. (eds) The Politics o f Race, Class and Nationalism in Twentieth Century South Africa (London, 1987), pp. 71-94, p. 75. See also Jochelson, K. ‘Moral Tribes and corrupting Cities: Explanations o f African Susceptibility to VD’ paper presented to Societies of Southern Africa in the 19th and 20th Centuries seminar series, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University o f London, 25 October 1991.

washed away. Man has misused the land that formerly gave him health and wealth.32

Cowen and Shenton look to the metropolitan Fabian colonial nexus for the source of ideas about the need to preserve African (rural) communities but there was also a longer standing romantic agrarian ideology in southern Africa. A romantic

agrarianism can be found particularly in nineteenth-century missionary ideologies and the celebration of a settled yeoman peasantry. John and Jean Comaroff trace the roots of this missionary ideology to the same experiences in early 19th century Europe that influenced French positivism, specifically the social disruption caused by rapid industrialisation. They note that many early members of the influential London Missionary Society (LMS) and the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society were originally from the parts of Britain which were undergoing industrialisation.33

Through-out the colonial period there were a number of influential administrators in the High Commission Territories descended from these early missionaries, especially from the LMS aligned Paris Evangelical Missionary Society (PEMS) whose activities were based in Lesotho. Other locally recruited officials were also descended from a missionary background. Neil Parsons’s has argued that these mission-connected administrators, recruited to the Union Native Affairs Department and the High Commission Territories, established a local southern African variant of trusteeship.34 Mahmood Mamdani has noted that a shift in local to metropolitan recruitment to the colonial service took place in the early decades of this century as the practice of administration by indirect rule spread across Africa:

Both Britain and France ended the local recruitment of colonial administrators between 1890 and 1914 and reorganised the colonial administration into a formal service along lines of the upper echelon of the metropolitan bureaucracy. The corollary of district-level decentralisation was that the agents of district administration were recruited, trained and placed from the centre. This was not simply a territorial shift, from local to metropolitan recruitment, but also a change in social emphasis. During the 1920s, the Colonial Office began to recruit

administrators chiefly from Oxbridge.35

32 CAD, Havenga papers, A38/29, Memorandum by I.B. Pole Evans, ‘The Needs o f the Land and its People’, 31 December 1938, quoted in Dobson, B. and Goudie, S.C. ‘Environment, ideology and politics: soil conservation in South Africa 1910-1948’ unpublished paper, Department o f Environmental and Geographical Science, University o f Cape Town, 1996.

33 Comaroff, J. and Comaroff, J. Ethnography and the Historical Imagination (Boulder, 1992), p. 196.

34 Parsons, N. ‘Colonel Rey and the Colonial Rulers o f Botswana: mercenary and missionary traditions in administration, 1884-1955’ in Ade Ajayi, J.F.and Peel, J.D.Y. (eds.) People and empires in African history: essays in memory o f Michael Crowther, (London, 1992), pp. 197-216.

35 Mamdani, M. Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy o f Late Colonialism (London, 1996), p. 77.

While a similar (though much later) trend towards metropolitan recruitment can be detected in the High Commission Territories many of those recruited through the British graduate recruitment programme had southern African roots not dissimilar to those of the local recruits. One early Oxford graduate recruit to the Basutoland service, Patrick Duncan, was the son of the first South African appointed to the post of

Governor General.36 Another recruit from Britain reported that the staff recruited directly from South Africa were not (except on the odd occasion) the ‘brutal Afrikaner types... Mostly they were a good bunch from mission stock’.37

There were other strands to anti-urban ideologies in Southern Africa, including one linked specifically to Afrikaner nationalism. While it is not possible to fully disaggregate these diverse strands it is clear that the concern amongst Basutoland administrators to stabilise the rural population was not simply a reflection of the economic demands of the South African mines but also reflected of some deep-seated ideological beliefs.

2.3.1. Russell Thonton and development in the High Commission Territories

One noteworthy South African recruit to the High Commission Territories who was especially concerned with stabilising the African rural population was Russell Thornton, previously the Director of Agriculture in the Native Affairs Department.

Thornton had been one of the first senior officials in the Native Affaris Department to call for the economic development of the South African reserves. Visits to the

Bechuanaland Protectorate and Lesotho in the early 1930s were important in

convincing Thornton that Betterment policies did not go far enough and there was a need for both general economic development and territorial expansion of the areas occupied by Africans in order to support populations that were in excess of the agricultural carrying capacity.38 In his report on Lesotho in 1931 Thornton’s first recommendation was that the territory of the country should be expanded (something he admitted was not likely!), or else a significant number of Basotho should be resettled in the Bechuanaland Protectorate (which he believed could carry a higher population if

36 See Driver, C J. Patrick Duncan: South African and Pan-African (London, 1980), p. 35-36.

37 Transcript of a Tape Recording by Sir Robert Latimer, CBE (dated 3 May 1972), interviewed by Dr. A. Sillery, Rhodes House, Oxford, Mss.Afr.s.1444, p. 27.

38 Thornton, R.W. ‘Bechuanaland Protectorate: Report on Investigations’ Feb 1951, NTS 1034/46/419 quoted by Rich, P. State Power and Black Politics in South Africa 1912-51 (London, 1996), p. 132.

economic development took place).39 He was prevented from publicising similar views about the South African reserves by more senior officials in the NAD because of fears that any call for the increase in their area would be used by opponents of the ‘native bills’ being debated at that time in a parliamentary select committee.40 His decision to move to the High Commissioner’s office was largely a result of his unhappiness with the piecemeal way economic development policies were carried out in the reserves 41

Thornton was central in the growth of a development ideology in colonial Lesotho and the conceptual link between the labour migration system and rural development.

In a letter to the Principal Agricultural Officer in the Basutoland administration in 1931 Thornton wrote:

With a drop in the value of agricultural products more and more labour is

becoming available, which labour it will be extremely difficult to absorb. At the present time... there is a big surplus of Native labour and, as it is only by going out to work that the people are able to exist, it becomes imperative... to find wages and means to enable people to live in times like the present. When a sufficient number of Natives can go out to work on the mines, on industries and in other industrial centres, and amongst European farmers, they are able, through the wages secured, to maintain themselves and pay their taxes. When this source of labour for securing money fails, this position becomes acute... As far as one can see, there is only one way of overcoming this ever increasing difficulty and that is by improving methods of stock raising and agriculture.42

Thornton argued that Lesotho’s ‘bleak economic position’ was not the result of over­

population per se but rather because of bad agricultural and pastoral practices.

Environmental decline, especially pasture deterioration and soil erosion, was the result of these bad practices and it also made solutions to them more difficult. To return to Quinlan’s original dichotomy between conservation and development it is noticeable that Thornton’s recommendations to the Basutoland authorities included both development (increasing the output from agriculture) and conservation policies (such as the fencing-in of denuded grazing areas).43 For Thornton, and for all the colonial administration, there was no contradiction between conservation and development.

39 LNA 212, Thornton, R. W. ‘Report on Pastoral and Agricultural Conditions in Basutoland, c. June 1931’.

40 Lucas, F.A.W. to Herbst, J.F., 8 January 1932 and Herbst, J.F. to Lucas, F.A.W., 11 January 1932, NTS 1769, quoted by Rich State Power and Black Politics, p. 132.

41 Milton, S. ‘The Apocalypse Cow’.

42 LNA 212, Thornton to Wacher, 28 March 1931. In the original document the last sentence o f this passage was underlined in red; it is not clear by whom.

4^ LNA 212, Thornton, R., Report on Pastoral and Agricultural Conditions in Basutoland, July 1931.

In the livestock sector the emphasis was on increasing the output per beast and decreasing the total number o f livestock.

The Basutoland authorities tended to label projects designed to prevent soil erosion, such as the massive contour bank building programme, as development projects. The Basutoland section of an article on ‘economic development* by Evelyn Baring, the High Commissioner between 1944 and 1951, concentrated almost entirely on the contour bank building programme in the lowlands. The policy to close huge swathes of mountain grazing land to all livestock was also briefly described in the article (in keeping with many of his statements, Baring gave an exaggerated version of the policy and described grand future plans for its extension).44

Recognising that development doctrine was concerned with ameliorating the negative impacts of capitalism means that the apparent contradiction between development and conservation simply disappears. As we will see in chapter 3, environmental decline was seen as one of the external indicators of the negative impacts of capitalist

accumulation. Rural development and conserving the rural environment (in particular its soils) were regarded as part and parcel of the same development project. There was a strong connection between the aim of stabilising the rural population and stabilising the rural environment.