The Colonial Division of Space: The Significance of the Swaziland Land Partition

Literature › Works

Jonathan Crush (1980). The Colonial Division of Space: The Significance of the Swaziland Land Partition. The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 13(1). Boston University African Studies Center.

Type	journal article
Scope	Comparative and methods
Method	archival narrative
Period studied	1885–1914
Regions	Swaziland, Eastern Transvaal
Themes	origins segregation, agriculture land, bantustans removals influx, comparative theory
Citation key	crush1980

Argument

Crush argues that the 1907-1910 Swaziland land partition, presented by British officials as a just and impartial settlement, was structured by criteria that served white settler and metropolitan capital control over Swazi land and labour. One third of the country went to reserves and two thirds to settlers and the Crown. He reads the partition's spatial pattern (boundaries, soil quality, location of homesteads, treatment of chiefs, proximity to the planned railway and towns) as evidence of state intent. That intent was to restructure the indigenous mode of production, keep Swazi on settler land as labour, and minimise Swazi protest. The argument draws on a political economy framework and on colonial official correspondence and commission reports.

Evidence and method

Colonial Office files (CO 417, CO 879), Swaziland National Archives correspondence and Grey's field notes, Selborne and Coryndon memoranda, concession records 1884-90 (Fig. 1), Murdoch's 1972 land capability survey, and Grey's maps of reserves, homesteads and chiefly structures. The author's own Wilfrid Laurier MA thesis is also cited.

Findings

• Partition was settled as a one-third/two-thirds division, shaped by settler lobbying. (p. 7)

  Intense lobbying and reactive clamour by individual and corporate settler interests presaged a state decision to partition one third of the land surface for reserves and retain the remaining two thirds for settlers and the crown.

• Officials explicitly saw partition as a way to create labour reserves and give settlers control of land and labour. (p. 6)

  partition was the most satisfactory means of creating Swazi labor reserves and of according settlers direct control over land and Swazi labor.

• Most reserve land was poor, undermining the claim that the Swazi received the best land. (p. 9)

  Approximately 79 percent of the total area of the reserves was comprised of soil types ranging from poor to untillable.

• Most good arable soil went to settlers. (p. 9)

  69 percent of all good soil on slopes of less than 14? was expropriated from the Swazi for settlers

• Settlers retained the majority of every environmental zone, including the densely settled Middleveld. (p. 10)

  settlers were left with 70 percent of the Highveld, 51 percent of the Middleveld, 66 percent of the Lowveld and 73 percent of the Lebombo region.

• A large share of the Swazi population was left on alienated land, which suited the aim of securing a labour force. (p. 12)

  Of the 6,787 Swazi homesteads identified by Grey, only 3,914 (58 percent) were within the reserves.

• The High Commissioner wanted Swazi to remain as farm labourers on the Transvaal model. (p. 12)

  I want many of the Swazi to stay on the farmer's land and work for them the way they do in the Transvaal.

• Royal and chiefly structures were included in the reserves as a spatial form of co-optation to minimise protest. (p. 14)

  Of 124 chiefs, for instance, only one was left outside the reserves, and all royal households, cattle posts, and burial grounds were incorporated.

• Pre-partition concession-granting was extensive and mostly agricultural, producing overlapping land claims. (p. 4)

  Between 1885 and 1889, over 400 concessions were obtained from the Swazi king, Mbandzeni; of these, 245 conferred some form of agricultural right.

• The reserve system assumed population growth would later require added land, and a 1940s crisis in the reserves forced enlargement. (p. 16)

  he estimated that the reserves could accommodate an increase of 52 percent of the total population.