Landlords, Tenants and Colonial Social Engineers: The Farm Labour Question in Early Colonial Swaziland

Literature › Works

Jonathan Crush (1985). Landlords, Tenants and Colonial Social Engineers: The Farm Labour Question in Early Colonial Swaziland. Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 11, No. 2. Taylor & Francis.

Type	journal article
Scope	Comparative and methods
Method	archival narrative
Period studied	1907–1920
Regions	Swaziland, eastern Transvaal, Witwatersrand
Themes	agriculture land, origins segregation, labour markets wages, mining migrant labour, resistance social movements, comparative theory
Citation key	crush1985a

Argument

The 1907-8 Swaziland land partition was designed as a labour partition as well as a land partition. The colonial state paired it with a state-regulated system of labour tenancy to give weak settler estates a cheap, stable and tightly controlled labour force. The scheme largely failed. Swazi households stayed on white farms mainly because of conditions internal to Swazi society (chiefly territoriality and tribute obligations), not because they accepted tenancy. They resisted through verbal contracts, desertion, moving between farms or to the Transvaal, and recruitment to the mines. Settlers were also hemmed in by capital shortages, and the state was torn between supplying farm labour and supplying the Rand mines. Crush concludes that legislation does not decide class struggle unless material conditions are propitious.

Evidence and method

Swaziland Archives (RCS, D-series files, Hlatikulu court records), Annual Colonial Reports and monthly reports of Assistant Commissioners, PRO Colonial Office files, Killie Campbell Library papers, Rhodes House papers, the 1921 census and Swaziland statistics, and two tables of homestead counts compiled from official files. Also contemporary newspapers and the Pim report (1932).

Findings

• Labour tenancy was explicitly designed to supply a weak settler agriculture with controlled labour. (p. 3)

  The establishment of a state-regulated system of labour tenancy on the white farms created by the partition was explicitly motivated by the need to provide a weak agricultural sector with a cheap, stable and tightly controlled labour force.

• Reserves failed to contain most Swazi homesteads, leaving a large population on alienated land. (p. 9)

  Despite the fact that reserve boundaries were drawn with the explicit intention of including as many Swazi as possible within the reserves, more than 40 per cent of Swazi homesteads were eventually excluded (Table 1).

• Resettlement to the reserves was minimal. The homestead count on settler land rose after the partition. (p. 9)

  Indeed, it appears that by 1914 the net number of Swazi homesteads on settler land had actually increased by several hundred (Table 2).

• Before 1914 settlers had little leverage, and competition from Rand migration pushed farm wages above Transvaal levels. (p. 8)

  farm wages increased steadily over the five year period from 1909 to 1914, to the point where some settlers were forced to offer wages in excess of those for farm labour in the Transvaal.

• Tenant labour was paid well below the ordinary farm wage, because landlords built an implicit rent into the wage. (p. 17)

  In 1917, for example, the ordinary farm wage for male labour was 15 to 20 shillings per month while tenant labour was remunerated at only 10 to 12 shillings per month.

• Tenants avoided written contracts, which fell to near zero, because verbal agreements were not legally enforceable and let them leave at will. (p. 19)

  In the Mbabane district, for example, forty-seven contracts were signed in 1914-15, seven in 1915-16 and only one in 1916-17.

• Landlords used the Transvaal Masters and Servants Act against individual workers, but desertion persisted. (p. 19)

  Between 1913 and 1916, 138 Swazis were tried for desertion under this Act, with a conviction rate of 88 per cent.

• Freedom of movement between farms, crown land, the reserves and the Transvaal gave tenants bargaining power against eviction threats. (p. 18)

  It was this relative freedom of movement which gave tenants some bargaining power and severely emasculated the landlord threat.

• Landlords turned to female and child labour, paid far below adult male wages. (p. 22)

  At a time when farm wages for male adults were running at 15 to 20 shillings a month, women were paid 5 to 10 shillings and children 3 to 5 shillings for a month's work.

• Persistent chiefly territoriality may explain uneven reserve deterioration, as much as absolute land shortage. (p. 13)

  the impoverished state of parts of the reserves identified by some observers in the 1930s may have reflected a maldistribution in reserve resources resulting from the durability of pre-capitalist structures of territoriality and land allocation

• The settler estate sector grew slowly and remained small-scale and under-capitalised. (p. 4)

  Between 1911 and 1921 the number of farms in the country increased from 141 to 331 and the number of whites involved in agriculture rose from 108 to 533

• The failure stemmed from material constraints and three-way struggles over labour between landlords, tenants, chiefs and mine recruiters. (p. 23)

  The defeat which followed arose both from the material conditions of settler-estate production and the struggles over labour power between landlord and tenant, landlord and chief, and landlord and mine labour recruiter.