The culture of failure: racism, violence and white farming in colonial Swaziland

Literature › Works

Jonathan Crush (1996). The culture of failure: racism, violence and white farming in colonial Swaziland. Journal of Historical Geography 22(2). Academic Press.

Type	journal article
Scope	Comparative and methods
Method	archival narrative
Period studied	1907–1940
Regions	Swaziland, eastern Transvaal, Natal, Witwatersrand
Themes	agriculture land, mining migrant labour, labour markets wages, origins segregation, business and state, comparative theory, resistance social movements
Citation key	crush1996

Argument

The paper argues that white farming in colonial Swaziland failed. Colonial officials nonetheless kept backing the settler as the only agent of development, in the face of mounting evidence. Settler racism, paternalism and farmyard violence were shaped locally by this failure and by struggles with Swazi tenants over land and labour, not simply imported from the metropole. Crush uses Hilda Kuper and Dorothy Doveton as opposing starting points. He traces the 1907 land partition, the settler lobby, the collapse of the tenant labour scheme, and the move to women's and children's labour. He uses this to challenge Said-influenced accounts that treat colonial racism mainly as a metropolitan projection.

Evidence and method

Colonial Office and Dominions Office files (PRO), Swaziland National Archives, Advisory Council minutes, the Pim report (1932), the settler press (Times of Swaziland, The Star), settler papers and memoirs (Wallis, Miller, Filmer, Forbes), Kuper's ethnography, an oral interview with a Swazi woman (Hlophe, 1990), photographs, and the author's earlier work.

Findings

• The 1907 land partition gave white settlers about two-thirds of the country and half its arable land. (p. 3)

  some 66 per cent of the land surface and 50 per cent of the arable land of the Swaziland Protectorate for white settlement

• The white population stayed tiny, undermining the vision of a white Swaziland. (p. 3)

  In 1911, there were only 1083 whites in the country. Twenty years later the number was still less than 3000.

• Even by 1931 most white farms were not occupied by their owners. (p. 3)

  By 1931, the number of white farms had increased to 500, but less than half were owner-occupied.

• Much white-owned land was held speculatively by absentees. (p. 6)

  were owned by individuals living outside the country, mostly in South Africa

• Lowveld ranching, the one viable form of white farming, was badly hit by the Depression. (p. 7)

  During the Depression, European cattle holdings fell by over 50 per cent.

• Colonial taxation was heavily loaded on Swazis to subsidise administration and white agriculture. (p. 8)

  Swazis were taxed more heavily than any other colonized people in the region

• Unlike Nyasaland, Swaziland's administration never shifted resources to peasant production. (p. 9)

  In Nyasaland, the failure of white farming prompted the colonial administration to direct more of its resources to peasant production.

• The partition left a large Swazi population stranded on white farms as tenants. (p. 12)

  In 1914, some 3000 homesteads (about 25 000 people or 25 per cent of the population) were left stranded on white farms.

• Young Swazi men preferred South African mine work to farm labour, so the tenant labour scheme collapsed. (p. 13)

  Thousands of young Swazi men were recruited each year for work on the gold mines of the Rand and the coal mines of the eastern Transvaal and northern Natal.

• Farmers turned to cheap female and child labour, paying far below adult male wages. (p. 15)

  When farm wages for adult males were running at 15 to 20s, women were paid 5 to 10s and children as little as 3 to 5s a month.