Crisis and Catharsis in the Development of Capitalism in South African Agriculture

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Timothy Keegan (1985). Crisis and Catharsis in the Development of Capitalism in South African Agriculture. African Affairs, Vol. 84, No. 336. Oxford University Press on behalf of The Royal African Society.

Type	journal article
Scope	Economics and economic history of apartheid
Method	archival narrative
Period studied	1893–1924
Regions	northern and eastern Orange Free State, southern Transvaal, Witwatersrand hinterland / arable highveld
Themes	agriculture land, origins segregation, labour markets wages, resistance social movements, politics ideology elections, business and state
Citation key	keegan1985

Argument

Keegan argues that the 1913 Natives Land Act did not itself destroy black sharecropping or create capitalist agriculture, as recent revisionist work implies. Booms in 1893-95 and c.1908-13 raised competition between white and black producers for labour, grazing and credit, and white populist mobilisation and landlord collusion turned that tension into a crisis. The Act acted as a catharsis: it legitimised landlord ultimatums, forced stock sales and evictions, and brought tenants more tightly under landlord control. It also extended Masters and Servants criminal sanctions to all tenants. Sharecropping was transformed rather than suppressed, and the capitalisation of white farming remained uneven and cyclical until the state backed it and mechanisation arrived. The argument draws on local archival and oral evidence, and warns against inferring social reality from legislation.

Evidence and method

Magistrates' annual reports (Justice Dept files), Standard Bank inspection reports, Land Bank reports, the Natives Land Commission evidence (U.G. 22-1916), Bloemfontein and Pretoria archives, Free State Volksraad minutes, farmers' press (Farmer's Weekly, The Friend), Senate select committee evidence, and oral history interviews from the Wits Oral History Project.

Place in the debates

• Liberal vs revisionist interpretations of the rural economy and the 1913 Natives Land Act (see Agrarian transition to capitalism and the fate of the African peasantry). Rejects the liberal image of a stagnant, backward countryside. Accepts the revisionist stress on early black peasant success and white agriculture's vigour, but criticises it as unilinear and functionalist, ignoring local specificity and the gap between law and practice.
• Did the 1913 Land Act destroy the black peasantry and create capitalist agriculture? (see Agrarian transition to capitalism and the fate of the African peasantry). Only partly. The prohibition of sharecropping was largely unenforced and the main effect was tighter landlord control and extraction. It was neither the decisive blow nor mere consolidation of earlier law, as Wickens implies.
• Economic-functionalist vs ideological explanations of white assaults on black tenants (see Agrarian transition to capitalism and the fate of the African peasantry). Narrow economic calculation often favoured sharecropping, so populist ideology, poor-white anxiety and organised white mobilisation must be added to explain the assaults.

Findings

• Revisionist historiography treats the 1913 Act as the decisive blow against black peasant production, which Keegan then qualifies. (p. 2)

  the 1913 Natives Land Act is given pride of place as the single most devastating blow aimed at black peasant production.

• Absentee and undercapitalised ownership was widespread, which made sharecropping attractive to many landholders. (p. 4)

  In 1918 (the earliest date for which such statistics are available) 36 per cent of farms in the Orange Free State and 45 per cent in the Transvaal were owned by absentees.

• Tenants' livestock gave them market access and reduced dependence on labour service and credit, so landlords came to resent it. (p. 12)

  As long as grazing land was available to them, many African households loosened their dependence on rendering labour and on credit.

• Black land purchase on the Transvaal highveld before 1913 was a significant form of resistance and security-seeking. (p. 14)

  according to information given to parliament, 78 farms were bought by blacks.

• Evictions and forced stock sales followed the Act, yet the Act's formal sharecropping ban was ineffective and not implemented. (p. 22)

  The formal prohibition of sharecropping in the Act was in large part ineffective, and indeed it was not even implemented by the authorities

• The boom brought only limited capitalisation of white farming: Land Bank loans mostly paid off existing debt rather than buying productive equipment. (p. 23)

  In the first year of operation of the Union Land Bank in 1913, ?231,639 out of ?615,335 granted to Free State landowners was for liquidation of liabilities

• Without mechanisation there was little incentive to eliminate peasant production; technology was close to what black households used. (p. 23)

  In the absence of widespread opportunities and motivation to mechanize (as was the case a few decades later) there was little incentive to suppress the peasant economy entirely.

• Sharecropping persisted openly for decades and was ended by tractor mechanisation. (p. 24)

  It was the tractor more than anything else which eventually put a stop to it.

• The Act's real legal impact was to classify all black tenants as servants under the 1904 Masters and Servants Ordinance, adding criminal sanctions for farmers. (p. 25)

  The Act laid down that all black tenants were to be defined as servants under the 1904 Masters and Servants Ordinance

• The Act's significance lay in tighter landlord control and surplus extraction, not in abolishing sharecropping. (p. 27)

  The significance of the 1913 Land Act and the great spate of forced removals that it sparked off lay not in its effectiveness in abolishing sharecropping, as was the Act's formal intention

• Sharecropping was transformed rather than suppressed. (p. 28)

  Sharecropping was not yet suppressed; it was transformed.

• White agricultural capitalism was uneven and cyclical, and ultimately depended on massive state support. (p. 28)

  In fact the capitalization of white agriculture was an unsustainable, cyclical, uneven development, manifested in different degrees, and ultimately achieved only with the massive support of an advanced capitalist state.

Evidence ledger

Sources used

Source	Kind	Period	How used
U.G. 13-1927, Report of Agricultural and Pastoral Production, 1925	official statistical series	1918 (absentee ownership); report for 1925	Supplies the 1918 share of farms owned by absentees (36% OFS, 45% Transvaal) as evidence of undercapitalization and reliance on sharecropping.
Bloemfontein Archives, VR 381, 1894 (burgher petitions)	state archives	1894	Petitions from white burghers evidence the agitation against black tenant competition behind the 1895 anti-squatting laws.
Orange Free State Volksraadsnotule (1895-1898)	parliamentary debates	1895-1898	Shows populist sentiment (I. S. Ferreira) and that the 1895 anti-squatting laws were seldom implemented against big grain farmers and absentees.
Pretoria Archives JUS 1/401/10 etc., Annual Reports of Magistrates 1910-1913 (Department of Justice)	state archives	1910-1918	Magistrates' reports document the financial boom, easy rural credit, land inflation, and tenant resistance and trekking.
Standard Bank Archives, Johannesburg, Inspection Reports 1909-1915	company records or reports	1909-1915	Used for local credit conditions, bank lending, land price inflation, overstocking and the post-1914 slump in land prices.
G. T. Amphlett, History of the Standard Bank of South Africa, 1862-1913 (1914)	company records or reports	1910-1914	Provides the growth in bank branches (5 to 17) and loans in the Free State to show the expansion of commercial banking.
Annual Reports of the Department of Justice, 1911-14 and U.G. 36-1919 (1918 report)	official statistical series	1911-1918	Evidence of rapid land price inflation and the 1918 Vredefort magistrate's statement that the Land Act changed little.
U.G. 13-1914 and U.G. 2-1915, Land and Agricultural Bank of South Africa Reports (1913, 1914)	commission or official report	1913-1914	Shows Land Bank lending concentrated in the inland provinces and that Free State loans mostly liquidated debt (231,639 of 615,335) rather than funding productive capital.
Senate Select Committee on Closer Land Settlement, S.C. 6-1910/1911 and S.C. 9-1910/1911 (evidence of C. A. Madge)	parliamentary debates	1910-1911	Documents landowning interests behind land settlement and the Transvaal Land Owners' Association's holdings.
The Farmer's Weekly, The Friend, The Farmer's Advocate (1908-1924), letters and reports	newspapers periodicals	1908-1924	Used for farmer agitation, labour complaints, congresses (Boerenbond), land company prospectuses, and the 1924 deputation to Malan.
Bloemfontein Archives, CS and DA files (e.g. CS 4502/07; DA 72 2065/1/10; CS 1325/i/09)	state archives	1907-1910	Contemporary reports on tenant trekking and white complaints about black tenants.
U.G. 22-1916, Natives Land Commission, Minutes of Evidence	commission or official report	1913-1916	Primary testimony on black stockholdings, evictions, trekking, and landlords' and farmers' views of the Act.
U.G. 17-1911, Blue Book on Native Affairs, 1910	official statistical series	1910	Cited for burgeoning stockholdings of black tenants.
Pretoria Archives JUS 5/262/13, Natives Land Act 1913: Opinions re. Position in the Orange Free State	state archives	1913-1914	Magistrates' opinions on implementation of the Act, evictions, African petitions and legal interpretation.
Oral History Project interviews, African Studies Institute, University of the Witwatersrand (1979-1984)	interviews oral history	1979-1984 (recalling c.1905-1930s)	Informants' memories supply evidence on goat sales, third-share sharecropping, land purchases (Mogopa), and the social decline of sharecroppers.
A Community Man: An Oral History of Barney Ngakane (SAIRR, 1983)	interviews oral history	1983 (recalling 1912-13)	Barney Ngakane's account of Botha's meeting with farmers and Cronje's ultimatum to tenants illustrates intimidation.
House of Assembly Debates, 18 February 1913	parliamentary debates	1913	Source for the figure that 78 farms were bought by blacks in the Transvaal in 1910-12.
Matsetela, M.A. thesis (Univ. of London 1981) and 'Life Story of Nkgono Mma-Pooe'	secondary literature compilation	1890-1935	Draws on its oral-history material for sharecropping and the Mogopa land purchase.
Orange River Colony, Report of the Natives Administration Commission (1909)	commission or official report	1908-1909	Its conclusion that anti-sharecropping legislation could not be enforced is used to show the Act's impracticability.
U.G. 22-1932, Report of the Natives Economic Commission, 1930-32	commission or official report	1930-1932	Evidence of Archdeacon Hill showing the post-1913 shift from half shares to labour tenancy on a company farm.
Carnegie Commission, Poor White Problem (Grosskopf, Rural Impoverishment and Rural Exodus, vol. 1)	commission or official report	1929-1930	Shows that sharecropping persisted illegally and evasion of the law continued into the 1920s-30s.
Sol T. Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa (1916)	other	1913-1916	Used as evidence of mass forced migration in 1913, though its detail is treated as suspect.

Inference

Quantification: Illustrative figures.

Regional historical case study of the northern Free State and southern Transvaal highveld, reading local magistrates' reports, bank inspection reports, commission evidence, newspapers and oral interviews against the legislative record to argue that local social struggle rather than law explains the Land Act's effects.

Key claims

Claim	Basis	Strength
The Land Act's formal ban on sharecropping was largely ineffective and unimplemented; sharecropping persisted and was transformed rather than abolished. (p. 393)	Magistrates' reports (U.G. 36-1919), Land Commission testimony, Grosskopf's Carnegie report, Matsetela and interviews.	Partial data
The years before 1913 were a financial boom with abundant credit, land inflation and state aid that intensified white-black competition for land, labour and grazing. (p. 376)	Magistrates' annual reports, Standard Bank inspection reports and Amphlett's history, Land Bank reports.	Partial data
The Act acted as a catalyst for landlords' ultimatums, forced stock sales and mass evictions of wealthier tenants in 1913. (p. 391)	Natives Land Commission evidence (U.G. 22-1916), magistrates' reports, JUS files, Plaatje.	Partial data
Stock ownership by black tenants expanded rapidly after 1905 and generated conflict over grazing, leading landlords to force stock reductions. (p. 381)	Land Commission evidence, Blue Book on Native Affairs 1910, Standard Bank reports, farmers' letters and oral interviews.	Partial data
Africans responded to insecurity with land purchases in the Transvaal (78 farms in 1910-12), later closed off by the 1913 Act. (p. 383)	House of Assembly Debates 1913 plus interviews and Matsetela's work on Mogopa and the Ngakanes.	Partial data
White agriculture was undercapitalized and capital-hungry; most mortgage credit paid off debt rather than productive investment, so sharecropping retained cost advantages for landlords. (p. 392)	1918 absentee ownership statistics (U.G. 13-1927) and Land Bank 1913 report loan breakdown.	Partial data
By designating all tenants as servants under the 1904 Masters and Servants Ordinance, the Act strengthened landlords' legal and criminal sanctions. (p. 394)	Keyter's testimony in Land Commission evidence (U.G. 22-1916), legal advisors' responses.	Illustrative or anecdotal

The author's caveats

The author flags that polemical sources such as Plaatje are suspect in detail and that farmers' letters are exaggerated diatribes and ideologically encrusted. He notes informants cannot give precise dates for the change to third shares and that conclusions on the sharecroppers' changing social characteristics are tentative and based on interview evidence. He also stresses that regional variation limits generalisation.

Gaps in the evidence

The argument relies on selected magistrates' reports, bank inspection reports and testimony rather than systematic series on tenancy terms, stockholdings, evictions or land prices by district. Farm-level records, land deeds registries, Land Bank mortgage data and census returns by district would allow tests of changes in tenancy forms, stock numbers and absentee ownership; many of these existed then and survive in archives. Oral evidence recorded seventy years later is subject to memory problems and cannot be corroborated against contemporary quantitative data.

Replicability: Data described but not public.