The State and the Social. Ørnulf Gulbrandsen
put forward by Schapera and the Comaroffs raise the question of exactly how relationships resulting from royal FBD marriages can be manipulated to amalgamate the power structures surrounding the rulers. The answer varies according to context. In the case of the Northern Tswana, vast cattle herds enabled the rulers not only to exercise such manipulations. They were also highly instrumental in bringing potentially rebellious agnates into dependency as cattle clients.
Cattle clientship is established amongst the Tswana according to their institutions of mafisa and kgamelo. Mafisa is a contractual relationship by which a rich or wealthy herd owner places some of his cattle with another person who herds the cattle for the benefit of milk and some of their offspring. This practice can be found on all levels and at different scales. With the vast royal herds building up as a consequence of the dikgosi's monopolization of the highly beneficial trade of fur and ivory, they had the opportunity to place out large portions of the cattle, not only to potentially challenging rivals, but also a number of important dikgosana. The political significance of this practice as a measure to amalgamate the power structures of the Tswana merafe centred in the bogosi follows from the fact that mafisa cattle could be called back at any time.5 This powerful sanction on political clientship was further reinforced amongst the Bangwato who developed the institution of kgamelo; that is a contract by which the holder was compelled to return not only the cattle initially received by the kgosi, but his entire herd (see Schapera 1984: 249).
Although rise and expansion of the Northern Tswana merafe is attributable to the fact that they were located at the edge of the Kalahari where the dikgosi took great advantage – economically and consequently politically – of their monopolization of the vast wildlife in their respective territories, I reiterate that I do not want to pursue a determinist or evolutionist argument of ecology. The point is that cattle wealth and cattle-based trade amongst the Northern Tswana were mediated through social and political processes that favoured both state formation and large, compact settlements. I thus argue that there is no necessary connection between these processes and the environment (see Gulbrandsen 2007).
This point is particularly evident if we consider the ways in which these merafe expanded during most of the nineteenth century. At this time the Northern Tswana merafe were located in a region characterized by vast unexploited pastures and hunting grounds. Further east, in the present Transvaal, by contrast, demographic and ecological pressure was building up. The consequent violence and warfare brought many groups in flight westwards where they were attracted by a resourceful environment and mostly peacefully harboured in one of the merafe in focus here. These peoples and the peoples who had been conquered and incorporated locally, were of such a magnitude that they in due course comprised the numerical majority (Schapera 1952: v, 1984: 5).
It needs to be explained that unlike other so-called Bantu-speaking peoples in Southern Africa, the Tswana do not form large unilineal exogamous descent groups. On the contrary, the Tswana are organized in sociopolitical units known as kgotla; in English these units have long been referred to as ‘wards’6. Such wards are composed of a number (usually 57) of relatively small, agnatically structured, co-residential descent groups which may be related by marriage (and thus subsequently matrilateral ties). But neither the descent group nor the ward has ever been endogamous. A ward has a distinct location, with a relatively dense settlement pattern, and is also referred to as a motse (‘village’). Each of the agnatic segments is similarly referred to as a kgotla and motse. ‘Kgotla’ is also the name of the descent group's council place located in the open adjacent to the cattle kraal. This open space and the kraal are surrounded by family homesteads, known as malwapa (sing. lolwapa). Each ward is composed of six to eight such elementary entities which, within this context, are ranked with the ward kgosana's kgotla as the most senior one. The wards are the basic sociopolitical building blocks of the merafe, ‘as a basic feature of their social organisation’ (Schapera 1935: 207; cf. Schapera and Roberts 1975). The ward kgosana – who is also the head of the most senior kgotla within the ward – refers either directly to the kgosi or to a senior kgosana who is assigned the responsibility of a number of wards by the kgosi.
The kgotla of the descent group thus constitutes the link between the everyday world of the people and the politico-judicial hierarchy of the morafe. In Chapter 4 I shall elaborate on these interconnections in order to explain their postcolonial significance. Here I shall give an account of the ward as an organizational tool for sociopolitical integration under precolonial and colonial conditions. As already suggested, the wards are composed of a number of agnatic descent groups which are ranked. The ward kgosana is either closely related to the ruler or to a particularly trusted ‘commoner’.
The notion of ‘commoner’ is composite. It includes nonroyals of the ‘original’ stock as well as groups of people conquered or harboured at different historical stages. They are generally ranked according to the length of time they have stayed. Groups incorporated at an early stage were terminologically distinguished from those who could trace their agnatic descent to the founders of the morafe. The latter, named dikgosana, naturally enjoyed superior status. The former were called batlhanka (‘commoners’, lit. servants); which was an honorary matter of holding royal cattle (mafisa, kgamelo) or otherwise assisting the kgosi – indicated by also being titled basimane ba kgosi (the kgosi's boys). Immigrants of more recent origin, called bafaladi (refugees), were in turn ranked lower than the batlhanka.
The dominance of the ruling dynasty is underscored by the fact that those identified as bafaladi might, in the larger Tswana world, be of higher rank than even the hosting kgosi. For example, today there are groups categorized as bafaladi who can trace their origin to the ruling dynasty of the Hurutshe, who are recognized as senior to all three of the merafe under consideration here. Such ‘downgrading’ in the hierarchical order is, as indicated in the Introduction, justified by the Tswana maxim of ra tlou e tlola noka ke tloutstwane (‘when an elephant crosses a river, it becomes a small elephant’).
Finally, there was a distinct ‘underclass’ of people (mainly San and Bakgalagadi). As the dominant Tswana groups expanded their herds – and therefore needed larger territories and more herd labour – they stripped such people of any livestock they might have and put them to work for wealthy families, either as herders or as domestic servants. People belonging to this often-despised category, called malata, thus became part of the morafe on terms that amounted to serfdom (Wilmsen 1989: 99). For example, they were ‘deprived of their children or transferred from one man to another’ (Schapera 1984: 32; cf. Tlou 1977; Wilmsen 1989: 285ff.), a practice prevailing at least until midcolonial times. In such circumstances, it is comprehensible that there evolved a Tswana notion of a huge contrast between the ruling group found at the kgotla kgosing (‘kgosi's court’ or ‘the royal kgotla’) in the royal town – the epitome of ‘civilization' – and the mobile, ‘lawless’ people of the bush – hence ‘bushmen’. This hierarchical order is underpinned by an elaborate code of rank and respect, reproduced in a multitude of contexts – precolonial as well as postcolonial – spanning from the elementary family group to the royal court.
Socio-politically, this means that foreigners were systematically – and tightly – incorporated into the hierarchical sociopolitical order of wards which was spatially concentrated in large royal towns or compact outlying villages (this did of course not pertain to the mentioned ‘underclass’ of serfs unless they were brought in as domestic servants). This was, however, not only a matter of placement in the sociopolitical hierarchical structure. The forceful apparatus of capture at work in these merafe involved a persistent mill of cultural assimilation through the everyday practices of litigation in the context of the hierarchy of courts spanning from the kgotla of single descent group to the royal kgotla (see Chapter 4). It was by virtue of these processes that vast numbers of conquered or hosted groups, in due course, assumed primary identification with the Tswana morafe in which they were incorporated.
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