Pula: Botswana Journal of African Studies voI.17(2003) no.2
  A Comparative Analysis of Two Labour Reserves in Early
 20th Century Southern Africa
 Tidimane Ntsabane
 Department of Sociology
 University of Botswana
 email: ntsabane@mopipi.ub.bw
 Introduction
 Southern Africa has through much of its 20th century history been characterised by a
 centre~periphery regional economic system. At the centre has been South Africa (minus
 its African reserves) and the rest of the region the periphery. Key has been the migrant
 labour system whereby the centre has been able to extract cheap labour from its periph-
ery. The cheapness, however, is disputed by among others Burawoy (1976). The la-
bour-supplying periphery was actually composed of two tiers. On the one hand were
the African Reserves, comprising the Transkei, Ciskei, Bophuthatswana, etc., politi-
cally a part of South Africa. On the other hand were the independent states of Bot-
swana, Lesotho, Swaziland, Malawi, Mozambique and Zimbabwe. A question that very
often arises is how the two tiers reached the same position in the regional economic
system, given that the independent states were not, like the African Reserves, subject to
the whims of state intervention by South Africa. Two broad models are frequently ad-
vanced to answer this question: the Lewis model of development in labour -surplus
Third World countries (Lewis, 1954), and the Marxist analysis (Legassick, 1974;Bundy,
 1979; Wolpe, 1972; Arrighi, 1970 and others). It is the inadequacies of both models
which constitute the focus of this paper, which is an attempt to compareand contrast the
processual development of the two tiers oflabour-supplying states in Southern Africa.
Three related theses will be advanced: first, that foreign imperialist interests, and not
economic supply and demand factors, served to reshape pre-capitalistsubsistenceecono-
mies in the region; second, that the introduction of capitalist relations of production
required the creation of sources of cheap labour from within the existing prosperous
~asant production sectors within the economy; and third, that migrant labourw~ never
Just a source of cheap labour but also a system of how power is organisedand reSIstance
fragmented (Mamdani,1996) ..
         The centre-periphery relationship seen among these SouthernAfrican states rep-
~esents,in most respects, a microcosm of the various dialecticaldichotomies,on a broader
~ternationallevel, between developed and underdeveloped nations, between metr0tx:
~ISand satellites. The question at the centre of development theory ~ been why thIS
mequality? exists between rich and poor nations. The North-South DIalogue ~Brandt,
1981) represented practical concerns about this dichotomy. It is generally beheved, at
least by those who subscribe to the dependency and underdevelopment theories, that
development and underdevelopment are outcomes of the same process.
         One such unequal exchange occurs in connection with migrant labour.. The un-
derdeveloped peripheral states of Southern Africa periodically exported thetr s~on~,
able~bodied men for work in the developed centre. The essential characte~of thIS~-
gration is one of dichotomization between centre and periphery,the separatIonof mam-
tenance and renewal costs for the migrant labour (Burawoy, 1976). The former costs
are.in the form of wages, temporary housing and the provision offood and bealth-care,
while the latter costs are to ensure the long.term survival oCthe labour supply through
                                             105


the sustenance of a below subsistence pre-capitalist production system. The separation,
however, is not complete as the subsistence has to partially rely on remittances from
migrants and the migrants, on the other hand, rely on the latter secto~ as a means of
social and economic security to return to when they no longer have a Job. Such costs
are normally borne by one economy that of the place of origin. In the case of migrant
labour, however, the host economy meets only the maintenance costs, while renewal or
reproduction costs are left to the peripheral economy, that of the supp~ier.states. ~e
dichotomization process involves the use of supermarket forces to maIntaIn a certaIn
level of precapitalist production while at the same time ensuring a flow of labour from
this precapitalist sector to the capitalist production system in accordance with its labour
needs. The result has been the integration of the peasantry into the wage employment
sector while maintaining their pre-capitalist relations of production in their own state.
This process has been clearly noted for Rhodesia and South Africa by Arrighi (1970
and Bundy (I 979), respectively.
         The two tiers of peripheral states under present consideration have diverse histo-
ries. The African Reserves, comprising about 13% of pre-I 994 South Africa's land
surface, were created by the South African government through the 1913 Land Act.
This date does not mark the start oftheir peripheral function in the economy, but it does
serve to emphasize the formalization, through direct state legislative intervention, of
their peripheral status. As a part of South Africa and subject to the whims of the state,
migrant labour was never just a source of cheap labour but was also a way of addressing
the age old question of stabilizing alien rule (Mamdani, 1996). Incontrast, the neighboring
countries that comprise the second tier of the periphery were not subject to such legis-
lative action. Still, both tiers have shared the same relationship with the centre. The pre-
capitalist social formation of both tiers was originally characterized by prosperous,
self-sufficient, communal production systems (Bundy, 1970 and Parson, 1980). In both
cases, these were restructured to suit the needs of an emerging capitalist mode of pro-
duction which came with the development of mining and commercial agriculture in
South Africa and secondly to regionally further a form of British indirect rule.
         These centre-periphery relations have stimulated ideological and intellectual con-
troversy. The ideology of the ruling apartheid regime of pre-l 994 South Africa affirms
white supremacy, the belief that blacks will continually be dependent on whites. The
underdevelopment that characterizes the peripheries is attributed to the culture of the
citizenry (Lipton, 1977), and the migrants from these states are seen as "living off the
resources of another country rather than argumenting the number of those trying to eke
out a subsistence from traditional agriculture at home" (Leistner, 1975, p. 40). Closely
 linked to this school, at least in its basic theoretical assumptions, is the Lewis model of
 development in labour-surplus Third World countries (Lewis, 1954). As will be elabo-
 rated upon later, this model explains underdevelopment in terms of inequality, which is
 seen as leading to differences in factor payments and wage rates. Migrancy is, there-
 fore, simply a tangible effect of the invisible hand of the market as labour flows from
 areas oflower factor payments to those of higher ones. There is an obvious flaw in this
 an~lysis. Essentially it fails to place the phenomenon within an historical perspective
 W~IC~ would, f~r example, show the evaluation of underdevelopment through the ap-
 plIcatton of vanous extra-economic measures.
         The other mode of analysis that has predominated has been the Marxist view.
 This ~iew ~olds that the introduction of capitalist relations of production in mining and
 later In a~culture, and their dire need for cheap labour, mark the beginning of a con-
 certed <i.rive for peasant production underdevelopment to create a labour supply source.
 The major proponents of this view have focused on the internal dynamics of capitalism
                                               106


in South Africa and on how it created its own periphery in the African Reserves. Little
if any ~lysis .has considered a similar process adopted in connectionwith neighborin~
coun~es - whlch were also to function as part of the periphery. In most analyses, the
function of these latter countries is that of serving as escape routes when South Africa
could not generate enough labour within the Reserves and thus had to turn outside. The
implicit assumption here is that the impact of capitalist development on pre-capitalist
social formation has been limited to the political boundaries of South Africa.
        Overlooked in this analysis are several key facts: British capital dominated the
mining industry; Britain was the colonial power in the neighboring countries; South
Africa was a former British colony and was at some point in its history subject to indio
rect rule like all other British colonies; and since the founding of the Union in 1910,
South Africa had been urging the incorporation of Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland.
The first three points imply British cooperation in the generation of labour and a re-
gional approach to Southern Africa, in which one sector provided the minerals and the
other the labour and the subjects. The last point - the incorporation bid - suggests that
South Africa sought total control over the generation of labour in the three neighbour-
ing countries similar to the control it had in the African Reserves. All three points
support the view, to be advanced later in this paper, that South Africa's neighboring
states were subject to the same underdevelopment process as seen in the African Re-
serves. This similarity will be demonstrated in this paper through a discussion of the
Transkei and Botswana, two areas that are representative, respectively, of the African
reserves and South Africa's independent neighbors.
The African Reserves: The Case of the Transkei
The Transkei, as an African Reserve in South Africa, represents one tier of the periph-
eral states _that which lies within South Africa and is thus subject to the directpolitical
whims of the South African state. The fact that it has developed as part of the periphery
is a consequence of and a response to the limitations placed on it by the South African
state and was thus reflective of its political status vis-a-vis the centre. The p~~ess of
underdevelopment _the development of a reservoir of cheap labourfor both mInIngand
farming in South Africa _ involved the processual dichotomization of the labour~force
maintenance and reproduction functions of the economy, i.e., the creation of a l1llgrant
labour force. The key functions of the state became those of bringing such a. labour
force into existence and of ensuring its continued existence in the long run, l.e., ~e
conditions that created it had to be produced again and again (!arn~s, 1978). ~lS
constituted a necessary condition for primitive capital accurnulanon In South A~ca.
Migrant labour, as we note earlier, did not only help meet the labour needs of soclety
but also helped preserve native institutions and sustain a system of g~vemance.
        Arrighi's (1970) study of the proletarianisation of the RhodeSlanpeasantry (r~-
ferred to earlier) represents a similar process in another labour-reserv,eeconomy. Hls
basic argument _ contrary to that of dualism and modernization theonsts, represent~
by Barber on the same proletarianisation process in Rhodesia is that ~e s~pplyof Afri-
can labour to the European fanns plantations, and mines was pnrnanly a result of
s....                                '          .            th peration of "law of ceo-
 LlUCtural changes as opposed to wage-rate lDcreasesor         e.o.                  riods
nomics". The Transkei exhibits the same phenomenon - mantfested~ two key pe              d
One is characterised by the centre's use of non-economic mechanlSr,ns,suc~ as l~
appropriation and the imposition of taxation on the peasantry - mech~sr,ns which:; the
as push factors , indue'mg the flow 0f labour to the labour-starVedcapltahstfunderdevel
                                                                              sector
economy. A second period is characterised by a self-sustaining process 0 ..                -
opInenl Through thcperiodic absence of the most able-bodied men. agnculture - m-
                                            107


 eluding arable and animal husbandry, both of which were male-dom!n~t~d - ~as t?,
 suffer lower yields. Thus, even more migration was produced, and a 'vICIOUS circle
 created.
          Prior to incorporation as a periphery (pre-l 870), as in much ~fpre-colo~ial Af-
 rica Transkei was characterised by the predominance of a rural subsistence agnculture
 (Bu~dy, 1979). Utilizing communally owned land and family labour marke~ by ~ sim-
 ple division of labour based on age and sex, agricultural production was ~nmanly for
 subsistence or home consumption, with limited, if any, external market relatiOns. Wolpe
 (1972) and Sahlins (quoted in Bundy, 1979) respectively, have referred to this produc-
 tion system as "African redistribute economy" and "primitive economy". Sahlins has
 further characterised such economies as those where
            ...most production is geared to use of the producer or to discharge of kinship
            obligations rather than to exchange and gain. A corollary is that de facto con-
            trol of the means of production is decentralized, local and familial. The fol-
            lowing propositions are implied:
  I) Economic relations of coercion and exploitation and the corresponding social rela-
 tions of dependence and mastery are not created in the system of production;
 2) In the absence of the incentive given by the exchange of the product against a great
quantity of goods on a market, there is a tendency to limit production to goods that can
be directly utilized by the producers" (Sahlins in Bundy, 1979: 15).
         The discovery of diamonds in Kimberley (I870) and later of gold in the
 Witwatersrand (1886) led to a large-scale foreign capital inflow that was to characterize
the subsequent mining activity as the dominant feature of the period 1870-1910. This
era marked the emergence of capitalism and the most critical stage of infant primitive
capital accumulation and (the stage) of the generation of surplus value. The central or
key problem of this stage of capitalism is that of output maximization and cost minimi-
zation. This calls not only for the formation of a labour-force, but for a cheap labour
force in the midst of an autonomous, self-sufficient, pre-capitalist production system.
The latter system, in its form, could not be relied upon to provide such cheap labour, as
long as it paid more to labour to be in the subsistence sector than it did for it to be in the
wage sector. Left to market forces, labour flow from the subsistence sector could not be
expected, and state intervention to induce such flow became a necessary option. The
resolution - which had to avoid raising wages since this would make mining and the
infant commercial agriculture less profitable, if not uneconomic _ was to lie in the re-
structuring of the predominant production system from an independent existence to a
more dependent one. This was accomplished, on the one hand, through its systematic
underdevelopment, which forced peasants into partial wage employment, and, on the
other hand, through the nursing along of commercial agriculture as a food supplier for
the mining towns.
         Two key factors were responsible for the independence of the peasantry: first, its
having access to land on its (peasantry's) own terms and readily available markets for
its surplus produce which was out of a rational response to the food needs of the mining
towns. State i.n~rvention was promoted (with a view to its emerging) as the supplier of
food to the mmmg towns and thus to its displacing of the peasantry from this role. In
1910, the state introduced discriminatory subsidies favorable to white farmers, in the
form of fencing, dams, houses, veterinary and horticultural advice and the Land Bank
easy credit facilities. Through the establishment of white farmer~ntrolled         marketing
                                              108


  boards, prices were guaranteed for the white fanner. Conversely, the state spent liter-
  ally nothing on peasant agriculture (Lipton, 1977). Restrictions on peasant exports from
  the Transkei and other reserves were imposed, thus depriving the peasantry of its mar-
  ket (Bundy, 1979) The end result of the above two measures were to place the peasant
 producer at a competitive disadvantage to white commercial farmer, in the former case,
  and to deprive him of a market in the latter case. There was resultant erosion of peasant
  independence, which led to progressive rural decay as the magnitude of migration in-
 creased year \tfter year. The effort price of participation in peasant agriculture fell far
 too short of that in the labour market.
           The accessibility of land to the peasantry was to be another target of state inter-
 vention. The 1913 Native Land Act and the subsequent 1936 Native Land and Trust
 Act were to be key to the land question. Under the 1913 Act, thirteen per cent of the
 country's land mass was allocated to some seventy percent of the country's population,
 thus effectively depriving the black population oflandholding rights outside these "home-
 lands", as the designated thirteen percent of land came to be known. Transkei, as an
 African reserve, became part of these homelands. Blacks were to lose the land they
 held outside the homelands, and large-scale movement - for the most part forced and
 violent into the homelands was to result in overpopulation, overuse of the soil, and
 resultant soil erosion. In the Transkei, as was the case elsewhere in the reserves, land
 could no longer support the population, and wage employment became the alternative
 to agriculture. The cheap labour requirements of the capitalist economy made some
 level of peasant production necessary - to meet the renewal costs of the labour force -
while the capitalist sector took care of the maintenance costs. It is this necessity to
sustain some level of an agricultural base for the migrant, which was to set a limit,
below which underdevelopment             or beyond which the collapse of the migrant labour
system would be imminent. A too low subsistence level, on the other hand, could spell
permanent migration to the capitalist sector and a fully proletarianized wo~kfo~e and
thus the transfer of the renewal or reproduction costs to the capitalist sector 1D thIS case,
that of South Africa. Once created, the system of migrant labour tended to recreate
itself. The departure from the peasant agricultural sector of its young, ,healthy, and most
productive members _ leaving behind the women, children, and the s~ck - le~ the rural
economy at its barest subsistence level and made wage employment tmperatlve.
The External SuppUers: The Case of Botswana                                                 , f
Botswana, together with Lesotho Swaziland, Zimbabwe, etc., is part of the tier 0 .pe-
   . hI'                                              .        th Afri        d thus were not subject
np era states - those states which were outsIde Sou                     ca an                        b
to the direct whims of the South African state, as is the case with the Re~es,                         ~t
    hi   h                                                                    the Reserves vIs-a-VIS
w c turned out to behave functionally in the same way as
South Africa. In 1975, this tier contributed some seventy per cent of the labour.forthceto
the Id '                                                .thin th Marxist and non-Maoost eo-
      . go mmes. The popular position ' from WI                    e           , 1 bo needs uom   Go
retical viewpoints is that when South Africa could not meet Its a ur ..
    'th' .'                                               ...     thi . are' 1) that It was easIer
WI tn, It turned to neighboring countries. Imphclt 1D s vIew                     ...               th'
ti S                                                    '       I' 'cal boundaries than from WI 1D
  or outh Africa to get the labour from outside Its po In
and 2) that, not unrelated to 1), an Arthur Lewis two-.sector model fo~ the d~v:t
PTocess oflabour surplus in Third World nations appltes. A comparatIVe 100
                                                                                             I
                                                                                              :::0
                                                                                                .
                                                                                                        t
                                                                                                        t
case studies of the T---J-ei
                          1~
                                   and Botswana points to South African labour recru Itm~.l
                                                                         •   ti                di
                                                                                     As was SCUSllC'U
di tliculties and the use of different measures to stimulate mtgra ~n.                        thro gh
. the                                                        deal directly WIth the peasant        u
m . case of the Transkei, the South African state                t ..                   did not exist.
South Africa     m::;
8pectfic legislati         Th
                          des:=~th
                                     'bilily, however. to do this 1D Botswana
                                             ~ local Colonial Administration. on the one hand.
                                                   109


  and local traditional rulers on the other, the latter of whom, under the indirect system of
  rule were left with considerable authority over matters affecting the tribe. The key to
  capitalist penetration in this case was principally in the hands of Britain, which was th~
  colonial power. This part of the essay, as was the case in the section. on the Transkel,
  seeks to discuss the process that produced a labour reserve economy m Botswana.
          Given the fact that Bechuanaland (now Botswana) was a British colony and
  colonialism's basic premise is the right of one country or people to impose its will on
  another in accordance with its (the colonialist country's) self-interest, it is self-consist-
  ent to draw a direct relationship between colonialism and underdevelopment or, more
  specifically, between colonialism and migrant labour in Botswana. In accordance with
 the needs of capital accumulation in South Africa, British colonial policy was to have
 as its trademark the systematic subordination of a dominant, autonomous pre capitalist
 mode of production (to these needs). This was to involve the transformation of social
 and economic fabric of the colonized according to the needs of an economy external to
 them. As Rosa Luxembourg was to put it:
            Since the accumulation of capital becomes impossible in all points without
            non-capitalist surroundings ...capital needs the means of production and the
            labour power of the whole globe for untrammeled accumulation; it cannot
            manage without the natural resources and the labour power of all territories"
            (Luxembourg 1968:365)
 This notion runs counter to the popular notion of modernization theory that capitalist
 development involves the encroachment on and eventual erosion of pre-capitalist pro-
 duction systems.
          Botswana, much like the other peripheral territories of southern Africa, under-
 went the process of the subordination of its pre-capitalist production system to the la-
 bour needs of capitalism in South Africa. My basic argument, like Arrighi's argument
 in his study of the proletarianization process of the African peasantry in Rhodesia, is
 that the supply oflabour from the traditional subsistence sector of the Botswana economy
 is a function not of the demand and supply factors of the economy but of forces non-
 economic and external. Two periods are identifiable in the transformation process.
 First, as in the case of the Transkei, it was a question of creating the migrant labour
 system and second, that of the reproduction of the system. As we noted in our study of
the Transkei, the pre-colonial period was marked by the predominance of an autono-
mous, self -sufficient pre-capitalist production system, which was characterized by a
communally owned land tenure system and an agricultural production system geared
towards home consumption, with limited external market relations. This autonomy
was first sundered in the 1800's with the beginning of contact with various manifesta-
tions of capitalist society, such as the traders, in their role as representatives of the
manufacturing world (Parson, 1980). The other visible group of newcomers, the mis-
sionaries, on the other hand, in furtherance of their "civilizing mission", discouraged
certain traditional attire as being too revealing and unchristian. The combined effect of
these two groups was to displace a certain amount of locally produced articles and
cause the penetration of mass-produced goods from outside. The extent of both contact
and impact was not great and did not undermine the prevailing mode was not great and
did not undermine the prevailing mode of production, but did bring the potential for
this.
         By 1800, some limited migration was taking place, as some 2,135 Batswana
were at that time ~orking at the Kimberly mines (Schapera, 1947). The numbers were
small, and, according to Schapera, the reason for migration was limited to a desire for
                                              110


 money to purchase agricultural tools and to obtain guns for defence against the land-
 hungry Afrikaners. Increased, grain production was also reported, as new, missionary-
 introduced fanning techniques were used (Parson, 1980). Coupled with these changes
 in farming techniques, as a cause of increased production and the independence of the
 peasant, was the abundance of land and its easy accessibility to the peasantry.
          Due to an increased imperial competition among the Germans, Afrikaners, and
 British for control of the region and to Botswana's importance as a gateway to the
 interior (where Britain had commercial interests), the country was declared a British
 Protectorate in 1885 and was thus incorporated into the British Empire. Botswana's
 function within the wider imperial economy, however was not altogether clear upon
 incorporation, given the fact that its incorporation was a result of imperial competition
 in the region and beyond and had little to do with economies of the territory, except for
 its importance as a route to the interior. It was to be the discovery of gold in 1886at the
 Witwatersrand and the resultant emergence of a British capital dominated mining sec-
 tor - that was to make the territory's function within a regional imperial economy fairly
 obvious, i.e. as in other High Commission Territories, as a labour supplier to the South
 African economy. Given the autonomy and self-sufficiency of the peasant economy,
 market forces could not, as was the case also for the Transkei, be expected to produce
 such a labor force. It was thus left to the colonial state to create and sustain such a
 labour force. State policies for generating labour, however, are based on conditions in
 the peasant economy. In the case of the Transkei, mining opened new markets for
 peasant produce and thus fostered peasant prosperity and led to less propensity on the
 part of the peasant to go into wage employment. The same, however, cannot be said of
 Botswana. There is no documentary evidence attesting to the magnitude of Botswana's
 exports at the time, but given the fragility of the country's climate of low rainfall and
periodic droughts, it is sound to suspect that these exports were not large or ?verly
 extensive. What can be strongly argued, however, is that production was suffiCIentto
meet the subsistence needs of the peasants and to sustain the autonomy and self-suffi-
ciency of the economy ..                                                             '
         The colonial state was instrumental in the process of labour creatIon, I.e., the
 semi-proletarianization of the peasantry through the processual, partial pushing off the
land. The latter was achieved through various policies whose overa~le~ect was the
subordination of the territory to the requirements of capital accumulatIon ID South Af-
  ...                                                                      t       from the
nca and, through that, in the world, and it was thus a turnlDg polD away                   ,
voluntarism that characterized earlier migration. As was argued earlier, the process IS
very similar to the one that took place in the Transkei and is distinctly different ~om the
ones that occurred in the Portuguese colony of Mozambique and in RhodeSia under
001. The latter attained the status oflabour supplier through labour supply.~ements
such as the Mozambique Convention of 1909 with the portuguese authontIes. Under
th.ese agreements, labour generation was left to the other p arty,, ID the case of Mozam-
blque to the Portuguese authorities ..                                    ' 'f               t
         Historically, land has been extensively used in the destabilIzatIon ~9~;S:
production, and Botswana was no exception. According to Kowet (Kowet,                   ,w~
promulgation of boundaries that created tribal reserves and resultant land sh~rtathges
                                                                        reated With e suc-
one measure that induced labour migration: land shortages were c                   b         t
      .                                                   C     C 1 y and the su sequen
cession of the southern part of the country to the ape 0 o~                   .       d The
establishment of white owned freehold farms on what was preViouslytnbandal        ~       t'
Iatter was land that was conceded to the British South Afri ca C om,pany           It cons l-
tutes some of the most arable land in the country. The most affected ~ups
Balete, the Batlokwa and other groups in the Tati who lost most of thelf Ian
                                                                                    ~e:  th
                                                                                         th:
                                              III


company. It is not surprisingly, therefore, that the early heavy migration was from these
tribal groups. The distinction between the Tribal Reserves and freehold f~,            repre-
senting white settler territory, was very much similar to that in South Africa after the
 1913 Native Land Act strictly prohibiting land transactions by the settlers. One clause
in the British South Africa Company's land-sale deed to white farmers stated that " ...nei-
ther the proprietor nor any successor in the title shall sell, alienate, or transfer the s~id
farm or any portion of it to a native" (Massey, 1980: 125). The impact of the concessIOn
was thus to aggravate the shortage of arable agricultural land and thereby limit food
production. This pressure, however, as we noted earlier, was limited to certain tribal
groups, who were to constitute the bulk of the early heavy migrations. These proclama-
tions were to also serve a second function, that of creating tribal groups that were to
become the subject in the colonial system of indirect rule.
         The Hut Tax of 1899 and early-1900s native tax together constituted a second
means of labour inducement: they were to be yet another means of forcing peasants into
wage employment - this time in order to eam the cash necessary to pay the taxes. The
tax instrument has been widely and successfully used in colonial Africa as a means of
inducing labour flow from peasant production to the production in colonial plantations
and mines. The imposition of the taxes (which were payable only in cash) on a pre-
dominantly non-monetary economy - in which there were no other avenues of earning
cash than the predetermined ones - left the peasantry with no other option but to peri-
odically migrate to the mines of South Africa. The absence of the most able-bodied
men, very often at times most critical to peasant agriculture left both arable and pastoral
agricultural management to those least able to handle them - women, children, older
men' and the sick which resulted in a general decline in agricultural productivity, a
condition that was to lead to more migration and further declines, thus setting up a
vicious circle. Massey (1977) has argued that the taxes were not specifically intended
as devices for inducing a flow of labour to South Africa, but were instead the primary
means of raising revenue for the colony. The evidence, however, points to collusion
between British-dominated capital in South Africa and the Colonial Administration in
the territory. The administration's view was summed up by Bechuanaland's Assistant
Resident Commissioner in 1903:
           It is my most earnest desire to assist in my power the native labour movement.
           I have talked to all chiefs and headmen about the advantages of work, etc. I
           recently got Khama to call public meeting to try and induce his people to go
           out (Schapera, 1947:149).
The chiefs were to share in the revenue derived from their recruiting activities (paid per
recruit), and, in addition, they imposed their own taxation, in the form of a tribute, on
the returning migrants. The chiefs, under the umbrella of the colonial state, thus con-
tributed to increasing the migration.
         Natural disasters afforded yet another opportunity for labour-migration genera-
tion and perpetuation by the Colonial Administration.         According to Massey (1977)
peasant production was hit in the early 1900s by a devastating rinderpest and drought.
Relief assistance from the missionaries and the Administration was heavily biased against
families that had men who could work in the mines (Massey, 1977).
         The combination of the aforementioned individual acts or measures was to lead
to the integration of Botswana into a Southern African regional economic system as a
subordinate member supplying labour. As we noted in our study of the Transkei, it
became neceswy that there be some mechanism to ensure the reproduction of the la-
bour force, a reproduction whose costs, under a migrant labour system, are borne by an
                                             112


  economy separate from that of the host. Some level of peasant production had to be
  promoted to meet the reproduction costs and thus make possible cheap labour costs to
  the labour-receiving economy. In order to ensure this, the administration imposed a
  number of restrictions which prescribed the period of time for which labourers could
  enlist for services in South Africa, prescribed the means for ensuring their return, etc.
  These restrictions were included in Proclamation No.6 of 1899, which required that
  recruiters have their licenses renewed annually, a renewal that would be granted pro-
  vided that there was compliance with certain other restrictions. The restrictions were
 meant to maintain the level of subsistence agriculture necessary for the survival and
 renewal of the migrant labour-force. These restrictions were, however, opposed by South
 Africa, and it is this opposition that was to lead to South Africa's union and hence was
 to mark a key distinction between our two case studies.
 Conclusion
 For both the Transkei and Botswana, state intervention was the key instrument in ensur-
 ing a systematic dichotomization       between capitalist centre and precapitalist periphery,
 of the maintenance and renewal costs of the economy's labour force. The precapitalist
 social formations of both were prosperous, self -sufficient, communal production sys-
 tems. In both cases, these were restructured to suit the needs of an emerging capitalist
 mode of production which came with the development of mining and commercial agri-
 culture in South Africa. This structural functional make up of the region, however, was
not achieved without resistance by both the Africans in both peripheries and white
working class in South Africa. One can thus see the outcome as more of compromises
between the contending forces but which in the main favored the centre. The benefits
were not only economic, through migrant labour, but also political in the form of fur-
thering a system of governance.
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