Tribute, land and the Boer state in the Soutpansberg, 1855 to 1898

Tribute, land and the Boer state in the Soutpansberg, 1855 to 1898: an overview

From the 1850s to 1898 the Boer settlers of the Soutpansberg and the government of the South African Republic tried to turn Venda rulers into tribute-payers and then into taxpayers on demarcated “locations”, while the Venda kingdom treated tribute, land and rule as parts of one thing that could not be divided or sold. This article follows that quarrel from the meeting of 27 February 1855 to the war of 1898, mostly through one Venda historian’s reading of the Transvaal archive.

The story

Two ideas of tribute. Nemudzivhadi describes the Venda order as a pyramid: subjects gave to their mukoma, who gave to the gota, who gave to the khosi, who gave to the khosi khulu or Thovhele, in goods or labour “as a sign of loyalty”, and the rulers themselves gave only upward, to their own seniors (p. 26, footnote). He says it was “no payment of taxation or tribute in the western sense, where receipts were given and defaulters were prosecuted” (p. 65). The Boer system, by contrast, asked everyone for opgaaf, including the Thovhele, which in his words reduced the Thovhele to the status of an ordinary subject (p. 26, footnote). Paying opgaaf to Michael Buys, João Albasini and the field cornets therefore implied, for the Venda, that these officials were usurping the monarch’s authority (p. 65).

The meeting of 27 February 1855. Seven years after the first settlement, he writes, a meeting chaired by Commandant-General Stephanus Schoeman decided that certain Venda leaders must supply labour to farms and act as gun carriers, and that leaders whose lands lay far from white settlement must pay tribute (p. 20). The meeting’s stated purpose was money: Schoemansdal needed improving, the white community was too small to pay, so tribute was to be raised from the Africans “believed to be under the control of the Whites” (p. 62). The scale he gives is five head of cattle or five elephant tusks, plus a goat and a sheep or four hoes, per hut; failing these, 25 pieces of copper or 20 leopard hides (p. 20). He adds that the new white farms “were carved out of” Ramabulana’s lands (p. 20), and that Boer rule over the region was exercised through “unilateral land demarcations, forced taxation and compulsory labour” (p. 62).

The justification. In Nemudzivhadi’s account the Boers treated tribute as the price of the protection the Venda supposedly enjoyed after Mzilikazi’s power was broken, a claim he sets beside Colonel Stanford’s remark that the Venda grew and prospered only after “the great lion of the country” was defeated; he questions the idea of a Mzilikazi “empire” over Venda, noting that the Venda had repulsed Ngwane and Malema raids in 1839 and 1840 and that Zwangendaba and Manukosi passed through without attacking (pp. 20 to 21).

Thirty-eight chiefs. The same meeting named 38 so-called chiefs in a country which, by Venda custom, had five senior rulers: Ramabulana, Tshivhase, Mphaphuli, Rambuda and Modjadji. The other 33, he says, were really mahosi under one of those five, whose status had been “relegated” to that of their subordinates, among them Matidze, Nelwamondo, Magoro, Mashau, Neluvhola, Nthabalala and Madzivhandila (pp. 64 to 65). A list of “opgaafkaffers” compiled by J. W. du Plessis on 2 August 1864 named Tshivhase, Rambuda, Mphaphuli, Nelwamondo, Netsianda, Tshikundamalema and Nethengwe, whose lands lay far from Schoemansdal and who were to collect from their own people and hand the tribute to the field cornets (p. 63). He calls this a Boer arrangement “devised … for their own benefit” and says it remained the official reading of Venda politics under later governments (p. 65).

Collectors. The field cornets could not manage the collection, he writes; it was entrusted to the Buys community under Potgieter and Schoeman, and Michael Buys could not cover so large an area (p. 63; see Michael Buys and Buys community). On 9 June 1859 Schoeman appointed João Albasini as tribute collector, with the Dutch title Superintendent van kafferstammen, over the Vhuronga, Vhulovhedzi, Mashau, Luonde, Tshakhuma and other areas; Albasini also watched the Tsonga refugees of Mzila and reported war plans to the Executive Council (p. 63). Nemudzivhadi says Albasini used his Tsonga followers to seize cattle, goats, sheep, ivory and hoes “against the wishes of the local residents”, and that within five years he had gathered a considerable quantity (pp. 63 to 64). The Tsonga, being foreigners, complied, he says; the Venda, above all under Makhado, resisted, since paying Albasini would mean accepting both the Boers and “the foreigners who had established themselves at Luonde” (p. 64).

An ivory economy. Behind the tribute was the hunting frontier. Hunters, accompanied by Venda labourers, shot many elephants; the ivory was stored at Schoemansdal and traders from the Cape Colony and Natal came to buy it, so that the town “became a flourishing centre of trade” (p. 24). The labour and gun-carrying that the 1855 meeting demanded were what kept that trade going, which is one reason the demands were hard to give up and, to the Venda, hard to accept. See Schoemansdal.

The war, and the Republic’s return. The conflict that followed, from Ramabulana’s death in 1864 to the Boers’ departure from Schoemansdal in July 1867 and the failed return of 1869, is told in The Soutpansberg war, 1863 to 1869. Nemudzivhadi describes the Republic as having been “forced out of Venda in 1867” (p. 244). By the early 1880s it was back in the shape of commissioners and landdrosts. Antonio Albasini, Commissioner for the Spelonken, and Oscar Dahl of Klipdam each claimed Makhado’s tax, and on 10 December 1884 the Superintendent of Natives, P. J. Joubert, visited Makhado, who agreed Albasini should be responsible but wanted to collect the money himself, which Joubert said was against the law (pp. 232 to 235).

Hut tax in 1886. The law, as Albasini explained it to Makhado in 1887, was 10 shillings a hut a year, with the huts counted (p. 242). In June and July 1886 Makhado offered 50 and then 40 small cattle, some sick, worth no more than five shillings each by Albasini’s reckoning; Albasini refused them and would not be allowed to count huts, since Makhado said nobody should concern himself with “his people” as he was their Thovhele (pp. 235 to 237). The Republic’s State Secretary replied that Albasini should have left the sickly cattle, valued the rest, told Makhado what was still owing and counted the huts; the count was “what was important” (p. 237). In January 1886, asked for the arrears, Makhado had replied that his people were at the Diamond Fields earning little (p. 235).

The Location Commission, February 1887. The government sent a Native Location Commission under Joubert, with Albasini, the surveyor Captain Zboril, S. H. Rissik, S. Snyman and a secretary, which camped near Makhado’s residence on 22 February and met him on 23 February 1887 at Luatame (pp. 239 to 240). Joubert told him that every khosi, Thovhele included, would be given a demarcated location, with beacons and a population count, to end hostilities (p. 240). Makhado’s reply, as Nemudzivhadi gives it, was that he could not part with any of his territory; that the plains were grazing for sheep and cattle; that he had about 50 lands under mahosi, so counting people as Joubert directed was impossible; that the country belonged to his father Ramabulana and was his by inheritance; and that “land could not be divided or traded”, not being “like a farm, which could be bought or sold” (p. 241). Asked how far he claimed, he named the Luvuvhu and Muhohodi rivers to the Machaba hills, then along the Soutpansberg range and the Brak River to the Vhembe, adding that if this were granted he would pay taxes (p. 242).

Too large. That, Nemudzivhadi says, was the land the Spelonken Boers had set their sights on. Joubert held a meeting with them at Lovedale Park and could not reconcile their needs with Makhado’s demands; he then wrote to Makhado that the land claimed was too large, including Schoemansdal, the farms of Cilliers, Jan Breedt and Christian Rabe, the Hofmeyr mission station and cultivated land amounting to over 600 farms, so that it would be hard for him to collect the taxes (p. 243). Nemudzivhadi’s reading is that the territory Makhado named “suddenly became too large as the Boers needed to exercise control by collecting taxes” and that the Commission meant “dispossessing the Venda of their land by means of the demarcation of locations, the counting of huts and the imposition of taxes” (p. 244). Joubert also said arrears had “soared” to an estimated £15,000, calculated on an assumed population of 5,000 before any census (pp. 244 to 245).

Affidavits and the other side. Alongside the Commission, local officials sent the government complaints: affidavits from Knobneuzen headmen and a policeman that Masindi Ratombo and Makhado had told them not to pay tax to the Republic (pp. 237 to 238; see Antonio Albasini), and a statement by Stuurman and Lihirema, sons of the khosi Ramasunzi, that Makhado had burned their huts in 1884 and driven Mamali off when he demanded taxation (p. 246). Nemudzivhadi says such complaints were prompted by officials and aimed to estrange Makhado from the government, but concedes that Makhado’s own “ambitious and expansionist policy” had prepared the ground for them (p. 246).

After Albasini: census and “divide and rule”. Antonio Albasini died in 1889, and the government replaced him with Captain Adolf Schiel as Commissioner for the Klein Spelonken, deliberately not letting the office pass to another Albasini (pp. 248 to 249). In January 1890 Schiel was told to take a census and collect tax; Makhado called the kraal heads together, and the count was 987 men, 1,163 women and 1,172 children, a number Makhado himself said was too small and invited a count of huts in winter. He then paid a sum Nemudzivhadi gives as “592” (the currency is unreadable in our scan) and said he had paid more than Tshivhase and Mphaphuli (p. 250). Schiel advised that Makhado’s power “could be weakened by recognising his mahosi as independent”, a policy he called “divide et impera”, and asked for a police contingent of 25 men (p. 251).

Dzimauli, 1891. When Schiel reported that Makhado had attacked Tshivhase to annex Dzimauli, the Commandant-General ordered a mounted show of force at Fort Hendrina on 13 August 1891 and warned that a burgher force might be raised (pp. 251 to 252). Nemudzivhadi says the report was wrong: the fighting at Dzimauli was between Siphuma and Thikasi over Rambuda’s throne, Tshivhase was backing one claimant and Makhado another, Tshikosi, in order to keep Tshivhase’s influence out (pp. 251 to 252). See Tshivhase.

1895 to 1898. Makhado died in 1895 (see Makhado), and in 1898 the Republic attacked his successor Mphephu; on 16 November 1898 Tshirululuni was shelled and burned and Mphephu fled to Rhodesia (see his page). Nemudzivhadi writes that the Venda country “was a single and independent state up to 1898” (p. 5), against those who treat the Venda as separate small chiefdoms. The work of demarcation did not end there: a footnote cites a Location Commission report of 23 March 1907 on a proposed location for “Chief Mpefu” (Mphephu) (p. 240, note 34), and an informant’s note says the Natives Land Act of 1913 later separated some rulers from their mahosi (p. 83).

Cautions

This article rests mainly on one source, M. H. Nemudzivhadi’s 1998 doctoral thesis on Makhado, which is written from the Venda side and quotes Transvaal Archives files (SS and R numbers) that we have not seen, mostly in Dutch. Nemudzivhadi is sharply critical of Joubert and Albasini and says so; we have tried to separate what he reports from what he concludes. His reading of the 1855 meeting also leans on Wagner, Boeyens, Moolman, De Vaal and Möller-Malan, whom we have not read. The Boer side, in Joubert’s full reports, Tempelhoff’s study of the occupation system and Schoeman’s and Albasini’s biographies, is missing here, and the Republic’s officials may have understood their aims differently. Some figures are uncertain in our scan: the currency of Makhado’s “592”, and whether the arrears were £15,000. Makhado’s death is dated 1895 on our linked pages though one source we cite elsewhere gives 1897.

Sources and further reading

Mphaya Henry Nemudzivhadi, “The attempts by Makhado to revive the Venda kingdom, 1864-1895”, PhD thesis, Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education (1998); open access at the North-West University repository (a scanned copy; read by OCR, printed page numbers cited)
The linked pages on this site for Antonio Albasini, João Albasini, Stephanus Schoeman, Makhado and Mphephu, each with its own sources and cautions

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