1. Robert Moffat, the first LMS missionary to visit the Bangwaketse royal town (1824), preaching to a Tswana local community as rendered on the title page of Moffat's Missionary Labours and Scenes in Southern Africa (1842).
So how could it be that these merafe developed such scale and strength? I shall start examining the process of centralization in these kingdoms with the point of departure in asking how they successfully overcame the conflict-generating ambiguities and contradictions that have often permeated other ‘Southern Bantu’ polities (e.g. see Schapera 1956: 176; cf. Gluckman 1963: 20). Such conflicts relate mainly to succession to office and the exercise of authority once in office. They rose primarily amongst close, rivalling agnates who were able to mobilize sufficient factional support to represent a threatening challenge. However, the conditions for generating such support varied considerably amongst so-called Southern Bantu tribes (see van Warmelo 1974: 56ff, 1930; Schapera 1965: 7f.). Sansom has described how the Tswana (as a major section of the Sotho-speaking peoples) tended to have rulers whose power lay in manipulating bonds and grants concerning people's access to land. He contrasts such ‘Tribal Estate’ regimes (as he calls them) with ‘Chequerboard’ regimes, in which land allocation was decentralized and rulers depended upon ‘reallocating products rather than means of production’ (Sansom 1974: 251). This thesis draws attention to the fact that centralization depended on certain material resources under the ruler's control. But in order to come to terms with the centralizing forces at work during precolonial times among the three major Northern Tswana merafe, we need to examine the rulers' control over cattle rather than land. This notion is by no means an obvious one. Goody, for example, has stated of Africa in general that cattle ‘easily become fused with the personal property of the incumbent; support of livestock is the formula for a very much looser polity. it is difficult to centralise cows’ (Goody 1974: 33). Nevertheless, it is my contention that the centralizing processes of the three Northern Tswana merafe were particularly powerful precisely because of their rulers' exceptional access to cattle (e.g. see Tlou 1985: 69). But note, the conundrum thus presented by the Tswana can be resolved provided we do not seek the answer in the determinist or evolutionist arguments of ecology. Instead, I shall demonstrate that the role played by cattle and cattle-based trade amongst Northern Tswana is mediated through social and political processes that favour not only state formation but a concentrated population as well.
The aggregation of cattle wealth among the ruling families may well reflect the fact that the Tswana – known as an exceptional African case (Radcliffe-Brown 1950: 55) – allow FBD (father's brother's daughter) marriages. Such marriages are practised especially among noble families (Schapera 1957). As the saying goes, ngwana rrangwane, nnyale, kgomo di boele sakeng (child of my father's younger brother, marry me, so the [bride – wealth – bogadi] cattle may return to our kraal). Schapera places particular emphasis on this custom as instrumental in transforming potential rival agnates into supportive matrilaterals, arguing that ‘intermarriage of royals is a means of reinforcing social ties between different (and potentially hostile) branches of the royal line’ (Schapera 1963: 110, cf. 1957: 157). Whether such marriages actually work in practice, however, depends – as the Comaroffs argue – on relationships being ‘skilfully manipulated’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 1981: 44).
The arguments 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
