INTRODUCTION

During the years 1900 to 1940, many of the African chiefdoms in the bushveld were struck by dissension and what one historian, Graeme Simpson, has termed ‘crises of control’. The causes lay partly in past events, and partly through much closer involvement and engagement by these communities with the colonial world in which they lived and worked. More specifically, disputes over land acquisition and other material interests resulted in conflict, either among ruling factions or between the dikgosi and their followers, often united in opposition to the chieftainship in a ‘popular’ alliance. The other common feature of these conflicts was that they had a distinctly ethnic character as they were between opposing ethnic factions which mobilised support by appealing to ethnic sentiment and affiliation. Thus while ethnicity was the glue that kept the disparate factions of these communities together in the latter years of the nineteenth century, it increasingly became contested and a source of division in the first half of the twentieth. Nevertheless, despite internal dissent and division, all of the baTswana in the bushveld of the western Transvaal managed to adapt to changing circumstances. It was a difficult period of colonial intervention when chiefs were expected to cooperate with the state by implementing new administrative and bureaucratic tasks, but these black communities nevertheless managed to retain quite considerable economic and political independence and were not merely victims of the colonial state and the growing capitalist economy of South Africa.

What is also striking about these dissentions and divisions is that, in various forms, they prefigure the schisms and disharmony between commoners and traditional leaders and between different factions of chiefly families that struck many of the bushveld merafe in the early years of the twenty-first century, as the final chapter in this volume will relate.

The division of the baHurutshe

Moiloa, who had unified the merafe in the nineteenth century, was followed as chief of the Moiloa faction at Dinokana by Ikalafeng. When Ikalafeng died in 1893, his heir, Pogiso, was a minor, and Ikalafeng's brother Israel assumed control. In 1906 the government decided to instate Pogiso – but Israel opposed the appointment. The boy was only eleven years old, and Israel therefore felt he himself should continue as regent (such practices were common in Tswana societies and often the cause of schisms).