This book weaves together several stories about popular politics in South Africa in the course of making the argument that those politics have been largely misconstrued. It begins, for all intents and purposes, with Chapter 1. Here, briefly, are a few of its most basic assertions for those who would like a preview. First, the case is made that the people of South Africa were historically well equipped to embrace and absorb strangers. Hybridity lay at the core of their subcontinental political traditions. Nineteenth-century European newcomers were different and attempted to repudiate mixing, politically and otherwise, albeit with only partial success. It was they who characterized, or mis-characterized, Africans as perennial tribesmen. Second, the book is about what happened to popular politics in the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. South African modes of self-rule comprised a venerable political tradition, one that deprecated skin color and language as barriers and elevated brotherhoods, rankings, and amalgamations. The tradition preceded tribes and survived through them and beyond them. Ultimately it fed into the politics of the twentieth century, informing South Africa's growing independent Christian churches, other hard-to-catalogue popular movements, rural resistance, and eventually, even the nationalism of the African National Congress.

Popular Politics in the History of South Africa, 1400–1948, offers a revised view of what happened to people's efforts to mobilize themselves in their own interest through much of the colonial era. Therefore it is also an explanation for previous representations of Africans and brown-skinned people.

President Brand's decision to award the chief's court to Tshipinare did not resolve the crisis at Thaba Nchu. It did, however, give Tshipinare time to legalize his control of land in terms of Orange Free State law. In fact, he set in motion a strategic program to secure his chiefdom under white colonial authority. He would create an aristocracy of patriarchs to own land, replacing all other political formations; and he would try to prevent his landlords from reselling their farms to outsiders.

Meanwhile the Reverend John Daniel complained darkly of a popular movement against this transformation. He pointed to “some dissatisfied and designing men” who were trying to “raise a rebellion in the country,” and said the “rebels” included “more than half of our [Methodist Church] members.” Adopting an unusual tone, Daniel wrote that “the numerical superiority of the rebels threatened for a time to [crush all] opposition & revolutionize the country.” The nature of the country was changing; free movement was a memory. A nonethnic and nontribal alliance was formed in this context under the leadership of Samuel Moroka in Thaba Nchu. The Samuelites stood against the forces of European and African landlordism fronted by Tshipinare.

Nonetheless, Samuel first rode to Bloemfontein with Father Crisp to see President Johannes Brand and beg him to change his mind and install him as chief. Brand was out of town, and Samuel was shown no special treatment.

In the nineteenth century, colonialism brought missionaries and literacy and religion and ethnic division to the highveld. It also brought about a dramatic transformation in people's access to the land. This change modulated the way ordinary people were able to orient themselves toward collective ends, conceived in the terms explored in earlier chapters. Chiefship, ranked alliances (including “twin courts”), prestige-place associations (ha rotse, rolong, crocodile), and the idea of sharing a paternal ancestor – these ideas continued to structure people's mobilizations. Shifting, diminishing access to land helped determine how, and in what form, their communities survived.

The approach taken in this chapter is to consider a large part of the century, 1828–1880, while focusing increasingly on the southern highveld and on popular mobilizations that sprang from it, in the era of conquests, enclosures, and privatizations. The period also indicates precisely the reign of Chief Moroka, Sefunelo's son and heir, and the last of the independent chiefs of the southern highveld. The greatest of the material changes in people's lives came toward the end of this half-century.

As a preliminary, we may note the continuing heterogeneity of highveld life in the 1830s. As men and women struggled to protect their access to land under attack, they also absorbed and accommodated distant kin, orphans of famines or commando razzias. Moroka welcomed his old ally, the people-of-Tshidi court, to his vicinity, one of many chiefdoms fleeing the “zulu” Matebele. Together they formed a twin court, while other towns and centers hosted other hybridities.

Throughout decades of competitive political formulations, from the 1920s onward, the official understanding of popular politics remained fairly elementary. Chiefdoms were seen as natural phenomena. Because the Christians' ideal kingdom was made of what people strove for on earth, Christianity echoed traditional highveld political speech much more closely than government-recognized tribalism. Anthropologists stepped into the breach and labored to learn and catalogue the life of African people, writing their rules of inheritance and civic justice, their habits of labor, their religions. They found complex and multilayered identities within and shared between chiefdoms. At the same time, they framed their results in an ethnic or tribal paradigm, set in an undefinable time. One scholar in particular made a meticulous and broad contribution to knowing the highveld in this way. This chapter appraises his work in the context of contemporaneous popular mobilizations.

Men continued, in crises, to express their commitment to their chief with the ideas, tone, and emphases that Christians long ago laid claim to. Men continued to resort to mobile generational alliances and partnerships in the name of a putative shared ancestor, in pursuit of land and wealth. Such was the basic shape of the historical subjectivity of most South Africans. The Native Affairs Department (NAD) and British imperial officials ham-fistedly kept their understandings of subjectivities in play, treating loyalties as organic affiliations that might somehow remain intact even without real chiefly or public community power.

Over the centuries, in the middle of what eventually became South Africa, hundreds of thousands of people lived and labored. They were farmers and livestock-keepers, warriors and poets. They spoke the same language, or incrementally distinguishable dialects of it; they moved about among themselves, married one another, and ranked their princely houses together.

Theirs was a history of settlement on verdant hills, of men and women building a world of ranked communities with cross-cutting loyalties and long-range connections to the Limpopo basin to the north, and the foothills of the Drakensberg range and the grasslands to the east. As the highveld's agrarian towns expanded, they brought together into their midst households, and sometimes whole communities, from the wider world. Most professional travelers could make themselves understood with little effort. Prestigious healers and specialists in rituals, rain-makers, militia-scouts, and cattle-herders covered great distances; women often married away from home, sometimes far away. As a result, authority and culture were disposed across the highveld and its enclosed river valleys in a widely comprehensible tradition, shading up even onto the Zimbabwean highlands on the northern side of the Limpopo Valley. Within this context developed multiethnic chiefships and chiefly partnerships.

Most accounts of South Africa's past summon up a different picture from this, however: a world of tribes. Tribes may be designated ethnic groups, or peoples, but the treatment is the same. In its purest form, the tribe constitutes the claim that popular mobilizations among African people were apolitical, customs-determined phenomena.

One comes without much notice upon the ruin of Great Zimbabwe. Its apparent volume is washed in shadow, inconspicuous at a distance like the breeze-block storefronts of Masvingo, the nearest town; but as one approaches, there suddenly is its curved, looming edifice, in coursed, gray granite bricks, mottled in orange lichen. No mortar lies between the rectangular stones. The outer wall is built thick as a schoolbus and ten meters high; at the top, there is a delicate chevron pattern. The main structures in stone date from the fourteenth century.

The immediate surrounding area is laced with low stone walling, the skeletal remains of a thriving urban zone. Once, the whole neighborhood was teeming with people, living in wide, thatched rondavels of red earth and manure. The archaeologist T. N. Huffman, drawing on the historian David Beach's work, has subjected the site to the most ambitious and thorough analysis. The critical invention at Great Zimbabwe, according to this pioneering scholar, was to pattern popular loyalty repeatedly with age-grade initiation ceremonies, featuring circumcision. Huffman argues that the central stone enclosure was a gendered, sacred space, and that religious ceremonies gave it its subjective power. Against this interpretation, it has been noted that none of the early Portuguese sources for the Zimbabwean highlands mention male initiation schools or genital circumcision, which were certainly known on the South African highveld. Even more, the attribution of religious power to polities of the past should not so easily be accepted.