The Marxist Workers’ Tendency (MWT) of the African National Congress (ANC) grew out of the coming together of comrades from the ANC, the emerging internal democratic trade unions, and the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) in Soweto and the Western Cape in the 1970s, together with comrades from the Mpondo revolt of the early 1960s. At its inception, it had a black majority membership. Among those from the ANC were George Peake and Nimrod Sejake, both former trade union leaders and treason trialists who had subsequently been forced into exile, as well as myself, who had worked throughout the 1960s with Mazisi Kunene, then ANC representative in Europe. Among those from the emerging unions were Dave Hemson, Rob Petersen and Paula Ensor, all three declared ‘banned persons’ and going into exile.

This chapter deals with the origins of the MWT and its early articulation of a programme and perspectives. It concludes with an examination of the MWT's approach to the National Question.

ORIGINS

The South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU), a federation of non-racial trade unions, had become defunct through repression in the early 1960s. It survived only as a small rump of officials in exile, oriented to solidarity work (Sithole and Ndlovu, 2006; Legassick, 2008). In the post-Soweto strengthening of the ANC in London, however, Rob Petersen and Paula Ensor were employed by the SACTU office, the former as editor of the revived SACTU publication Workers’ Unity and the latter as personal assistant to general secretary John Gaetsewe. Dave Hemson and I also worked on the paper.

The first issues of the paper placed primacy on building SACTU among factory workers underground – to assist in building and to guide the work of the emerging democratic unions. These unions had already become schools of struggle, through which workers came together to discuss not merely factory issues but all the problems they faced and how to overcome them.

The independent trade unions, said Workers’ Unity (1977b), were ‘forced by repression to keep themselves cut off from the liberation struggle as a whole but we do not oppose them. Our policy is to fight for independent unions and to give these new organisations our support – in so far as they advance the workers’ struggle.’

This book is a series of essays on the 19th- and 20th-century history of what was at the time called Gordonia (now essentially the Z.W. Mgcawu district of the Northern Cape Province, together with parts of the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park). The region surrounding Gordonia – the northern part of this province – though a large land area, is marginal in South Africa. Some reports on this region estimate it as containing only 2.2 per cent of South Africa's population in 2014, and the lowest growth rate in the country of 2.2 per cent in 2011.

Gordonia is a part of central Transorangia, which may be defined as ‘the region to the north of the middle Orange River mainly comprising Griqualand West and what was once called British Bechuanaland’. Gordonia proper lies north of the Orange, between Groblershoop and the Aughrabies Falls. To its west is Namaqualand – ‘the mountainous and rugged granite terrain along the escarpment south of the lower Orange… [comprising] Little Namaqualand; the area extending from the Orange River to Rehoboth in the north and from the great escarpment to the Kalahari sands… [comprising] Great Namaqualand’. To the south of Gordonia is Bushmanland, which lies to the east of Little Namaqualand and shades away to the west into the Great Karoo. The Orange River cuts its way between the arid semi-desert of Gordonia to the north and Bushmanland to the south. The river valley is an elongated fertile oasis, the only historical source of permanent water and excellent grazing pasture, with rainfall progressively lessening to the river's mouth. Between Upington and the Aughrabies Falls the valley widens out (variably between one and 11 kilometres wide) into an 80-kilometre long chain of islands, big and small.

From late October until May, when summer rains fall, the Orange River is generally in flood, though for the remainder of the year its bed is dry. When the river is in flood, the islands are ‘intersected by innumerable streams, almost all unfordable, and many of them swift as mill races’. Leading a military expedition against the Kora on the islands in 1869, Sir Walter Currie commented that he ‘used to think the Fish River bush [on the eastern Cape frontier] a stronghold, but it stands nowhere in comparison with this water jungle’.

This was what Old Katje, the wife of a Bushman man living at Kuie Pan in the northern Cape, told police in January 1910, who were gathering evidence on the activities of a Mr Mehnarto, hired by the Austrian anthropologist Dr Rudolf Pöch to acquire Bushman human remains for him. In this case, and in numerous others, Mehnarto had dug up the graves of recently buried Bushmen, without the permission of their relatives. In at least one case he also exported to Austria recently buried corpses. Old Katje's husband's remains, and those of the numerous others, came to be housed in Vienna.

In May 1909 Pöch arrived in Kimberley (from South West Africa and Bechuanaland). He was given red carpet treatment by the South African authorities, from the Prime Minister of the Cape Colony down to magistrates and field-cornets. His purpose was to collect Bushman remains principally for the measurement of skulls in order to understand the ‘racial’ classification of human ‘types’ and their ‘prehuman’ ancestors. This work also sought to prove that people of colour were intellectually and morally inferior to whites, a line of thinking that later fed into Nazi racial thought and ideas of the inherent superiority of ‘Aryans’. In 1915 Pöch wrote that ‘[there] are primitive cultures which are separate from the highly developed ones of Europe…

The previous chapters have examined segregation, forced removals, and resistance in the rural areas of Gordonia and vicinity. This chapter turns to an examination of the establishment of urban locations in Upington and eventual forced removal from them. The research on which the chapter is based was initially undertaken for the Commission on Restitution of Land Rights, forming the historical section of a report on the basis of which 688 land claimants from the two locations of Blikkies and Keidebees received R18.7 million in a restitution settlement. The forced removals from these locations took place in the 1960s. The schemes on which these moves were based dated from the 1940s, even before the accession of the NP to government. The chapter starts, however, with the pre- 1940s historical background to three locations in Upington. Figure 10.1 depicts the growth of Upington during the period covered by this chapter.

The origins of the first Upington location are unknown: the first mention of it is in 1890. By October 1910 it was estimated to have 135 huts – made mainly of ‘mud and straw’ – and a population of 125 men and 375 women. There is, however, evidence on the foundation of Keidebees. The town's Village Management Board (VMB) was told in May 1894 that 50 people (‘squatters’) were living on the Upington commonage and had refused to move to the existing (Upington) ‘Location’. It was pointed out by two Basters on the VMB that the people concerned were servants who would be too far from their masters if they moved there. The VMB then agreed that ‘a second Location at Keidebees be Established for the Convenience of the Residents; and that a Commission… be appointed to beacon off the two Locations providing the separation of the different classes’.

From at least 1903 onwards, location residents were time and again subjected to the insecurity of threats to move or destroy the locations, in particular Upington location. In October 1926 the town council decided to have the Upington and Keidebees locations proclaimed under the Native (Urban Areas) Act No. 21 of 1923 and this was done in the Government Gazette of 25 March 1927.

The author of these words, John Scott, was appointed special magistrate on the northern border of the Cape Colony in 1880 and served there until 1887. In presiding over the Baster settlement established in Gordonia, amongst his duties was dealing with the Bushman inhabitants of the area. Through an examination of his relations with Bushmen it is possible to see the transformation of Scott's Cape liberal ideology into one approximating turn-of-the-century racism. Imprisoning them for breaches of colonial law, essentially because the Bushmen refused to become a part of the cheap black labour force required by the colony, Scott also became involved in organising them as objects of ethnographic research and objects of exhibit and display.

In his book The Birth of the Museum, Tony Bennett takes issue with Douglas Crimp for describing the museum as another Foucaultian ‘institution of confinement’. While the museum and the prison are both articulations of power and knowledge relations, the museum, he insists, is an institution not of confinement but of exhibition. In contrast to the withdrawal of objects and bodies from the public gaze, ‘[the] institutions comprising the “exhibitionary complex”… were involved in the transfer of objects and bodies from the enclosed and private domains in which they had previously been displayed… into progressively more open and public arenas where, through the representations to which they were subjected, they formed vehicles for inscribing and broadcasting the messages of power’.

In this chapter we return to the issue of dispossession of Baster land. In 1921 a petition signed by 259 Baster men from Gordonia was submitted to parliament. They asked parliament ‘to restore our previous rights in the settlement of Gordonia’ given by the imperial government ‘in perpetual Erfpacht’. A demand for restitution of land, the petition would be reinterpreted by successive South African governments in line with policies of segregation. It catalysed, in fact, the racial division of Gordonia.

In the Gordonia settlement, Basters had been granted farms along the north bank of the Orange River as well as in the interior of the country. Subsequently, they had lost most of this land (see chapters 2 and 3). Basters told a Lands Department official in 1921 they were ‘finding it practically impossible to find places where they can pursue their calling, which is agricultural farming, and even when they do succeed in securing places where they can live, their form of tenure is very insecure… [causing] them a great deal of inconvenience and financial loss’. Moreover their tenancies were threatened, wrote the Rand Daily Mail, because ‘Europeans… more and more require their land for their own use’. The petitioners blamed the loss of the land on government. Under the original regime, they claimed, land alienation was prohibited to persons not registered as citizens (who were mainly Basters). So far as they knew, these rights had been ratified when Gordonia was annexed to British Bechuanaland. (This was partly incorrect: their original titles had been recognised but were now subject to a free market in land.) But after annexation farms were sold by public auction, including to people previously ineligible. Because their forefathers had been even less educated than they were now, they had not paid attention to this violation of the conditions. They had trusted that the government would defend them. But having now seen the original documents, the petitioners were amazed that the sale of the farms had been allowed. Even those who had sold their property, they claimed, wondered why they had never been warned by officials when these transactions were registered.

From the foundation of Upington in the 1880s, irrigation of the Orange River has been central to its economic existence. Both north and south of the river in these parts are some of the driest lands of South Africa – the Kalahari to the north and Bushmanland to the south. But today, along a 280-kilometre stretch between the Buchuberg Dam and the Aughrabies Falls, centred on Upington, are some 25 000 morgen of immensely productive land. In the words of local publicist J.M. Brauer, it is ‘a heavenly greenbelt… a verdant paradise… [stretching] through irrigation settlements, along canals, past fields of lucerne, orange groves, vineyards, and past kameeldoring trees. You see green islands with patch-quilt farmlands and red-roofed houses, white stone bridges and suspension bridges made of wire strands laced with thousands of short wild tree poles.’

White historical mythology credits the DRC missionary C.H.W. Schroeder, who lived in the area in 1871–9 and 1883–1912, with the idea of irrigating the Orange. Such historiography takes for granted that white drive, innovation, and ‘know-how’, assisted at most by black labour, developed and ‘modernised’ South Africa. But, so far as irrigation of the Orange River is concerned, the quotation from Percy Nightingale at the start of this chapter sets matters straight. It is the preface to the following:

In the battle of the farm of Naroegas, fought near Kenhardt in the northern Cape on 23 May 1901, a Boer commando suffered a severe defeat at the hands of a force of ‘brown’ people of the Northern Border Scouts. The story of this battle has been buried almost since its occurrence. The text of the present chapter was written to accompany an account by Jesse Strauss, a recovery of the story of the battle based solely on oral testimony from brown people, including his own ancestors, which originally formed part of his manuscript titled Kinders van die Gariep (Children of the Gariep) on the history of brown people in the northern Cape up to the turn of the 20th century.

In the course of my research in the northern Cape, I met Jesse Strauss, read his manuscript, and was excited by the originality of some sections of it, including that on Naroegas. I undertook to try to discover what could be found in the archives on this forgotten battle of the South African War (1899–1902). The following commentary is based largely on the written sources. It places the battle in the context of the war in the north-west Cape, and reflects on the silences and distortions in the written accounts of this war, as well as the ‘hiddenness’ of the oral records of the battle. It argues that the significance of the ‘history’ of the battle lies as much in what it reveals about social relations in the area as in adding to our military knowledge.

The battle of Naroegas: context, historiography, sources and Significance