Migrant workers from Mpondoland have been characterised as traditionalist and fiercely attached to their rural homes. Yet mineworkers from this area came into the national news in August 2012 as both strikers and victims of the shootings at Marikana Platinum Mine. Of the 45 people killed at Marikana, 30 came from Mpondoland and nearby districts of the Eastern Cape/ former Transkei. Their deaths raise questions about their history and their politics. While it is important not to ethnicise a diverse segment of the South African workforce, or the strikes themselves, I suggest that a sense of collective identity has, in part, shaped their experiences of migration over the long term.

Labour migrancy and the rural economy

Historians have analysed different patterns of migrant labour in southern Africa, but it is still difficult to distinguish the forms of consciousness and organisation that arose amongst specific groups and networks of migrants. Migrants from Mpondoland were, in part, distinctive because the Mpondo chiefdom was, in 1894, amongst the last to be annexed in South Africa as a whole. They were not conquered by force, lost little of their land to settlers and were pushed into wage labour at a later stage than other African societies. Most families maintained access to arable plots, as well as grazing for their livestock, until far into the twentieth century. Since the region is blessed with high rainfall, smallholder agriculture was relatively effective, at least until the 1960s. Mpondoland comprised only 7 of the 26 old Transkeian districts (the number rose to 28 in the 1970s when the homeland was consolidated). Yet although they were sometimes categorised as Xhosa in the homeland era, Mpondo people retained their identity, as well as separate paramount chiefs and regional political authorities.

Until the 1960s, Mpondo migrants characteristically worked underground on the gold mines and as canecutters in the Natal sugar fields.1 In general terms, their experience differed from rural isiZulu-speakers to the north, who tended to avoid long phases of underground work and cane-cutting; they worked in mills or migrated to Durban or Johannesburg. Those to the south, in the western Transkeian and Ciskeian districts, gravitated more to the Cape ports, working on the docks and in a wide range of urban employment. Bhaca workers from Mount Frere, neighbouring Mpondoland, specialised for some decades in night-soil removal and municipal employment in Durban and on the Witwatersrand.

The road from the bustling town of Lusikisiki to the coastal village of Mbotyi in Mpondoland passes through a large tea plantation then twists down a precipitous escarpment through dense indigenous forest. At any point on this route you are likely to find cattle, horses or goats straying across the way. On the beach cattle often roam the sands and dip their hooves in sea water. Green hills with lush pasture sweep up from the shore line. It is a romantic scene, but there is another side to this bucolic idyll. Many of the cattle have parts of their ears eaten away by ticks which are embedded in every orifice from the eyes to the anus. Even the fattest and healthiest of animals can be assailed by these parasites. Richard Msezwa, a local resident in his sixties, recalled: ‘when I was a boy herding you seldom saw ticks in the veld. If you saw a tick you would get excited and call the other herdboys over. Now if you walk through grass your trousers become black with ticks.’ All is not well on South Africa's veld.

South Africa is a land not only of politics and gold but also of animals. Its teeming wildlife, once hunted close to extermination, is now conserved and celebrated in renowned reserves. Wildlife was displaced over a long period by livestock in the hands of Africans and then white settlers. Livestock became central to rural society and until recently many South Africans owned or worked with animals.

The dynamics of local knowledge

Understanding local knowledge has become a significant academic project amongst those interested in Africa and developing countries more generally. We have explored a central body of African knowledge about livestock diseases. We have drawn on the small but expanding field of what others call ethnoveterinary research but we have attempted to move beyond this literature. We have examined, first, changing patterns of local knowledge and the extent to which it has become hybridised. Second, we have analysed the relationship between local and scientific knowledge. Third, we have tried to understand an overarching range of ideas and practices and move beyond discussion of plant medicines, on the one hand, or witchcraft on the other.

Our informants were the descendants of communities that had been colonised well over a century ago. They have lived in a state that has imposed practices rooted in scientific conceptualisations of disease causation and control. State veterinary institutions and policies have touched the lives of their ancestors and themselves. Yet their ideas and consciousness have not been completely colonised or transformed by such interactions. To a surprising degree, we have found that rural African livestock owners worked with older but dynamic understandings of disease and treatment that interacted vigorously with changing scientific ideas and conceptions of modernity. Overall we suggest relatively limited penetration of biomedical ideas about germs, or parasites such as ticks, in the explanations of disease. The dominant form of understanding rested in environmental and nutritional concerns.

The cause of disease in animals and humans is the same: bad food, worms and witchcraft.' (Anna Pooe, traditional healer and goat breeder, Shakung, North West Province)

Introduction: Witchcraft and the ambient supernatural

Throughout our field sites there were those who attributed some animal diseases to types of witchcraft, or to supernatural causes, but occult explanations were far rarer than environmental and nutritional aetiologies. As discussed in chapter 3, many of our respondents ascribed familiar diseases like gallsickness to the state of the veld and seasonal changes in the texture of the grasses. We cannot definitively assess how commonplace beliefs in the supernatural and ritual pollution are amongst African rural communities. In part this is because we interviewed across a number of sites, rather than observed practices in one village over a long period. We are thus largely dependent on what people said about their ideas in connection with animal diseases. It is possible that some stockowners regarded witchcraft as a private matter and were reluctant to discuss it. However, many informants spoke openly about supernatural ideas and ritual pollution. Few explicitly refused to talk about these issues and a good range of our interviews at least touched on them.

The context of transhumance

Transhumance, or trekking in South African settler language, was intrinsic to white and black livestock management up to the early decades of the twentieth century. By transhumance, we mean the movement of people with livestock – a practice common to many societies, especially but not only in regions with large areas of pastureland held in common. The practice is not restricted to pastoralists, or those who specialise in livestock, and it takes a multitude of forms.

In the past, most African societies found it necessary to move their animals during the year, sometimes over considerable distances. Colonisation, private property and veterinary restrictions on movement made this increasingly difficult during the twentieth century. Yet the practice survives on a small scale in particular localities. This chapter explores the rationale and parameters of transhumance historically, and offers two examples of localised movement, in Mbotyi, Mpondoland, and QwaQwa. We suggest that transhumance in South Africa was shaped not least by the imperatives of animal nutrition and health, including the avoidance of specific animal diseases.