merafe. In addition, a considerable number of people were scattered around in small villages or hamlets: as discussed earlier in this chapter, these consisted partly of small groups originating from Sotho-speaking communities in the Transvaal, and partly of people who had ‘always’ been living in the area and who were classified by the ruling Tswana groups as Makgalagadi or Masarwa.16 When the dominant Tswana communities increased their cattle wealth from the eighteenth century onwards, the latter categories constituted a source of free labour and consequently were exploited as herders. This was particularly the case among the four large merafe. The Bangwato and the Batawana were granted the most extensive ‘native reserves’; they also were assigned overlordship of great numbers of people who had retained their non-Tswana cultural identities.
By the exercise of their dominant position, all communities within the confines of each native reserve were captured into the hierarchical structure of authority radiating from the royal centre of the officially recognized merafe. The Tswana ruling group exercised their power by means of this network: formally on behalf of the Crown, they administered the allocation of natural resources, collected tax and exercised jurisdiction. The heads of provincial communities were recruited either from the local group or from members of the royal centre who were placed in provincial communities to embody the authority of the kgosi officially recognized by the colonial state. During the colonial era such delegation by the dikgosi increased, with a system of ‘chief's representatives’ originating from the royal centre and also an extensive intelligence service.
This system worked more efficiently in compact communities, especially those closer to the royal centres, than in peripheral communities in large ‘reserves’ such as those of the Bangwato and Batawana. On the other hand these peripheral communities, composed mainly of hunter-gatherers and horticulturalists, were politically inactive and thus represented no threat to the Tswana rulers. Moreover, although the majority of the population in the reserves lived in compact villages, being agriculturalists and pastoralists they operated over a wide area: a family's arable land could be located 500 kilometres from their village and their cattle post even further away. As all land resources were ‘communal’, and under the trusteeship of the kgosi access to land could be obtained only with the consent of the kgosi or one of his deputies, by appointing ‘overseers’ to administer all the areas used for agricultural and pastoral purposes (see Schapera 1943a: 143, 224ff), the dikgosi kept control of this particular part of the hierarchical network.
It needs to be stressed, however, that communities foreign to the Tswana merafe were brought under their domination to a highly different extent. This had partly to do with space. For example, while one Kalanga group was so closely connected to the royal centre of the Bangwato that it constituted a separate ward in the royal town, other Kalanga groups were living far away at the fringes of the territory which the Bangwato attempted to control, allowing them considerable de facto autonomy (Werbner 2004: 37; cf. van Binsbergen 1994: 156; Schapera 1952: 65ff). Partly this was a matter of power: while most ‘foreign’ Tswana-speaking communities were tightly integrated with the royal centre, there were some large Tswana communities which, as we shall see subsequently, were not located far from the royal centre yet always challenged the supremacy of the ruler of the ‘hosting’ morafe.
In any case, the domination of the Tswana merafe recognized by the British prevailed. The force of the processes and structures of subjection is testified by the fact that during the colonial era – spanning some eighty years – there were very few rebellions or serious conflicts between the dominant Tswana groups and their subject communities. It also reflects the fact that the leaders of these subject communities often perceived some benefit in submitting to the dominant morafe. For example, in 1922 a large contingent of Herero (originating from the present Namibia) sought refuge among the Bangwato and were accommodated by the establishment of a separate ward in 1922 (see Durham 1993: 72, 130–31). Furthermore, among the sizeable, composite population designated by the Tswana as Makgalagadi, who were mostly scattered among small hamlets, there were groups which gathered under the leadership of a kgosana and formed Tswana-style settlements, centring on compact villages divided into lekgotla.
I lived for a year in such a village in southeastern Bangwaketse that had been established at a small lake in the southern part of the ‘reserve’ and brought into the political order of the Bangwaketse at the time of Kgosi Seepapitso III (c. 1915). In 1946 his son, Kgosi Bathoen II, moved the people of this community some 15 kilometres towards the north and placed it under the authority of one of his dikgosana who were located there in a separate ward with five descent groups from different wards in the royal town. They were, without question, compelled by the kgosi to move in order to give the kgosi's representative a substantial support group. The group of people brought from the south were identified by the Bangwaketse of the royal town as X; their actual name I do not relate for reasons that will be obvious shortly. This group met this reorganization with considerable ambivalence, if not resistance.17 On the one hand, it linked them more closely to the hierarchical order of the Bangwaketse, thus clearly ranking them above those who were, as one of their elders put it, still living in the bush. Moreover, the position of their leader (to whom I was able to speak shortly before he died in 1977) was strengthened within his own community, and he asserted that he worked well with Kgosi Bathoen's kgosana. On the other hand, the Bangwaketse group from the royal centre – constituting the senior ward in the village – never accepted X as Bangwaketse ‘proper’.18 When I came to the community thirty years after it was established, there had been – with one exception – no intermarriage between the X and those who claimed to be bona fide Bangwaketse. Yet the X insisted to me that they were Bangwaketse ‘just like everybody else in the village’, and they made every effort to appear indistinguishable from them. The story of the X offers a perfect illustration of how the dominant Tswana group had inculcated their holistic ontology of an all-embracing hierarchical order – there was nothing else to aspire for than belonging to the dominant Tswana.
Similarly I have come across other groups of ‘Bakgalagadi’ Tswana in a number of small provincial communities in Eastern Botswana who were hiding their perceived stigmatized identity and asserting their belonging to the dominant Tswana (see Solway 1994; Chapter 5 below). This aspect came out in an intriguing way at Botswana's independence when the ruling group of the postcolonial state embarked on constructing a ‘nation’ principled upon nondiscrimination and other virtues of equality (see following chapter). It became a matter of offence that could be prosecuted to address minorities by the degrading prefix of ‘Ma’, as in Makgalagadi and Masarwa, the stigmatising Setswana label of Makalaka for Kalanga, or even by the use of their distinct group name if they themselves perceived it humiliating, as in the case of the X above. This and many other communities insisted on being identified by the name of the morafe that claimed ownership to the territory in which they were living.19 I was told by people who identified themselves as Bangwaketse proper in the village in which I was living that if ‘if you call them X, they might hit you or take you to court!’ Tswana hegemony had obviously been forcefully at work. I shall pursue the issues of domination and pressure for assimilation in Chapter 5.
While many groups thus submitted rather quietly to Tswana overlordship, there were some occasions on which ambivalence, tension and uneasiness turned into open conflicts and confrontation. Although not so many in number, they are significant because they show that the dikgosi of the colonial era began to rely less on amicable incorporation and more on coercion. A case in point is the Kalanga, living scattered in a number of small communities in a region of northeast Botswana into which the Bangwato expanded. Werbner has compared the Kalanga to the Tswana, describing both as ‘super-tribes’: having ‘neither political community nor territory, [they] emerged as the broader category of culturally related people, widely spread in tribes and their diasporas, both rural and urban’ (Werbner 2002b: 733). In addition, both contained peoples of diverse origins from the outset (e.g. Ramsay 1987: 74). Sociopolitically, however, the Kalanga and the Tswana appear to have differed radically from one another. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the northern Tswana were organized