Population and rural development

The conservation or development schemes undertaken in East and southern Africa from the 1930s onwards are often explained in terms of the need to ameliorate the effects of population growth.20 Fears about the effects of population growth were most acute in the settler states where the African population found itself crowded into the reserves, but total population figures were increasing in every colony.21 It was not, however, the absolute growth of population that was important in driving development or

conservation policies but rather the spectre of rapid rural to urban migration in response to decreasing opportunities in the countryside. The counter to the threat of the growth of an urban proletariat was rural development to maintain the rural population in its rural home and conservation to break the perceived vicious cycle of soil erosion and increasing population density.

Cowen and Shenton note that development policies, both in colonial Africa and in other times and places, were primarily concerned with controlling the movement of

population:

From the threat of emigration from Quebec or Victoria in the mid-nineteenth century to that of de-industrialisation in late-century Britain or rural

20 Anderson, ‘Depression, Dust Bowl, Demography and Drought’, and Iliffe, Africans, p. 250.

21 Though there were also fears, in various places and at various times, about ‘disappearing tribes’ and population decline in specific rural areas.

unemployment in Kenya a century later, the focus [of development] is on the disordered movement of population.22

In colonial and post-colonial Africa the emphasis has been on controlling rural to urban migration and preventing the growth of a large relative ‘surplus population’ in cities and towns. This does not mean that the colonial state wanted to prevent rural to urban migration, but rather that they wanted to maintain control over it. In southern Africa the specific concern was to maintain control over the migrant labour system.

Harold Wolpe’s now classic thesis explaining the shift from segregation to apartheid postulates that an ecological crisis in the reserves during the 1930s and 1940s, the result of population growth in on a restricted land area, contributed to a crisis of social reproduction. The more draconian legislation of apartheid was implemented as a means of controlling this crisis and ensuring the continuation of the migrant labour system. Policies designed to protect the reserve’s environment were an integral part of this process. Concern about the environment of the South Africa’s reserves was therefore directly linked to their ability to provide for the reproduction of the labour force in the reserves.23

Wolpe’s structuralist arguments say little about conditions in the reserves or the policies enacted to confront the supposed ecological crisis. Subsequent research on these issues has shown a more complex interplay of economic, political and

ideological motivations. Nevertheless most research on conservation and development in South Africa does indicate that interventions in African rural environment, society and economy were essentially linked to the aims of segregation and, later, apartheid.

In the words of Beinart:

The discourse and justification of conservation in the African areas became bound up with the political imperatives of segregation: stemming African urbanisation, maintaining the migrant labour system and ‘developing’ Africans within their

‘own’ areas. In the words of the influential Native Economic Commission report of 1932: ‘the fundamental problem lies in the reserves’. The situation in the reserves of South Africa (and Rhodesia) was diagnosed as bordering on ecological disaster. This was inimical to agricultural development and it also posed a threat to the direction of ‘native policy’.24

22 Cowen and Shenton, Doctrines o f Development, p. 476.

23 Wolpe, ‘Capitalism and Cheap Labour-power in South Africa’.

24 Beinart, W. ‘Introduction: The Politics o f Colonial Conservation’, Journal o f Southern African Studies, 1 5 ,2 ,1 9 8 9 , pp. 143-162, p. 153.

2.2.1.Population, conservation and development in colonial Lesotho

Much of the structuralist literature on Lesotho’s economy has assumed that the colonial state simply acted in the interests of international capital invested in South Africa25 and any policy shift in South Africa could, therefore, be expected to have its counterpart in Lesotho. Despite the fact that this line of reasoning simplifies the complex and often contradictory motivations of the Basutoland government, Wolpe’s theoretical model of the transformation of the reserves’ political economy fits Lesotho well. Colonial conservation/development policies were first put forward at a time when it looked as though the colonial authorities might lose control over the migrant labour system. After decades of stimulating the outflow of labour from Lesotho the colonial authorities began to be increasingly concerned about keeping the lid on the system, and especially to maintain control over the migration of women.

The population of Lesotho has grown steadily over the past century. Given the dependence of the country on migrant remittances and the large numbers of men (and some women) migrating to Johannesburg or the Free State farms and gold fields it is necessary, however, to disaggregate the de facto population from the de jure

population (see Figure 2.1). During the heyday of colonial conservationist

interventions, from the mid-1930s through to the mid-1950s the de facto population of Lesotho grew only very slowly, only rising again once the apartheid state started to apply influx control with renewed vigour.

25 Chapter 1 of Rugege, ‘Chieftaincy and Society in Lesotho’, surveys the literature on this issue.

Figure 2.1. De facto and de jure population for Lesotho during the colonial period.

1

,

,

,

800,000-

600,000-200,000

1960

1900 1920 1940

d e facto population ■■■ d e jure population

The global depression of the early 1930s hit Lesotho hard:

The bottom fell out of wool prices as a result of the massive recession in world trade which followed the 1929 slump. The coincidence of acute economic depression with an exceptional drought in 1932-3 led to a loss of perhaps half the country’s livestock. Wheat production survived and recovered but maize did not:

in 1933 more than 350,00 bags of maize had to be imported... At the same time a resurgence in the price of gold stimulated the expansion of mining production and enormously increased the demand for labour on the gold mines. In the following decade a vast flow of emigration from Basutoland took place which, offsetting natural increase, explains the virtually static population recorded between the censuses of 1936 and 1946.26

The Basutoland authorities were faced not just by increasing unemployment at home, but also pressure from South Africa to stem the flow of migrants, especially of women. The answer to this uncontrolled out-migration was rural development.

Colonial interventions into the rural economy of Lesotho were not motivated by simple demographic pressure, but by the increase in the gap between the de facto and de jure population. I am in no way suggesting that the colonial authorities wanted to bring the migrant labour system to an end. The colonial state wanted to ensure the continuation of an ordered and controlled system of oscillating migration, rather than the wholesale emigration of men and, crucially, women to South Africa’s urban centres.27 Nor am I suggesting that the interventions by the colonial state were in any way successful in stabilising the migrant labour system. The primary reason for the narrowing of the gap between de facto and de jure population figures after the late 1950s was the draconian influx control regulations employed by the apartheid state and the forcible expulsion of many Basotho living in South Africa.28

Maintaining control over the migrant labour system was in the interests of not just the colonial state but also of the chiefs. In the Sesotho praxis, a chief is a ‘chief by the people’ and in the nineteenth century one of the controls on a ch iefs actions was the threat that his followers might shift allegiance to a new chief.29 On the other hand, a

26 Murray, ‘From Granary to Labour Reserve’, p. 9-10.

27 When Anthony Sillery became the Resident Commissioner o f the Bechuanaland Protectorate, in 1947, he claims he was given one single instruction by the Dominions Office: keep up the labour supply to the Witwatersrand; Sillery, A., Unpublished memoirs, Rhodes House, Oxford; cited by Parsons, N. on H-SAfrica electronic mail discussion list (27 November 1997).

28 After Independence, development discourse in Lesotho shifted to an emphasis on changing the pattern of a labour exporting economy, and encouraging self-sufficiency and self help. Nevertheless the government of Lesotho remained fearful o f any moves by the South African government to restrict the migrant labour system. In June 1996, for example, officials from Lesotho were vocal in their opposition to plans to give 90,000 long-term Basotho migrants permanent South African residency rights because o f the potentially devastating impact on the Lesotho Bank (which receives direct transfers o f a portion of migrants wages) and on the overall economy; Coplan and Quinlan,

‘A Chief by the People’, p. 50.

29 Coplan and Quinlan, ‘A Chief by the People’, p. 35.

chiefs personal aggrandisement was often tied up with encouraging the out-flow of migrant labour, not least because of the payments made by labour recruiters to senior chiefs. In short it was in the political and material interests of chiefs to encourage the continuation of an ordered and stable migrant labour system, in which Basotho did not permanently leave for South Africa.

Maloka’s research shows some of the ways in which an alliance between the chiefs and the colonial state (and the missionaries) maintained control of the migrant labour system. He notes that the 1920s and 1930s marked a crisis period for the chiefs and their control of the migrant labour system. The growth of a civil society in the 1920s threatened their national political position whilst the massive movement of labour to South Africa after the early 1930s drought and depression meant that many chiefs were concerned about losing their followers.30 For both ideological and political reasons it was in the interests of the chiefs to support colonial calls for rural development.