Roots and rights in the Transkei: Colonialism, natural resources, and social change, 1880--1940

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as the successive Cape Colony and Union of South Africa governments extended and expanded colonial rule in the various African polities north and east of the Kei river, they simultaneously institutionalized the domination of local environments. Amid the other state pressures and interventions of this period, transforming what became known as the Transkei into a labor “reserve,” colonial administrators gradually established a regime of forest conservation and management across the region, one which altered the political basis of forest control, reserved forest lands and species, and restricted popular access to these crucial resources. This process, and its integration with wider colonial transformations, inspired and was in turn shaped by negotiations, contestations, and conflicts within and between rural African populations and colonial communities. In particular, this thesis explores how forests were at the center of three arenas of struggle during the formative colonial period: conflicts over the meaning of environmental authority, of popular resource rights, and of resources themselves. Through a discussion of trends in the Transkei as a whole and in the specific case study of the KwaMatiwane region from roughly 1880 to 1940, the thesis examines how differently situated groups within both official and popular circles experienced and responded to the realities of the emerging colonial order by bringing contending political, economic, and cultural interests to bear on their negotiation of forest relations. Contrary to inherited official narratives of this history, the planting of state forestry's roots in the Transkei was thus far from being smooth or unproblematic, nor was it merely about “conserving” the area's “endangered” resources. Conflicts over forests reflected significant historical struggles over the meaning of much deeper and broader colonial changes in the Transkeian countryside.