Lindsay Frederick Braun's outstanding book makes a significant contribution to South African history. He enters the later part of the nineteenth century through the unusual portals of surveying and cartography; drawing on many neglected and underutilized sources. Following a useful introduction to the techniques, theory, and politics of surveying, he takes up case studies of the Eastern Cape and the Venda kingdom. He also makes worthwhile observations on the Pedi kingdom (which he continues to call the Pedi polity, notwithstanding the 2010 official determination on South African kingdoms).
The least surprising aspect of the book is Braun's argument: that the imposition of European cadastral surveying could not accommodate African patterns of land distribution and usage; therefore, it operated to erase them from the maps they made. For this reason mapping provides little assistance to historians trying to make sense of precolonial landscapes and to present-day commissions attempting to deliver retributive justice to dispossessed populations. The novelty of the study is the light the archival record of mapping throws on the social and political development of African societies that have not previously been subjected to this degree of close scrutiny.
Earlier historians emphasized the role of surveying in technically evicting people from the land on which they lived. Braun shows that this effort often failed to achieve even a modicum of success on the ground for the colonizers due to resistance, passive or active, of the inhabitants and their political leaders. Patterns of accommodation and resistance differed markedly even within small localities. Chiefs resisted tight definitions of territory, hoping to stake out the widest possible terrain for allocation to clients and supporters. Some influential individuals supported surveying and titles to secure an economic footing free from control by traditional authorities. Missionaries and mission Christians were not averse to freehold title but sought safeguards against the breakup of their community through sale to outsiders. Questions of succession and inheritance also bedeviled land allocation, generally to the disadvantage of women. By keeping his eye on the topography, Braun gains insights into the dynamic workings of societies in conflict and transition that escaped most observers and chroniclers.
Braun's first case study covers familiar territory in the Fingoland, Gcalekaland, and Tembuland Districts in what used to be known as the Transkei. This has been worked over in terms of frontier warfare, mission history, the House of Phalo, and the Glen Grey Act. Braun gets beyond the obvious faults and injustices of the Glen Grey Act and shows how difficult it was to implement. Even efforts to get white settlers to take up designated sections of land foundered on the rocks of expense and defiance. Colonial treasurers soon discovered that they could fill their coffers more efficiently through hut taxes on communal lands than through sale of surveyed titles and collection of quitrents.
No such scruples applied north of the Orange River in the nineteenth century. From the time of Voortrekkers, the Boer Republics had little need of surveyors to back their claims to everything. They simply declared all land available for sale to white settlers, many of whom never visited the farms they acquired through ‘inspections’ that consisted of marking out quadrilateral sections by riding a horse for a designated period north, east, south, and west. Africans did not need to be erased from maps on which they had never appeared. Here again, however, Braun shows that enforcing rights to their lands was as difficult for the Transvaal Republic as in any other thickly populated part of Southern Africa. His study of contests for control over land in the Venda-held Zoutpansberg range is the best yet made of this previously neglected terrain. Venda kings Makhado and Mphephu held their own right into the twentieth century. In fact, this section of the book deserves to stand alongside the previous kingdom histories of Delius, Bonner, Cobbing, Guy, and Peires. It is richly documented with reference to all the available sources.
It is understandable but a pity that Braun could not extend his work to the whole of Southeast Africa. It would be particularly helpful to bring KwaZulu-Natal into the comparative framework, building on previous research into the large locations, the rent farmers, the African land-buying syndicates, the Mission Reserves devised by George Grey, and the workings of the Natal Native Trust. Indeed, Braun's template for research could be usefully applied almost everywhere, even by scholars less conversant with the black arts of the surveyor.
