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ORDER, OPENNESS, AND ECONOMIC CHANGE IN PRECOLONIAL SOUTHERN AFRICA: A PERSPECTIVE FROM THE BOKONI TERRACES*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2014

Peter Delius  and
Stefan Schirmer
Peter Delius
Affiliation:
University of Witwatersrand
Stefan Schirmer
Affiliation:
University of Witwatersrand
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Abstract

The Bokoni settlement in Mpumalanga, South Africa is the largest known terraced site in Africa. The settlement consisted of intensively farmed terraced fields spanning 150 kilometres along the eastern escarpment. It flourished from around 1500 until the 1820s, after which it all but disappeared. This article first sets out to interpret the growing body of primarily archaeological Bokoni evidence from the perspective of economic history. Another, although secondary, goal of the article is to contribute to debates about the precolonial roots of African poverty. Accordingly, we outline the factors that may have facilitated the emergence of this region as a major food-producing area. We argue that Bokoni formed part of a decentralised social order that was built around the logic of production and was conducive to dynamic forms of accumulation. This decentralised, cooperative regional order was replaced in the early nineteenth century by a new order built around the logic of extraction and war. This new order militated against the development of decentralised intensive farming and emphasised instead the accumulation of military technology – most notably guns and the construction of military strongholds. As a result, the population of Bokoni plummeted and terraced farming fell into disuse in the region. These insights, we argue, call into question recent attempts to find the roots of African poverty in specific types of precolonial social arrangements.

Keywords

ArchaeologySouthern Africaeconomicpoliticalcultural
Type
Social Order and Economic Transformation
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 55 , Issue 1 , March 2014 , pp. 37 - 54
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

*

Authors’ email: peter.delius@wits.ac.za and stefan.schirmer@wits.ac.za

References

1 For the most recent overview of this research, see Delius, P., Maggs, T., and Schoeman, M., ‘Bokoni: old structures, new paradigms? rethinking pre-colonial society from the perspective of the stone-walled sites in Mpumalanga’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 38:2 (2012), 399–414CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The outline provided above and elaborated elsewhere in the article is based on ongoing research, publications, and conversations with Alex Schoeman, Tim Maggs, Mats Widgren, and others.

2 For major contributions to making sense of continent-wide processes of development in the precolonial period, see Austin, G., ‘Resources, techniques, and strategies south of the Sahara: revising the factor endowments perspective on African economic development, 1500–2000’, Economic History Review, 61:3 (2008), 587–624CrossRefGoogle Scholar; J. Iliffe, Africans: The History of a Continent (Cambridge, 1995); and J. Iliffe, The African Poor: A History (Cambridge, 1987).

3 D. Acemoglu and Robinson, J. A., ‘Why is Africa poor?’, Economic History of Developing Regions, 25:1 (2010), 21–50Google Scholar. They also, in a somewhat contradictory fashion, point to the existence of centralised states that became too inflexible and extractive as a further cause of Africa's poverty. See also Acemoglu, D. and Robinson, J. A., Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (New York, 2012), 88–91Google Scholar.

4 See, for example, Collet, D. P., ‘Excavations of stone-walled ruin types in the Badfontein Valley, eastern Transvaal, South Africa’, The South African Archaeological Bulletin, 37:135 (1982), 34–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Evers, T. M., ‘Recent Iron Age research in the eastern Transvaal, South Africa’, The South African Archaeological Bulletin, 30:119 (1975), 71–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For more recent overviews, see P. Delius and M. H. Schoeman, ‘Revisiting Bokoni: populating the stone ruins of the Mpumalanga escarpment’; and Maggs, T., ‘The Mpumalanga escarpment settlements: some answers, many questions’, in Swanepoel, N., Esterhuysen, A., and Bonner, P. L. (eds.), Five Hundred Years Rediscovered: Southern African Precedents and Prospects (Johannesburg, 2008), 135–68 and 169–82Google Scholar.

5 One important reason for this initial undercount is that once terraces have been abandoned, they act as firebreaks, which allows for rapid processes of afforestation.

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7 The extent to which the valley bottoms were also cultivated remains a subject of a debate which is difficult to resolve, as they have been intensively ploughed and cultivated by subsequent farmers (personal communication with Dr Alex Schoeman and Jeanette Smith, April 2013).

8 These are discussed at some length in Delius, Maggs, and Schoeman, ‘Bokoni’, 403–7.

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13 This has been identified in other instances of intensive farming islands. See Austin, ‘Resources’, 601.

14 Mitchell, Archaeology, 356–9.

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16 For contextualising comments, see Maggs, ‘The 2009’; and Beinart, ‘FYI Workshop’, 213–27.

17 Delius, Maggs, and Schoeman, ‘Bokoni’, 412–13.

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20 See especially Parkington, J. and Hall, S., ‘The appearance of food production in Southern Africa 1,000 to 2,000 years ago’, in , Hamilton, , Mbenga, and , Ross (eds.), The Cambridge History, Volume 1, 63–111Google Scholar; and Hall, ‘Farming Communities’.

21 Hall, ‘Farming Communities’, 134.

22 It is evident from Hall's summary that archaeologists and historians studying precolonial Southern Africa have been primarily concerned with understanding social, political, and cultural changes. As a result, when they have focussed on economic change, they have regarded it mostly as the cause of political centralisation, increased conflict, and associated developments.

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28 Delius, The Land, 52.

29 Ibid. 48–9.

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31 Hall, M., The Changing Past: Farmers, Kings, and Traders in Southern Africa, 200–1860 (Cape Town, 1987), 45Google Scholar.

32 Hall, The Changing Past, 68.

33 Peires, J. B., ‘Chiefs and commoners in precolonial Xhosa society’, in Peires, J. B. (ed.), Before and After Shaka: Papers in Nguni History (Grahamstown, South Africa, 1981), 128Google Scholar.

34 Ibid. 134.

35 Ibid. 133; Delius, P., ‘Witches and missionaries in nineteenth century Transvaal’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 27:3 (2001), 434–6CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

36 Parsons, N., ‘Prelude to Difaqane in the interior of Southern Africa, c. 1600–c. 1822’, in Hamilton, C. (ed.), The Mfecane Aftermath: Reconstructive Debates in Southern African History (Johannesburg, 1995), 323–49Google Scholar.

37 Ibid. 331.

38 Ibid. 335; A. Manson, ‘Conflict in the western highveld/southern Kalahari, c. 1750–1820’, in Hamilton (ed.), The Mfecane Aftermath, 352–6. See also Hall, ‘Farming Communities’.

39 Delius, The Land, 18.

40 Ibid.

41 Eldredge, E. A., ‘Sources of conflict in Southern Africa, c. 1800–30: the ‘mfecane’ reconsidered’, The Journal of African History, 33:1 (1992), 1–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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43 North, D. C., Structure and Change in Economic History (New York, 1981), 159Google Scholar.

44 Ibid. 102–3.

45 North, D. C., Summerhill, W., and Weingast, B. R., ‘Order, disorder, and economic change: Latin America versus North America’, in Bueno de Mesquita, B. and Root, H. L. (eds.), Governing for Prosperity (New Haven, CT, 2000), 42Google Scholar.

46 Delius, Maggs, and Schoeman, ‘Bokoni’.

47 Maggs, ‘The 2009’, 215.

48 Ibid. Also personal communication with Widgren and Maggs, ‘Rietvlei’, July 2013.

49 Delius, The Land, 50.

50 Delius, ‘Recapturing captives’, 15–17.

51 Omer-Cooper, J. D., The Zulu Aftermath: A Nineteenth-Century Revolution in Bantu Africa (Evanston, IL, 1966)Google Scholar.

52 For an interesting discussion of how such a decentralised system worked in the context of West African urbanisation, see McIntosh, R. J., Ancient Middle Niger: Urbanism and the Self-Organizing Landscape (Cambridge, 2005)Google Scholar. ‘The understood complementarity of the system dampens the (otherwise natural?) desire of individuals and groups to gather unto themselves more and more authority.’ (142). The authors would like to thank Gareth Austin for this reference.

53 Hall, The Changing Past, 68.

54 M. Douglas ‘The Lele: resistance to change’, in Bohannan and Dalton (eds.), Markets in Africa, 211–33; Acemoglu and Robinson, ‘Why is Africa poor’; see also Acemoglu and Robinson, Why Nations Fail.

55 They do, however, argue that states that were too rigid and too extractive were another, possibly more important, cause of African poverty, but this is a slightly different point. The argument in Why Nations Fail is that a centralised political order also requires an inclusive political system in order to achieve development.