Forced labour in the Pilanesberg: the flogging of Chief Kgamanyane by Commandant Paul Kruger, Saulspoort, April 1870

Bernard Mbenga

Journal of Southern African Studies, 1997, vol. 23, issue 1, 127-140

Abstract: During the 1860s, most of the Kgafela‐Kgatla lived on Commandant Paul Kruger's property, Saulspoort, in the western Transvaal. They were forced to render unpaid labour to the local Boers. At first, during the 1840s, Bakgatla‐Boer relations were ‘amicable’, but relations deteriorated as the Boers embarked on irrigated farming in the 1860s and demanded labour in order to build dams. In the late‐1860s, when Kruger forced Bakgatla men to pull cartloads of stone to the construction site, they refused to render labour and Kruger publically flogged their chief, Kgamanyane. Consequently, he and more than half his people migrated to present‐day Botswana. The article situates the incident in the wider contemporary social and political context in which Boer labour practices and racial attitudes prevailed, as well as Kruger's personal problems at the time. It argues that the flogging reveals aspects of the racial ideology of the time and adds to the current literature on corporal punishment in settler societies.

Date: 1997
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/03057079708708526 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:cjssxx:v:23:y:1997:i:1:p:127-140

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/cjss20

DOI: 10.1080/03057079708708526

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Southern African Studies is currently edited by Ralph Smith

More articles in Journal of Southern African Studies from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().