Chieftaincy and resistance politics in Lehurutshe during the apartheid era.
Abstract
This article focuses on the politics of chieftaincy in Lehurutshe, a rural region
in South Africa’s North West Province, in the second half of the twentieth
century. This was a period of profound social and political restructuring in the
South African countryside. The imposition of Bantu Authorities, the extension
of passes to African women and the deposition of Kgosi Abram Ramotshere
Moiloa by the white authorities in 1957 sparked a popular struggle of
resistance (better known as the Zeerust uprising or the Hurutshe revolt) that
engulfed Lehurutshe in the late 1950s. The article analyses the establishment
of a new political order in the aftermath of this period of resistance. It goes
on to examine the attempted revival of the institution of chieftaincy by Lucas
Mangope’s Bophuthatswana bantustan in the period from the mid-1970s to
the late 1980s. The paper ends with the onset of another period of intense
struggle over the incorporation of the “black spot” villages of Lekubu (or
Braklaagte) and Mokgola (or Leeuwfontein) into Bophuthatswana in 1989.
Like the Zeerust uprising of 1957-1959, the anti-incorporation struggle of
1989-1994 points to the complex and continued intersection of local political
struggles for authority with liberation politics – crucially articulated through
the institution of the chieftaincy - during periods of contestation over local
resources.