‘Throwing Down White Man’: Cape Rule and Misrule in Colonial Lesotho, 1871–1884 by Peter Sanders, and: Luka Jantjie: Resistance Hero of the South African Frontier by Kevin Shillington (review)

Here are two books on episodes of tough resistance to colonial rule which illustrate that it was not exactly always easy going for the Victorians in Africa, even in a region in which British imperial ascendancy was well entrenched by the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Depicting the mixed fortunes of African extractions from a life determined by the rocky balance between accommodation and resistance to British colonialism, the authors of ‘Throwing Down White Man’: Cape Rule and Misrule in Colonial Lesotho, 1871–1884 and Luka Jantjie: Resistance Hero of the South African Frontier are both distinguished scholars of southern African societies. Impressive in their scale of research, richly illustrated with maps, sketches, and photographs of the leading adversaries of their respective stories, these books (coincidentally, both of precisely the same length) are both lively in tone and a pleasure to read.

The examples of steely African resistance to overbearing colonial authority presented by Peter Sanders and Kevin Shillington are both drawn from the southern African interior, share roughly overlapping decades, and deal with peasants who had been chafing under intensifying European exactions and confiscations to the point of snapping. One is a retelling of a struggle that will, to a greater or lesser degree, be known to scholars of African conquest and anti-colonial rebellion, the Gun War of 1880 through 1881 in which the Sotho of Britain’s Basutoland protectorate repudiated their ties of deferential Crown loyalty to the eponymous white man, throwing him down, as the book’s title puts it so vividly. An imagined ecstasy of scorn, Sanders has taken this phrase from the chiefly praise poem of a grandson of King Moshoeshoe, widely credited as the founder of the Basotho and the subject of a much earlier definitive historical biography by the same author, Moshoeshoe, Chief of the Sotho (1975). The other, Shillington’s evocation of an obdurate stand against rapacious colonial encroachment by some southern Tswana who had had enough, is a lesser-known British Bechuana-land story. A biography, this volume seeks to restore to the historical record the experience of an obscure and neglected colonial rebel. An acknowledged leader or kgosi, Luka Jantjie headed a Batlhaping cluster of Tswana followers into a fateful armed stand against government militia forces near the end of the 1890s, a time when Britain was contemplating its frying of the last remaining big free fish of the region, the independent Boer Republicans.

The Republicans had mineral resources and firearms, commodities which feature among the many rich, varied, and complex themes which course through these two studies and which help to knit them together. The discovery and opening of the diamond fields in Griqualand West from the 1870s not only fattened that chronically acquisitive Victorian capitalist buccaneer, Cecil John Rhodes. For both African peoples examined here, the advent of industrialisation created pulsating new markets for their labour, grain, draught animals, and wagon transport. For many Sotho peasants, this spurt of prosperity brought some compensation for earlier land losses.

Although their circumstances were different, for Jantjie’s Batlhaping the diamond boom also came as a sudden windfall, furnishing the hunters among them with new strings to their bow in the form of prospecting and the provisioning of lucrative Kimberley markets with grain, meat, and firewood. In various ways, as ‘Throwing Down White Man’ and Luka Jantjie emphasise, the abrupt changes which now rippled through rural African lives emboldened the minds and stiffened the spirits of these colonial subjects. As native Africans grew increasingly less likely to take colonial land seizures, the planting of unwelcome colonial boundaries, and newly intrusive colonial political demands lying...