Abstract
D.Litt. et Phil. (Anthropology)
Seville is a small settlement in the Mhala district in Gazankulu. It is a former
white-owned farm taken over by the South African Development Trust in the
1960's. When the Trust took over: the land it was planned according to 'betterment'
principles. This meant that the former tenants were relocated into a central village,
and separate arable and grazing lands were demarcated by officials. Today poverty
and powerlessness dominate the life of the inhabitants who depend on the export
of. labour, migrant remittances and subsistence agriculture. This situation is
directly related to the history of capitalist and state penetration in the Lowveld.
Since the 1860's the population of the Lowveld were systematically dispossessed by
the State. Their incorporation into the capitalist economy followed the process of
dispossession and proletarianization. In the 1890's drought, rinderpest and the
Anglo-Boer War completed the process of incorporation as the Lowveld
population were increasingly forced to join the migrant labour force. From the
early 1930's when ownership of Lowveld farms changed from mining companies to
individuals, labour tenancy replaced rent paying squatting as the dominant form of
residence of the black population in the Lowveld. Labour tenancy on farms in the
Bushbuckridge area provided the Lowveld population with opportunities for
accumulation. Cattle numbers increased and small surpluses were produced.
Tenants on Seville whose owners only used Seville for hunting in winter, enjoyed
considerable freedom, and migrant labour became a matter of choice and not of
necessity. But the recovery did not last long.
State penetration to bring about racial separation transformed Busbuckridge farms
into reserves, and as ethnic nationalism developed and became the dominant
framework for intervention, reserve areas in the Lowveld were apportioned into
ethnic homelands. Seville changed from a white-owned farm to a ward in the Mnisi
Tribal Authority Area in Mhala, and the former tenants became citizens. of
Gazankulu. These developments accelerated the process of rural decline and
stagnation, leading to ever increasing poverty and powerlessness.
Faced with these insecurities economic diversification and social mechanisms are
major strategies to overcome poverty and survive. Though migrant labour is the
material base of.life in this rural village, it cannot sustain social reproduction on its
own. Neither can rural production. Families and households are forced to diversify economic activities and to find, according to their particular circumstances, a
balance between migrant labour, local employment, rural production and informal
economic activities. The demands of production and reproduction in the context of
poverty and powerlessness also require the diversification of social relations to
maximize the possibilities the social environment as a resource provides. And to
maintain a community life and live as individuals in Seville, a balance between
relations that unite and the relations that divide the community is necessary. Social
diversification and the balance of relations that unite and divide are manifest in
residential and domestic relations, and in cooperation and conflict.