Environment, Production and Social Difference in the Kalahari Thornveld, c1750–1830

This article considers the food production activities of people in the Thlaping and Tlharo chiefdoms in the present-day Northern Cape and North-West Provinces between c1750 and 1830. It considers food production methods, their environmental suitability and how food produtction related to social difference. It is arguted that the Tlhaping and Tlharo chiefdoms did not arise through the migration of agro-pastoralists, but that indigenous inihabitants began stock keeping and cultivating as the chiefdoms were established in the mid-eighteenth century. Thereafter food production remained extensive and the products of pastoralism – milk – provided the staple of the diet. Food production did not provide support for all people, and a significant class of foragers, who were not ethnically differentiated from other members of the chiefdons, lived at the bottom of the society and outside of the towns. It was possible for men to move between stock keeping and foraging in a process similar to the “ecological cycle” described by Richard Elphick for the Khoisan. However, chiefs and headmen exerted their power, in part gained through stock ownership, to protect their positions of wealth fromn the vagaries of nature and human competition. Agriculture was the most intensive use of the environmnent and supplemented food gained through pastoralism and foraging, rather than providing the staple. Production methods show it had relatively low labour requirements and may be understood as shifting cultivation. It was the responsibility of women, who could not achieve status through their production. Cultivation was a less individualistic activity than pastoralism, but its reciprocity did not amount to communalism. A consideration of production activities and yields in this enviroinment suggests that men invested their hopes for wealth in stock rather than in women’s labolur power; that success as stock keepers was not an option for all men, and that the exclusion of women from stock ownership was due to cultural forces and not a means of relegating them to service as agricultural labourers.