The Transformation of the World (78 page)

The attitude of whites to the black majority was largely marked by brutality and cynicism. One side effect of this was that, with the exception of some missionaries, no one took the trouble to “civilize” the Africans and hence to undermine their cultural autonomy. In contrast, that is precisely what happened in America, in the last third of the nineteenth century, through the well-meaning attentions of “friends of the Indians.” All told, Bantu-speaking Africans in South Africa did not suffer a total defeat. They remained demographically the majority, were allowed a minimum of cultural autonomy, and played an indispensable role in the economy. When the United States in the 1930s switched to a kind of humane Indian policy, it was too late for a genuine “Indian revival.” In South Africa at that time, full-scale repression of the black majority population still lay in the future. Only the overthrow of the coercive state apparatus at the end of the twentieth century would create the conditions for popular self-determination. The frontier had deeply marked South African statehood, but after a long delay it finally issued into a “normal” nation-state development. In the United States there are still reservations. In South Africa the homelands have disappeared on paper, but their imprint remains in the distribution of landownership.

Turner in South Africa

Apart from the United States, the frontier thesis is applied to no other country more often but also more controversially than it is to South Africa. All those who sustain one of its many variations are essentially agreed that social tensions and racist attitudes grew sharper as the distance increased from a colonial-cosmopolitan atmosphere. The Trekboers in the interior are generally seen as the epitome of uncouth pioneers, but whereas for some this means freedom-loving outdoorsmen, for others it means feral racists. What such interpretations have in common is an emphasis on the isolation of frontiersmen from “Western civilization,” or anyway from the urban Europe that had its African outposts in Cape Colony. A rigidly Calvinist sense of mission is part of this image. Critical histories argue that South Africa's racist system, which came to a climax after 1947–48, first began to take shape precisely on that frontier, and that nineteenth-century experiences therefore marked the whole social order in the second half of the twentieth century. This idea of a long-term continuity in racist attitudes, from the 1830s until the heyday of apartheid, forms the kernel of the frontier interpretation of South African history.

In 1991 a book much read in South Africa repeated the claim that the Enlightenment and liberalism completely passed the Boers by, that these were “the simplest and most backward fragment of Western civilization in modern
times.”
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Critics of this thesis were unwilling to go quite that far and found elements of racist thinking in the late-eighteenth-century Cape; while others came close to the “middle ground” interpretation of American history by pointing to numerous instances of contact or cooperation between whites and Africans. The historian Leonard Guelke, in particular, has sought a way out of such sharp counterpositions, identifying both an orthodox “frontier of exclusion” and a liberal “frontier of inclusion.” Another proposal is to distinguish between a phase when the frontier was still open and another when it was closed, and to show that the situation hardened in the extreme only during the latter period. Nowadays a strict continuity thesis has few supporters among South African historians: neither the nineteenth-century frontier nor slavery in Cape Colony (before its abolition in the British Empire in 1833–34) is seen as the direct source of apartheid; rather, both the one and the other contributed to the fact that a (partly religious) sense of white cultural superiority, together with practices of sharp segregation, was already developing in the late nineteenth century. The frontier thesis does not provide a key to South African history, but it does emphasize the importance of geography and environmental factors for the crystallization of social attitudes.
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Turner's theme of the emergence of freedom at the frontier is only intermittently applicable to South Africa. The Boer exodus to the interior was, among other things, a response to the social revolution brought about by the liberation of the Cape slaves in 1834, and by the Governor's decree of 1828 that any person not having the status of a slave was equal in the eyes of the law and enjoyed its full protection.
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In their own republics, founded at a time when such a polity was rare even in Europe, the Boers created a quasi-Hellenic form of democratic selfgovernment involving all male citizens but excluding a section of the population regarded as immature (although slavery itself was not permitted there).

This frontier democracy calls to mind not so much a modern constitutional state as the egalitarianism of frontiersmen all over the world. In Argentina Juan Manuel de Rosas, a prototypical caudillo, first created a power base for himself by fighting the Indians at the frontier, then won support as a strongman from the Buenos Aires oligarchy, and in a startling volte-face, turned against his erstwhile gaucho followers. In South Africa, British colonial rule in the cape was too firmly entrenched to be threatened by a Boer liberation movement, while the Boers themselves cared only to be left in peace in their isolated republics. But the gold rush that began in 1886 in the Witwatersrand disturbed this self-sufficiency. Eager to profit to the full from the new riches, the Boers gave British capitalists a free hand but ensured that they kept political control, asserting their frontier democracy against not only the black underclass but also white newcomers (
uitlanders
). The South African or Boer War of 1899–1902 developed out of this tangled situation. It ended with the victory of an imperial power which, having had had to make extraordinary efforts to overcome a seemingly insignificant enemy, began to doubt whether colonial domination—especially over other whites—was worth imposing at such a high price.

The war deeply wounded Boer society on the High Veld; one-tenth of the population lost their lives. But Afrikaners still formed the great majority of the white population of South Africa, and they remained in control of agriculture. There were no other allies to whom the British could turn. Since a regime based on permanent occupation was not an option, some arrangement had to be made with the subordinate Boers. A younger and relatively more liberal Afrikaner leadership saw things in much the same way, and this provided the basis for a compromise. The founding of the Union of South Africa in 1910, as a self-governing dominion within the Empire, represented a triumph for the Afrikaners, a defeat for black Africans, and a safeguarding of basic economic and strategic interests for the British—at least until the Statute of Westminster was passed in 1931.
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Subsequently, older elements of racial discrimination came together in a fully fledged system. The political and cultural values of the Boer frontier took hold of the entire state, first gradually and then more dramatically with the 1948 electoral victory of the National Party. Unlike in Argentina, where the power of the gaucho frontier soon waned, the frontier periphery here conquered the political core and stamped it for almost the entire twentieth century. Nothing like it had been seen before, even in the United States. In 1829, with Jackson's presidency, a representative of the frontier had for the first time dislodged the urban East Coast oligarchy from the highest office of state. From then right down to the Texan oil dynasty of George Bush, father and son, “Western” attitudes repeatedly marked American politics. But in the nineteenth century a greater challenge came from the slave-owning South. The Civil War was for the United States what the Boer War was for South Africa, albeit in a more compressed time frame. The secession of the Southern states of the United States in 1860–61 was an equivalent of the Great Trek, and their planter democracy before the secession displayed great similarities with the master-race republicanism of the Boer pioneers (which justified itself, however, less in terms of an elaborate racial ideology than through a muffled, barely articulated, sense of superiority).

The defeat of the South in 1865 prevented the ideology and practice of white supremacy from engulfing the American state as a whole. Nevertheless, from the late 1870s on, blacks were again deprived of many of the rights that had been granted, or at least promised, to them during and after the Civil War; the ending of slavery by no means made them into citizens with equal rights. In the great compromises that followed the Civil War in 1865 and the Boer War in 1902, the vanquished whites were to a great extent able to maintain their own interests and values—in each case at the expense of the blacks. Evidently, however, the frontier did not triumph in the United States as it did in South Africa: the values and symbols of the true “Wild West” made themselves visible not at the level of the political order but as components of America's collective consciousness and “national character.” In the United States, the North-South opposition complicated the political geography. It became the equivalent of a rebellious frontier in other parts of the world.
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4 Eurasia

At the beginning of this chapter, a frontier was defined as a special kind of contact situation, where two collectives of different origin and cultural orientation encountered each other in exchange processes combining conflict and cooperation in varying proportions. Turner's old premise that these collectives represent societies at “different stages of development” has turned out to be not generally sustainable. At the time of the Great Trek—to take just one example—the pastoralist Boers were by no means at a different stage of social evolution from their Bantu neighbors. Nor was it at all evident—to take another of Turner's themes—who were the “barbarians” and who the “civilized.” In North America it was only fairly late, with the advent of Indian bison hunting, that a sharp opposition developed between different economic forms: on the one side, sedentary pioneers supplementing agriculture with fenced-in livestock breeding; on the other side, pastoralist nomads with the additional mobility of mounted hunters. Such clear-cut contrasts were rarely found in Africa, with its numerous gradations of nomadism. But as Owen Lattimore pointed out long ago, they were characteristic of the whole of northern Asia.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, mobile lifestyles based on the breeding and exploitation of animal herds stretched all the way from the southern boundary of the Scandinavian-Siberian-Manchurian forest belt to the Himalayas, the highlands of Iran and Anatolia, and the Arabian Peninsula, and eastward from the Volga almost to the gates of Beijing: an area far larger than the “Central Asia” to be found on today's maps. Sedentary agriculture was concentrated on the margins of the Eurasian landmass, from northern China to the Punjab, and in Europe west of the Volga, which rounded off the world of grasslands and steppe.
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Such an ideal-typical opposition between static and mobile should not, of course, make us forget that in the nineteenth century wandering population groups also existed in Europe and South Asia.
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Nomadism on the Steppe Frontier

Within these huge spheres of mobile lifestyles, ethnologists identify the following variants: (1) the camel nomads of the desert, also found throughout North Africa; (2) the tenders of sheep and goats in Afghanistan, Iran, and Anatolia; (3) the horseback nomads of the Eurasian steppe, the best known being the Mongols and Kazakhs; and (4) the yak herders of the Tibetan plateau.
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These all have certain features in common: a detachment from, and often violent rejection of, urban existence; a social organization in lineage groups with elected chiefs; and a great stress on proximity to animals in the formation of cultural identity. Traversed by countless ecological boundaries, nomadic Asia was divided into numerous linguistic groups and at least three major religious orientations (Islam, Buddhism, and shamanism, each with a range of subvariants). On the frontier of this world, which in area constituted the largest part
of Eurasia, conditions were relatively straightforward. Where nomadism did not—as in Arabia and the Persian Gulf—stretch all the way to the sea, it always encountered sedentary farmers in its path. This was true for millennia in both Europe and East Asia: both had a steppe frontier.

History has seldom been written from the viewpoint of nomads. European, Chinese, and Iranian historians saw, and still see, them as the Other—an aggressive threat from outside, against which any means (usually forward defense) was justified. Although Edward Gibbon, the greatest of Enlightenment historians, already asked what made the mounted warriors of early Islam or the Mongols of Genghis Khan into such an elemental force, sedentary societies found nomads almost beyond comprehension. Conversely, nomads often felt at a loss when confronted with representatives of nonmobile urban cultures. This did not, however, prevent both sides from developing a wide range of strategies in their dealings with each other. Methods of handling barbarian peoples from central Asia were always one of the most well-developed fields of Chinese statecraft. And in the late fourteenth century, Ibn Khaldun made the opposition between city dwellers and Bedouins the cornerstone of his theory of (Islamic) civilization.

The life of nomads is riskier than that of farmers, and this leaves its mark on their view of the world. Herds can multiply exponentially and lead to sudden wealth, but they are biologically more vulnerable than cultivated plants. Mobile ways of life constantly require decisions about how to manage herds and how to behave with neighbors or strangers; they therefore involve a quite distinctive kind of rationality. As the Russian anthropologist Anatoly M. Khazanov has emphasized, nomadic societies—unlike subsistence farmers—are never autarkic; they cannot function in isolation. The more socially differentiated a nomadic society is, the more actively it seeks contact and interaction with the outside world. Khazanov mentions four broad strategies available to nomads:
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