The Transformation of the World (77 page)

Sheep became another factor in the Argentine economy over the next two or three decades; it was a robust and undemanding animal that did not have to be killed to yield a profit. Stockades and special livestock farms transformed the economy from pastoral to mixed. By 1870 in the province of Buenos Aires, the most populous in Argentina, perhaps as much as one-quarter of the rural population could be described as gauchos. Thereafter the proportion rapidly declined, as fences reduced the need for horseback riders. In 1900 the
frigorífico
, with modern techniques of packing and freezing, acquired great significance, and the industrialization of meat production led to the rapid shedding of labor. The gaucho, less valued than ever, was robbed of the last vestiges of his independence.

When General Julio A. Roca in 1879 attacked and largely annihilated the Mapuche (the “Araucanos” of the Spanish sources), the largest Indian people in the country, the more turbulent elements among the gauchos were also reined in. The social elite saw them as (potential) criminals and forced many of them into leaseholds, dependent labor, or military service; drastic new laws curbed their mobility. As it so often happens, urban intellectuals began to romanticize the figure of the gaucho at the very moment when he was disappearing as a social type. In his demise, the gaucho would become the embodiment of the Argentine nation.
¹⁰¹

In Argentina, unlike in Brazil, the Indians did not give way for a long time; they were still carrying out repeated raids in the 1830s in the province of Buenos Aires. Hundreds of Euro-Argentine women and children were abducted. The advance inland required both a more extensive definition of the state territory and a discourse that devalued the indigenous peoples and excluded them from
the national community. The struggle no longer concerned particular natives but raised the whole question of civilization versus barbarism. The “Desert War” against the Indians, which dragged on from 1879 until 1885, was eventually settled only when the government introduced the breech-loading rifle on a wide scale. In almost the same year as the last of the great Indian wars in the United States, the vast expanse of the Argentine interior was opened up for agricultural development. The Indians were not allowed even the wretched future of life on a reservation.

Brazil

In Brazil, whose land reserves were at least as large as those of the United States, the development of the frontier was quite different—and also varied from the pattern seen in Argentina.
¹⁰²
It is the only country in the world where some of the post-1492 frontier processes of exploitation and settlement persisted right through the twentieth century. In addition to the mining frontier, there was a kind of slave-operated sugar-plantation frontier, similar to Alabama's or Mississippi's before the American Civil War, while a patchy farming frontier developed late. Even today the social life of Brazil is concentrated in a narrow coastal strip. The interior (
sertão
), originally the whole country beyond the reach of Portuguese cannons, was (and to some extent still is) a symbolically inferior place that attracted few explorers. The Amazon jungle—until the assaults on the rainforest in the final decades of the twentieth century—was something like a “frontier beyond the frontier.”
¹⁰³
In Brazilian literature, the frontier is theorized in explicitly spatial terms, hardly at all as a process. So the spatial category
sertão
is the closest equivalent to Turner's concept, while
fronteira
denotes the state boundary line.

In Brazil many objective prerequisites were missing for the opening up of the interior. In particular, there was no serviceable network of waterways remotely comparable to the Ohio-Missouri-Mississippi system in the United States; nor were minerals that might have been useful for industrialization (like the coal and iron in the North American West) present in the ground. Only when Brazil blazed a trail for itself in the world coffee market did something like an agrarian development frontier see the light of day. In the mid-1830s coffee overtook sugar for the first time in the country's exports, and Brazil became the world's leading producer.
¹⁰⁴
But with the technology of the time it took only a generation for soil exhaustion to set in, compelling planters to move farther west. After slavery was abolished in 1888, a demand for plantation labor drew many Italians to Brazil, but the conditions there were as unfavorable as in Argentina—so appalling, in fact, that in 1902 the Italian government banned publicity for further emigration. The power structures were similar in Argentina and Brazil,
latifundistas
in the former corresponding to big coffee planters in the latter. In neither was there a policy of land allocation or redistribution to small farmers.
¹⁰⁵
The Brazilian
fronteira
was essentially a land of coffee monoculture, run by large businesses with or without slaves; it was not a place where independent pioneers (in
Frederick Jackson Turner's sense) and a home-centered middle stratum could take shape or an open-air school of democracy establish itself. As John Hemming has depicted in a moving trilogy, the Brazilian Indians trapped before 1910 in the Amazonian rubber business (not, it is true, in the coffee and sugar economy) were not even afforded the protection of reservations.
¹⁰⁶
The rainforests, unlike the enclosed Great Plains settled by Euro-Americans in the United States, were an open frontier. The
indios
therefore retreated farther and farther into the remotest regions, their resistance to the colonists finally exhausted by the turn of the century.

South Africa

The lack of any real interaction between the frontier processes in South America and South Africa makes their exact coincidence in time all the more striking. The last Indian wars in North and South America took place in the 1870s and 1880s, just as the white (British) conquest of the South African interior was being completed. For South Africa the year 1879 saw the closing act, when the Zulus, the most important African counterpower, suffered military defeat. It was the last in a series of wars between the colonial power and African armies. The Zulu king Cetchwayo, provoked by British demands that were impossible to meet, was able to mobilize more than 20,000 men (a figure quite out of reach for North American Indians), but in the end he, too, had to bow to the superior might of the British.
¹⁰⁷
Both Sioux and Zulus were significant regional powers, having reduced their indigenous neighbors to subjection and dependence, but they knew all about the whites' military strength from decades of contact with them. Both had taken only small steps to assimilate with the invaders and to adopt their way of life. Both had complex political structures and belief systems, which remained alien to Europeans and Euro-Americans and provided material for their propaganda concerning the savage's imperviousness to reason and civilization. By 1880, in the United States as in colonial South Africa, the supremacy of the whites had become unshakable.
¹⁰⁸

These common features contrast with differences in the fate of the Sioux and Zulus. The two peoples did not have the same capacity to resist economic pressures: the Sioux were nomadic bison-hunters, organized in bands, lacking a pronounced political or military hierarchy, and completely devoid of an economic role in the expanding internal market of the United States; the Zulus were sedentary and had a much stronger mixed economy based on livestock breeding and agriculture, with a centralized monarchy and a socially integrated system of well-defined age groups. Despite military defeat and occupation, it was therefore not as simple to break up and demoralize the Zulus as it was the Sioux. Moreover, Zululand was not marginalized within the wider South African economy but transformed into a reservoir of cheap labor. The gradual proletarianization of the Zulus thus played an important role in the division of labor inside the country.

The earlier frontier chronologies of South Africa and North America also displayed striking parallels. The first contacts between European immigrants and the indigenous population occurred in the seventeenth century, and in both countries the 1830s proved to be an important watershed: with Andrew Jackson's policy of deporting southern Indians in the United States and the beginning of the Boers' Great Trek in South Africa. One peculiarity of South Africa was the division within the white population after the British takeover of the Cape of Good Hope in 1806. From that point on, the Boer population dating back to the seventeenth-century Dutch immigration existed alongside a smaller British community, which was linked to a wealthy and powerful imperial metropolis and took over the key decisions in Cape Province.

At first the Trekboers, living entirely from farming, were forced into mobility by the shortage of land. Then in the 1830s the wind of slave emancipation blew down from London, finding application in the cape and becoming a central structural element for Boer society. The Boers found the British policy of legal equality for the races unacceptable. But the presence of well-armed African forces, especially the Xhosa to the east, meant that the pioneers' ox wagons had only one direction open to them: into the more lightly defended High Veld to the north. The Boers profited from the disintegration of many African communities, itself the result of a period of military conflict among African peoples that became known as the Mfecane. Between 1816 and 1828, the lightning advances of the Zulu state under its war leader Shaka had depopulated large areas of the grasslands, while at the same time handing allies to the white settlers from the anti-Zulu camp.
¹⁰⁹

The Great Trek was a militarily and logistically successful maneuver on the part of one of the ethnic groups competing for land in South Africa. It became a campaign of conquest, initially “private” in character. A process of state formation followed only later, as a kind of “by-product” (Jörg Fisch) of private land appropriation, when the Boers created two republics of their own: the Transvaal Republic in 1852, and the Orange Free State in 1854. These two entities were breakaways from the Cape Colony, but the British officially recognized them and exercised a certain influence over their economic life. So, nineteenth-century South Africa did not have a unified state that could have mapped out a general “black policy” analogous to the federal “Indian policy” in the United States.
¹¹⁰
Militarily, the Boers had no central army to give them support. As armed settlers, they had to fend for themselves and to prove their capacity to form a state of their own. They were reasonably successful in the Orange Free State, but much less so in the Transvaal (which the British temporarily annexed in 1877). In both cases, the state apparatus was rudimentary and the financial situation precarious, and there was a lack of “civil society” integration outside the church.
¹¹¹
Since the South African frontier of the 1880s was “closed,” in the sense that there was no more “free land” to distribute, the Boer republics were not essentially states on a settlement frontier.

Any frontier exhibits special demographic features, and in this respect South Africa differed importantly from North America. Before the 1880s there was no mass immigration into South Africa, and even subsequently the influx into its gold and diamond fields cannot be compared to the gigantic flows across the North Atlantic. By midcentury the Indians constituted a tiny share of the US population, whereas Africans made up the vast majority of the total in southern Africa. Black Africans were much less devastated than North American Indians by diseases brought in from Europe; nor was their cultural trauma so deep as to produce a steep demographic decline. In South Africa, then, the precolonial inhabitants did not become a minority in their own country.
¹¹²

In South Africa as in North America, the armed pioneer providing for himself and his family was at first the principal frontier type. In America, however, the frontier was penetrated early on by large firms producing for export markets. In the eighteenth century, tobacco and cotton plantations—many of them situated at the frontier—formed part of extensive commercial networks, while in the nineteenth century the frontier increasingly became the site of capitalist development processes. In South Africa, after their partial exodus to the interior, the Boers were initially more remote than before from world markets. Only the discovery of diamonds in the 1860s, and of gold deposits two decades later, established in the Boer republics a mining frontier (largely aimed toward the world market) alongside subsistence farming.
¹¹³

At the end of the nineteenth century, the Bantu-speaking population of South Africa managed to occupy a place in the social order relatively more favorable than that of the Indians of North America. Whereas the Khoisan peoples in the Southern Cape lost nearly all access to farmland early in the colonial period, the Bantu speakers in the interior, despite the advance of the settlement frontier, were able to make effective use of considerable land resources. In large areas of Lesotho (Basutoland) and Swaziland, and in eastern parts of today's Republic of South Africa, African small farmers worked their own land. This was partly the outcome of their resistance, and partly thanks to ad hoc decisions by various governments against the complete expropriation of the Africans. In North America no such concessions were forthcoming; the nomadism of the bison-hunters came into direct conflict with the expansion of farmland and the exploitation of the prairies for capitalist stock breeding. Neither of these economic forms had any need for Indian wage labor. In South Africa, farms and mines did require native wage labor, and so black Africans were not shunted off into subsistence niches but often integrated, at the lowest level of a racially defined hierarchy, into dynamic sectors of the economy. The rulers of South Africa tried to prevent the spread of a black proletariat throughout the country, creating instead a series of ghetto-like separate territories in some ways reminiscent of the North American Indian reservations. But the South African reservations, which came into their own only much later (after 1951) under the appellation “homelands,” were not so much an open-air prison to isolate an economically functionless population
as an attempt to control the black labor force politically and to channel it economically. They rested on the principle that families should feed themselves in the homelands through subsistence agriculture, while the male workers—whose reproduction costs were thus kept to a minimum—found employment in the dynamic sectors.