Removals and resistance: Rural communities in Lydenburg, South Africa, 1940-1961

After 1948, the National Party government implemented coercive policies to remove African landowners and rent tenants from 'white' farming districts and resettle them in black 'reserves. This paper focuses on the different responses within and among four communities in the Lydenburg district of the eastern Transvaal (now Mpumalanga Province). It shows how Africans were more than mere victims of these policies but responded actively to the policies of the state which had to take account of their actions. The responses to removals of members of each community were shaped by the histories which had given rise to their distinctive identities and their relations to the wiser agrarian and industrial economies of South Africa, Communities themselves were divided between chiefs and followers, between richer and poorer farmers, and between those involved in nationalist politics and those who focused rather on immediate, local interests. Responses to removals and among and within communities were complex and ambiguous and cannot simply be understood in terms of the distinction between 'resistance' and 'collaboration'. Present state policies, which seek to remedy the injustices of the past, need to be sensitive to the divisions among rural communities and the complex reasons for people's different responses to past removals.