Burning the wheat stacks

On a single night in late 1924 unknown arsonists burned freshly harvested wheat stacks on the farms of a number of white settlers in the Pokwani area of the northern Middelburg district. This wave of incendiarism that swept this recently settled frontier area of the northeastern Transvaal symbolized in microcosm the ongoing class struggle between white farmers and their farm labourers. Farmers were determined to clear their lands of unwanted African ‘squatting’ households and to impose increasingly onerous terms of ‘labour service’ on those who remained. Local Africans resisted. In the ensuing bitter conflict, some settler‐farmers resorted to chicanery, including impounding of stray livestock, evictions, charging farm labourers with violations of the Masters & Servants laws, and other tactics. Africans responded in turn with work stoppages and slowdowns, petty thievery, and arson. Agrarian capitalism eventually triumphed throughout the South African countryside. Yet in some places, like the Pokwani area of northern Middelburg, Africans were able to purchase arable land from near‐bankrupt white settlers, and hence, at least temporarily, stem the tide of the forward march of capitalism agriculture

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