Identities, Politics, and Rights by Sarat Austin;Kearns Thomas R.;

Author:Sarat, Austin;Kearns, Thomas R.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Michigan Press

To withhold these “inherent rights” on the basis of color or race, tribe or nation, he added,132 “is a deadly delusion.”

Double Consciousness, Double Standards, and the

Denial of Rights

As I have already intimated, the chimera of primal sovereignty was to be used to disenfranchise and disable black South Africans, thwarting their efforts to become free, right-bearing, propertied citizens. In this respect, recall my earlier point that Southern Tswana, one and all, had been familiarized with the authoritative rhetoric of rights by the realpolitik of the frontier; that some discerned in it the “English mode of warfare”; that others, most notably the rising elite, had internalized the Protestant ethic and the spirit of liberal individualism. It was predictable, then, that “the Bechuana,” both as incipient ethnonation and as a congeries of chiefdoms, should fight the implications of overrule in the language of individual and collective entitlement, invoking it to protest against their loss of autonomy, the seizure of their territory, the imposition of taxes, the conditions of wage labor, and so on. It was also to be expected that colonizers—statesmen, settlers, manufacturers, mine managers—would speak back in the same language, often wielding it as a blunt instrument.

Let me give just one example in lieu of a history of the struggle over rights in this colonial theater. It concerns a Land Commission set up by the British authorities in 1886, soon after the establishment of the Bechuanaland Protectorate and British Bechuanaland, but before the latter was absorbed by South Africa.133

Like many such commissions, the brief of this one was to clear up conflicting territorial claims among local “tribes,” and between them and white settlers, thus paving the way for Pax Britannica. Its more self-interested aim, arguably, was to gather intelligence and to lay the geopolitical foundations for an effective administration.134 Among the disputes heard by the Land Commission was a minor wrangle between two neighboring chiefdoms, the Tshidi Rolong and the Ngwaketse, over some 432 square miles of remote pasture that lay in their mutual borderland. Montshiwa, the Tshidi chief to whom it was awarded, used the occasion to press for the introduction of individual land ownership, registered by title deed. A canny ruler, he had learned well the language of liberal individualism; in particular, he was aware of the salience of private property to British notions of civility and modernity. Among other things, Montshiwa held that, if freehold were granted and deeds lodged with the government, the latter would have to protect Tswana owners from settler expropriation. According to Tshidi informants many years on, he also thought that the creation of heritable individual property rights might prepare the ground for other kinds of rights as well; but there is no documentary trace of any of this. What we do know, however, is that Montshiwa, strongly backed by his advisers, argued the case in a manner that would have done John Stuart Mill proud: those who had occupied the land, he said, deserved to own it because they had “improved” it. And they would do so even more if they had secure, permanent, heritable possession.

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