All whites knew that the prosperity of the country depended on the mining industry but nobody wanted to see the coerced black labour that rendered the system possible and profitable. The mine compounds were designed to keep indentured black workers tied to their places of employment, but they also had the great benefit of keeping a servile labour force out of the direct line of sight of a European electorate living through its radical dream.

Bundy’s research notes that the suppression of the black commercial agriculture went beyond the raid on the land. Custom duties were stacked against black farmers, thus reducing the margin on their earnings. Purchase of land by black people was also made to be very difficult. But did these black commercial farmers have names and who were they? The rest of this chapter selects some individuals to provide visibility to those who prospered during changing socio-economic circumstances.

Black people could buy land at £1 an acre and they could buy farms from white farmers. Many Africans had adopted the plough and advanced methods of cultivation that missionaries wanted to instil. Tini Maqoma, the son of the Xhosa warrior Maqoma, outperformed his white neighbours in cultivation. He produced maize and grain that was in contrast to the ‘white man’s weed’. In 1876, one of the sons of Chief Stokwe bought a farm containing Fort Willshire for £1 800 as part of a strategy to get back the land.

Regardless of how liquid a black man was, the discriminatory laws made it difficult for him to purchase land freely. A laborious bureaucratic process had to be followed and permission sought, as natives were not allowed freely to acquire property in certain areas. This was due to the segregationist Native Trust and Land Act of 1936. In crude terms what this meant was that natives had to get the permission of a white man on how to spend their hard-owned pounds. Wealth did not equate to freedom.

In the late 1860s, many Africans in Natal were in a position to produce agricultural surplus for trade and to withhold their labour.