As the African National Congress gathers in Moruleng to mark its January 8 celebrations, it is both symbolic and overdue. Symbolic, because Moruleng sits at the heart of Bakgatlha ba Kgafela kingdom; overdue, because Batswana communities have for far too long been treated as the stepchildren of South Africa’s liberation narrative, as if they stood idly by while others bled for freedom.
This distortion of history is not accidental. It is convenient. It erases the political agency, sacrifice and principled resistance of African polities that confronted colonial conquest long before liberation movements were formally constituted and that later refused to collaborate with apartheid’s grand deception: The Bantustan system.
The Bakgatla and the Long Arc of Batswana Resistance
Long before the formation of the ANC in 1912, African resistance to land dispossession and political subjugation was already entrenched. Across what is today the North West and Northern Cape, Batswana kingdoms mounted sustained, organised resistance to colonial encroachment. The Bakgatla ba Kgafela were not passive spectators to this history; they were central protagonists in the struggle to defend their sovereignty, land and dignity.
The Battle of Derdepoort in 1897/99 stands as a searing reminder of this reality. When the Bakgatla resisted encroachment by Boer forces and colonial authorities, the response was a brutal collective punishment. Their villages were attacked with the assistance of colonial-aligned forces, cattle were looted and women and children were enslaved and killed.
Derdepoort was not merely a skirmish; it was a declaration by colonial power that African autonomy would be crushed wherever it dared to assert itself. This moment of resistance was not isolated.
Around the same period, other Batswana leaders were engaged in similarly fierce struggles against colonial land grabs. The Battle of Langeberg (1896–1897), led by the visionary and defiant Kgosi Luka Jantjie of the Batlhaping accompanied KgosiToto and Galeshewe was a direct response to settler expansion, forced taxation and land dispossession.
Jantjie’s resistance was ultimately crushed through overwhelming military force and he was executed by colonial authorities. However, his struggle stands as one of the clearest expressions of African political consciousness and refusal to submit to imperial domination and subjugation.
Likewise, the Siege of Mahikeng during the South African War (1899–1900) further exposes the myth that African communities were mere bystanders in white conflicts. While British and Boer forces fought for imperial control, African populations bore the brunt of dispossession, starvation and displacement.
Batswana communities around Mahikeng navigated coercion, forced labour and violence, all while defending their land against a war that was fundamentally about who would control African territory.
Taken together, Derdepoort, Langeberg and Mahikeng reveal a continuous epistemological trajectory of Batswana resistance. These were not spontaneous uprisings but politically grounded struggles against land theft and colonial domination. That they are rarely foregrounded in mainstream liberation history tells us more about modern political science and its amnesia than about Batswana agency.
Therefore, resistance did not begin with conferences and manifestos, it began with communities defending land with their lives.
Why the Bakgatla Shunned Lucas Mangope
This long tradition of principled resistance explains why the Bakgatla chieftaincy refused to collaborate with Lucas Mangope and his so-called Bophuthatswana homeland.
Unlike many leaders who were coerced, co-opted or corrupted by apartheid’s Bantustan architecture, the Bakgatla understood that Bophuthatswana was not self-determination but dispossession dressed up as independence.
Mangope’s regime represented a betrayal of African unity and historical truth. It fragmented African polities, turned traditional leaders into administrative extensions of Pretoria and weaponised ethnic identity to undermine political liberation.
The Bakgatla‘s refusal to recognize or submit to Mangope was therefore not obstinacy, but ideological clarity rooted in a much older resistance tradition. This refusal resulted in harassment, marginalisation and deliberate underdevelopment.
Yet history has vindicated that stance. Bophuthatswana collapsed under the weight of its illegitimacy, while those who resisted it stand today on the right side of history.
The Bakgatla and the Underground Infrastructure of Liberation
The Bakgatla’s commitment to liberation was not only expressed through open resistance to colonialism and apartheid structures, it was also quietly and courageously demonstrated through material support for the liberation movement during its most vulnerable moments.
When political activists were forced into exile in Botswana, many found themselves in precarious conditions. The Botswana government, constrained by its small economy and fearful of economic and military reprisals from apartheid South Africa, often adopted a cautious and restrained posture. Official support for South African liberation movements was limited, inconsistent and shaped by the imperative of state survival.
It was under these conditions that the Bakgatla chieftaincy stepped forward. Using their own resources, networks and authority, the Bakgatla provided shelter, financial assistance and logistical support to political activists in exile when official avenues were closed or unreliable.
This was not symbolic solidarity, it was practical, costly and dangerous. To assist exiles was to invite surveillance, intimidation and retaliation from the apartheid security apparatus and its regional proxies.
Bakgatlha did not retreat nor relent on the course to see South Africa independent and free.
This support was extended not for recognition or political favour, but because the chieftaincy understood that the liberation of South Africa was inseparable from the liberation of African people as a whole.
In doing so, the Bakgatla functioned as part of the liberation movement’s unofficial infrastructure, a reminder that freedom was sustained not only by formal organizations but by communities and traditional authorities who assumed enormous risk without public acclaim.
That this contribution remains largely unacknowledged in mainstream liberation historiography is itself an indictment. It reflects a persistent bias that privileges urban, formal political activity while marginalising rural, traditional and cross-border forms of resistance that were no less essential to the defeat of apartheid.
The Sale of Land and the Birth of Sun City
Nothing exposes the moral bankruptcy of the Bantustan project more clearly than the sale of Bakgatla land on which Sun City now stands. This land was not Mangope’s to sell. It belonged and belongs to the Bakgatla people.
Under the guise of “development,” communal land was commodified and handed over to private capital, creating a playground for apartheid elites and international celebrities while the rightful owners remained impoverished.
Sun City became a global symbol of apartheid decadence: entertainment built on stolen land, sustained by structural injustice.
That these land questions remain unresolved today is not accidental. It is the direct inheritance of Bantustan governance, which normalised elite enrichment at the expense of African communities.
Why This History Matters Now
This history is not an academic exercise. It is profoundly relevant today, particularly in a moment where some South Africans, disillusioned or forgetful, flirt with the idea of voting white conservative forces into power.
To do so is to ignore history’s most consistent lesson: that white conservatism in South Africa has never been neutral, benevolent or interested in African freedom except where it protects privilege. The same ideological current that justified land dispossession, colonial conquest and Bantustans cannot be rehabilitated through clever rebranding.
The Bakgatla experience situated within the broader Batswana resistance from Langeberg to Mahikeng, teaches us that liberation is not merely about changing faces in government, but about defending land, dignity and political agency against all forms of dispossession, whether colonial, apartheid or neoliberal.
Reclaiming a Complete Liberation Narrative
As the ANC celebrates January 8 in Moruleng, it must do more than commemorate its own founding. It must acknowledge the deeper, broader liberation history rooted in African resistance traditions like that of the Bakgatla ba Kgafela and other Batswana kingdoms.
Batswana were not spectators to liberation, they were its foundation stones. From Langeberg to Derdepoort, from the Mahikeng Siege to the rejection of Mangope, their story is a mirror held up to South Africa itself.
To forget this history is to risk repeating it. To remember it fully and honestly is to safeguard the future.
Moruleng is not just a venue. It is a reminder.
* Gomolemo Mothibi is a Mahikeng-based activist and co-founder of the Maftown Book Club. She writes about people, politics and the continuous democratic project that is South Africa.
** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of or Independent Media.
