The large Fingo reserve areas of Oxkraal and Kamastone in the Queenstown Division were the site of significant social change and colonial efforts at spatial engineering in order to guide the area from communities under chiefs and hereditary headmen into landscapes with blocks of yeoman farmers and surplus labourers. From the 1850s onward, the area was a target for ...

In histories of the South African Highveld, the persistence of extra-colonial authority after the South African War (1899–1902) often appears as a vestigial remnant, and even more so when the kings and chiefs in question were deposed by the Boers or the British. However, many of those polities reinvented themselves around the very centres of power that were eject...