caa a22 4500 386344442 CHVBK 20180307111806.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161130e198903 xx s 000 0 eng 10.1017/S0021853700030905 doi S0021853700030905 pii (NATIONALLICENCE)cambridge-10.1017/S0021853700030905 Murray Martin J. State University of New York, Binghamton ‘The Natives are always stealing': white vigilantes and the ‘reign of terror' in the Orange Free State, 1918-24 [Elektronische Daten] [Martin J. Murray] During the formative years of capitalist agriculture, white farmers in the Orange Free State relied on both legal and extra-legal means to create a docile labour force of African workers. Coercive laws were a necessary component in the overall process of fashioning a rural working class out of quasi-independent squatter communities. Yet, no matter how repressive, the legal system alone was not sufficient to ensure work-discipline and docility on the white-owned farms. Frustrated with their inability to force African farm labourers to work diligently and to prevent them from deserting the farms, white farmers frequently turned to indiscriminate violence to sow terror amongst the dispossessed African rural population. White vigilantes formed a kind of paramilitary wing of the white farming class. While the state authorities never officially sanctioned vigilantism, those white farmers who used violence to intimidate their African labourers had little to fear with respect to prosecution, let alone conviction. Yet despite all their efforts to break the will of rural Africans, white farmers lived in continued fear of ‘native risings'. Rural Africans, too, remembered: the shooting incidents that occurred in the Orange Free State were indelibly etched in the collective memory of the emergent rural working class. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989 The Journal of African History Cambridge University Press 30/1(1989-03), 107-123 0021-8537 30:1<107 1989 30 AFH https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700030905 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700030905 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Murray Martin J. State University of New York, Binghamton NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- The Journal of African History Cambridge University Press 30/1(1989-03), 107-123 0021-8537 30:1<107 1989 30 AFH CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-cambridge