The relation between “native” marriage and slavery was one of the main themes of the evangelisation of Southern Africa. Since their contact with the so-called “Bantu” societies in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, missionaries had to face what they considered the most despised elements of the local institution of marriage: the “purchase” of women with cattle, and “polygamy”. However, trying to conciliate the public campaign against slavery in the British empire, their criticism to settler colonialism in South Africa, and their own agenda of African evangelisation, missionary societies chose at first to limit their actions to preaching and debates with local African rulers.
This changed in the second half of the nineteenth century, when the colonisation of the interior gained momentum, and humanitarianism became part of the general expansion of European empires over the African continent. In the South African context, this meant the cooptation of parts of the missionary world into the apparatus of the colonial state, and a more vocal criticism of African marriage. It was not before Adam Kuper published his “Wives for Cattle”, in 1982, that a strong case against the equation between lobola, or bridewealth, and “purchase” was made, and the original connection with slavery was finally severed.
In my paper, I attempt to adopt a different perspective, and to look at marriages without bridewealth or with atypical forms of “payment”. I focus on the Sotho-Tswana societies of the Highveld and on the social category of bahlanka, a term that defined children and women captured in battle, “servants”, and the families whose bridewealth had been provided by the ruler, who afterwards claimed their children as his. In particular, I investigate how the lower ranks in a polygamous marriage, referred to as “brooms” and “heels” of the main wives, could be recruited with the practice of taking captives in battle. War prisoners lost their ability to create kin just like poor couples married thanks to the “generosity” of the ruler. The evidence of numerous cases of “slave wives” given away by the elite to the poor in susbtitution of bridewealth suggests a connection between slavery and marriage on grounds that were completely neglected by missionaries, who focused on the element of “purchase”.