DIAMONDS.GOLD.AND BRITISHIMPERIALISM
trates, traders, and missionaries. Among the Mpondo, in contrast, the
chiefs were able to exert some control over the activities of traders until
their country was annexed in 1894. Some Mpondo chiefs themselves even
produced grain and cattle for the market, using communal land and labor,
but the dominant trend was for production to be decentralized to the
homestead level.Bythe end of the century, however,the rinderpest, popula-
tion increase, and the heavy hand of the colonial state were reining in all the
southern Nguni peasantry, and the men were finding it increasingly nec~s­
sary to leave home to earn wages on colonial farms or in the mines.s!
Circumstances differed in Natal, where Shepstone had left the chiefs in
charge of the African population subject to his ultimate control, but by the
end of the century there was a similar trend toward impoverishment. In the
early days of white settlement, the Natal Africans had access to sufficient
land for their needs, and traders and missionaries provided them with
means to market their surplus produce and to acquire a literary education.
Nevertheless, the white settlers showed their power in 1873, when they
raised such an outcry after a chief named Langalibalele had resisted arrest