learning the English language, wearing imported clothes, buying land from
white settlers, andabsorbing
Christian ideas of social and political justice.
By the 1860s, many Africans had become quite prosperous peasants, pro-
ducing maize for export to Cape Town or wool for the local market.s"
White colonists, meanwhile, had not been prospering as farmers, and
they complained that Shepstone's system of African management made it
difficult for them to obtain an adequate supply of cheap labor. One group
of white settlers' labor needs were especially ill-served: landowners who
were finding that the subtropical coastal zone was suited to the production
of sugar but that they could not attract sufficient African laborers to do the
arduous labor demanded-labor
for which, unlike stock farming or grain
production, the Africans had no previous experience. First, the planters
tried to persuade the colonial government to break up the locations and
"release" the required African labor. When that failed, they turned to
British India, which was already exporting labor to Mauritius and the
British West Indies to remedy the labor shortage that followed Britain's
emancipation of the slaves in 1833. Under laws and regulations of the