THESEGREGATIONERA
themselves and pay their taxes. African families were being disrupted.
Women were assuming some of the responsibilities of household heads
previously reserved to men. With their wages, young men were acting
independently of their seniors, buying cattle for their own bridewealth,
forming their own associations, and establishing their own homesteads,
creating tensions between the generations.
In the reserves, the ultimate authority in a district was the white magis-
trate, but he had little physical force at his disposal. He relied on the
cooperation of the chiefs, who continued to settle disputes among Africans
and to control the distribution of land but also tolerated the collection of
taxes and received a small salary. A chief was therefore caught in the
middle. He was legally responsible to the state but socially dependent on
the support of the community. As Shula Marks has demonstrated in the
case of Solomon ka Dinuzulu, the Zulu king who died in 1934, a chief held
an ambiguous position; to be successful, he had to be a shrewd rein-
terpreter of tradition and a skillful manipulator of people, white as well as
black.56
Missionaries presided over "an enormous benevolent empire" that
reached into every African reserve community. In 1928, forty-eight mis-