Mpondo, group of Nguni-speaking peoples who have for several centuries occupied the area between the Mtata and Mtamvuna rivers in Eastern province of South Africa. The Mpondo homeland formed one of the largest parts of the former Transkei (until 1994), an independent republic that was established under the South African government’s policy of apartheid but was dissolved and reincorporated (in part) into the new province in 1994.
At the beginning of the 19th century, the Mpondo people shared with other Nguni speakers a basic social organization and material culture that set them off from other South African peoples. They settled in dispersed households. Agriculture was a female occupation. Men were responsible for cattle raising, which played a central role in both subsistence and social relations and which also formed the basis of Mpondo wealth. Patrilineal succession and exogamous marriage were the rule, and cattle were used to obtain wives through the payment of lobola (bridewealth). Political structure consisted of a number of subsidiary chiefdoms subordinated in varying degrees to a central chieftaincy under a royal lineage.
The series of wars known as the Mfecane (“The Crushing,” causing a massive migration of Nguni peoples), which resulted from the expansionist policies of the Zulu leader Shaka, brought great changes to the Mpondo in the 1820s. In 1828 the Zulu defeated them, and they fled as refugees across the Mzimvubu River, losing their cattle and their lands. Under the leadership of their chief, Faku, however, the Mpondo reorganized themselves. Faku established an army on the Zulu model and organized production of grain for sale to facilitate the rebuilding of their cattle herds. By the early 1840s Faku had re-created the Mpondo state and, in order to gain grazing land for the new Mpondo herds, had gradually reoccupied the lands to the east of the Mzimvubu River. By 1860 Faku ruled over a state containing an estimated 100,000 people.
In the 1860s European traders established many trading posts throughout Mpondo territory, and the Mpondo traded cattle and hides for agricultural implements, luxury items, and weapons. With increased use of draft animals and new agricultural techniques, agricultural productivity improved, and in the 1880s the state seemed secure. However, the colonial governments of both the Cape Colony and Natal coveted Mpondo territory, and civil conflict among competing Mpondo groups gave the Cape government under Cecil Rhodes the opportunity to annex Mpondo territory in 1894. The destruction of Mpondo political independence was paralleled in 1897 by the great continent-spanning rinderpest epidemic that decimated their herds.
To obtain fresh cattle many adult men became migrant workers in the gold mines of the Witwatersrand. Gradually, the rural economy was rebuilt, although in the early 20th century there was increased social stratification of Mpondo families based on wealth. In 1913, when the Natives’ Land Act was passed giving the best lands in South Africa to the white population, its effect on the Mpondo was less severe than elsewhere in the country; most Mpondo land remained in Mpondo possession. Later, during the 1920s and ’30s, state policies against cattle diseases ensured the survival of the cattle-oriented society of the Mpondo. The state also accepted the continued legitimacy of Mpondo chiefly institutions and the enforcement of customary law. It was therefore relatively easy for the South Africans to utilize Mpondo territory as a fundamental part of the Nguni-speaking Transkei.