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purchase farms. People of different origins and backgrounds found
themselves cramped in the same fenced entities. The fencing of the
Makgabeng land into bought farms not only brought people from further
afield, it also separated relatives and family members. Before the advent of
these European arrangements, Black communities lived loosely and
occupied land without fixed boundaries. As a result, they could move and
interact freely and make relatives (by marriage, for instance) even to the
most remote areas. With the fencing of farms, friendships and relationships
were cut off by fences. This led to relatives living in separate farms, while
strangers found themselves living within the same fenced entities. This
resulted in destruction of some identities (of those separated friends and
relatives) and the construction of new ones (of those strangers who found
themselves in the same bought farms). This is another form of imposed
(coerced) identity creation 600 .
The separation of relatives by fences and the cramping of strangers into the
same farms had some problems here and there, of which most of them
were discussed in Chapter 6 on land. The separation of relatives by the
fencing of farms in the Makgabeng area can be illustrated by the fact that in
the farms Norma A, Early Dawn, Ketting, Sadu and Non Parella, there are
families of Ngwepe, Setumu, Ramoroka, Mojela and Seanego, in almost all
of them. These examples indicate that these clans which had loosely
600 J. Muller et al, Challenges of Globalisation, p. 116.
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