DURING 20 years of armed struggle between the apartheid state and the black liberation movements, South Africa was often infiltrated but never invaded. At various times South African troops mounted raids or full scale invasions into Angola, Mozambique and Lesotho, but the traffic was one way.
The first invasion of South Africa from a neighbouring state did knot come until February 3rd this year, when at least 600 people crossed the border from the mountain kingdom of Lesotho and attacked the remote village of Tswelike, in the Transkei region of South Africa.
Seeing the armed Basuto tribesmen swarming down the mountain, the local Xhosa villagers fled to a nearby police station and implored the protection of the small South African Police detachment there. The police in turn managed to rope in a few army officers who were training in the area, and within a couple of hours thee Basuto were driven back up into the mountains by automatic fire. In the process, at least 14 of the Basuto were killed. Police are investigating claims that some were executed after they were captured.
The Basuto had, however, achieved at least part of their aim. When they retreated, reported the South African Sunday Times, they took with them over 1,000 cattle and property taken from the abandoned village.
Last week's raid was, in fact, merely the latest chapter in a range war which was troubling the region even before the days of direct white colonialism. To the pastoral peasants of Lesotho and the Transkei, the Tain Bo Cuailgne would be the stuff of current events.
Like so much else in South African history, the cattle wars of Lesotho and the Transkei can be traced back to the onslaught of white settlers and the rise of the Zulu nation. In the early 19th century, the Xhosa and Sotho tribes of the Transkei and the interior plateau found themselves under attack from two sides.
From the south and west came the mixed race "Baster" frontiersmen, with horses and firearms, who were themselves attempting to flee the iniquities of white Afrikaner domination in the Cape. From the east came bands of Nguni speakers driven out of Natal by the military power of the leader Shaka, who was busy uniting various Nguni speaking tribes into the Zulu nation.
The result of thee tin tides came to be known as the mfeqane, or "crushing", a time of huge disruption and even extinction for many Sotho and southern Nguni (or Xhosa) tribes.
Using guile, diplomacy and military ruthlessness, the great Sotho chief Moshoeshoe was able to piece together the Basuto nation modern day Lesotho out of the fragments of broken tribes, both Sotho and Xhos impoverished, uprooted and starving, many of the refugees he accepted into the fold had resorted to cannibalism.
To restore the fabric of social life for these newcomers, the new nation needed cattle, which have a ritual as well as practical significance to most traditional African societies. The Basuto were willing and able with much success to fight the advancing Boers for land and cattle, but the easiest source of new stock was the Transkei, the traditional homeland of the Xhosa tribes which lay to the south at the bottom of the Drakensberg escarpment. And 160 years on the raids, counter raids and ambushes continue to take a toll on human lives.
According to the South African Police, the latest incident appeared to spring from the drought which has afflicted much of southern Africa, and Lesotho in particular, in recent years. Faced with a shortage of grazing, in late 1994 Basuto herd boys began taking their animals across the ill defined, mountainous border to find grass.
The South African government may not have cared much about these incursions, but the local Xhosas, who knew and treasured every inch of their grazing, were incensed. In December 1994, they abruptly seized over 2,000 head of Basuto stock and demanded payment for the grazing before they would return them. Last week's attack seems to have been conceived as a direct act of revenge for the cattle seizure. And now it is said that the Basuto want revenge for their dead comrades as well.
In response to the problem, the South African Police and Royal Lesotho Mounted Police have set up joint patrols of the mountains, and the South African army has even mounted big coordinated sweeps in horded areas. Few frontiers could be more difficult to police, however, and the cattle and herd boys, who are forced to probe the most remote passes in search of pasture, are always vulnerable to surprise attacks from the other side.
Faced with this problem, people on both sides of the border as well as Afrikaner farmers in the Orange Free State have set up "anti stock theft committees" which, in grand old frontier tradition, have been known to mount retaliatory stock raids of their own.
Yet despite its historical and extra territorial dimensions, the stock theft issue receives very little coverage in the South African press. Used to car hijackings in Johannesburg, political murders in KwaZulu Natal and bloody taxi wars just about everywhere, most South Africans now regard cattle rustling as something really quite quaint.