The Lobatse Cooperative Dairy of 1909/10

Sandy Grant | Wednesday February 18, 2015 16:18

 

Foremost amongst these blunders is the truly awful, endlessly repeated claim that the three Dikgosi went to London to ask for Queen Victoria’s protection against the Boers. 

In comparison, agreeing on the start up date for Cooperative Societies in this country is relatively unimportant yet it is something that we need to get right.

Not so long ago we had a Minister affirming that the first Coop Society was established in Serowe in 1964. Now Btv news recently repeated the same mantra.

In contrast, and as I have previously attempted to explain, the first Coop was in fact established 55 years earlier, in Lobatse in 1909. 

Remarkably this was a Dairy Coop and not as some might suppose, a cattle marketing Coop. So once again, Lobatse needs to be urged to start making the most of its many claims to fame and to market itself as historically an innovation centre of major importance.

But only Lobatse can do this. Anyway, for those who are interested, or need to know, check the file, its cover, courtesy of the National Archives,  being shown here, which although thin does give us the letter written by W.C. Mason on 7.7.09 to the British Resident Commission, Col. F.W. Panzera. Mason, who identifies himself as the Chairman of the Lobatsi Cooperative Dairy uses a simple letterhead, ‘ Lobatsi Farms’ with no differentiation then being found necessary between one farm and another. He tells Panzera about the existence of the Society but laments that it is without any legal framework.

Evidently he had done his homework because he refers Panzera to the Government Notice of the British South Africa Company No. 172 of 1909 which made provision for Cooperative Agricultural Societies in the new Rhodesia and suggests that this closely follows the one in force in the Transvaal.

Panzera, by letter of 28.9.09 then took up the matter with the High Commissioner in Pretoria, the Earl of Selbourne advising him that the Society, ‘ is a thriving concern, under a good management’.

The outcome, after some minor fluttering over detail, was the High Commissioner’s Proclamation No. 2 of 1910 which should have put this country on the cooperative map of the world.

Hopefully, someone - and yet again I come back to the need for Lobatse to shake up and get a grip on its own history - will eventually tell us what happened to Mason’s Dairy Society, how long it survived, whether it crashed like everything else in the 1930s, and why Col. Rey who did so much to push (develop?) the dairy industry, found nothing on which he could graft his initiatives.

In the index of Monarch of All I survey, Rey’s Diary, there is not a single reference to Cooperative Societies. Is this yet another example of the way that the wheel has so often to be re-invented here and why historical untruths become so deeply embedded?