Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-hc48f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T08:38:09.024Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Nederduitse Gereformeerde Sendingkerk and the Nama Experience in Namaqualand, South Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 June 2011

Robin Oakley
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In Steinkopf, a former coloured Reserve in the Northern Cape Province, the Nederduitse Gereformeerde Sendingkerk (NGS; Dutch Reformed Mission Church), a former sub-branch of the Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk (NGK; Dutch Reformed Church) forged a legitimate public space for the expression of Nama identity in the 1960s. The legitimisation of aboriginal identity was not accidental, but very much an expression of apartheid policies of the day. I hope to demonstrate both the content and the consequences of this particular episode in Steinkopf, and thereby contribute to an understanding of the links between a crumbling capitalist infrastructure and the ideological efforts to reinforce that infrastructure through processes of ethnic strengthening. My claim is that the NGK played an ideological role supporting the capitalist interests as it strengthened the super-structural pillars of the segregation and apartheid eras.

Type
Conference: ‘An Apartheid of Souls’
Information
Itinerario , Volume 27 , Special Issue 3-4: An Apartheid of Souls , November 2003 , pp. 189 - 204
Copyright
Copyright © Research Institute for History, Leiden University 2003

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1 Lydia Cloete, an eighty-three-year-old former migrant worker.

2 Wolpe, Harold, ‘Capitalism and Cheap Labour Power in South Africa: From Segregation to Apartheid’, Economy and Society 1 (London, New York 1972)Google Scholar.

3 Others included Concordia, Leliefontien, Richtersveld North and South, Komaggas, and Pella. These lands are subject to the Transformation of Certain Rural Coloured Areas Act (law 94 of 1998), under which the title rests with the Minister of the Department of Land Affairs.

4 Carstens, Peter, Klinghardt, Gerald and West, Martin eds, Trails in the Thirstland: The Anthropological Field Diaries of Winifred Hoernlé (Cape Town 1987)Google Scholar.

5 Carstens, Peter, ‘Mothers, Daughters and Grandmothers in Khoi Society’ (Paper presented at the African Studies Association 39th Annual Meeting, California 1996)Google Scholar.

6 Marais, J.S., The Cape Coloured People 1652-1937 (London 1939)Google Scholar.

7 The other ‘part’ being mainly Nama.

8 See Carstens, , ‘Opting out of Colonial Rule: The Brown Voortrekkers of South Africa and Their Constitutions’, Part One, African Studies 42/2 (1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Idem, Part Two, African Studies 43/1 (1984)Google Scholar.

9 Lang, Hartmut and Denk, Adolf eds, The Laws of the Rehoboth Basters (Rehoboth 1998)Google Scholar.

10 I perceived a remnant of the early settlement pattern of Onderstraat, where the Basters lived, and Bostraat, where the Nama lived, in Steinkopf. More matjieshuise, traditional Nama dwellings, as well as more Nama speaking people were evidenced in Bostraat. Yet this may also simply be a consequence of the fact that many poor people used matjieshuise as a temporary dwelling, and the raad (local political council) ‘encouraged’ these structures to build farther from the core of the town (farther from Onderstraat).

11 Carstens, P., The Social Structure of a Cape Coloured Reserve: A Study of Racial Integration and Segregation in South Africa (West Port 1976)Google Scholar.

12 Oakley, Robin L, ‘Aging and the Life Course in Steinkopf, A Rural South African Community’ (Doctoral Thesis, Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto 1999)Google Scholar.

13 See Oakley, , ‘Generational and Life Course Patterns of Occupational Retrenchment and Retirement of South African Migrant Labourers’, Marshall, V., Verma, Anil, Krueger, Helga and Heinz, Walter eds, Restructuring Work and the Life Course (Toronto 2001)Google Scholar.

14 Oakley, Robin L, ‘Gendered Imprints of History and Economy Across the Life Course of an Elderly Namaqualander’ in: Makoni, Sinfree and Stroken, Koen eds, Discourse on Ageing in South Africa (In press)Google Scholar.

15 Vail, Leroy ed., The Creation of Tribalism in South Africa (Berkeley 1991)Google Scholar; Sharp, J., ‘The Roots and Development of Volkekunde in South Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies 8 (1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Wolpe, , ‘Capitalism and Cheap Labour Power’Google Scholar.

17 There are several churches in present day Steinkopf including the Anglican, Apostolic, Presbyterian, Calvinist, Roman Catholic and Methodist churches.

18 Cf. Carstens, Social Structure of a Cape Coloured Reserve.

19 Both men and women are involved in the church, but by far more women are involved in a visible public way. This may be because more men than women are absent from Steinkopf for work contracts in local mines and the service sector.

20 See Carstens, Social Structure of a Cape Coloured Reserve.

21 See Carstens, ‘Opting out of Colonial Rule’.

22 See Comaroff, Jean and Comaroff, John, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism and Consciousness in South Africa 1 (Chicago 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 The people of Steinkopf would have also had more interaction with local white Afrikaans farmers and would therefore have borne the brunt of the patriarchal and often derogatory terms of reference used by the boere for coloured and other ‘non-white’ people. They would have had little or no contact with the ‘British’ except at the mines, or in the homes (as domestic servants) of British families. I only met a few people who had any direct working relationship with British people, such as one particularly bitter man who, although senior and more skilled, had to report to a young, pompous and ill-qualified English man working in Kleinzee in the 1980s in a supervisory position. Such people who worked under the British generally voiced bitterness toward them with the comment that the boere were nasty alright but at least they were honest and straightforward, while the British were much more race and class conscious but hid these feelings. This perception has also been noted in Van Onselen's recent work when Kas Maine indicated that, in contrast to the relative generosity of his boer employers in handing out extra sugar, tea, cloth etc., British employers were very painstaking in calculating the exact amount of an item owed to an employee. Onselen, C. van, The Seed is Mine: The Life of Kas Maine, a South African Sharecropper, 1894-1985 (New York 1996)Google Scholar.

24 Oakley, ‘Aging and the Life Course’.

25 Gedenkboek, Een-en-n-Half-Eeufees 1819-1969 (Nederduitse Gereformeerde Sending-gemeente Steinkopf 1969).

26 Which paved the way for the more intrusive apartheid era acts.

27 This act, while it tried to concretize race, was inherently flawed in that the classifications were very much based on social, as much as phenotypic characteristics. For example, there were some 21 ‘types’ of coloured people at its zenith.

28 Carstens, , Social Structure of a Cape Coloured Reserve, 150Google Scholar.

29 Many informants remembered anthropologist Peter Carstens who, while conducting Reldwork in Namaqualand, had to ride his motorcycle out of town each night lest the police catch him in a coloured area.

30 In Afrikaans universities volkekunde was popular (Sharp, ‘Roots and development of Volkekunde’) and textual and visual images of Africans engaging in ‘traditional culture’ the norm. In reality, Africans were migrant wageworkers in the cities and mines, or attempting the impossible task of scraping out a living in the rural areas. By the 1970s there were millions of black South Africans who lost their South African citizenship and became citizens of homelands that few had ever visited or which, as in the case of the former Ciskei, had not previously existed: Peires, J.B., ‘Ethnicity and Pseudo Ethnicity in the Cities’ in: Beinart, William and Dubow, Saul eds, Segregation and Apartheid in Twentieth Century South Africa (London 1995).Google Scholar This was all evidence of ideological apartheid as an effort to maintain the crumbling dual economy that had made mineral and metal mining most profitable in South Africa. During the segregation era capitalists relieved themselves of the costs of social reproduction by restricting the mobility of African women thereby forcing them to engage in communal sector semi-subsistence agriculture in the reserves while the men migrated for labour in the gold and diamond mines. Freeing themselves from providing that part of the wage toward social reproduction capitalists were able to extract maximum surplus labour: Wolpe, ‘Capitalism and Cheap Labour Power’.

31 The name Brink is a pseudonym.

32 One forty-year-old woman who worked as a domestic servant after a turbulent divorce, consulted Ouma Marcus on a weekly basis to be told her fortune as well as given spiritual remedies for difficulties in her economic situation and her current romantic life.

33 A characteristic traditionally associated with women in Steinkopf: Carstens, , Social Structure of a Cape Coloured Reserve, 183Google Scholar.

34 Oakley, , ‘Aging and the Life Course’Google Scholar; ‘Local Effects of New Social-Welfare Policy on Aging in South Africa’, Southern African Journal of Gerontology 1/1 (1998)Google Scholar.

35 See Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London, New York 1966)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 Okely, Judith, The Traveller Gypsies (Cambridge 1983) 103–104CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 A designation not limited to things Nama.

38 Cf. Sharp, John and Boonzaier, Emile, ‘Ethnic Identity as Performance: Lessons from Namaqualand’, Journal of Southern African Studies 20/3-4 (1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sharp, J., ‘Ethnogenesis and Ethnic Mobilisation: A Comparative Perspective on a South African Dilemma’ in: Wilmsen, E. and McAllister, P. eds, The Politics of Difference: Ethnic Promises in a World of Power (Chicago 1996)Google Scholar.

39 Boonzaier, Emile, ‘The Modern Period: The Namaqualand Reserves’ in: Boonzaier, E. et al. eds, The Cape Herders: A History ofthe Khoi Khoi of Southern Africa (Cape Town 1994) 142Google Scholar.

40 Although there were many matjieshouses in Steinkopf, where mainly poor people resided as a temporary shelter, or where those elderly Nama people chose to live, some in Steinkopf indicated an interest to spend their vacation in Namastaat to have the Nama experience. Other people, however, expressed anger at the appropriation of indigenous material culture and the ensuing economic benefit.

41 The Steinkopf Namachoir performed at the Conference on Khoisan Identity in 1997 held at the old slave lodge in Cape Town, which may suggest a shift in local perceptions of the Nama. But during the period of fieldwork, this was patently not the case, and the Namachoir, like the dozens of other church choirs, was always interested in any opportunity to tour outside of Steinkopf both as a way to enhance their choir's profile, and as a way of seeing new places.

42 Cf. Sharp, and Boonzaier, , ‘Ethnic Identity as Performance’Google Scholar; Robins, Steven, ‘Beyond Expose Analysis: Hybridity, Social Memory and Identity Polities’, Journal of Contemporary African Studies 15/1 (1997)Google Scholar; ‘Transgressing the Borderlands of Tradition and Modernity: Identity, Cultural Hybrids and Land Struggles in Namaqualand (1980-1994)’, Journal of Contemporary African Studies 15/1 (1997)Google Scholar.

43 Translated by the author from Afrikaans.

44 A pseudonym.