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‘SLOW REVOLUTION’ IN SOUTHERN AFRICA: HOUSEHOLD BIOSOCIAL REPRODUCTION AND REGIONAL ENTANGLEMENTS IN THE HISTORY OF CATTLE-KEEPING AMONG NGUNI-SPEAKERS, NINTH TO THIRTEENTH CENTURY CE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 August 2020

Raevin Jimenez Open the ORCID record for Raevin Jimenez [Opens in a new window]
Raevin Jimenez*
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University of Michigan
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Abstract

In the eleventh to thirteenth century, Southern African Nguni-speakers made a counterintuitive choice to begin investing in large herds of cattle. Despite a long-standing knowledge of cattle, the earliest Nguni-speakers did not take to cattle-keeping as a way of life. Rather, the transition came as the result of changing social circumstances as households sought to manage the lifecycles of young men and reliably exploit their labor through gendered and generational expectations of decorum. Nguni-speakers grounded new concepts about cattle in older practices and norms regarding the social reproduction of young men. Agropastoralists situated cattle-keeping among the obligations young men faced after passing through initiation, giving cattle local salience. The transformation unfolded in gendered and generational household choices, but was shaped by the broad context of an increasingly interconnected Southern Africa.

Keywords

South AfricaSouthern Africagenderlinguisticsmasculinitypastoralism
Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 61 , Issue 2 , July 2020 , pp. 155 - 178
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

Many thanks to David Schoenbrun and Tamás Polányi, who read multiple early versions of this article. Quincy Amoah offered a thorough and incisive review at a critical juncture. Participants in the University of Michigan Anthro-History workshop in 2019 and the Northwestern, University of Wisconsin - Madison, and University of Chicago joint African History Workshop in 2017 helped guide the evolution of the piece. I am also grateful for feedback from four anonymous reviewers, and especially for their assistance navigating the interdisciplinary challenges of the archaeological and paleoecological evidence. Responsibility for any errors remains with me. Author's email: [email protected]

References

1 Hereafter, the Southeast, referring to the area of what is now South Africa south of the Drakensberg Escarpment between the Black Mfolozi River at the northeast and the Mzimkulu River at the southwest. The area overlaps with much of KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape but avoids the overrepresentation of the Zulu kingdom and Zulu ethnic identity in history predating the nineteenth century and obscures the twentieth-century political boundaries between provinces.

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6 For examples of similar histories elsewhere in Africa's distant past, see especially Schoenbrun, D. L., A Green Place, A Good Place: Agrarian Change, Gender, and Social Identity in the Great Lakes Region to the 15th Century (Portsmouth, NH, 1998)Google Scholar; Vansina, J., How Societies Are Born: Governance in West Central Africa before 1600 (Charlottesville, VA, 2004)Google Scholar; Stephens, R., A History of African Motherhood: The Case of Uganda, 700–1900 (Cambridge, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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14 Huffman, Handbook, 457.

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17 Vansina, ‘Slow Revolution’, 16.

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19 For example, see Schoenbrun, Green Place; Schoenbrun, D. L., ‘Cattle herds and banana gardens: the historical geography of the western Great Lakes region, ca AD 800–1500’, African Archaeological Review, 11:1 (1993), 39–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Stephens, African Motherhood; Saidi, C., Women's Authority and Society in Early East-Central Africa (Rochester, NY, 2010)Google Scholar; Vansina, Societies.

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22 See roots 2–4 in Appendix.

23 This includes the term *-kunzi, which refers to any altered male, such as wethers and capons.

24 Appendix, root 5.

25 Appendix, root 6.

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30 Ehret and Kinsman's classification of Shona suggests this process was well underway as much as 1500 years ago. See Ehret, C. and Kinsman, M., ‘Shona dialect classification and its implications for Iron Age history in Southern Africa’, The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 14:3 (1981), 401–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 Appendix, roots 7–9.

32 Ibid. Root 10.

33 Ibid. Roots 11–12.

34 Ibid. Roots 13–14.

35 Ibid. Root 15.

36 Ibid. Root 16.

37 The terms Proto-Uplands and Proto-Woodlands replace names for the same speech communities used by the author in her dissertation. Proto-Uplands refers to the speech community previously labeled ‘Proto-Southern Nguni’ and Proto-Woodlands refers to the speech community ‘Proto-Northern Nguni’. New names for these speech communities better reflect the approximate locations of communities based on additional evidence generated after publication of the original thesis. See Jimenez, ‘Rites’, especially ch. 2.

38 Hall, Settlement Patterns; Maggs, T., Iron Age Communities of the Southern Highveld, Occasional Publications of the Natal Museum 2, (Pietermaritzburg, 1976)Google Scholar; Maggs, , ‘The Iron Age sequence south of the Vaal and Pongola rivers: some historical implications’, The Journal of African History, 21:1 (1980), 1–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Appendix, root 17.

39 Hall, Settlement Patterns, 156.

40 Though environmental research indicates the amount of labor necessary to build and maintain terraces depends on soil composition and other environmental factors, and construction differs considerably depending on the intended purpose of the terrace (water retention or drainage). See Ferro-Vázquez, C., Lang, C., Kaal, J., and Stump, D., ‘When is a terrace not a terrace?: the importance of understanding landscape evolution in studies of terraced agriculture’, Journal of Environmental Management, 202:3 (2017), 500–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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43 Appendix, roots 18–20.

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45 Huffman, Handbook, 444. The radiocarbon dates associated with Blackburn may require calibration of linguistic divergence dates. However, overlap with pottery does not mean language family and pottery tradition were coterminous. Proto-Drakensberg-speakers may have participated in production of Blackburn, or otherwise used Blackburn pottery without generating the facies as part of their identity.

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49 Appendix, root 22. The innovation of a new word root to replace an older word root with the same meaning may indicate a shift in thinking about the nature, consequences, or remediation of animal infertility, such that new vocabulary better described the material conditions. These details cannot be inferred from the root itself.

50 However, Shona-speakers do not practice male initiation. If Southern Bantu-speakers made changes to the materials, behaviors or beliefs associated with male circumcision inherited from earlier Bantu-speakers, the change either came about after the divergence of Proto-Shona from Southern Bantu, or Shona-speakers eventually eliminated the practice of male initiation. This is a subject for future inquiry requiring comprehensive survey of Southern Bantu.

51 Appendix, root 23.

52 Once innovated, it is uncharacteristic of meaning evoked in speech to include the original metaphor. What this root and others like it provide is an eventful chronology of conceptual history. The metaphor captures a single (if prolonged) moment in the changing conceptualization of social relations in which Proto-Nguni-speakers accepted the metaphor to be relevant.

53 For example, marriages conducted using bridewealth exchanges may have been an ideal sufficiently widely held as to materialize in the lexicon, but the use of stones among the impoverished, and the existence of terms for elopement, suggest bridewealth was aspirational and not uniformly practiced or valued.

54 Root 24. Despite similarities in form, the term bears no relation to the ethnonym Khwe, referring to Southern African speech communities characterized by their use of click sounds. For further discussion of the word history of the root *-kó and its derivative *-khwe, see Vansina, J., Paths in the Rainforests: Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa (Madison, 1990)Google Scholar; and Stephens, African Motherhood, especially ch. 3.

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59 Arnold, Greenfield, and Creaser, ‘Domestic cattle mobility’, 131.

60 Hall further argues the appearance of seral (intermediate regrowth) trees in nearby low-lying valleys suggests patterns of deforestation in lowlands. Partitioning of natural resources therefore followed a meticulous strategy and were not haphazard or accidental. See Hall, Settlement Patterns, 156.

61 Ibid. 162.

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69 Mitchell, Archaeology of Southern Africa, 350–6.

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71 For interpretations of feasting and the political use of cattle at Mapungubwe and other Iron Age sites, see Magoma, M., Badenhorst, S., and Pikirayi, I., ‘Feasting among Venda-speakers of South Africa: the Late Iron Age fauna from Mutokolwe’, Anthropozoologica, 53:1 (2018), 195–205CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Reid, A., ‘Cattle herds and the redistribution of cattle resources’, World Archaeology, 28:1 (1996), 43–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

72 Denbow, ‘Material culture’, 110–13.

73 Klehm, ‘Local dynamics’, 605–6.

74 Klehm, ‘Local dynamics’, 605; but see also Moffett, A. J. and Chirikure, S., ‘Exotica in context: reconfiguring prestige, power and wealth in the Southern African Iron Age’, Journal of World Prehistory, 29:4 (2016), 337–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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76 Excavations by Carolyn Thorp at the Great Enclosure of Great Zimbabwe yielded faunal remains in which cattle comprised 98 per cent of stock, with goats comprising the other 2 per cent and wild game virtually non-existent. Thorp argues the high rate of juvenile cattle remains at the Hill Midden represents a system in which cattle of thirty months of age or less were transferred to the social group living in the Great Enclosure, likely as a form of tribute. See Thorp, C., Kings, Commoners and Cattle at Zimbabwe Tradition Sites, Museum Memoir Series 1 (Harare, 1995)Google Scholar.

77 Chirikure, ‘Perspectives’. Chirikure further emphasizes the local, conditional nature of value assigned to other forms of material wealth, drawing attention to the ways in which political economy may intersect with global and regional forces but, in practice, translate to prestige and power at a much smaller scale.

78 Mitchell, P., ‘Prehistoric exchange and interaction in southeastern southern Africa: marine shells and ostrich eggshell’, The African Archaeological Review, 13:1 (1996), 35–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar. However, Mitchell points out a growing differentiation between societies situated across the mountain range, something he correlates with the arrival of Southern Bantu-speakers.

79 Paul Landau argues Southern Africa should be regarded within its ‘broadest possible context’, allowing for recognition of the ways in which people, ideas, and materials flowed through the region as an ‘interactive space’ rather than discrete cultural or linguistic areas. See Landau, P., Popular Politics in the History of South Africa: 1400–1948 (Cambridge, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

80 Y. Bastin and T. Schadeberg (eds.), ‘Bantu Lexical Reconstructions 3’ (hereafter referred to as ‘BLR3’), Musée Royale de l'Afrique Centrale, Tervuren, Belgium, (www.metafro.be/blr), RN 1088; Ehret, African Classical Age, 312; Jimenez, ‘Rites’, 354.

81 Ehret, ‘Livestock raisers’, 9–10; Bastin and Schadeberg, ‘BLR3’, RN 6531.

82 Bastin and Schadeberg, ‘BLR3’, RN170, DER 172.

83 Ibid. RN 434.

84 Ibid. RN 1227, DER 5195.

85 Ibid. RN 2841.

86 Ibid. RN 2793; Ehret, African Classical Age, 314; Jimenez, ‘Rites’, 367.

87 Bastin and Schadeberg, ‘BLR3’, RN 7240; Stephens, African Motherhood, RN 27; Schoenbrun, D. L., The Historical Reconstruction of Great Lakes Bantu Cultural Vocabulary: Etymologies and Distributions (Köln, 1997), RN 133Google Scholar.

88 Bastin and Schadeberg, ‘BLR3’, RN 5871; Jimenez, ‘Rites’, 387.