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‘COLONIAL’ EXPERTS, LOCAL INTERLOCUTORS, INFORMANTS AND THE MAKING OF AN ARCHIVE ON THE ‘TRANSVAAL NDEBELE’, 1930–1989*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 April 2009

SEKIBAKIBA PETER LEKGOATHI
SEKIBAKIBA PETER LEKGOATHI
Affiliation:
University of the Witwatersrand
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Abstract

The perspectives of African informants and researchers profoundly shaped the writings of government ethnologist Dr. Nicholas Jacobus van Warmelo who not only collected information from local African informants but also relied on African researchers who wrote manuscripts in the vernacular that would constitute part of his archive. This study explores the process of producing knowledge on the ‘Transvaal Ndebele’, and provides an analysis of Van Warmelo's texts and of his researchers' manuscripts. By looking at the role of local interlocutors, I make a case for African agency in shaping the ‘colonial’ expert's conceptions of Ndebele identity. This article provides an account of the co-production of cultural knowledge. Van Warmelo was employed by the South African Native Affairs Department to identify and fix ‘tribes’, a highly political enterprise, and in the process generated an archive. His work was as much appropriated by the apartheid state for social engineering as by Ndebele interlocutors involved in contemporary struggles over chieftainship.

Keywords

South Africaethnicityidentityculture/culturalarchives
Type
Authority, Knowledge and Identity in South Africa
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 50 , Issue 1 , March 2009 , pp. 61 - 80
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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References

1 There is a whole corpus of literature that is apologetic about anthropology's complicity in aiding colonial conquest in South Africa, sometimes displacing the blame onto particular strands within the discipline, especially Afrikaner ethnology or Volkekundige. See, for example, Hammond-Tooke, W. D., ‘N. J. van Warmelo and the Ethnological Section: a memoir’, African Studies, 54 (1995), 119–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hammond-Tooke, Imperfect Interpreters: South Africa's Anthropologists 1920–1990 (Johannesburg, 1996), 11–12, 109–39; Gordon, R., ‘Early social anthropology in South Africa’, African Studies, 49 (1990), 15–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gordon, ‘Apartheid's anthropologists: the genealogy of Afrikaner anthropology’, American Ethnologist, 15 (1988), 535–53; Gordon, R. J. and Spiegel, A. D., ‘Southern Africa revisited’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 22 (1993), 83–105CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the other hand, there is a body of scholarship both inside and outside anthropology that provides a useful critique of the discipline versus the colonizing project. See, for example, Goddard, D., ‘Limits of British anthropology’, New Left Review, 58 (1969), 79–89Google Scholar; Vawda, S., ‘The other anthropology: a response to Gordon and Spiegel's review of Southern African anthropology’, African Studies, 54 (1995), 128–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Quinlan, Tim, ‘What is the state of anthropology in South Africa?’, African Studies, 54 (1995), 132–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mafeje, A., ‘Anthropology and independent Africans: suicide or end of an era?’, African Sociological Review, 2 (1998), 1–43.Google Scholar

2 I use the term ‘colonial expert’ in reference to white researchers employed by the state to provide knowledge of Africans. Even though South Africa was no longer a colony in the period after 1910, the term ‘colonial’ appropriately describes the nature of the relationship between the white scholar and his African subjects.

3 L. Schumaker, Africanizing Anthropology: Fieldwork, Networks, and the Making of Cultural Knowledge in Central Africa (Durham NC, 2001), 3.

4 E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983); L. Vail (ed.), The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa (London, 1989); B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983); M. Chanock, The Making of South African Legal Culture, 1902–1936: Fear, Favour and Prejudice (Cambridge, 2001), 34, 273, 288–90; ‘Making customary law: men, women and courts in colonial Northern Rhodesia’, in M. J. Hay and M. Wright (eds.), African Women and the Law: Historical Perspectives (Boston, 1982), 53–67.

5 Spear, T., ‘Neo-traditionalism and the limits of invention in British colonial Africa’, Journal of African History, 44 (2003), 3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Ibid.

7 Van Warmelo himself acknowledges in his 1935 text that ‘The tribes under consideration are … one and all commonly known as amaNdebele or (in the Sotho form) maTebele’. See N. J. van Warmelo, A Preliminary Survey of the Bantu Tribes of South Africa (Ethnological Publications, 5) (Pretoria, 1935), 87.

8 There is a fairly strong literature (mostly ethnographic and historical, and to a less extent archaeological) on the Transvaal Ndebele. See, for example, N.J. van Warmelo, Transvaal Ndebele Texts (Ethnological Publications, 1) (Pretoria, 1930), 7–23, 32–108; Van Warmelo, A Preliminary Survey, 87–9; Van Warmelo, The Ndebele of J. Kekana (Ethnological Publication, 18) (Pretoria, 1944), 13–21; Van Warmelo, The Bahwaduba (Ethnological Publications, 19) (Pretoria, 1944), 23–32; Van Warmelo, Language Map of South Africa (Pretoria, 1952), 1, 10–12; Van Warmelo, ‘The classification of cultural groups’, in W. D. Hammond-Tooke (ed.), The Bantu-speaking Peoples of Southern Africa (London, 1974), 67; D. Ziervogel, A Grammar of Northern Transvaal Ndebele (Pretoria, 1959), 3–14, 179–203; Ziervogel, ‘Notes on the noun classes of Swati and Nrebele’, African Studies, 7 (June–Sept. 1948), 59–69; Kuper, A., ‘Fourie and the Southern Transvaal Ndebele’, African Studies, 37 (1978), 107–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar; A. O. Jackson, The Ndebele of Langa (Ethnological Publications, 54) (Republic of South Africa, 1983); J. H. N. Loubser, ‘Ndebele archaeology of the Pietersburg area’ (MA thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, 1981); C. McCaul, Satellite in Revolt – KwaNdebele: An Economic and Political Profile (Johannesburg, 1987); James, D., ‘A question of ethnicity: Ndzundza Ndebele in a Lebowa village’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 16 (1990), 33–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar; James, ‘Kinship and land in an inter-ethnic rural community’ (MA thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, 1987); P. N. Delius, ‘The Ndzundza Ndebele: indenture and the making of ethnic identity, 1883–1914’, in P. Bonner, I. Hofmeyr, D. James and T. Lodge (eds.), Holding Their Ground: Class, Locality and Culture in 19th and 20th Century South Africa (Johannesburg, 1989), 227–58; I. Hofmeyr, ‘We Spend Our Years as a Tale that is Told’: Oral Storytelling and Historical Narrative in a Rural Transvaal Chiefdom (Johannesburg, 1993); Ritchken, E., ‘The KwaNdebele struggle against independence’, South African Review, 5 (1989), 426–45Google Scholar; Transvaal Rural Action Committee, KwaNdebele: The Struggle Against Independence (Johannesburg, 1986); S. N. Phatlane, ‘The Kwa-Ndebele independence issue: a critical appraisal of the crises around independence in Kwa-Ndebele 1982–1989’ (MA thesis, University of South Africa, Pretoria, 1998); Wilkes, A., ‘Northern and Southern Ndebele – why harmonisation will not work’, Southern African Journal of African Languages, 21 (2001), 310–22Google Scholar; D. Nielsen, ‘“Bringing together that which belongs together”: the establishment of KwaNdebele and the incorporation of Moutse’ (WISER seminar paper no. 393, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 11 Mar. 1996); Lekgoathi, S. P., ‘Chiefs, migrants and North Ndebele ethnicity in the context of surrounding homeland politics, 1965–1978’, African Studies, 62 (2003), 53–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lekgoathi, ‘Ethnicity and identity: struggle and contestation in the making of the Northern Transvaal Ndebele, ca. 1860–2005’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Minnesota, 2006).

9 Cited in McCaul, Satellite in Revolt, 12.

10 Having lived for a while in the Transvaal, the Ndebele of Mzilikazi fled across the Limpopo River when the emigrant Boers and their emissaries attacked them relentlessly in 1833, finally settling in the region that came to be called Matebeleland in present-day Zimbabwe. For more detail, see A. T. Bryant, Olden Times in Zululand and Natal (London, 1929), 417–45. Studies on the history of the Ndebele in Zimbabwe include R. K. Rasmussen, Migrant Kingdom: Mzilikazi's Ndebele in South Africa (London, 1978), 27–96; Rasmussen, ‘Ndebele wars and migrations, c. 1821–1839’ (D.Phil. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 1975), 32–232; J. Cobbing, ‘The Ndebele under the Khumalos, c. 1820–96’ (D.Phil. thesis, Lancaster University, 1976); Lye, W. F., ‘The Ndebele kingdom south of the Limpopo River’, Journal of African History, 10 (1969), 87–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; A. J. B. Hughes, Caste and Nation among the Rhodesian Ndebele (Manchester, 1956).

11 Mzilikazi's regiments almost completely annihilated several groups in the Transvaal, including some of the local Ndebele chiefdoms. For example, in 1821 and 1826 Mzilikazi routed the combined forces of the Manala and the Ndzundza under Sibindi and Magodongo, respectively – identified in oral traditions as leaders of Ndebele chiefdoms – living north of Magaliesberg. Julian Cobbing misconstrued these groups as the Kgatla/Sotho communities while acknowledging that their ancestors originated on the eastern side of the Drakensberg Mountains about 400 years prior to these attacks. See Cobbing, ‘The Ndebele’, 20.

12 Van Warmelo, Transvaal Ndebele Texts, 7.

13 C. Hamilton, Terrific Majesty: The Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical Invention (Cape Town, 1998), 8–71, 130–67; P. Harries, Butterflies and Barbarians: Swiss Missionaries and Systems of Knowledge in South-East Africa (Oxford, 2007), 155–260; Harries ‘Exclusion, classification and internal colonialism: the emergence of ethnicity among the Tsonga-speakers of South Africa’, in L. Vail (ed.), The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa (1989), 82–117.

14 Map drawn by Wendy Job, The Cartographic Unit, School of Geography, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2008.

15 For more information on the James Stuart archive, see, for example, Hamilton, Terrific Majesty, 130–67. For a discussion of Junod's work, see Harries, Butterflies and Barbarians, chs. 5–8.

16 For a discussion of the political use made of state ethnographies, see L. Vail (ed.), The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa (London, 1989), 1–20, 82–117.

17 See, for example, Hammond-Tooke, Imperfect Interpreters, 109–18; Hammond-Tooke, ‘N. J. van Warmelo and the Ethnological Section’; Pugach, S., ‘Carl Meinhof and the German influence on Nicholas van Warmelo's ethnological and linguistic writing, 1927–1935’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 30 (2004), 827–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18 Hammond-Tooke, Imperfect Interpreters, 113–14.

19 Pugach, ‘Carl Meinhof and the German influence’, 827.

20 Van Warmelo, Transvaal Ndebele Texts, 7, 12.

21 Ibid. 13.

22 Transvaal Native Affairs Department, A Short History of the Native Tribes of the Transvaal (Pretoria, 1905).

23 The Native Locations Commission was launched in the Transvaal in the aftermath of the South African War, which had caused massive dislocation of African communities. The Transvaal had been the main theatre of military operations, with no less than 56,000 Africans – men, women and children – estimated to have been kept in the concentration camps established along the main railway lines. The disorder that prevailed at the end of the war and the government's inability to distinguish between different groups represented a major threat to social and political stability. As a result the commission was set up ‘to enquire into the past history, distribution, and general condition of the African communities and to furnish reports with particular regard to the location of various tribes and to the lands in their occupation’ and to ‘make recommendations as to the boundaries, where undefined, of existing locations granted to Native Tribes’. National Archives of South Africa (henceforth NASA): NTS, C27, Native Locations Commission, 1904–8.

24 Fourie wrote his doctoral thesis under the title ‘Amandebele van Fene Mahlangu en hun religieus--sociaal leven’ (‘Amandebele of Fene Mahlangu and their religious--social life’). Cited in Van Warmelo, Transvaal Ndebele Texts; also cited in A. Kuper, ‘Fourie and the Southern Transvaal Ndebele’, African Studies, 37 (1978), 107–24.

25 A. Kuper, ‘Fourie and the Southern Transvaal Ndebele’, 107.

26 Cited in ibid. 108.

27 Department of Native Affairs, Report, 1950–1957 (Pretoria, 1957), 15. For a full discussion of the establishment of the Native Affairs Department and the changing attitudes towards it, see, for example, S. Dubow, Racial Segregation and the Origins of Apartheid in South Africa, 1919–36 (London, 1989), 77–81.

28 Van Warmelo, Transvaal Ndebele Texts, 8, 10, 12, 14.

29 Van Warmelo, The Ndebele of J. Kekana, 21.

30 Van Warmelo, Transvaal Ndebele Texts, 8.

31 Ibid. 32.

32 Silamba appears as the twenty-first ruler on the genealogical diagram of the Manala chiefs provided by Van Warmelo. See ibid. 17.

33 Ibid. 23.

34 Schumaker, Africanizing Anthropology, 7.

35 Van Warmelo, Transvaal Ndebele Texts, 23.

36 Ibid.

37 Ibid.

38 Hofmeyr, ‘We Spend our Years’, 78–101.

39 Ibid. Also cited in C. Hamilton, ‘“Living by fluidity”: oral histories, material custodies and the politics of archiving’, in C. Hamilton, V. Harris, J. Taylor, M. Pickover, G. Reid and R. Saleh (eds.), Refiguring the Archive (Cape Town, 2002), 220.

40 For a detailed discussion of the 1927 Act, see, for example, I. Evans, Bureaucracy and Race: Native Administration in South Africa (Berkeley, 1997), 168–70; Chanock, The Making of South African Legal Culture, 34, 273, 288–90.

41 Hammond-Tooke, Imperfect Interpreters, 113.

42 Comaroff, J., ‘Chiefship in a South African homeland: a case study’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 1 (1974), 36–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

43 Hamilton, Terrific Majesty, 152.

44 Even Isabel Hofmeyr contends that the major marker of ethnic distinctiveness within Ndebele chiefdoms was language. Commenting on this ethnicity in the 1980s (commentary that is relevant for the 1930s and 1940s as well), she argues that, ‘even if fixed in language, ethnic categories are not rigid, particularly in the nineteenth-century Transvaal where constant interaction among societies ensured a fluid sense of ethnic definition’. See Hofmeyr, ‘We Spend our Years’, 18–19.

45 Van Warmelo, Transvaal Ndebele Texts, 14.

46 Ibid.

47 Like their later counterparts, these early European observers had to rely on local informants, or ‘messengers’, to translate the complexities of the societies they encountered, further discrediting the notion that African ethnicities could simply be outsiders' ‘inventions’.

48 ‘The latest exploratory trips of our Bassuto-missionaries’, Berliner Missionsberichte, 7 (1865), 99–109.

49 I explore this issue at length elsewhere. See, for example, Lekgoathi, ‘Chiefs, migrants and North Ndebele ethnicity’. See also Nielsen, ‘“Bringing together that which belongs together”’.

50 Pugach, ‘Carl Meinhof and the German influence’.

51 Ibid. 830.

52 German influence in South Africa was not limited to trained graduates like Van Warmelo who returned home with skills to conduct research on African languages: the German missionaries in the country also did some significant work in this respect. For a comprehensive discussion of the influence of German missionaries especially of the Lutheran denomination, see, for example, C. J. Kros, ‘Economic, political and intellectual origins of Bantu education, 1926–1951’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, 1996), 79–116.

53 Ibid.

54 Van Warmelo, A Preliminary Survey, 5.

55 Department of Native Affairs, Report, 1950–1957, 15.

56 Van Warmelo, Language Map, 11.

57 Van Warmelo's tentative estimation of the number of Northern Ndebele speakers in 1952 was 32,500 persons. Ibid. 12.

58 Van Warmelo, A Preliminary Survey, 87.

59 By virtue of their geographical location, some Ndebele groups, such as the Seleka and the Langa, have been grouped together with others as the Northern Transvaal Ndebele, even though they did not share the same origins. See, for example, ibid. 87; Van Warmelo, Transvaal Ndebele Texts, 7; Jackson, The Ndebele of Langa, i, 3–5; Ziervogel, A Grammar of Northern Transvaal Ndebele (Pretoria, 1959), 3–14, 179–203.

60 Van Warmelo, The Bahwaduba, 23.

61 Van Warmelo, The Ndebele of J. Kekana, 13–21; The Bahwaduba, 23–32.

62 Van Warmelo, The Ndebele of J. Kekana, 17–19.

63 Ibid.

64 For a detailed discussion of Volkekundige, see, for example, Hammond-Tooke, Imperfect Interpreters, 119–39; Gordon, ‘Apartheid's anthropologists’; Gordon and Spiegel, ‘Southern Africa revisited’.

65 Cited in Hammond-Tooke, Imperfect Interpreters, 115.

66 Copies of the Collection have also been stored in the University of Pretoria's archive.

67 Department of Native Affairs, Report, 1950–1957, 15.

68 Ibid.

69 Rare Book Collection University of Johannesburg Library: Van Warmelo Collection, B13 A/5 Diary 1 Entry dates 19 Mar. 1942, 20 Mar. 1942, 20 June 1942, 23 June 1942, 27 June 1942, 18 Sept. 1942, 12 Nov. 1942, 28 Nov. 1942, 27 Jan. 1943.

70 Interview, Chris J. van Vuuren, University of South Africa, Pretoria, 26 Feb. 2007.

71 Van Warmelo Collection, B13 A/5 Diary 1 Entry date 20 Mar. 1942.

72 NASA: K34/77 Dr. N. J. van Warmelo Collection, letter from Elias N. Sethosa to Dr. N. J. van Warmelo, dated 5 Jan. 1942.

73 NASA: K34/79 Dr. N. J. van Warmelo Collection, letter from A. S. Mosehle to Dr. N. J. van Warmelo, dated 2 Oct. 1944.

74 Relevant to our purposes, several local researchers from the Ndebele areas gathered oral information about their local communities and wrote it in manuscript form before posting it to Pretoria.

75 Hammond-Tooke, Imperfect Interpreters, 111–13.

76 Hamilton, ‘Living by fluidity’, 218–19.

77 Teachers came from the communities inside and around the areas of the Ndebele chiefdoms. Their usage of North Sotho in the Ndebele manuscripts originates from the arrival of the German (Berlin Lutheran) missionaries in the area and their preference for proselytizing and teaching in the medium of Sotho. According to Hofmeyr, from an early date the missionary schools were filled mostly with Sotho commoners, who, by attending, gained advantage over the royal Ndebele who were quite hostile to the missionary project. Hofmeyr, ‘We Spend Our Years’, 19–20. Given the scarcity of their skills at the time, these schoolteachers became highly mobile and they tended not to settle in one community for a long period. This can be deduced from the different postal addresses used in their correspondence with Van Warmelo.

78 The only non-North Sotho manuscript is the one by Elias N. Sethosa, which he wrote in the Northern Ndebele language that was never wholly reduced to writing. It is a translation of the manuscript he wrote in Northern Sotho.

79 NASA:K34/77 Dr. N. J. van Warmelo Collection, Manuscript 528, E. Sethosa, ‘Fragments of history of the Letwaba and Moletlane’, 16 Feb. 1942 (translation). For a comparable discussion of the use of human flesh in war medicine among the Kekana Ndebele of Mokopane, see Hofmeyr, ‘We Spend Our Years’, 140–1.

80 NASA:K34/77 Dr. N. J. van Warmelo Collection, Sethosa Manuscript (translation).

81 Ibid.

82 Ibid.

83 NASA, K34/31 Dr. N. J. van Warmelo Collection: J. S. Mahapa, ‘History of the Lamola tribe’, Manuscript 103, 14 Oct. 1938 (translation).

84 Ibid.

85 Ibid.

86 NASA: K34/62 Dr. N. J. van Warmelo Collection, W. Gwangwa, ‘How Mokopane's war with the Boers started’, Manuscript 308, 19 June 1962 (translation).

87 The Makapansgat siege has received some scholarly attention. See, for example, Hofmeyr, ‘We Spend Our Years’, 105–81; Jackson, The Ndebele of Langa, 13–18; J. Naidoo, Tracking Down Historical Myths: Eight South African Case Studies (Johannesburg, 1989), 120–32.

88 Lekgoathi, ‘Chiefs, migrants and North Ndebele ethnicity’, 53–77.

89 NASA: K34/28 Dr. N. J. van Warmelo Collection, C. M. Mokgohlwe, Manuscript 83, 12 Sept. 1939.

90 Ibid.

91 Ibid.

92 Interview, Lesiba William Molomo, Mamelodi Township, 2004.

93 NASA: K34/11 Dr. N. J. van Warmelo Collection, Manuscript, M. E. Ledwaba, ‘Matebele a ga-Mashashaan’, 29 Aug. 1938 (translation).

94 Ibid.

95 Interview, Fikizolo Maraba, Mahwelereng Township, Mokopane, 7 May 2005.

96 NASA: K34/32 Dr. N. J. van Warmelo Collection, Manuscript, J. M. Maraba, ‘Ba-xa-Mašašane’, Manuscript 109 (translation).

97 Ibid.

98 Interview, Fikizolo Maraba, Mahwelereng Township, Mokopane, 7 May 2005.

99 Ibid.

100 For a detailed discussion of the Native Administration Act of 1927, see, for example, Evans, Bureaucracy and Race, 168–70; Chanock, The Making of South African Legal Culture, 34, 273, 288–90.

101 NASA: K34/32 Dr. N. J. van Warmelo Collection, Manuscript, J. M. Maraba ‘Ba-xa-Mašašane’, Manuscript 109.

102 Ibid.

103 Ibid.

104 Ibid.

105 Spear, ‘Neo-traditionalism’, 26.