Six native churches: a preliminary survey of religion in an urban location

This report had its genesis in a proposed thesis, purporting to investigate the part that Religion (including both Christianity and the indigenous beliefs of the Bantu) is playing in the lives of the people at Langa, the Municipal Native location lying about eight miles from Cape Town. It was felt that, after some two hundred years of missionary endeavour in South Africa, the time was ripe for an assessment of the degree to which Christianity had become part of the Bantu scheme of things, to see how far it has changed the culture and outlook of the people, and how far it, in its turn, has been modified by the ever-menacing mass of Africa heathendom. It was hoped that the finished work would be of use, not only yo students of sociology, but also to the practical man on the mission-field who so often, working hard in his corner of the vineyard, has no opportunity to estimate what effects his labour is having on the bulk of the people

Descent groups, chiefdoms, and South African historiography

African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented July, 1984A number of impressive historical studies by a group of young South African scholars has recently appeared, seeking to apply new insights in tracing the effects of the imposition of colonial rule over the indigenous peoples of the sub-continent (e.g. Slater 1976; Hedges 1978; Peires 1981; Bonner 1980, 1983; Guy 1979, 1981; Delius 1982, Hamilton and Wright 1984). Some of these authors, notably Slater, Hedges, Guy, Bonner, Hamilton and Wright, seek, as a starting point of their analyses, to establish the nature of the ‘mutation’ to chieftainship that must have occurred from a previous period in which there were no chiefs. These works focus mainly on the Nguni, especially the incorporative states of Zulu and Swazi; others, like those of Peires on the Xhosa and Delius on the Pedi, tend to assume chieftainship as given and take their analyses from there

Chieftainship in Transkeian political development

In November 1963 the inhabitants of the Transkeian Territories, the largest block of Bantu reserve in the Republic of South Africa, went to the polls to elect representatives for a Legislative Assembly, upon whom the responsibility for the government of this, the first so-called ‘Bantustan’ to achieve a limited form of self-government, is to be laid. The election was the culminating point in a series of changes in the administrative structure of the area which have been characterized by an emphasis on the institution of chieftainship as the basis of local government. After approximately 60 years of rule through magistrates (later supplemented by a system of district councils) the Bantu Authorities Act of 1955 was introduced, giving greatly enhanced powers to the Chiefs, who now became the heads of the tribally-structured Bantu Authorities

In search of the sacred : a problem in the anthropological study of religion : inaugural lecture delivered at Rhodes University

Inaugural lecture delivered at Rhodes UniversityRhodes University Libraries (Digitisation