A general ethnographic survey of the amaBhaca (East Griqualand)

The material for this survey was collected during field investigations in the Mount Frere district of East Griqualand during the period January to October, 1949. The Bhaca are a small group of people occupying roughly the district of Mount Frere - although a considerable number lie outside district boundaries, particularly on the Mount Ayliff side - with a Southern Nguni type of culture and speaking a dialect of Xhosa. They are of particular interest as they are representative of those tribes who were forced to flee from Natal during the chaotic period of Zulu history subsequent to T/haka's rise to power, and, unlike the Mpondo, Thembu and Xhosa tribes, they are thus fairly recent immigrants into the Cape. The Bhaca are very conscious of their Zulu origin, although "Zulu" is hardly the scientifically correct term to apply to it. Van Warmelo has stressed the fact that before the rise of T/haka (c 1816) Natal was the home of a number of different tribes, the majority little more than large clans, roughly divisible into separate groups both dialectically and culturally, viz., (a) the true Nguni or Ntungwa, (b) the Mbo and (c) the Lala tribes. The name "Zulu" should correctly be applied only to the descendants of the small Zulu clan which by rapine and conquest established political and cultural supremacy over the whole of Natal from 1816 onwards. Those tribes which did not submit were forced to flee or be annihilated, and these successive southward waves of fugitives have given rise to the establishment of numerous small tribes in the Cape, classified by van Warmelo as "Fingo and Other recent Immigrants into the Cape". Other tribal elements moved north and today exists as Swazi, Rhodesian Ndebele, Transvaal Ndebele, Ngani and others. At least a century of wandering away from Natal has modified considerably the culture of these immigrants and today the culture of Bhaca, Xesibe (in the district of Mount Ayliff) and the various Mfengu tribes, approximates more nearly to Southern Nguni than to Northern Nguni culture. Foreign influence on the Bhaca must have been strong - at one period the tribe lived in Pondoland under the protection of Faku - and today there is intermarriage with Mpondo, especially on the Eastern boundary which impinges on the district of Tabankulu, and with Hlubi and Xesibe. In the following chapters the question or cultural origins and ethnic composition will be taken up: here it is sufficient to say that ethnographically Bhaca culture today is southern Nguni in character

The nature and significance of bride wealth among the South African Bantu

Perhaps the most controversial topic in the whole field of South African Bantu ethnography is that of the institution known variously as lobola (Zulu-Xhosa), bohadi, boxadi, bohali (Sotho) or mala (Venda). In its simplest form it can be defined as the handing over of some consideration, usually cattle, by the father of the bridegroom to the father of the bride on the occasion of a marriage between their children. No subject has been so widely discussed nor, unfortunately, given rise to so many misconceptions in missionary, administrative and lay circles, and it is imperative that some scientific investigation be made to ascertain, as accurately as possible, the exact nature of this institution and its significance in Bantu society. A glance at the literature shows that this topic has certainly not remained unnoticed by travellers, missionaries and others who have come into contact with our native peoples, either professionally or otherwise, but many of their observations are vitiated by prejudice and such subjective evaluations as: "The individual woman is less than a human being, she is merely a channel through which the children are delivered to the purchaser. It is truly not woman purchase, it is a wholesale transaction in child-life.", and the use of such terms as "sale" and "wife barter". Others say it plays an important stabilising part in native marriage. Thus in all contact situations, but particularly in the native Church and in the law courts, there is marked perplexity - and inconsistency - in dealing with the custom, all tending to increase the confusion and maladjustment of our native peoples - especially among native Christians. It is submitted, therefore, that the time is propitious for a detailed study of this institution, and this the following thesis attempts to do

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

The nature and significance of bride wealth among the South African Bantu

Perhaps the most controversial topic in the whole field of South African Bantu ethnography is that of the institution known variously as lobola (Zulu-Xhosa), bohadi, boxadi, bohali (Sotho) or mala (Venda). In its simplest form it can be defined as the handing over of some consideration, usually cattle, by the father of the bridegroom to the father of the bride on the occasion of a marriage between their children. No subject has been so widely discussed nor, unfortunately, given rise to so many misconceptions in missionary, administrative and lay circles, and it is imperative that some scientific investigation be made to ascertain, as accurately as possible, the exact nature of this institution and its significance in Bantu society. A glance at the literature shows that this topic has certainly not remained unnoticed by travellers, missionaries and others who have come into contact with our native peoples, either professionally or otherwise, but many of their observations are vitiated by prejudice and such subjective evaluations as: "The individual woman is less than a human being, she is merely a channel through which the children are delivered to the purchaser. It is truly not woman purchase, it is a wholesale transaction in child-life.", and the use of such terms as "sale" and "wife barter". Others say it plays an important stabilising part in native marriage. Thus in all contact situations, but particularly in the native Church and in the law courts, there is marked perplexity - and inconsistency - in dealing with the custom, all tending to increase the confusion and maladjustment of our native peoples - especially among native Christians. It is submitted, therefore, that the time is propitious for a detailed study of this institution, and this the following thesis attempts to do

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

South Africa: anthropology or anthropologies?

A direct result of South Africa’s specific history has been the extraordinary significance of its contested, if not conflicting, political and ideological positions on anthropology’s South African trajectories. This was particularly true for the apartheid era between 1948 and the early 1990s when, as Robert Gordon and Andrew Spiegel (1993:86) have observed, South African anthropology had largely succumbed to apartheid as the dominant power in the country and in the region as a whole, with “its discourse perniciously dictating what should be written by both its supporters and, significantly, its opponents.” Yet, as we demonstrate in this article, sociopolitical historical circumstances were momentous factors in the development of the discipline from its beginnings in South Africa in the early 1920s, and they continue to influence contemporary debates and practices

Gendered endings: Narratives of male and female suicides in the South African Lowveld

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11013-012-9258-y. Copyright @ Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012.Durkheim’s classical theory of suicide rates being a negative index of social solidarity downplays the salience of gendered concerns in suicide. But gendered inequalities have had a negative impact: worldwide significantly more men than women perpetrate fatal suicides. Drawing on narratives of 52 fatal suicides in Bushbuckridge, South Africa, this article suggests that Bourdieu’s concepts of ‘symbolic violence’ and ‘masculine domination’ provide a more appropriate framework for understanding this paradox. I show that the thwarting of investments in dominant masculine positions have been the major precursor to suicides by men. Men tended to take their own lives as a means of escape. By contrast, women perpetrated suicide to protest against the miserable consequences of being dominated by men. However, contra the assumption of Bourdieu’s concept of ‘habitus’, the narrators of suicide stories did reflect critically upon gender constructs