The Migrations of Tsonga-speakers

In the early nineteenth century people who were later to be defined as Tsonga-speakers occupied the whole of Mozambique south of the Sabi river except for the enclaves of territory surrounding and immediately to the south of the town of Inhambane. For the major part of the century the chiefdoms to the north of Delagoa Bay fell under the hegemony of the Gaza Nguni; those to the west of the bay were heavily influenced by the Swazi; while the Zulu dominated the chiefdoms to the south of the bay. All three states incorporated, both politically and culturally, many of the people living on their borders who spoke language forms later to be classified as Tsonga.^[2] These people, particularly traders and hunters from the areas around Inhambane and Lourenco Marques, had for many years operated in the high and lowveld areas to the west of the Lebombo mountains. Here their commercial skills, rites, customs and organization bound them together and, together with their foreignness, singled them out as a distinctly separate group.^[3] But it was only in the second quarter of the nineteenth century that coastal peoples settled the area that was later to become the northern and eastern Transvaal in a purposeful way.

During the 1820s a number of Nguni refugee groups fleeing from the disturbances in Natal associated with the growth of the Zulu state passed through southern Mozambique. In the late 1830s one of these groups, led by Soshangane, took advantage of a decline in Zulu power following the battle of Blood River and reoccupied the fertile lower Limpopo. According to missionary historians who gathered evidence a half-century after the event, Soshangane's return to the south initiated a 'general exodus' of people living between the Nkomati and Limpopo rivers.^[4] The refugees travelled along the trade routes flanking two rivers, the Olifants and Limpopo-Levubu, that passed through the thinly populated lowveld and gave access to the healthier, well-watered areas to the west.^[5] The second major wave of immigrants entered the Transvaal as a result of the Gaza civil war and ecological upsets of 1858–62. Raids into the coastal and northern Delagoa Bay hinterland by the defeated heir to the Gaza throne and his Swazi allies continued into the 1870s, causing the movement of people into the Transvaal to continue unabated.^[6] The flow of war refugees was continually augmented by people fleeing from natural upheavals such as drought, famine and smallpox.

These immigrants settled under virtually every chief living on the escarpment and eastern highveld. Although they often shifted their political allegiances, they were welcomed by chiefs to whom they paid tribute in labour and in goods. They were attached to homesteads as individuals or, as small groups under their own

headmen, were scattered throughout the veld, colonizing those areas where human and animal diseases, poor soils or lack of water had previously restricted settlement. Coming from a different ecological area, East Coast immigrants introduced new types of food such as fowls, cassava, certain kinds of groundnuts, various grain and potato strains and, especially, maize. These new foodstuffs, together with their techniques of preparation and cooking, served as cultural markers that defined these displaced people, in the eyes of the autochthonous population, as outsiders. Chiefs competed with each other to attract these East Coast immigrants by offering them security and access to a means of production.

Probably the best known of these chiefs was João Albasini who at one time controlled a following of more than 5000 refugees in the Spelonken hills at the foot of the Zoutpansberg. Albasini, in contrast to many chiefs, allowed his followers to retain their clan-names, material culture and leaders without discriminating against them as foreigners. They were also offered the possibility of rapid advancement in his service as hunters, traders and raiders-cum-tax-collectors. His followers were a cultural and political conglomeration of people from various coastal chiefdoms. They had few links with other refugees drawn from the same region and were often embroiled in conflicts with these people, as well as with local chiefs who had given them refuge. Albasini presided over a shifting population the size of which depended upon his fluctuating fortunes. At the height of his power in the early 1860s he attracted large numbers of Venda-speaking refugees from north of the Levubu as well as Tsonga-speakers drawn both from the coast and from other local chiefdoms.^[7] As Albasini's power was destroyed by the decline of elephant hunting and slavery many of his followers deserted him for wealthier masters. Albasini, however, was merely one of many chiefs living in the Transvaal who gave asylum to large numbers of people uprooted from their homes east of the Lebombo mountains.

By the 1860s four small semi-independent clusters of East Coast refugees had begun to emerge in the Transvaal. The middle and lower Levubu river was largely settled by members of the Maluleke clan who were perennially under Gaza hegemony. The heterogeneous population in the Spelonken hills accepted the overlordship of Albasini and his chiefs. To the south the other major groups, consisting mainly of Baloyi and Nkuna clan members, lived in the Haernertsberg under various North Sotho-speaking chiefs. Smaller settlements, many of whose members were described as 'Hlangaan', developed to the south of the Olifants river around Pedi, immigrant Boer and Swazi communities.^[8] The discovery of alluvial goldfields in this area in the 1870s attracted large numbers of coastal immigrants who settled as labour tenants on company lands surrounding the mining villages. The final major wave of East Coast refugees, consisting of several thousand Gaza Nguni, settled in the eastern and northern Transvaal in 1897 following their defeat in the second Luso-Gaza war. In the twentieth century the movement of Mozambicans into the Transvaal, drawn by better living conditions, continued unabated despite a legislative attempt in 1913 to restrict this immigration.^[9]

By the early twentieth century East Coast immigrants were scattered throughout the northern and eastern Transvaal; many barriers divided them from each other and, although they tended to settle in low-lying areas and river valleys, no natural frontier separated them from their neighbours. Even where borders can be distinguished, immigrant communities were surrounded by wide belts of mixed settlement, and islands of linguistic minorities existed on both sides. In 1896 a northern Transvaal newspaper remarked of the immigrants from the East Coast that they were 'an admixture of refugees . . . they have no recognized king, but

subject themselves to the most wealthy, who assumes the leadership under the title of induna or headman'.^[10] It is ironic that the geographically diffuse and politically amorphous form of settlement practised by these nineteenth century immigrants was also recognized by N.J. van Warmelo, the government ethnologist who was later to play a leading role in their definition and delimitation as a 'population group' with its own 'homeland'. In 1937 he wrote that

the Tsonga-speaking refugees came over the border [sic ] in small parties and settled down wherever they could. Very often they became the subjects of Sotho and Venda chiefs and, though the tendency to reassemble and live together was there, they usually failed to muster sufficient strength to form tribes of any importance.^[11]

Even to use the term 'Tsonga-speaking' with reference to the nineteenth century is misleading as it invokes an erroneous linguistic unity. No single language linked the early East Coast refugees who were settled throughout the northern and eastern Transvaal. Instead, they spoke a rich variety of language forms that reflected their diverse geographical origins. The codification and categorization of Tsonga as a language was only undertaken at the end of the nineteenth century by missionaries who, trained to categorize and classify national groups and characteristics according to language, reified this linguistic category into an ethnic group—into a 'tribe'.