Introduction

This chapter deals with the formation of ethnicity amongst the Tsonga-speaking people of the northern and eastern Transvaal. It argues that the notion of a 'Tsonga' ethnic group as defined by anthropologists at the turn of the century is of little objective value for it was more a product of their social and intellectual environment than an objective reality. While Tsonga-speakers were often excluded, as foreign immigrants, from local society, ethnicity as an expression of group consciousness emerged only with the development of a local petty bourgeoisie. This class was literate in a missionary-constructed lingua franca, later to evolve into the Tsonga language, and was equipped with a social and economic vision that extended well beyond the boundaries of the scattered precapitalist political unit of the chiefdom. A Tsonga ethnic consciousness initially arose out of the conflict between the petty bourgeoisie as the representatives of a new form of production and the traditional chiefs, as well as from the new identity forged by Tsonga-speaking industrial workers. This consciousness grew on the base of a modern economic infrastructure, and it should not be seen as a residual or transitional political identity that will eventually be transformed, by the same process of modernization, into a broader national identity. The roots of Tsonga ethnicity are not to be found in the primordial values associated with the precapitalist political systems and forms of production that early anthropologists categorized and classified by 'tribe.'

I shall argue that the degree to which an ethnic identity is adopted is dependent on the various class interests engendered by the historical regional division of labour or centre-periphery form of internal capitalism that has developed in southern Africa.^[1] People choose, adopt and emphasize cultural symbols that they believe to be signs of a shared historical Tsonga identity in order to benefit their class or regional interests.

Although whites had long employed popular stereotypes of the Tsonga-speaking population as a group, it was only in the 1950s-60s that the government actively intervened through its Bantustan policy to forge an ethnic alliance between chiefs and elements of the petty bourgeoisie and to impose a central homeland upon the disparate peoples who spoke Tsonga-related dialects.

A Tsonga identity has thus emerged as the product of a variety of forces. These include the European obsession with social classifications; a government policy that attempted to divide Africans along ethnic lines; and, as well, an awareness expressed by many Africans of the numerous benefits that accrued from the mobilization of people along ethnic lines. What must be questioned is the readiness with which historians have fused the two forms of ethnicity—early classificatory ethnicity and later politicized ethnicity—and have consequently extrapolated into preceding centuries the existence of ethnic groups, such as 'the Tsonga', imbued with a political and social unity that in reality only emerged in the twentieth century. Nor can Tsonga ethnicity be traced to an ethnos with the physiognomy of a soul. It is, rather, very much a human construct, a social product the fabrication of which over time is the subject of this essay.