The African Mode of Self-Identification

In reality, however, the Africans conceptualized the structure and order of their world in an entirely different way. The basis of African political and social life was the chiefdom. This grouped together members of the same productive unit and was dominated by the members of one clan. Membership of the clan was expressed through the use of a common patronymic, or shibongo, through which an individual identified himself as a member of his clan leader's house. Outsiders who professed fealty to the clan leader or chief defined themselves as being 'from the land of their host clan while the latter's unifying ideology of agnatic descent provided for their gradual incorporation through the adoption of the clan patronymic. Junod referred to the chiefdom, or tiko, as 'the true national unit' in which political identity was rooted.^[35]

Various symbols bound the members of the chiefdom together and distinguished one chiefdom from another. Foremost amongst these was the institution of chieftaincy, for the chief, as the believed direct descendant of the founding ancestors and as the senior member of the kin group, was the embodiment of clan unity and the centre of its corporate identity. He administered a form of justice that was entirely based on the moral community of the clan and the chiefdom, protected the army with his war medicines, interceded with the clan ancestors and generally regulated production strategies. The chief gave to his followers a sense of belonging and unity by using symbols of office that were believed to invest him with special powers and by organizing various rites that were limited to clan members, such as first fruit ceremonies and entry to the age regiments. The cohesion of the clan and the differences between clans were accentuated by marriage patterns which stressed clan endogamy, by the accreditation to each clan of a separate area of origin and migration and by particularities of dialect.

There were a number of popular controls over the succession to office of the chief. These consisted of various legal precedents which provided for the exclusion from the chieftainship of the eldest son of the chief's first wife. Thus the councillors could declare that for moral reasons he was unfit to rule; a son born of a junior wife, but still of royal blood, could be chosen; or the chieftainship could pass to the line of the regent, who was generally the eldest brother of the deceased chief. Consequently, the inheritance of the chieftainship was not automatic and ascribed; it was processual and was dependent upon the support of the councillors and army whose backing was, in turn, influenced by the power and popularity of the individual competitors for office. An unpopular chief was continually threatened by the segmentation of a part of his following.^[36]

Tsonga-speaking chiefdoms in the Transvaal remained small and independent of one another and manifested no tendency to grow through conquest. But the roots of ethnic consciousness cutting across the divisions of clan and chiefdom may be discerned by the beginning of the twentieth century. Clan endogamy had broken down entirely in areas of the Transvaal like the Spelonken where large numbers of refugees had gathered.^[37] Men were meeting and working on the mines and plantations as 'Shangaans' and 'Tongas' and literacy in Thonga/Shangaan, although limited to a small number of people, provided Christians and traders from different areas with a common means of communication. But the vast majority of the population remained illiterate and the individual's world remained largely a small personal one, limited to the chiefdom with whose members he or she shared symbols and rituals that gave meaning to their lives. Poor communications and a limited area of social and economic exchange further restricted the development of a political consciousness extending beyond the clan and chiefdom. What defined the Tsonga in the final instance were their neighbours. The Tsonga/Knobnoses/Gwamba/Shangaans, as their various neighbours called them, only took on or adopted an ethnic identity later in the twentieth century. This new identity emerged as a result of the politicization of the old classificatory ethnicity—a politicization that was the product of the new economic infrastructure introduced by capitalist development.