The Consolidation of a Tsonga/Shangaan Ethnic Awareness

As the chiefs lost their power of protection and patronage, the chiefdom and clan declined as a focus of political consciousness. Within the clan new political institutions emerged that paralleled those of the chief. These included firmly hierarchical women's organizations associated with epidemic forms of spirit possession and politically structured competitive dance groups.^[83] It was the rising petty bourgeoisie that benefited most from the undermining by capitalism of the old mode of production, from the tenancy and freehold land tenure systems, and from the breakdown of the powers of the backward-looking chiefs. As the chiefdom deteriorated as the centre of economic life and political identification, a new ethnic culture, engendered and encouraged by the petty bourgeoisie, started to play an increasingly integrative role in rural society.

The petty bourgeoisie emerged as an alternative source of political leadership to that of the chiefs through organizations such as the Native Vigilance Association. This political movement was formed in Pietersburg in the early twentieth century and campaigned for African rights through its newspaper, written in North Sotho, Tsonga and English, Leihlo lo Babatsho ('The Native Eye'). Many of the same issues, particularly regarding segregation and land alienation, were later taken up by the northern Transvaal branch of the African National Congress as well as by groups associated with the Communist Party and the northern Transvaal section of the Joint Council System. Many were also to find a political voice through membership of Mission and Ethiopianist churches. But while the petty bourgeoisie expressed itself on one level in national terms, at the regional level it began to foster and articulate an ethnic consciousness.

At the centre of this movement was the Swiss Mission which controlled Lemana college, the only senior educational institution for Africans in the northeastern Transvaal. The annual synod of the Swiss mission was also the only institution linking literate Tsonga-speakers throughout the Transvaal. The political ideology of the mission was strongly influenced by Henri Junod's concept of Tsonga-speakers as a 'tribe' and by the self-help schemes of Booker T. Washington, which had so many parallels with the successful Afrikaner nationalist movement.

The ethnic consciousness expressed by the Tsonga-speaking petty bourgeoisie tended to be a defensive reaction to the politicization of ethnicity. This may be traced to the actions of men like John Dube and Pixley Seme, who sought to mobilize rural support on an ethnic basis after having been ousted in 1917 from the leadership of the South African Native National Congress by the Rand-dominated Transvaalers. The assertiveness expressed by numerically larger and politically more centralized and confident ethnic groups such as the Swazi and Zulu surged forward in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Encouraged by white segregationists, this ethnic assertiveness found expression at all levels of African society and threatened to marginalize disparate and unorganized peoples such as

those considered to be 'Tsongas'. Ethnicity had to be mobilized to maintain the balance of power within the African nationalist movement. The rise of ethnic awareness also indicated a shift in the awareness of the petty bourgeoisie away from politics at the national level, with its more abstract concern for civil rights, towards local issues. These had become of crucial importance because of the extreme social and economic dislocation in the rural areas caused by proletarianization and betterment schemes. Tsonga-speakers also laboured under the very real fear, first expressed at the time of the land commissions, that, as immigrants into the northern Transvaal, they did not have a secure historical tenure to their land. They were subject to attacks such as that made by a Venda headman when addressing the Eastern Transvaal Natives' Land Commission in 1916:

You must take no notice of these Shangaans. They are no good. We are Bawendas here. These Shangaans came to the country. . . . You must remove the Shangaans. There will not be enough room [for us both]. Take the Shangaans away.^[84]

Tsonga-speakers were not the product of a military tradition and had no paramount chief to represent their interests, factors which made them inferior to the more politically centralized ethnic groups in the eyes of many whites and blacks. Consequently, Tsonga-speakers were divided by the Native Affairs Department into administrative districts dominated by Venda or Northern Sotho chiefs, while within the black urban areas they were marginalized as a minority group. The reasons for the emergence amongst the petty bourgeoisie of a Tsonga ethnicity were well expressed by the mission-educated editors of the African newspaper in the Spelonken. In 1934 they gave three reasons for the existence of their newspaper:

We want to arise . . . nearly all our brothers have risen. The Zulus have their national paper, the Xosas have their own National paper . . . the different Bantu tribes are getting up. Our second aim is to create what we call the 'Shangaans National Pride'. Too often we hear of people, Shangaans included who, when amongst nations or tribes other than theirs, are afraid of calling themselves after their own tribe. Some even go to the length of changing their names for fear they will be laughed at. A third aim is to present Shangaan idioms and the language of today.^[85]

The following year the editor urged 'The Shangaan nation . . . [to] learn to respect one of its own, otherwise we shall be no people. The world will laugh at us and everyone will do as he pleases with us.' In another editorial they significantly stressed that 'the increase of land-buyers among us means the increase of investment of wealth for our race'. It also meant an increasing independence of the chiefs and a bolstering of the economic power of the petty bourgeoisie.

Appeals by the petty bourgeoisie to an ethnicity that stretched well beyond the borders of the individual chiefdoms gave them a source of political power, at the regional level, that was not controlled by the chiefs. The rise of an ethnic consciousness also tended to obscure the class divisions accelerated by the economic crisis of the 1930s, for as the ability of the petty bourgeoisie to purchase land was restricted and their productive capacity undermined, they turned to rentier incomes and invested their profits in education. But although ethnicity tended to be the product of a petty bourgeoisie literate in Tsonga and equipped with a sufficiently wide social and economic horizon to be able to incorporate all Tsonga-speakers, it also had roots at a more popular level.

From the late 1850s 'amaTonga' and 'Shangaan' workers were recruited and travelled in batches, consisting of men from the same home areas, along recognized routes to areas of employment scattered throughout South Africa. By the late 1870s a form of nascent worker consciousness linked these Tsonga-speaking communities in much the same way as the 'tramping systems' of England or the tour de campagnonnage of France.^[86] It was in the schools on and around the mines that many 'Shangaan' men first acquired a basic literacy in the Tsonga lingua franca of the Swiss mission. On the mines, 'Shangaans', because of the distance and the impoverished nature of the area from which they came, were prepared to do dangerous and heavy manual work and consequently took on the occupational stereotype of underground labour.^[87] Working in ethnic teams at the rock face bred solidarity. Miners were housed in ethnically segregated rooms and barracks in the mine compounds and their representatives and policemen were appointed on an ethnic basis.^[88] In a harsh and often hostile world, ethnicity took on some of the functions of the extended family. From the mining capitalists' perspective, the tribal structuring of the compounds cushioned the impact of industrialization by retaining the 'moral restraints and standards of tribal life'.^[89] This allowed the mines to argue that tribal (migrant) workers were too unsophisticated to appreciate trade unions and, more importantly, caused working class consciousness to be divided along ethnic lines. As early as 1913, a government report considered that 'inter-tribal jealousies have always rendered it possible, in the last resort, to protect Europeans by utilizing one tribe against another', a view that is still today held by many mine employers.^[90]

These divisions were compounded by the traditional desire of men from the same home area to work and be housed together. Thus Tsonga-speakers tended to gather on certain mines and the home friend network, with its sense of continuity for the migrant, has always been a centre of social activity.^[91] Ethnic competition has been encouraged by the organization of recreational activities on the mines. From the initiation of tribal dancing, dance teams and their supporters were defined and separated along ethnic lines.^[92] As many dance movements were brought from the home area, they were easily distinguishable from 'foreign' dance styles and further entrenched these differences by parodying and stereotyping their competitors. In this way, an ethnic identity has been concretized and, as a Chamber of Mines pamphlet stated in 1947, 'competition between the tribes is encouraged.'^[93]

Ethnic competition was also fostered in various other ways, such as the installation of noticeboards which urge workers to vie with each other along ethnic lines over such issues as room and barrack cleanliness and absenteeism. Promotion has often been dependent on ethnic patronage. The competition between groups of workers on the mines was commonly expressed in songs such as:

Take off your [dancing costume] skins!
There is no relish left, you Shangaans!
It has been eaten by the Sotho and Xhosa,
And we will not get it.^[94]

This emerging ethnicity had a contradictory effect on the development of a working class consciousness. While it divided and weakened the labour movement as a whole, ethnicity strengthened segments of the workforce. For without trade unions to represent their interests, workers often sought political and social solidarity in a shared ethnicity. As early as 1907, a Benevolent Society was formed by largely Tsonga-speaking East Coasters on the Witwatersrand to

help sick members, to provide burials, and to aid Christian proselytizing at home. Concomitantly, groups such as the African Union of Natives of Mozambique emerged on the mines with distinct political interests.^[95] In the absence of broad working class organizations, workers often used ethnic ties to mobilize themselves in the interests of their class, and Shangaans as a group, often in concert with other ethnic groups, played a militant role in initiating boycotts, work stoppages and strikes. The contacts which the home group maintained with its area of origin also gave it the power to influence recruitment, which in turn pressured employers to adhere to contracts. Beyond the compounds the basis of an urban ethnicity was laid when home groups with strong rural links started to form burial societies and savings groups. The sense of ethnic community that emerged on the mines and in the urban areas was constantly funnelled into the rural areas by men returning home. These 'sons abroad' had developed an ethnic consciousness as a means of survival in an unfamiliar and competitive world and they spread their ideas and experiences into rural areas where people had little concept of the existence of a Tsonga or Shangaan 'people'. The emergence of this ethnic consciousness was the product of a complex interaction of forces; these were as much working class as they were petty bourgeois; as much urban as they were rural. It was also to become increasingly clear that ethnicity was as much an imposition of the central state, as it was a product of the people themselves.