A Model
The case studies in this volume suggest a model for the development of ethnic consciousness, or tribalism, in the southern African region. This model stresses the historical creation of such ideologies over time. It is also flexible, in that it can
be detected operating within different societies at different points in time from the late nineteenth century down to the present—and probably into the future—depending upon the impact of a range of variables. It has the advantage of incorporating many of the valuable insights of the various interpretations that have dominated the analysis of ethnicity up to now without being a mere combination of their best points. Finally, it has the additional attraction of suggesting concrete reasons why ethnic consciousness and its near relative, regionalism, were able to develop a special allure for the people of southern Africa during the colonial era. Within the historical perspective, one can begin to understand why it was so easily revitalized after independence, when one-party systems of government were established, and why it can still mobilize popular opinion today, albeit in new ways.
The creation of ethnicity as an ideological statement of popular appeal in the context of profound social, economic and political change in southern Africa was the result of the differential conjunction of various historical forces and phenomena. It is the very unevenness of their co-appearance and dynamic interaction that accounts for the unevenness of ethnic consciousness in the region. One may discern three such variables in the creation and implanting of the ethnic message. First, as was the case in the creation of such ideologies elsewhere, for example in nineteenth century European nationalism, it was essential to have a group of intellectuals involved in formulating it—a group of culture brokers. Second, there was the widespread use of African intermediaries to administer the subordinate peoples, a system usually summed up in the phrase 'indirect rule', and this served to define the boundaries and texture of the new ideologies. Third, ordinary people had a real need for so-called 'traditional values' at a time of rapid social change, thus opening the way for the wide acceptance of the new ideologies.
What emerges perhaps most clearly from these studies is the fact that intellectuals carefully crafted their ethnic ideologies in order to define the cultural characteristics of members of various ethnic groups. These intellectuals could be European missionaries, as the studies by Harries, Ranger, Vail and White, and Roberts make clear. Or, as Harries, Vail and White, Jewsiewicki and Papstein show, they could be European anthropologists and historians. And, in all cases in this volume, local intellectuals—whether Afrikaner, 'coloured' or African—were intimately involved in the process and, where it was possible, they were ready to work hand in hand with their European counterparts.
The role of missionaries was especially crucial in at least one—and sometimes all—of three ways, and it is evident that their influence upon the development of African history in the twentieth century has been far greater than they have been given credit for over the past two decades. First, missionaries themselves were often instrumental in providing the cultural symbols that could be organized into a cultural identity, especially a written language and a researched written history. Samuel Johnson long ago recognized that 'languages are the pedigree of nations', and missionaries accepted this dictum wholeheartedly. They had the skills to reduce hitherto unwritten languages to written forms, thereby delivering the pedigrees that the new 'tribes' required for acceptance. Again and again, in the chapters by Giliomee, Butler, Harries, Ranger, Vail and White, and Penvenne, to mention only some, language stands as the central item in the assemblage of a cultural package. Where these languages have been African languages, it was the missionaries who chose what the 'proper' form of the language would be, thus serving both to further unity and to produce divisions by establishing firm boundaries.[9]
In addition to creating written languages, missionaries were instrumental in creating cultural identities through their specification of 'custom' and 'tradition' and by writing 'tribal' histories, a process discussed in the chapters by Ranger, Vail and White, and Jewsiewicki. Once these elements of culture were in place and available to be used as the cultural base of a distinct new, ascriptive ethnic identity, it could replace older organizing principles that depended upon voluntary clientage and loyalty and which, as such, showed great plasticity. Thus firm, non-porous and relatively inelastic ethnic boundaries, many of which were highly arbitrary, came to be constructed and were then strengthened by the growth of stereotypes of 'the other', as the essays by Siegel and Papstein show.
Second, and of considerable practical importance, European missionaries, assuming that Africans properly belonged to 'tribes', incorporated into the curricula of their mission schools the lesson that the pupils had clear ethnic identities, backing up this lesson with studies of language and 'tribal custom' in the vernacular. The importance of such education is made clear in the chapters by Ranger, Vail and White, and Jewsiewicki. Thus, mission education socialized the young into accepting a tribal membership, and to be a member of a 'tribe' became 'modern' and fashionable through its close association with education.
Third, and finally, missionaries educated local Africans who then themselves served as the most important force in shaping the new ethnic ideologies. These people—usually men—were keenly aware of the forces that were pulling apart their societies and, with the examples of nationalism in Europe derived from their own mission education before them, they sought to craft similar local movements as a means of countering these problems. Despite their own western-style education, they realized that such a construct would best be understood and accepted if it were put in a cultural idiom easily accessible to the people. Thus, in formulating their new ideologies, they looked to the local area's past for possible raw material for their new intellectual bricolage.[10] Like their European predecessors during the initial stages of nineteenth century nationalism, they 'rediscovered' the 'true values' of their people and so defined the 'ethnic soul'. Their cultural strongbox was the 'customs' and 'traditions' of the people, identification with which they saw as giving an automatic, ascriptive cultural unity to 'their' people as they confronted the challenge of colonialism and the impact of industrialization. Virtually every study in this volume demonstrates the role of educated people as key actors in the creation of such ideology.
In those societies where missionaries did not work, or where they did work but did not introduce education along western lines, or where African intellectuals emerged only at a late period or not at all, the development of ethnic ideologies was either stalled or never occurred. The unevenness of education in southern Africa largely determined the unevenness of the development of ethnic consciousness, as is brought out in the essays by Vail and White, Macmillan, Siegel, and Papstein. In many locales it is only today, after the post-independence expansion of education and the emergence of local intellectuals, that the process of creating such ethnic ideologies and 'forging traditions' has emulated what happened earlier in other societies.
It was not sufficient, however, that there should be local intellectuals—white or black—interested in the recovery of the ethnic past. A second, more instrumental factor was also required, and this is explored most fully in the chapters by Harries, Vail and White, Marks, Jewsiewicki, and Papstein. All of southern Africa was under direct European administration of various types, and by the period after World War I, virtually all administrations were engaged in implementing systems of indirect rule, using African 'traditional' authorities as intermediaries between
the white administration and the ruled. Thus, if language in the form of written discourse was central in specifying the forms of culture, indirect rule provided the institutional framework for articulating these forms. Communication between the European administrators and subordinate Africans was distinctly tribal in its tone and content. Africans were talked to in terms deemed suitable, and these terms were ethnic. In the cases of the 'Cape Coloureds' and the Luso-Africans of Mozambique, and, to some extent, the Afrikaners, for whom the conventions of indirect rule were not suitable, they were simply denied representation, as the studies by Goldin, Penvenne, Giliomee and Butler indicate.
There were several reasons for the European policy of indirect rule. First, there was the realization that the use of so-called 'traditional' African leaders could be markedly less expensive than the employment of expensive European officials. Second, administrators assumed that Africans were naturally 'tribal' people. If the natural ethnic units could be strengthened, it would help ensure their continuation as discrete 'tribal' groups and prevent the emergence of 'detribalized' Africans of whom whites were deeply suspicious. This, in turn, would slow the emergence of any potentially dangerous territory-wide political consciousness that might develop. The remarks of a British War Office official in 1917 reflect these divide-and-rule tactics:
[The] spirit of nationality, or perhaps it would be more correct to say, of tribe, should be cultivated and nowhere can this be done with better chance of success than in British East Africa and Uganda, where there are numerous tribes ethnographically quite distinct from one another. It is suggested that in each ethnographically distinct district the schools should, as far as possible, form integral parts of the tribe and centres of folk-lore and tradition. . . .
. . . a method may also be found whereby the efforts of missionaries may also assist in the cultivation of national spirit. This it seems might be done by allowing only one denomination to work in each demographic area and by not allowing the same denomination to work in two adjacent areas.[11]
Third, by the end of World War I it was becoming increasingly evident that the chronic absence of men from rural societies was producing great social stresses. The administrators became convinced that the rural disintegration occurring before their eyes could be slowed, if not stopped, by the encouragement of 'traditional authorities' to use 'traditional sanctions' in exercising control over the rural areas to counter the forces of social decay.
This acceptance of indirect rule by European administrations obviously gave opportunities to African political authorities to augment their personal power. More importantly, I suggest, it gave opportunities to the intellectuals of the areas concerned—both European missionaries and African members of the educated petty bourgeoisie—to implement their ideological programmes through alliances with the newly recognized chiefs. This process is a theme of several essays in this volume, including those by Vail and White, Marks, Jewsiewicki and Papstein. In this way the cultural ideals contained in their new ideologies could be at least partially actualized in the day-to-day workings of African administrations under indirect rule. Ethnic identity, thus, came to be specified not only by the written histories, grammars, and accounts of 'traditional customs' produced by local culture brokers, but also—and in many respects, far more importantly—by the actual operation of the administrative mechanisms of indirect rule. This aspect of the development of ethnic identity was the consequence of the dynamic interaction of African initiative with the expectations of European administrators and forward-looking missionaries. It should be remembered, however, that the
subordinate peoples did not have a free hand in their work as they had to operate within the severe constraints imposed by racist administrators who were ever alert to check initiatives deemed either unseemly or dangerous, something brought out clearly in the chapters by Marks, Macmillan, Jewsiewicki and Siegel, among others.
The presence of intellectuals, the socialization of ethnic ideas through mission schools and through the actual operation of administrative systems under indirect rule to strengthen 'tribal' rule were, however, by themselves inadequate to produce a broad acceptance of an ethnic ideology. The ideology itself needed a raison d'être and an appeal, and it was this appeal that constitutes the third factor in our model of the growth of ethnicity in southern Africa.
The ideologies of nationalism have often been described as 'Janus-like'. They are in one aspect profoundly reactionary, looking backwards to a Golden Past: they concentrate upon its heroes, its historical successes, and its unsullied cultural purity, and are decked out with the mythic 'rediscovered' social values of that past. In Africa, the explicit association of such ethnic ideologies with chiefs and headmen whose position was often firmly rooted in the past was an additional factor in accentuating the backward-looking face of ethnicity. Yet these ideologies were also clearly products of the present, concerned with current conditions, and they typically exhibited a forward-looking concern for the future. Nationalism—and tribalism—have thus appeared uncertain and ambiguous to many observers.
Yet when one looks closely at the situation in southern Africa, one comes to realize that the ethnic message's backward-looking aspects and its forward-looking concerns have been in no way contradictory. The emphases on past values, 'rediscovered' traditions, and chiefly authority were truly conservative—that is, they were calculated to conserve a way of life that was in the process of being rapidly undermined by the forces of capitalism and colonialism. Forward-looking members of the petty bourgeoisie and migrant workers alike attempted to shore up their societies and their own positions in them by embracing ethnicity and accepting tribal identities.
As the chapters by Vail and White, Marks, and Jewsiewicki show, ethnicity appealed to the petty bourgeoisie because its forward-looking aspects ensured them a leadership role in the newly defined 'tribe' as the well-informed interpreters of 'tribal tradition'. Their position as allies of chiefs further legitimized their role, blunting consciousness of the class divisions that were then appearing in local societies. In this situation, it was generally accepted that they also had a duty to improve their own social and economic positions 'for the good of the tribe'.
Far more importantly, ethnicity appealed strongly to ordinary African men, not primarily because it gave them a sense of psychological comfort, as the primordialist interpretation argues, but because it aided them in bringing a measure of control to the difficult situations in which they found themselves in their day-to-day life. The word 'control' is crucial. It was the element of control embedded in tribal ideologies that especially appealed to migrant workers, removed from their land and families and working in far distant places. The new ideologies stressed the historical integrity of the tribe and its land and, especially, the sanctity of the family and its right to land.[12] Land stood at the very centre of ethnic ideologies.
The place of women was also a central issue dealt with in ethnic ideologies. In the early decades of the century bridewealth steadily inflated in value, and women thus represented a greater 'investment' by men in cattle or money. With most men absent as migrant labourers, women were also becoming more important to the day-to-day survival of the family through their work on the land. Yet such
valuable women naturally often sought to act independently, even to the extent of seeking divorces or leaving the rural areas illegally to move to industrial and urban areas. This produced acute conflict between the genders. Therefore an emphasis on the need to control women and a stress on the protection of the integrity of the family came to be intrinsic to both ethnic ideologies and the actual institutional practices of indirect rule. The studies by Vail and White, Marks, and Jewsiewicki show this with special clarity. Ethnicity's appeal was strongest for men, then, and the Tswana proverb to the effect that 'women have no tribe' had a real—if unintended—element of truth in it.
Ethnic ideologies helped to provide the control necessary to minimize migrants' natural anxieties about what occurred at home. In the system of indirect rule, the chiefs were of central importance. It was they, with their new official histories, their new censuses and lists, their new courts and records, all of which employed for the first time that most fundamentally powerful invention, writing, who were now able to exercise a greatly increased degree of surveillance over both women and land in the absence of the men. It was they who brought into daily practice those 'rediscovered traditions' which emphasized control in the name of 'custom'. The old dictum that 'all politics is local' was especially valid throughout southern Africa. African men and their lineages accepted that it was in their essential interest to support the new structures of chiefs, their courts, and their educated petty bourgeois spokesmen and agents. It was also for this reason that men, when returning at the end of their contracts from the mines or farms or plantations, gave chiefs the gifts that constituted one of their most important sources of income. The good chief was a proxy who protected the interests of the migrant workers and, for that, they were ready—if not eager—to reward him materially. In effect, the bureaucratized chief of the newly constituted 'tribe' had replaced the lineage head or independent patron of earlier times, and the old language of kinship came to be employed as metaphor to sustain and legitimize this new, obviously non-kinship relationship.[13]
It was for very real reasons of exercising at least a measure of control over land and women, thereby bringing at least a measure of peace to their minds, that African men welcomed the new ethnic ideologies which involved augmenting powers of chiefs in a situation of rapid social decay. Ethnicity, insofar as it was a mechanism of such control, may be interpreted, then, as a form of popular male resistance to the forces that were reshaping African lives throughout southern Africa. It was for this reason also that the appeal of ethnic ideologies was strongest amongst those who were migrant labourers. The ethnic identity that was rooted in the realities of the countryside was, rather incidentally, strengthened in the workplace, where migrants found themselves in the company of, and often in competition with, workers from other cultural groups, a situation which generated sets of largely negative ethnic stereotypes and is explored in the chapters by Jewsiewicki, Siegel and Papstein.
Men came to think of themselves as belonging to particular ethnic groups, then, not because they especially disliked their fellow workers, nor because being a member of the group made them feel good, but rather because the ethnic apparatus of the rural area—the chiefs, 'traditional' courts, petty bourgeois intellectuals, and the systematized 'traditional' values of the 'tribe' as embodied in the ethnic ideology—all worked to preserve the very substantial interests which these men had in their home areas. Without ethnicity—or tribalism—the migrants would have been less able to exercise the control that was necessary for them to assure the continuation of their positions in rural societies and their ultimate retirement in their home areas.
In those situations in which labour migrancy was not a pressing reality (the Afrikaners, the 'Cape Coloureds', the Luso-Africans of Mozambique and, to a lesser extent, contemporary Swaziland and Ciskei—see Giliomee, Butler, Goldin, Penvenne, Macmillan and Anonymous, respectively) or in areas from which men did not emigrate in large numbers, such as southern Zambia and central Malawi, the ethnic message has clearly had less popular appeal, reaching no further than the petty bourgeoisie in most cases. In the case of the Afrikaners effective class alliances between the bourgeois elements of society and the 'poor whites' were brought into being only in the 1940s and afterwards. In the case of the 'Cape Coloureds' and the Mozambican Luso-Africans—and possibly Swaziland and the Ciskei—the gaps between well-off and poor were too great to be easily overcome by appeals to ethnicity, as is suggested in the chapters by Goldin, Penvenne, Macmillan and Anonymous. In these situations, class identity—or at least class tension—has tended to overshadow ethnicity.