Stranger at Home. Ashlee Neser
of literacy and newer media technologies, to registering concern about whether apartheid censorship of poets and state co-optation of traditional structures of leadership and community will fatally transform or silence traditional izibongo. The foundational assumption of this study is that it is not the form of the polity alone that nourishes the praise poet or threatens his art with extinction. The broadening of the community – into a multiracial, multicultural polity for instance – does not by definition threaten the genre’s capacity to address, characterise and call into being an appropriate audience or public. Rather, the praise form founders when its addressees comprise actual and imagined publics that are characterised by strained, tenuous and inequitable relations, and when there is a polarised politics at work – of oppression and its opposite (the dominant counter-discourse of resistance) during apartheid – which narrows legitimate modes of address, and constrains the poet’s ability to imagine and validate legitimate identities that fall between or beyond the binary in struggle. The essence of the form from pre-colonial times to the present is not its ability to decide unchanging identity but rather to accommodate the human complexity of connection and mutability.
Discourses of domination and the uses of ‘tradition’
In South Africa, the imposition of colonial claims to land and authority and of apartheid minority rule gave rise to vocabularies of identity and belonging that managed the black majority and legitimated white domination. In the late 1980s, anthropologists Emile Boonzaier and John Sharp edited an influential book entitled South African Keywords: The Uses and Abuses of Political Concepts (1988) in which a variety of political terms were scrutinised in order to assess how colonial and apartheid rule had distorted and refashioned their applications. In his introduction to the book, Sharp argues that the South African terms associated with group identity – such as ‘tribe’, ‘race’, ‘ethnic group’, ‘tradition’ – in fact ‘constitute a discourse about the nature of South African society, which reveals the logic and serves the interests of those who wield power. They form, in other words, a discourse of domination in South Africa’ (Sharp 1988: 6). It is this coercive language of belonging and difference that explained the need for and the mode of apartheid segregation, and that was used to co-opt and corrupt rural institutions.
The idea of the tribe was a colonial invention which failed to acknowledge the highly interrelated nature of African societies. On the one hand, the idea that Africans were members of ‘neatly bounded “tribal” or “traditional” societies’ allowed colonials to imagine that the world was arranged into groupings that were similar to, although considerably simpler than, European nation states, and which consequently needed ‘civilising’ (Sharp 1988: 4). The colonial construct of ‘tribe’, as Terence Ranger (1983) has shown, was internalised by indigenous people and applied to their societies so that Africans themselves ‘invented’ tribes as mirror images of the European idea. In Sharp’s summary, ‘[t]his process, by which the representations of the dominators are assimilated by the dominated, and pressed into service in their dealings with the former … is an important theme in the politics of [apartheid] South Africa’ (Sharp 1988: 5).
Peter Skalnik, one of the contributors to South African Keywords, suggests that the concept of ‘tribe’, which gave rise to related terms like ‘tribalism’ and ‘tribal’, enabled white South Africans to think of their black countrymen/women as being primitive, as belonging to distinct groups (although how to define these groups was always problematic), and as engaging in ‘tribal’ conflict as a consequence not of socio-political factors but of their ‘tribal’ identities. At the same time, ‘tribe’ had ‘become a powerful idiom for [many black people’s] expression of political affiliation and difference’ (Skalnik 1988: 69), while for yet other black South Africans, particularly those who had moved over to urban economies, the appropriation of ‘tribe’ by the apartheid lexicon – for some time ‘tribe’ supplied the broad category of ‘race’ with manageable and exploitable subdivisions – incited strong resistance to the category. That David Manisi hoped to use ‘tribe’ in his poetry in a way that evaded its negative apartheid construction does not mean that his izibongo would be interpreted to fit his intention. In his autobiographical notes, Manisi responds to the idea that the Thembu were not historically members of the original Xhosa line by castigating those who ‘encourage the evil spirit of tribalism to crack and crush the black people’s unity for the achievement of their own unblessed ends’ (Opland 2005: 19–20). For Manisi, tribes were expressions of African pride and nodes of special attachment to the local and the familial that enhanced rather than destroyed an overarching African identity. For many black South Africans like Manisi, commitment to particular, locally based identities did not preclude a deep attachment to the idea of national citizenship. This movement among a variety of affiliations was dismissed by the urban-based nationalist resistance because of the ease with which any loyalty to ‘tribe’ or ‘clan’ or chief might be considered to support apartheid’s divisive vocabulary and agenda.
In the 1950s, Sharp writes, ‘the concepts of “race” and “tribe” were supplemented by a new vision of “ethnic groups” and “nations” as the basic building blocks of South Africa’ (1988: 7). Each ethnic group, the government claimed, was defined by its own language, culture, beliefs and tradition, and should develop as a group in its own territory. Ethnicity thus provided the ‘moral’ and ‘scientific’ basis for the apartheid strategy of ‘divide and rule’, and ‘separate but equal’ development. In its 1913 Natives Land Act, the Union government of South Africa had demarcated land for use as ‘native reserves’. The purpose of the Act was to prevent black inhabitants of the Union from encroaching on land belonging to whites, and to prevent blacks from owning land in areas set aside for whites. Apartheid rule re-imagined these reserves as ‘homelands’ for groups of black South Africans who would evolve from being members of tribes into ethnic populations which would eventually gain ‘independence’ from South Africa. In practice, as social anthropologist Martin West has pointed out, legislation pertaining to ethnic identity and organisation created populations that did ‘not fit neatly with the national states created’ for them: the Xhosa, for instance, were split across two homelands, the Ciskei and Transkei, and in Transkei, Sotho groups lived among the Xhosa (1988: 107). The ‘impurity’ and imprecision that actually attended apartheid ethnicity is evident from the categories according to which people were classified into groups: citizenship of Transkei was determined by birth, domicile, language, ‘being related to’, ‘identified with’, or ‘culturally or otherwise associated with’ the Transkei nation.10
In his controversial book about the legacy of late colonialism in Africa, Mahmood Mamdani argues that ‘[a]s a form of rule, apartheid … fractured the ranks of the ruled along a double divide: ethnic on the one hand, urban–rural on the other’ (1997: 21). Rural homelands and rural leaders, in the form of chiefs, were central to the government’s divide and rule strategy. Several commentators have elucidated the ways in which apartheid governments used the term ‘tradition’ to claim the naturalness and authenticity of the rural nations they wished to create. Since colonial times and the institution of the lexicon of ‘tribe’, the juxtaposition of ‘traditional’ African society and ‘modern’ European society supported the notion that South Africa was a bifurcated society comprising a primitive black majority and a progressive, civilised white minority. The specific location of ‘tradition’ was the rural hinterland, which, since British colonial rule, had been governed by customary law, as administered by ‘tribal authorities’, rather than by civil law, which governed urban society.
Colonial annexation of Transkei between 1879 and 1894 led to the division of chiefdoms into districts presided over by white magistrates, and locations governed by local headmen. This system was intended to destroy the power of chiefs who had resisted and warred with colonial forces. The apartheid homeland policy sought to ‘revive’ the power of chiefs who would support Pretoria’s strategies. In their book about Transkei under Kaizer Mathanzima’s rule, Barry Streek and Richard Wicksteed remark of the homeland policy that it ‘transformed chiefs – theoretically at least the guardians of the interest of their people – into loyal, government-paid officials’ (1981: 18). Although Pretoria claimed that the restoration of the chieftaincy was in line with ‘tradition’, government ethnologists were charged with the job of investigating genealogical claims made by