African Affairs 101:557-583 (2002)
© 2002 The Royal African Society
Article |
Ethnicity and the boundaries of belonging: reconfiguring Shangaan identity in the South African lowveld
Isak Niehaus teaches anthropology at the University of Pretoria in South Africa.
During the 1980s, revisionist studies of ethnicity in southern Africa emphasized how colonial regimes constructed ethnic groups for their own purposes, such as for divide and rule tactics. Drawing on more recent theories on ethnicity, this article re-examines Shangaan identity in the multi-ethnic South African lowveld. It highlights the agency of the subordinate to adopt terms of their own definition as the basis for collective assertion, and also the multivocality of ethnic constructs. It suggests that through time different models of Shangaan ethnicity have emerged. Between 1864 and 1936, the leaders of Shangaan refugees from Portuguese East Africa (now Mozambique) entered into formal political alliances with autochthonous Basotho headmen and chiefs. But with the demarcation of Native Reserves and Bantustans during the era of apartheid, Shangaan leaders have deployed a segregationist ‘tribal paradigm’ to mobilize a constituency for struggles over land. By contrast, non-royalists have embraced an assimilationist model of Shangaan ethnicity to facilitate their incorporation into the social landscape of the lowveld. Such incorporation is evident in their attendance at Basotho initiation lodges, in the high incidence of inter-ethnic marriages, and in the eminence of Shangaan ritual specialists. This assimilationist paradigm was brought to the fore in the struggles against apartheid, and in the dramatic display of Shangaan and Basotho regional unity during the Bushbuckridge border dispute of 1996.