Sponsored by the International Institute at the University of Michigan and published by Duke University Press, Politics, History, and Culture is centered around cultural and historical studies of power and politics&; field that crosscuts the disciplines of history, sociology,anthropology, political science, and cultural studies. Many volumes in this series focus on the state and interstate relations, and the political and social movements that address them. Our authors address the study of politics and the state with culturalist methods, and conversely treat signifying practices as an essential dimension of politics. The dialectic of politics, culture, and history figures prominently in all books selected for the interdisciplinary series.

Michael R. Mahoney is Adjunct Professor of History at Ripon College and Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Lawrence University.

THE OTHER ZULUS

THE SPREAD OF ZULU ETHNICITY IN COLONIAL SOUTH AFRICABy Michael R. Mahoney

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2012 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5295-2

Contents

Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………………..ixMaps………………………………………………………………………………………….xiiIntroduction…………………………………………………………………………………..11 * The Failure of Zulu Ethnic Integration in the Precolonial Zulu Kingdom……………………………212 * A Zulu King Too Strong to Love, a Colonial State Too Weak to Hate, 1838–1879…………………473 * Increasing Conflict among Natal Africans, 1879–1906……………………………………….834 * The Role of Migrant Labor in the Spread of Zulu Ethnicity, 1886–1906………………………..1175 * Natal Africans’ Turn to Dinuzulu, 1898–1905………………………………………………1506 * The Poll Tax Protests and Rebellion, 1905–1906……………………………………………182Epilogue………………………………………………………………………………………217Notes…………………………………………………………………………………………225Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………..261Index…………………………………………………………………………………………277

Chapter One

THE FAILURE OF ZULU ETHNIC INTEGRATION IN THE PRECOLONIAL ZULU KINGDOM

Ask Zulus today when their ancestors first became Zulus, and they may greet the question with puzzlement. Those with a little more historical consciousness may trace the creation all the way back to the 1810s and 1820s and the actions of King Shaka, in some senses the founder of the Zulu kingdom and certainly the most prominent figure in Zulu history. But even the accounts of Shaka’s life most popular among Africans include some reference to how violent his conquests were and how much resistance they produced among the conquered. Scratch the surface a little more, probe the written historical record, examine living oral traditions, seek out local histories as opposed to national ones, and it quickly becomes apparent that the dozens of chiefdoms that now make up the Zulu kingdom had an independent existence not only before Shaka’s rule but often after it as well. Many of the people in those chiefdoms resented and resisted Shaka’s rule to the degree that they never came to identify themselves as Zulus. Instead they continued to identify themselves as members of their chiefdoms, of which the Qwabe was among the largest. The Qwabe had a closer relationship to the Zulu than did any other chiefdom in the region, but that relationship was also even more vexed than were those of the other chiefdoms. The Qwabe would ultimately become Zulu, but Shaka’s reign did more to hinder that process than to promote it, and the same was true for many other chiefdoms.

To understand the rivalry between chiefdoms and the degree to which people identified with one chiefdom or another, one must also understand another, more basic, unit of precolonial African society in the region: the homestead (umuzi). The continuity and stability of homesteads stand in striking contrast to the upheaval surrounding chiefdoms during this era. Chiefdoms without households were chiefdoms without followers. Chiefs tried to attract, co-opt, and control homestead heads. But homestead heads were not just subordinates, or even intermediaries; they were authority figures in their own right who competed with chiefs for the allegiances of their followers. Shaka tried to circumvent the authority of homestead heads and make young men and women directly answerable to him. But the system he introduced was less attractive to these youths than the one that homestead heads had established, and in many chiefdoms, like the Qwabe, it was the homesteads that prevailed. Identification with the Zulu king would only trump identification with the homestead head and the chief when there emerged changes that undermined the legitimacy and popularity of these more local authority figures and the institutions they represented.

MALANDELA, QWABE, AND ZULU: SOCIAL CATEGORIES AND IDENTITIES IN THE PRECOLONIAL ERA

The histories of the categories “Qwabe” and “Zulu” were joined from the very beginning, for the two share a common origin story. According to this story, the Qwabe and the Zulu (whose name means “sky”) are descended from two brothers with those names, and their father was named Malandela. James Stuart collected numerous versions of this story from his informants around the turn of the century. These stories were still circulating among Africans in Natal fifty years later. Indeed, some people from the Qwabe chiefdom are able to relate the story even today, one hundred years after Stuart began his work. In 1997, a schoolteacher named Mboneni Gumede, who lived in the Qwabe chiefdom in the Mapumulo district of KwaZulu-Natal, told a version of the story to me and Thuthukani Cele, my translator and interpreter. According to Gumede, Malandela came from the north to Zululand and settled near the Mhlatuze River. His senior wife, Nozidiya, was a daughter of the Zungu clan. Nozidiya’s oldest son by Malandela was Qwabe, and her second son was Zulu. Malandela stayed with his family. Before he died, he started to divide his wealth among his children. Malandela said Qwabe would inherit everything that belonged to him, mainly livestock, but also Malandela’s position as chief. While Qwabe would inherit Malandela’s property, he would not inherit the property of Malandela’s wives. After Malandela died, however, Qwabe took everything, including Zulu’s property. Nozidiya complained that this was unfair. She insisted that something be given to Zulu. One day, a dog sat down in front of the homestead and its penis became erect. Qwabe saw this, and knew that by this action the ancestors were saying something, namely that Zulu no longer belonged to this homestead. Lufenulwenja (dog’s penis) became Zulu’s new salutation, and he was to leave the homestead. Some people did not like this name, preferring Ufalwenja, the “crack of the dog.” Many were also very unhappy with Qwabe’s insult of Zulu and left with Zulu, crossed the White and Black Mfolozi rivers, and settled at Babanango. These were all Malandela’s people. Those who followed Zulu were called the Zulu, while those who stayed with Qwabe were called the Qwabe.

Many aspects of Gumede’s version of the story, including the ribald bits, can be found in many other versions of the story collected over the last hundred years. It is true that there is virtually no point on which all versions agree. Besides the basic question of whether or not Malandela, Qwabe, and Zulu were related to each other, other issues are also treated differently from account to account: the prior ancestry of Malandela, the relationship of Nozidiya to Malandela and the others, Nozidiya’s very gender, the identity of the siblings Qwabe and Zulu, and the resultant interrelationship of the various lineages of the region, the subsequent genealogies of the Qwabe and Zulu lineages, the story of the name Lufenulwenja, the reasons for the conflict between Qwabe and Zulu or indeed whether or not there was such a conflict, the role of chiefship in the story, and the residence and migration patterns of the story’s protagonists. Even the question of who was in the wrong, Qwabe or Zulu, has varying answers. Nevertheless, two motifs are particularly common: that the progenitors of the Qwabe and Zulu were brothers, and that they came into a conflict that led to the separation of the two peoples. Memories of these events, regardless of whether or not they actually happened, would lend additional significance to the many later conflicts between the two groups.

This was how the Zulus (singular, iZulu; plural, amaZulu), and for that matter the Qwabes (singular, iQwabe; plural, amaQwabe), first came to be. But the name Zulu can refer to at least four different kinds of categories: the Zulu ethnic group, the Zulu kingdom, the Zulu chiefdom, and the Zulu lineage. Members of each of these groups can be called, and may call themselves, Zulu. The Zulu ethnic group is made up of those who identify themselves, and are identified by others, as Zulus, based on their common language, culture, and ancestry. But the size and indeed the very existence of the Zulu ethnic group resulted from the creation of the Zulu kingdom. Before the 1810s, the peoples who would become Zulu had no overarching name for themselves. Instead, they identified with their chiefdoms or lineages, of which the Zulu was just one among many. To the extent that people recognized themselves as belonging to wider categories, they spoke of Lala, Mbo, Ntungwa, abaSenhla, abaSenzansi, and, most notably, Nguni, each of which included many different lineages and chiefdoms. None of these categories was coterminous with the present-day Zulu ethnic group, and many included groups that are not Zulu today, such as the Xhosa and Swazi. Three different, although closely related, languages were spoken during the pre-Shakan era in what is now KwaZulu-Natal province: tekela or tekeza (spoken along the Drakensberg escarpment from Swaziland to the Eastern Cape, and in most of the country south of the Thukela), thefula (spoken in the coastal regions from Durban northward into Thongaland), and Zunda (spoken in the heartland north of the Thukela, sandwiched between tekela and thefula speakers). It was only during Shaka’s reign and afterward that Zunda came to be known as isiZulu, the Zulu language, and the others went from being independent languages in their own right to being seen as mere dialects of Zulu.

In contrast to the Zulu ethnic group, the Zulu kingdom and Zulu chiefdom may be defined as social groups ruled by the Zulu king, or inkosi (plural amakhosi). The difference between a kingdom (izwe or isizwe) and a chiefdom (uhlanga) is that in a kingdom the inkosi rules over other amakhosi. Although in Zulu both a king and a chief could be referred to as an inkosi, one could also make a distinction between an inkosi yezwe (a “king,” the ruler of an izwe) and inkosi yohlanga (a “chief,” the ruler of an uhlanga). In this sense, the Zulu chiefdom only became a kingdom under Shaka.

Thus, before Shaka’s time, the Zulu ethnic group and the Zulu kingdom did not exist, so the only way to be a Zulu was to be a member of the Zulu chiefdom or the Zulu lineage. A chiefdom and a lineage were similar, and indeed both were called uhlanga in Zulu, which also means “stem,” “stock,” “ancestry,” “genealogy,” and “dynasty.” The main difference is that a lineage was the descent group one was born into, while a chiefdom was the polity ruled by a chief to whom one pledged fealty. People could change their chiefdom affiliations, but not their lineages. The name of one’s lineage would also be one’s surname, which remained constant, except when women married into another lineage. Thus, not all members of the Qwabe lineage belonged to the Qwabe chiefdom, nor did all Zulus belong to the Zulu chiefdom. There have long been, in fact, Qwabes in the Zulu chiefdom and vice versa. Each of the dozens of chiefdoms in KwaZulu-Natal has always included members of many different lineages.

Another difference between lineages and chiefdoms was that not every lineage had a chief. Submitting oneself to the authority of a particular chief was known as ukukhonza (the verb means “pay homage, pay respect to; subject oneself to, serve; send compliments, best wishes, regards; worship”). This submission was made with the declaration, “Ngizokhonza, Nkosi; ngifake ikhanda lapha kuwe” (“I have come to serve, O Chief; that I may put my head in your control”). Even before Shaka’s time, people “khonza’d” whenever they changed their allegiance from one chief to another. People spoke of khonza’ing not only chiefs within present-day KwaZulu-Natal province, but even those beyond, such as Pondos and even Sothos. People could also khonza one chief, then switch their allegiances and khonza another, or even a third. Sometimes they were forced to do so, but often it was a choice, made for many different reasons: to go where there was better and more abundant land for grazing and crops, to live closer to the friends and family of the husband or wife, or to leave one chief for a better one. In fact, the ability to change chiefdom allegiances has long been one of the main checks subjects have been able to exert on the authority of their chiefs; a chief who ruled poorly ran the risk of losing his subjects.

Before Shaka’s time, the Zulu had not particularly distinguished themselves in the competition among chiefdoms and lineages. When Shaka became the Zulu inkosi, several chiefdoms in the region were larger and more powerful than the Zulu, among them the Mabhudu, the Mthethwa, the Ndwandwe, the Ngwane, and the Qwabe. And members of the Zulu lineage, those who traced their patrilineal descent directly back to Zulu himself, were a large but hardly preponderant group. Even today, after almost two centuries of Zulu ethnic consolidation, Zulu is still only the tenth most common surname in KwaZulu-Natal, after Mkhize, Dlamini, Ngcobo, Ndlovu, Gumede, Cele, Khumalo, Mthembu, and Mhlongo, and there are numerous other surnames (and therefore lineages) besides.

As institutions, chiefdoms and lineages have been extraordinarily stable for centuries, perhaps since the time of Malandela, who is supposed to have ruled in the late 1500s or early 1600s, seven to nine generations before Shaka. Evidence from archaeology, oral traditions, and historical linguistics, not to mention documentary evidence from the time of Shaka to the present, all suggest a high degree of continuity in these basic patterns of social and political organization. While individual chiefdoms may have been in constant flux and individual chiefs may have been under constant threat of regicide or secession, the chiefdom as an institution was widely accepted, and seemingly permanent. The anthropologist Max Gluckman, long the most prominent ethnographer and analyst of Zulu society, first noted this decades ago. Gluckman pointed out that while there was no lack of contestation and struggle, even rebellion, in pre-Shakan southeastern Africa, true revolution—reorganization of the social and political structure—was rare. He characterized this stability as an “equilibrium”: people might reject the authority of their chiefs by overthrowing them, assassinating them, supporting rival claimants to the throne, or seceding, but every case involved merely a change in the officeholder, not a transformation of the political structure. The establishment of the Zulu kingdom under Shaka and the onset of European rule were more genuinely revolutionary, but even here new large-scale structures have often simply been grafted onto old structures of local governance. Though many European colonial officials, settlers, and missionaries called for the abolition of African chiefship, both the colonial state of the nineteenth century and the white-dominated South Africa of the twentieth century found they had little choice but to continue to recognize chiefs. Even the African National Congress, which over the course of the last century became progressively more inclined to portray chiefs as apartheid collaborators, had to become more accommodating towards chiefship after coming to power, in 1994. In short, chiefdom, lineage, and khonza have long been hegemonic ideas, accepted even by people who have otherwise disagreed about many things.

Chiefdom, lineage, and khonza may have derived their hegemonic power from the fact that they were based on patriarchy, the most basic unit of social and political organization in this area, operating on the level of the individual household or homestead (umuzi). In many ways, chiefship simply replicated on a larger scale the patriarchy of the homestead. Each individual chief was the head of his lineage, which was the family writ large, and, with very few exceptions, chiefs were always men. Moreover, the political hierarchy at the chiefdom merged imperceptibly with the social hierarchy on the homestead level. The chief was at the top of this hierarchy; below him were the headmen (singular induna, plural izinduna), who governed individual districts; and below the headmen were the homestead heads (singular umnumzane, plural abanumzane), who were the patriarchs or paterfamilias of each individual homestead.

The homestead has been the primary unit of social and political organization among the Nguni-speaking peoples (including the Zulu, Xhosa, Swazi, and Ndebele) for a very long time indeed. Archaeology and oral traditions demonstrate a fundamental continuity in Nguni household structure stretching back centuries before the political innovations of the 1700s. Although the rise of mining, urbanization, and migrant labor were to fundamentally transform the institution from the 1880s onward, many of these earlier patterns survive to the present. The typical household has consisted of the homestead head, his wives, their unmarried children, and various dependents, both related and unrelated. All homesteads, from the most humble to those of the Zulu kings, have tried to follow the same basic plan: several round, one-roomed huts arranged in an arc or, if the homestead is large enough, in a circle, around a central cattle byre. At the center of the arc, facing east, is the house of the homestead head, with one house for each individual wife arranged on either side, and additional houses beyond for each unmarried son. One wife, usually but not necessarily the first, is designated chief wife. The homestead is surrounded by fields used for farming. Archaeologists have found homesteads built in this pattern dating as far back as the seventh century, and the same structure is still to be found in the rural, communal land-tenure areas of KwaZulu-Natal province.

(Continues…)

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