April. 2014. Vol. 3, No.8
ISSN 2307-227X
International Journal of Research In Social Sciences
© 2013-2014 IJRSS & K.A.J. All rights reserved
www.ijsk.org/ijrss
THE COMPLEXITY OF COMMUNITY BUILDING AND IDENTITY
FORMATION IN THE 19TH AND 20TH CENTURIES: CASE STUDIES
FROM SOUTH AFRICA AND THE AMERICAS
Nokuthula Cele
Culture and Heritage Tourism, University of KwaZulu-Natal, School of Social Sciences, Durban, South Africa.
Abstract
Community building, as opposed to ethnicity, seems more appropriate as a unit of analysis in the study of human
settlements in KwaZulu-Natal (South Africa), the Americas and elsewhere in the 19 th and 20th centuries. The
KwaMachi chiefdom, in the far south of KwaZulu-Natal (one of the provinces in the north east of South Africa), and
other cases in the United States are being used in this essay as examples to show how complex community building
has always been. Analysis of the processes of community building in KwaZulu-Natal and the Americas shows that it
is often difficult to categorize people along a single line. People of various backgrounds in the regions influenced
the development of their own communities. Locating my case studies of KwaZulu-Natal and the Americas within this
context, I argue that official and rigid distinctions are not completely dominant due to ongoing interaction through
migrations, creation and shifting of identity boundaries, and other alliances, all of which clouded and undermined
ethnic homogenization. Human settlements have been shaped by diverse socio-cultural transformations in which
multiple identities operated in parallel and intersecting lines, where cultures were modified as people incorporated
many cultural elements at local level.
Case studies in this essay suggest that socially and locally constructed identities resulting from such interaction do
not always have an official name; rather the sense of belonging is accompanied by a sense of difference among
people who embrace an imagined uniform of identity in the construction, negotiation and manipulations of identity
that accompany the processes of community building in any changing system. Various stages and contours of this
transition could be studied by following the evolution of the community, its geographical position, language, way of
life and other aspects. Community building underwent various processes defined by social and political dynamics
emerging at different times in history.
Keywords: Community Building, Identity Formation, Culture and heritage
Americas and elsewhere to show that community
building and identity formation are dynamic, adaptive
and historically situated. For centuries communities
INTRODUCTION
In this essay I use the case studies from KwaZuluNatal, 1 one of the provinces in South Africa, the
Thukela/Tugela river (see map 1 attached, page 12)
was defined by the Natal colonial government as a
boundary between Natal and north of the
Thukela/Tugela that was inhabited by the Zulu
nation. After the Anglo-Zulu war of 1879, areas north
of the Thukela/Tugela came be defined as Zululand.
In the late 1890s, Zululand was annexed to Natal,
hence the Natal and Zululand colony, which became
a province after 1910. After the democratic elections
of 1994 in South Africa, the name changed to the
province of KwaZulu -Natal. Maps are attached at the
back of the article.
1
For consistency, KwaZulu-Natal or Natal and
Zululand will be used alternatively throughout the
article. What is now the KwaZulu-Natal province in
the southeast of South Africa began as Port Natal in
the 1820s after the arrival of the early English traders.
At the time, however, the traders only occupied the
bay (now Durban). In 1839 what is now KwaZuluNatal became the Natalia Boer Republic. In 1842 the
British seized it and renamed it the Natal colony.
Although many Zulu people settled in Natal, the
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April. 2014. Vol. 3, No.8
ISSN 2307-227X
International Journal of Research In Social Sciences
© 2013-2014 IJRSS & K.A.J. All rights reserved
www.ijsk.org/ijrss
in KwaZulu-Natal and elsewhere have been
characterized by migrations, ambiguities of
citizenship, and permeability of territorial boundaries,
which opened room for interaction. Using
KwaMachi, a chiefdom, in Harding, in the far south
of KwaZulu-Natal, and experiences of people of
African origin in the Americas and elsewhere, this
essay draws attention to how human settlements were
negotiated in the processes of community building. In
the 19th and 20th centuries, ordinary people from
different backgrounds met in geographical settings
where they shared their lives and negotiated social
and cultural spaces. Social formations developing out
of such human interactions created a flexible sense of
identity that reflected incorporation, amalgamation
and cultural openness. Personal ties, geographical
mobility and competing hegemonies produced
complex social movements that were neither
complete nor universal, but subject to challenges and
reformulations. Based on the analysis and
interpretation of available sources, the article
concludes that KwaMachi residents and people in
certain parts of the Americas operated in terms of
changing historical forces which involved
differences, common causes and interdependence in
responses to specific conditions. Their experiences
were drawn from broad social, cultural and linguistic
contexts which cannot be defined within a single
framework.
Americans and elsewhere are applicable within/at a
national or continental level. Within Africa, due
mainly to migration, communities have always been
characterized by locally specific elements. The
KwaMachi chiefdom4 on the border in the south
between KwaZulu-Natal, one of the provinces in
South Africa, and Mpondoland (in some sources
referred to as Pondoland, where the Mpondo people
live), now forming part of the Eastern Cape province
of South Africa, (maps attached, pages 12 and 13) is
the best example of intra- racial dynamics
characteristic of African communities. Within
KwaMachi people of various cultural backgrounds
became their own agency in building their
community, irrespective of their origins.
The European colonial system in Africa, and South
Africa in this case, designed systems that, influenced
by colonial interests, carried new definitions of
community building processes. For example, the
British colonial system in South Africa drew up new
boundaries that defined people as AmaZulu (Zulu
speakers), or Natal Africans, AmaXhosa (Xhosa
speakers), or AbeSotho (Sotho speakers). In the south
coast of KwaZulu-Natal where the KwaMachi
chiefdom is located, certain areas were defined as
“No Man’s Land”. All these labels undermined
African pre-colonial notions of a community that
were characterized by free and open settlement. In
this paper, using examples in KwaZulu-Natal and
Americas, I argue that analyses of community
building in Africa and elsewhere should place less
emphasis on common generalizations, racial, ethnic,
or cultural because, as case studies in KwaZulu-Natal
and the African Diaspora suggest, these leave some
communities marginalized outside the “official”
scope of history. The meaning of these terms is not
always precise and their definition depends on
contexts in which they are applied. People of African
descent shared certain experiences as “black” people.
However, there are various images of African identity
or blackness that are characteristic of any community
Background to the Study
For centuries, people of African origin settled in
different parts of Europe, the Americas and
elsewhere, thus forming the African Diaspora. 2 In
these continents they established communities
characterized by mixed settlement. Community
building 3 operated under a wide range of relations.
Cultures were modified as people incorporated many
cultural elements at a local geographical level.
Although the term Diaspora carries global
dimensions, elements of social formations
characteristic of the Diaspora communities in the
4
I define chiefdom in this context as a political
entity in a rural geographical territory under the
administration of the chief. Chiefdoms are mainly
traditional institutions ruled by the chiefs that operate
in consultation with social structures. These social
structures include mainly as headmen and traditional
councils. At a chiefly level, power is hereditary. The
chieftaincy itself remains an institution of the ruling
clan.
2
Meaning the dispersion of African people from
their original homeland/continent into different parts
of the globe.
3
Community building in this context is defined as a
process whereby people of different cultural, class, or
ethnic backgrounds come to live together as one
community.
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that comprises people of African origin within and
outside Africa.
Africans played a major role in enforcing collective
bargaining for political purposes. However, as
African Diaspora studies demonstrate, this approach
undermines the role of non- elite people in the
development and growth of a community in Africa
and elsewhere. Richard Thomas and Gretchen
Lemke-Santagelo demonstrate how black people
from different regions of the United States created a
common bond among themselves in Detroit
(Michigan, USA) and East Bay (Berkeley, California,
USA).7 Other studies show how the Caribbean and
Mexican immigrants in the United States struggled
between being an American community and keeping
their original ties in the twentieth century in Harlem
(New York, USA).8 Identity can also develop out of
the notion of security. In her studies of inter-ethnic
relations
in
Lesotho,
Elizabeth
Eldredge
demonstrated how national identity was developed
and forged in pursuit of security. 9 As the Basotho reemerged in the 1820s, they crossed ethnic boundaries
and forged consolidation through incorporation of
migrants from different parts of Southern Africa.
Nationalism in this case reflected incorporation,
amalgamation and cultural openness.
This article is divided into four major parts. The first
part looks at community building among black
people and other minority groups in the Americas.
The second part focuses on case studies in KwaZuluNatal in South Africa. It challenges the manner in
which South African/KwaZulu-Natal historiography
has addressed issues related to community building in
South Africa. The third and fourth parts focus on the
colonial settlement and the colonial politics of
naming in KwaZulu-Natal; the manner in which the
British system in South Africa formulated certain
names that undermined the pre-colonial African
human settlement, and the incorrect use of certain
labels referring to Africans living in specific regions.
Studies of social formations among people of African
origin in Africa and outside the continent should take
into consideration commonplace themes of migration,
adjustment, interaction, and conflict among groups
whose lives intersect in a geographical setting.
Europe and the African Diaspora
Within the African Diaspora and Comparative Black
History discourse, race has played a collective role in
the social make up of the community and should not
be underestimated.10 However, race alone as a unit of
Analysis of broad theories on popular culture and
ethnicity in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas
suggests that community building is/was open to
modifications
under
changing
socio-cultural
conditions. As David Newbury argues, 5 identity traits
are not the artifact of the past, but rather locally
produced by community residents to consolidate and
negotiate their space in the community. Such scholars
as Leroy Vail, Terence Ranger and William Samarin
see ethnicity in Southern Africa as an invention of
missionaries, colonial officials, and the African
educated elite, known as kholwa (Christian converts)
in Natal, in the twentieth century. 6 Indeed educated
7
Thomas, R, Life for us is What we Make of it:
Building Black Community in Detroit, 1915-1945,
Indiana University Press, Bloomington and
Indianapolis, 1992, Lemke-Santagelo, G, Abiding
Courage: African American migrant women and the
East Bay community, University of South Carolina
Press, Chapel Hill, 1996.
8
Watkins-Owens, I, Blood relations: Caribbean
immigrants and the Harlem community, 1900-1930,
Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1996.
9
Eldredge, EA, A South African Kingdom: The
pursuit of security in nineteenth century Lesotho,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993.
10
See for example Massey DS and Denton NA,
American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of
the Underclass, Harvard University Press, Cambridge
and Massachusetts, 1993, Georgakas D and Surkin
M, Detroit: I do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban
Revolution,
South
End
Press,
Cambridge,
Massachusetts, 1998, Capeci DJ
Junior and
Wilkerson M, Layered Violence: The Detroit Riots of
5
Newbury, D, Kings and Clans: Ijwi Island and the
Lake Kivu Rift, 1740-1840, University of Wisconsin
Press, Madison, 1991.
6
Vail, L, “Ethnicity in Southern African History”,
introduction in Vail, L (ed), The Creation of
Tribalism in Southern Africa, James Currey, London,
1991, Ranger, T, The Invention of Tribalism in
Zimbabwe, Mambo Press, Gweru, Zimbabwe, 1985,
Samarin, WJ, “Bondjo Ethnicity and Colonial
Imagination”, Canadian Journal of African Studies,
18, 12, 1984. Also see Newbury, Kings and Clans,
pp. 228-230.
25
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analysis sets limits on the definition of social
identification. Heterogeneity, arising from migration
of diverse cultures into a particular region, not only
reshapes social identities, it also competes against a
single cultural unity. These variations illuminate
alternative visions of a national identity within a
multi-racial setting. Comparative black studies in
Africa and elsewhere identify many forms of
community building that should not be left out when
studying race. 11 In Cuba in the 1950s, national
identity was adjusted and reconciled in support of
notions of nationality.12 In Brazil in the twentieth
century, with the emergence of home- grown national
movements, race consciousness could not be
sustained outside this nationalist framework. Kim
Butler also gives a comparative analysis of two
Brazilian cities. Although Afro-Brazilians shared
common national ideals as a non-white race, their
experiences differed, depending upon local social and
historical conditions. In the southern city of Sao
Paulo, Afro-Brazilians used racial discrimination as
their focus of activism. In Salvador, a city in the
north east of Brazil populated predominantly by
people of African descent, African cultural
manifestations gave a better meaning over race.13 The
underclass debate in the United States of America in
the twentieth century is another enticing subject. 14
John Hartigan Junior, in his comparative study of
three sites in Detroit (Michigan) namely Briggs,
Warrendale and Corktown, reveals Detroit as a city in
which the underclass is not uniformly black or
Hispanic. His classification of white Detroiters as
‘Hillbilly’, ‘Gentrifier’, and ‘Racist’ sees whiteness
and blackness as less hegemonic concepts.15 People
negotiated their diversity and manipulated their space
locally. All these cases may differ in some respects
from situations elsewhere. But one significant
framework that they share within the African
Diaspora discourse is that experiences of people of
African origin inside and outside Africa varied,
depending on situations on the ground. These
examples also demonstrate the role of ordinary
people in shaping their own lives. Coming from, or
living in, different regions of the Americas, life for
them was what they made of it. Community building
was a complex relational social phenomenon.16 The
Brazilians in Post-Abolition Sao Paulo and Salvador,
Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New
Jersey, London, 1998, Thompson, RF, “Kongo
Influences on African-American Artistic Culture”, in
Holloway JE (ed), Africanisms in American Culture,
Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1990, pp.
148-184, and Andrews, GR, Blacks and Whites in
Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1888-1988, University of
Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1991.
14
See for example Sugrue, TJ, The Origin of the
Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Post War
Detroit, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New
Jersey, 1996, Roediger, D, “Race and Working Class
in the United States: Multiple Identities and the
Future of Labor History”, International Review of
Social History, 38, 1993, 127-43, Zunz, O, The
Changing Face of Inequality: Urbanization,
Industrial Development, and Immigrants in Detroit,
1820-1920, University of Chicago Press, Chicago,
1982, Wilson, WJ, The Truly Disadvantaged: The
Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy,
University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1987, Trotter,
JW, Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial
Proletariat, 1915-1945, University of Illinois Press,
Urbana, 1985.
15
Hartigan J Jr, Racial Situations: Class
Predicaments of Whiteness in Detroit, Princeton
University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1999.
16
See for example Skidmore TE, Black into White:
Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought, Duke
1943, University Press of Mississippi, Jackson and
London, 1991.
11
For example Martinez-Alier, V, Marriage, Class,
and Color in Nineteenth Century Cuba: A Study of
Racial Attitudes and Sexual Values in a Slave
Society, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor,
1989, Seed, P, To Love, Honor, and Obey in
Colonial Mexico, Conflict over Marriage Choice,
1574-1821,Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1991,
Johnson LL and Lipsett-Rivera S (eds), Sex, Shame,
and Violence: The Faces of Honor in Colonial Latin
America, University of New Mexico Press,
Albuquerque, 1999, Clark-Hine, D, Black Women in
American History: From Colonial Times Through the
Nineteenth Century, 4 volumes, Carlson, Brooklyn,
New York, 1990.
12
Perez, LA, On Becoming Cuban: identity,
nationality and culture, University of North Carolina
Press, Chapel Hill, 1999.
13
Butler, KD, “Abolition and the Politics of Identity
in the Afro-Atlantic Diaspora: Toward a Comparative
Approach”, in Hine D and McLeod J (eds), Crossing
Boundaries: Comparative History of Black People in
Diaspora, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and
Indianapolis, 1999, pp. 121-133. Also see Butler,
KD, Freedoms Given, Freedoms Won: Afro26
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contact between Europe, Africa and the Americas, as
the case of Afro-Brazilians shows, produced
circumstances that were local in orientation. These
situations could neither be shared nationally within
Brazil, nor between Afro-Brazilians and AfricanAmericans or people of African descent living in the
Caribbeans or in Africa. Community building in
certain areas in KwaZulu-Natal in/and South Africa
followed similar patterns of human settlement. Local
forces shaped the manner in which people negotiated
and shared their experiences with one another.
Community Building
Historiography
and
South
communities remained outside this body of
scholarship. With the reconstruction of South African
history beginning in the 1970s, academic historians
produced works on pre-colonial KwaZulu-Natal.19
Still, few attempts were made to closely focus on the
development of African communities. Well into the
end of the twentieth century, issues associated with
community building remained on the periphery of
South African history.
Within KwaZulu-Natal, the dynamics of social
change in many chiefdoms have been hidden from
the regional history of South Africa. This is because
the study of KwaZulu-Natal has generally identified
all Africans in the province as IsiZulu speaking, and
thus as AmaZulu/Zulu,20 without investigating
African
Until recently, one of the main problems of South
African historiography was its selectivity. An African
centered approach that exposed Africans’ everyday
experiences in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
and telling these accounts from their perspectives,
was still underdeveloped in orthodox sources. It was
only in the 1960s that African historiography stressed
the centrality of Africans as actors in their own
history and in shaping their relations with
Europeans.17 One of the key academic achievements
of the 1960s, and 1970s, was the acknowledgement
of “non- literate” Africans in the recovery of the past.
This placed oral traditions as raw materials at the
center of scholarship.18 Nevertheless, many African
role and influence of Orality in Southern African
studies.
19
Including Guy, J, “Analysis of Pre-colonial
Societies in Southern Africa”, Journal of Southern
African Studies, Volume 14, 1987-88, Eldredge, EA
“Delagoa Bay and the Hinterland in the Early
Nineteenth Century: Politics, Trade, Slaves, and
Slave Trading”, in Eldredge EA and Morton F,
Slavery in Southern Africa: Captive Labor on the
Dutch Frontier, Boulder, Pietermaritzburg, 1994,
Hamilton C and Wright J, “The Making of AmaLala:
Ethnicity, Ideology, and Relations of Subordination
in the Pre colonial Context, South African Historical
Journal, 22, 1990, Hamilton, C “Ideology, Oral
Traditions and the Struggle for Power in the Early
Zulu Kingdom”, unpublished MA Thesis, University
of Witwatersrand, 1986, Wright J, “The Dynamics of
Power and Conflict in the Thukela-Mzimkhulu
Region in the late 18th and early 19th centuries: A
Critical Reconstruction”, unpublished PhD Thesis,
University of the Witwatersrand, 1990, Wilson M
and Thompson L (eds), Oxford History of South
Africa, Oxford University Press, London, 1969, and
Wright
and
Hamilton,
“Traditions
and
Transformations: The Phongolo-Mzimkhulu Region
in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries”, in
Duminy A and Guest B (eds), Natal and Zululand
from Earliest Times 10 1910, University of Natal
Press, Pietermaritzburg, 1989, and Wright J and
Manson A, The Hlubi Chiefdom in Zululand-Natal: A
History, Ladysmith Historical Society, Ladysmith,
1983.
20
The usage of Zulu as a surname, a language and a
name of the kingdom in KwaZulu-Zulu is linked to
King Shaka Zulu who founded the Zulu kingdom in
University Press, Durham, 1993, Winant H and Omi
M, Racial Formations in the United States: From the
1960s to the 1980s, New York, Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1986, San Juan E Jr, Racial Formations/Critical
Transformations: Articulations of Power in Ethnic
and Racial Studies in the United States, Humanities
Press, London, 1992.
17
Such scholars as Dike, KO, Trade and Politics in
the Niger Delta, 1830-1885, Oxford, 1956,
Shepperson, G, Independent African: John
Chilembwe and the Origins, Setting, and Significance
of the Nyasaland Native Uprising of 1915, Edinburg,
1958, and Vansina J,, Oral Traditions as History,
James Currey, London, 1985, emphasized the role of
African experiences and the African centered
approach in the study of African societies.
18
Vail L and White L, in Power and the Praise
Poem: Southern African Voices in History,
University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville, James
Curry, London, 1991, give a thorough analysis of the
27
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of power; boundaries were not completely sealed. 24
Therefore community building since pre-colonial
times in KwaZulu-Natal has been affected by various
historical events, and its history should be unearthed
and presented in less relational terms.
different processes which fostered their other
identities. Other identifications have been made
invisible by this top down perception of African
political systems. Before the early nineteenth century,
Zulu was a clan name,21 other groups existed
alongside it. The adoption of Zulu identity by people
of diverse origins took different forms. Carolyn
Hamilton’s work illiminuates various social and
economic forces and ideological shifts which
informed the definition of the Mthethwa identity in
the late 18th century and Zulu citizenship in the early
19th century. 22 The history of many chiefdoms in
KwaZulu-Natal predates political transformations of
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that
accompanied the rise of the Zulu kingdom under
King Shaka Zulu. These chiefdoms were never ethnic
entities. Many of them became conglomerate of
cultural groups that co-existed and altered social
boundaries that distinguished one group from
another.
For example, people who formed
KwaMachi were of Zulu, Xhosa, Mpondo, Sotho,
Griqua and other origins. The linguistic or cultural
combination arising out of these interactions does not
always have a name and should thus not be defined
within a single ethnic paradigm. Well into the
present, the changing demographic, social, political,
economic and religious conditions were translated
into local idioms and operated in a manner that made
ordinary residents part of that changing history. The
colonial administration and later homeland system in
South Africa23 operated within certain local relations
In the study of Zulu historiography, Norman
Etherington correctly points out that before the last
third of the twentieth century, scholarship did not
admit that there were political structures predating
the Shakan era, simply because Zulu had “loomed so
large as to overshadow all rivals”.25 African political
entities existed before the Shakan era, many of whom
have remained invisible in South Africa history. John
Wright provides an example of such entities in his
study of the Hlubi and Thuli groups in KwaZuluNatal.26 As the argument by John Wright and
Carolyn Hamilton states, 27 before 1840, Zulu identity
in what is now KwaZulu-Natal was not stable. Many
chiefdoms became vassals of the Zulu kingdom, but
were never fully incorporated into the Zulu empire,
which left a strong desire for self control. 28 G. Mare,
C. Walker, P. Karlsholm, D. James, J. Wright and C.
24
In other words, while dynamics that the colonial
and apartheid systems brought should not be
undermined because they introduced significant
changes in the history of African communities in
KwaZulu-Natal, life on the ground since the
nineteenth century supported continuity of certain
local traditions.
25
Etherington, N, The Great Treks: The
Transformation of the Southern African Society,
1815-1854, London, Longman, 2001, p. 331.
26
Wright J and Mason A, The Hlubi Chiefdom in
Zululand-Natal: A History, Ladysmith Historical
Society, Ladysmith, 1983, and Wright, J, “The Thuli
and Cele Paramouncies in the coastlands of Natal,
c.1770-1820”, in Southern African Humanities, 21,
December 2009.
27
Wright J and Hamilton C, “Ethnicity and Political
Change before 1840”, in Morrell R (ed), Political
Economy and Identities in KwaZulu-Natal: Historical
and Social Perspectives, University of Natal Press,
Pietermaritzburg (South Africa), 1996, pp. 15-32.
28
The Zulu kingdom has not existed without being
contested. For example, recent media reports
suggested that some groups might be claiming their
status as ‘equal to His Majesty King Zwelithini
Zulu’. See for example The Natal Witness newspaper,
July 7 2005.
the early 19th century, conquering and incorporating
other entities under himself to form what is now the
Zulu nation in South Africa.
21
In this study a clan is defined as a group of people
sharing family ties, culture, and a line of descent. In
KwaZulu- Natal males take surnames from some
common distant ancestors, from whom they claim
direct descent through male lines.
22
Hamilton, C, “Ideology, Oral Traditions and the
Struggle for Power in the Early Zulu Kingdom”,
unpublished
MA
Thesis,
University
of
Witwatersrand, 1986.
23
Under the Homeland System in the 1950s, Africans
were grouped according to their languages, for
example isiZulu speakers in KwaZulu-Natal.
Africans were supposedly holding to distinctive sets
of practices and common belief systems in each
homeland.
28
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Hamilton29 are some of the scholars to address issues
of ethnicity and identity, and their broader
implications for understanding the history of ethnic
relations in KwaZulu-Natal. Their argument is that
ethnic identification in KwaZulu-Natal has always
been shaped by time, place, and circumstance, and
that conflicts between African groups in the late
twentieth century were not a product of ‘tribal’
issues, but were modern struggles for power and
resources. Mare’s and Mzala’s works demonstrate
how in the 1970s the “official boundaries” of
Zuluness were refashioned for political purposes in
KwaZulu-Natal.30 People invoked and mobilized
cultural affinities and affiliations for political
purposes.31 Nevertheless, the colonial and apartheid
systems in South Africa introduced territorial
boundaries that saw Africans as supposedly
belonging to ethnic groups.
from one another, without regard to pre- colonial
settlements. Natal became a British colony in the
1840s. In the late nineteenth century the Natal
colonial government imposed a strong territorial
distinction that defined Africans who lived beyond
the uMthavuna River as Mpondo. Those beyond the
uThukela River in the north, and to the uMzimkhulu
River in the south were Zulu. “Zulu people” were
regarded as refugees when found among Natal
Africans living in Port Shepstone and Harding.32 The
identity of KwaMachi people nevertheless remained
controversial. This was because of the chiefdom’s
borderland status, being located right on the
Mthavuna border between Natal and Mpondoland
(see map 2, page 13). As late as the 1940s and 1950s,
such labels as Mpondo/Zulu, Mpondo/Bhaca, 33 and
Mpondo/Xhosa were used as identifiers in the official
documents of some KwaMachi residents. 34 Some
colonial documents refered to them as border natives,
Mpondos, Natal Africans, or simply Africans in “No
Man’s Land”.
British Colonial System and the Reformulation of
African community building
KwaZulu-Natal Historiography: A “No Man’s
Land”
The British colonial system in South Africa
introduced socio-economic and political changes that
redefined community building. During colonization,
Europeans drew up locations that, cutting through
African traditional territories, separated Africans
The notion of a “No Man’s Land” was itself a
colonial design. The name “No Man’s Land” was a
definition loosely given to the territory lying between
the uMzimkhulu and uMthavuna Rivers by
29
Wright and Hamilton, “Ethnicity and Political
Change Before 1840”, Mare G and Walker C,
“Evidence for Ethnic Identity of Zulu-Speaking
Durban Township Residents”, Journal of Southern
African Studies, Volume 21, Number 2, June 1995,
pp. 287-301, Brown, D, “National Belonging and
Cultural Difference: South Africa and the Global
Imaginary”, in Journal of Southern African Studies,
Volume 27, Number 4, December 2001, Kaarsholm P
and James D, “Popular Culture and Democracy in
Some Southern Contexts: An Introduction”, Journal
of Southern African Studies, Volume 26, 2, June
2000.
30
Mare, G, Brothers Born of Warrior Blood: Politics
and Ethnicity in South Africa, Johannesburg, South
Africa, 1992, and Mzala, Gatsha Buthelezi: Chief
with a Double Agenda, Zes Press, London, 1988.
31
See for example Marks, S, in “Patriotism,
Patriarchy and Purity: Natal and the Politics of Zulu
Ethnic Consciousness”, in Vail, L, (ed), The Creation
of Tribalism in Southern Africa, University of
California Press, Los Angeles and Berkeley, 1991,
Chapter 7.
32
NAB (Natal Provincial Archives), Secretary for
Native Affairs (SNA) 1/1/157, 1892/681. Theal GM,
The Republic of Natal: The Origin of the Present
Pondo Tribe, Imperial Treaties with Panda. The
Establishment of the Colony of Natal, Saul Solomon
and Company Printers, Cape Town, 1886, pp. 1-20,
also makes these distinctions in his definition of
Natal’s boundaries in relation to its neighbors. Port
Shepstone and Harding towns form a territory
between the uMzimkhulu and uMthavuna rivers (see
maps attached pages 12 and 13). This territory was
annexed to British Natal in 1866, after which it came
to be called Alfred County.
33
Bhaca is a name or term referring to people who
ran away, ‘deserters’ or ‘hiders’, from King Shaka
Zulu’s rule, those who were either driven out of what
became Zululand, or refused to submit to him. The
word Bhaca means to desert or to hide.
34
Interview with Councilor Madiya and headman
Zakuza, March 2003, Amba, KwaMachi. Madiya and
Zakuza are community officials.
29
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life had in all cases been destroyed, chiefs had
been slain, customs cast aside. The consequent
ignorance of tribal origins, indiscriminate mating,
and scrambling over insufficient portions of land
must be held as casual factors in the patchwork
distribution of many of present day tribes of
37
Natal
Europeans before it was annexed to Natal in the
1860s, after which the territory came to be called
Alfred County. The name “No Man’s Land” is
evident in earlier studies on Natal. 35 A. T. Bryant
maintains that although there were “tribes” 36 living
there, none of them had permanently occupied the
territory. This explains why, when the first Europeans
arrived prior to its annexation, the territory was called
“No Man’s Land”.
Bryant’s and Reader’s works were part of
historiography that was influenced by the writings of
settler and missionary historians of the nineteenth
century.38 These writers saw Africans in general as
mere objects in history. Records that were written by
certain Europeans in Port Shepstone and Harding
reflect this mentality about the African inhabitants of
the county. One of these Europeans was Mr. C.
Karlson, a biochemist by profession, and an amateur
historian and research expert in his spare time. In the
1950s he gathered some information and wrote a
general history of Port Shepstone. He contributed
many anecdotes from his research among old
newspapers, court records, and the Natal archives.
Karlson’s writings, including his letters of
correspondence with other white families/members in
Port Shepstone, 39 only covered European settlements
in Port Shepstone and Harding.
The name may have different meanings for both
Africans and Europeans. “No Man’s Land”, from a
European settler’s or colonizer’s point of view,
carries a specific meaning. It may be linked to settler
historiography of the nineteenth century that
caricatured Shaka Zulu, the founder of the Zulu
kingdom, as a blood-thirsty monster who allegedly
killed people and left many spaces “empty”, a
justification for European settlement. “No Man’s
Land” also raises the whole question of how colonial
maps were “manufactured” and for what purposes.
The Cape and Natal colonial governments in what
became South Africa in 1910 defined the territory
between the uMzimkhulu and uMthavuna Rivers as a
place without law and order. Because the territory
was located between Natal and Cape colonies but
forming no part of these states, it was defined as a
place that “belonged to nobody”. Between the 1850s
and 1860s the notion of a “No Man’s Land” justified
Natal’s expansion into the territory. Hence ‘No
Man’s Land’ could have been defined as such
because Europeans had, until the 1860s, not yet
“discovered” the area. In 1966, Reader defined “No
Man’s Land” as;
The settler attitude apparent in Karlson’s research is
also reflected in the Natal south coast white
newspapers, notably the South Coast Herald and
Southern Review, established in the late 1940s. Some
of the newspaper reports were based on his
research.40 In such reports Africans were rarely
mentioned only in passing, being referred to as
“natives” who greeted the first Europeans with a
warm welcome and provided them with food and
Displaced persons’ camp without the service of a
camp commandant. Within its borders thousands
of destitute tribesmen wandered hopelessly. Clan
35
For example Bryant AT, Olden Times in Zululand
and Natal: Containing earlier Political History of the
East-Nguni clans, Longmans, London, 1929. Also
see Hammond-Tooke WD, The Bantu Speaking
Peoples of Southern Africa, Routledge, London,
1974.
36
The term ‘tribe’ has been attacked as dysfunctional
in Southern African historiography. Africans in
Southern Africa were perceived as divided into
smaller distinct groups known as ‘tribes’. This
colonial definition helped to facilitate the ‘divide and
rule’ policy in South Africa, the Homeland System,
according to which Africans were supposedly
separated along language and thus ‘tribal’ lines.
37
Reader DH, Zulu Tribe in Transition, Manchester
University Press, Manchester, 1966, pp. 7-8
38
Wright, J, “Political Transformations in the
Thukela-Mzimkhulu Region in the late Eighteenth
and Early Nineteenth Centuries”, in Hamilton C, (ed),
The Mfecane Aftermath: Reconstructive Debates in
Southern African History, Witwatersrand University
Press, Johannesburg, 1995, p. 163.
39
NAB, Accession Number 1492, newspaper
clippings, undated, “History of the South Coast of
Natal”.
40
Ibid, The South Coast Herald newspaper, October
12 1951.
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refreshments. 41 In many instances, stories about
Africans of the south coast of Natal give a reader
negative impressions. South Africans of Norwegian
descent (many of whom have lived in Port Shepstone
to the present), claimed in their records that when the
first Norwegian settlers arrived in Port Shepstone in
1882, Duka Fynn, the son of Henry Francis Fynn, 42 “
staged a war with 400 Zulus as a welcome. Dressed
in full war regalia, with spears and cow hide shields,
they made a terrifying impression on the new comers
and they came down with the cries, began stamping
back and forth, until sand and dust were blowing in a
cloud”. 43 Such one sided records are still used in the
present. On the Internet of today, the reader can find,
for instance,
moved down from the north. Names like
44
Gun Drift provide a clue to this way of life
One may borrow David Beach’s words, in his study
of Zimbabwe, that in general Europeans in Africa
were not interested in the possibility that Africans
had a historical past of their own. Until about the
early 1960s, there was a general belief that only the
history of Europeans in Africa mattered. 45 In cases
where Africans appeared in written records, the
picture was not always inviting. The definition of the
territory as a “No Man’s Land” was therefore not a
coincidence. Since the territory formed no part of a
“civilized” British colony, the mentality of disorder
in a “No Man’s Land” remained unquestioned in
official documents. As this study shows, although
settler writers claimed that for centuries before
European settlement the area where KwaMachi and
other chiefdoms were established was unoccupied,
Africans in fact occupied it.46
The Harding area, once known as ‘No
Man’s Land’, was inhibited by Xhosa and
Pondo people long before the arrival of
European settlers. Legend has it that the first
European to put down roots was a sailor
who was wrecked off the Pondoland coast in
1782. In those days it was a wild, untamed
land, with hunters and traders roaming the
hills and skirmishes taking place between
the local tribes, including the Zulus who
However, the notion of a “No Man’s Land” may not
necessarily be viewed negatively by certain African
groups. The KwaMachi ruling house claims that they
and their adherents were the first group to establish a
stable chiefdom known as KwaMachi between the
uMthavuna and uMzimkhulu Rivers in the precolonial era. The idea of occupying a vast space that
was almost “empty”, except for a few fluid groups
that occupied it, reinforces a sense of a “No Man’s
Land”. The KwaMachi leadership and their adherents
would emphasize it to justify their rights to land and
their political authority in the southwest of KwaZuluNatal that predates the rise of the Zulu kingdom.
What all this means is that the British colonial
system, and European settlement, in Natal came up
with labels that suited colonial interests and
manipulated the manner in which, on paper, contacts
between Europeans and Africans in southern
KwaZulu-Natal were defined in order to justify
colonial occupation in the region. However,
41
NAB, Accession Number 665, Reference Number
19, W. J. Jackson, “History of the Borough of Port
Shepstone: For the Van Riebeeck Festivities,
February 1952”, an extract of History Masters Thesis,
University of South Africa, pp. 1-2.
42
Henry Francis Fynn is one of the earliest English
traders who arrived in what became the Natal colony
in the 1820s. Following political transformations
after the rise of Shaka Zulu, the founder of the Zulu
Kingdom in the 1820s, Henry Francis Fynn and his
brother Frank Fynn established their own chiefdoms
in the south coast of KwaZulu-Natal. The name of
Henry Francis Fynn’s chiefdom was Nsimbini.
43
Halland AA and Kjonstad I, (translated by
Andreasen AHE and Halland A) The Norwegian
Settlers, Marburg, Natal, 1882: Coinciding with the
50th Jubilee of Landing of Settlers on the 29th of
August 1882, published by the Marburg Norwegian
Church, printed by the South Coast Herald (PTY,
LTD) Port Shepstone, 1932, p. 16.
44
South Coast Web for Tourist Industry,
Margate.co.za- South Coast, KwaZulu Natal, South
Africa, reviewed May 2004 and September 2008.
45
Beach, D, The Shona and their Neighbors,
Blackwell, Oxford, UK, and Cambridge, Ma, 1994,
pp. 10-11.
46
Camp BE, The History of the District of Alfred, a
pamphlet, n. p. d., 1964, p. 3.
31
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Europeans did not always have overall control over
how Africans built their own communities at a local
level. Cross frontier human settlements grew as
people of different backgrounds came to live
together, creating frontier communities. Because of
its geographical position, the KwaMachi community
developed into a Mpondo/Zulu frontier community in
which linguistic and cultural affiliations took place,
creating a negotiated sense of belonging in which
bonds of kinship were refashioned at a local level.
different cultures, is underdeveloped. Studies
nevertheless suggest that there were frontier
processes in pre-colonial Africa. 49 The contact
between the indigenous Khoisan peoples of Southern
Africa and migrant Bantu-speaking farmers who
entered the region in the early AD centuries is a good
example. 50 In the Americas, as studies by Thomas,
Lemke-Santagelo and Watkins-Owens show, cultural
contacts between black people of varying
backgrounds also took place.
Records show that the rural areas of the present Port
Shepstone and Harding were from the beginning
open to mixed settlements. Place names within the
territory partly demonstrate this. For example, next to
Port Shepstone is a village called Nobamba.
Nobamba is the name of a place presently known as
Weenen in Zululand. It was given to the kraal of a
brother of King Cetshwayo Zulu, successor to King
Dingane Zulu (who succeeded King Shaka Zulu).
Chief Duka Fynn adopted the name for his kraal on
the Bhobhoyi area, near Port Shepstone. Legends say
that Duka Fynn adopted this name because the
Fynns’ chiefdoms comprised people who were
defined as “stragglers” from the Zulu kingdom. 51
The Black Frontier Communities
The study of frontier communities in South Africa
has focussed mainly on black-white frontiers. Such
prominent scholars as Martin Legassick, Robert Ross,
Christopher Saunders, Hermann Giliomee, Richard
Elphick, and Jeff Peires published impressive works
on interactions between various racial groups in
South Africa. Leonard Thompson and Howard Lamar
define a frontier as “a territory or zone of interpenetration between two previously distinct
societies”. 47 In any given region, the frontier, a zone
of interaction, “opened” when the “intrusive society”
arrived, and “closed” when a single political authority
established hegemony over that space.
Isandlundlu, a bush clad in Port Edward, a small
town further south from Port Shepstone, is believed
to have been a scene of massacre of AmaMpondo
who lived there at the hands of Shaka’s army in
1827.52 Isandlundlu is now within the KwaZulu Natal
province. There are African villages known as
Ganyaza and Mntengwane in Port Shepstone.
Ganyaza is one of the earliest leaders from Zululand
who asked for political asylum from Faku, the king of
Mpondoland, and settled in the present Port
Shepstone. Mntengwane was the son of
Ngqungqushe, Faku’s son. Legends say that
Mntengwane had a kraal there and the village was
named after him. The existence of Zulu and Mpondo
Thompson and Lamar published a comparative
analysis of this interaction between America and
South Africa.48 The focus was on the interaction
between indigenous groups and “intrusive” west, eg
between black South Africans or Native Americans
and Europeans. Studies on contacts between
Europeans and Africans/Americas overshadowed
other pre-colonial contacts, colonial/pre-colonial,
between people of the same race but different cultural
backgrounds. The historiography of a “black
frontier”, an interaction between African groups of
47
Thompson L and Lamar H (eds), The Frontier in
History: North America and Southern Africa
Compared, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1981,
p. 7.
48
See Legassick, M, “ The Griqua, the SothoTswana, and the Missionaries, 1780-1840: The
Politics of a Frontier Zone”, PhD dissertation,
University of California, Los Angeles, 1970, and the
essays in Elphick R and Giliomee H (eds), The
Shaping of a South African Society, 1652-1840,
Wesleyan University Press, Connecticut, 1989,
Thompson and Lamar, The Frontier in History.
49
Thompson and Lamar, “Comparative Frontier
Outlook”, in Thompson and Lamar, The Frontier in
History.
50
See for example Elphick R and Malherbe VC, “The
Cape Population”, in Elphick and Giliomee, The
Shaping of South African Society, 1652-1640.
51
Interview with Mbanjwa, May 2003, Bhobhoyi,
Port Shepstone. Mr Mbanjwa is a community resident
in Bhobhoyi.
52
Campbell Collections (KCM), Durban. C. H.
Lugg, “Places of Interest in Natal and Zululand”.
32
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names suggest that there were mixed settlements of
people of Zulu and Mpondo origins in the areas
between the uMzimkhulu and uMthavuna Rivers.
Ndamase refers to Faku’s Mpondoland as ikhaya le
zizwe (home of the nations) where ‘AmaXolo,
AmaBhaca, Adam Kok’s Griquas, and others lived’. 53
Community building was therefore a multifaceted
struggle in which bonds of patronage were negotiated
in a broad range of social interactions. Such
borderland entities as KwaMachi, that have for
centuries housed people of various backgrounds,
should be seen as grounds for interaction between
people of varying backgrounds. Adaptation and
continuity of different multicultural images, and their
implication for community building should be
explored. These themes are illustrated in some of the
views from KwaMachi. One of my informants stated
that “in history, we have never known a thing that
connects KwaMachi with either KwaZulu or
Mpondoland. KwaMachi was like an island in a
way”.54 Being a borderland chiefdom, KwaMachi has
maintained flexible linguistic and cultural affiliations.
For example, KwaMachi people would be regarded
as AmaMpondo because of a dialect that they speak,
and also because of certain cultural elements that they
borrowed from AmaMpondo (people from
Mpondoland), their neighbors. The interaction of
different speech communities resulted in the
invention of new words. These are local creations,
born out of changes in social relations and political
structures. 55 With all these influences, entities forged
coherence to validate incorporation into KwaMachi.
KwaMachi thus demonstrates a complex social
formation accompanying migration and resettlement,
characteristic of a frontier community. Such elements
are present in the history of many other entities in
KwaZulu-Natal and elsewhere.56 The colonial and
apartheid systems did not change the basic social
organization of the chiefdom. They tapped into such
local relations, the strength of which gave Africans
an opportunity to reject, incorporate, modify, and
redefine borrowed practices in terms of their local
idioms. The KwaMachi chiefdom continued to exist
as “an island” between mainly Zululand and
Mpondoland, as the quotation suggests. KwaMachi
has continued to accommodate people to the present
through, for examples, marriages. Therefore, a new
base line for studying African communities should be
explored; the exploration of “black frontier”
communities in South African historiography.
Conclusion
The study of the African Diaspora suggests that
social formations are characterized by specific
elements in each community. Not a single unit of
analysis should be used to analyze social formations
among people of African origin living inside and
outside Africa. The colonial administration created
artificial groupings that, while local in origin, were
nevertheless complex to conform to a single
collective. 57 Generally regional differences within
KwaZulu Natal and elsewhere, for example Brazil,
created what might be called “black ethnic
heterogeneity” 58 or, to borrow E. Lewis’s words,
“living and working in a world of overlapping
Izindaba Zabantu newspapers, 1911 and 1912, TSS,
Posted into Notebook, and KCM 31439, Shepstone
Papers, File 12, “List of Zulu Tribes and Their
History”.
57
Vansina, J, Paths in the Rain Forests: Towards a
History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa,
University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1990, pp.
19-21.
58
In Watkins- Owens, I, Blood Relations: Caribbean
Immigrants and the Harlem Community, 1900-1930,
Watkins-Owens emphasizes the black cultural milieu
emanating from a complex interaction of African
Americans and African Caribbean communities in the
Harlem during the first decades of the twentieth
century. These groups came together to form a new
community characterized by cultural controversies
and sometimes conflicts. The divergence of cultures
challenged old interpretations of race for white
Americans and native- born blacks.
53
Ndamase VP, AmaMpondo: Ibali NeNtlalo,
Lovedale, 1930s, pp 22-27.
54
Interview with J Ngesi, July 2003,
Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. Mr Ngesi was born in
KwaMachi.
55
See Comaroff, J, Body of power, spirit of
resistance The culture and history of a South African
people, Univeristy of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1985,
and Schoenbrun DL, A green place, a good place :
Agrarian change, gender, and social identity in the
Great Lakes region to the 15th century, Heinemann,
1998.
56
KCM, A. T. Bryant Collections, “Articles on the
Zulu Tribes”, Volume I, News Cuttings from
33
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diasporas”.59 Communities are products of their own
histories. Discourses of identity are developed and
changed through shifting historical time. 60
Conclusions should be drawn from experiences,
actions and views of ordinary people themselves and
those of their predecessors. Homogenization of
national or cultural identity does not operate in every
human settlement. In some cases identities are
negotiated and refashioned, depending on the
conditions on the ground.
Map 1: Showing KwaZulu-Natal Province
59
Lewis, E, “To Turn on a Pivot: Writing African
Americans into a History of Overlapping Diasporas”,
in Clark Hine and McLeod (eds), Crossing
Boundaries, pp. 3-32.
60
Laclau, E, “Universalism, Particularism, and the
Question of Identity”, in Wilmsen and McAllister,
The Politics of Difference: Ethnic Premises in a
World of Power, The University of Chicago Press,
Chicago and London, 1996.
34
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Map 2: KwaMachi and other chiefdoms in the district of Harding
2.
NAB, Accession Number 1492, “History of
the South Coast of Natal”
3.
NAB, Accession Number 665.
Mr Madiya
Mr Mbanjwa
Mr Ngesi
Mr Zakuza
4.
The South Coast Herald newspaper, 1951.
5.
Campbell Collections (KCM), Durban, C. H.
Lugg, “Places of Interest in Natal and
Zululand”.
Archival Sources
6.
KCM, A. T. Bryant Collections, “Articles on
the Zulu Tribes”, Volume I, News Cuttings
from Izindaba Zabantu newspapers, 1911
and 1912, TSS, Posted into Notebook, and
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38