Elizabeth MacGonagle has produced a study long awaited by scholars of southeast Africa. Crafting Identity in Zimbabwe and Mozambique offers a longue durée reconstruction of ethnic consciousness among the Ndau of the Mozambique–Zimbabwe borderlands. MacGonagle questions the prevailing orthodoxy that ethnic identity was an outcome of colonial rule, co-produced by Africans and European administrators. That orthodoxy has seen revision, but it still stands, and Crafting Identity is a welcome correction, placing the origins of Ndau identity in the precolonial era. MacGonagle explores the relatively thick documentary record, a product of an early and ongoing Portuguese presence, twinning this data with evidence from more than 200 interviews.
Opening chapters introduce the historiography of identity and the history of southeast Africa, with following chapters examining constitutive elements of Ndau identity. MacGonagle considers how ‘ethnicity was used for political purposes and ethnic boundaries were drawn within overlapping political structures’ (p. 40). Here her analysis especially draws on Portuguese documents; from their coastal and Zambezi-valley settlements, the Portuguese tried mightily to control the local gold trade (at the western end of Indian Ocean networks), and so they were keen observers of southeast African polities. In subsequent chapters, MacGonagle uses their reflections together with copious interview data to analyze clan totems, marriage practices and rules of succession; adornment practices (clothing, jewelry and tattooing), domestic architecture and cooking vessels; beer-brewing and rain-making ceremonies, and their contribution to spiritual and political authority; and the evolution of Ndau identity under nineteenth-century Gaza Nguni rule.
The result is a thorough cataloging of Ndau life before the twentieth century. Future researchers will need to expand on MacGonagle's scholarship. There is little doubt that the rise and fall of southeast African states affected the self-understandings of those who became known as Ndau-speakers. But the same could be said, one imagines, for many of the Ndau's neighbors. MacGonagle believes the prevailing view, that precolonial African societies lacked self-conscious identities, ‘does not work for the case of the Ndau’ (p. 14). This may be so, but analysis of a self-conscious Ndau identity prior to the 1830s will necessitate studies of a larger pool of evidence.
The book's real strength is its mapping of Ndau identity, reflected in the region's cartography but also etched onto people's bodies, shaped into cooking vessels and counted in the cadence of hand claps offered to visitors. This mapping will prompt other historians to ask what made – and might still make – ‘Ndauness’ distinct from other identities. Nearly all the markers on which MacGonagle focuses her rich analysis are practiced throughout east and southern Africa. It is intriguing to consider whether Ndau tattoos, or hand-clapping, or rain-making are different from their analogs in neighboring or nearby linguistic communities, but it is not clear how Ndau identity is ‘opposed to the existence of an “other”’ (p. 2). Exclusivity is a signal characteristic of ethnic or national identities; while one can be Christian and Zulu, or female and Kikuyu, or African and Bamileke, one tends not to encounter, other than exceptionally, people who are Ndau and Makua.
The most persuasive evidence of distinct ‘Ndauness’ comes from interview data MacGonagle collected in the late 1990s, and while she acknowledges debates about history and memory and the trouble of projecting the present into the past (p. 92), it remains somewhat puzzling that she relies on oral testimony from 1998 and 1999 to advance ideas about the ‘meanings of Ndauness since the sixteenth-century’ (p. 71). Does earlier evidence reveal a self-conscious identity? ‘Ndau’ is a twentieth-century term, and, as MacGonagle notes, the people upon whom it is bestowed did not use it before the late nineteenth century.
Crafting Identity examines 400 years of historical processes that change over time. A longue durée account will have to plumb what appear in MacGonagle's book as the fairly still waters of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. Only once the Ndau enter the strong currents driven by 1830s Nguni empire-making do we see how a peculiarly Ndau identity evolved under Gaza over-rule – that, especially for men, ‘the act of becoming Ndau occurred after the Gaza Nguni occupation’ (p. 10) – and, soon thereafter, a nascent industrial capitalism. Thus Crafting Identity raises crucial broader questions of how Gaza exploitation, if not quite colonial, may have shared some characteristics of European colonialism as a motor force for Ndau identity-formation. These questions ought to shape future lines of research, as might one elder's claims of dual ethnic identity: ‘we are Ndau and Shangaans at the same time’ (p. 98).
MacGonagle alludes to the Ndau reputation of wielding great spiritual power and to the belief among Ndau-speakers in Zimbabwe that ‘pure’ Ndau is spoken in Mozambique (pp. 87, 110, 109). Readers need more of an explanation for the reputation, and for the provocative suggestion of an uncorrupted wellspring of authenticity and power that seemingly divides speakers of a mostly common language. Such ideas may well be of colonial and postcolonial production, but they may also be found in a longue durée account. The issues discussed in this review do not detract from what MacGonagle has accomplished in Crafting Identity. She presents a fresh look at documentary sources that, blended with other evidence, should inform a historical ethnography with promise for other regions.
