[Ritual] is less about giving voice to shared values than about opening fields of argument; about providing the terms and tropes, that is, through which people caught up in changing worlds may vex each other, question definitions of value, form alliances, and mobilize oppositions. (Comaroff and Comaroff Reference Comaroff, Comaroff, Comaroff and Comaroff1993: xxiii)
INTRODUCTION
My overriding ethnographic research interest for over a decade has been to explore the myriad ways in which cattle are practically and discursively enmeshed in the everyday livelihoods, accumulation strategies and domestic struggles of the Xhosa-speaking people who live in the seventy or so villages of Peddie District (officially known as Ngqushwa Municipality) in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa.Footnote 1 In what follows I explore how rural and urban-based men and women – through their selective engagement with specific cultural norms – contest the spaces opened up by their shared desire to fund, prepare for and perform rituals. I show how, as a whole, people across Peddie District rhetorically and practically link ritual to the central cultural tropes that stress mutual support and reciprocity at two levels: intra-homestead, through ukwakh'umzi (to build the home); and inter-homestead, masincedisane (let us help each other). I suggest that their activities and interactions in the consumption of traditional beer, brandy and the meat of ritually slaughtered animals are geared towards performing and contesting these two cultural scripts.
The contested social reproduction of migrant-dominated households in rural Lesotho of nearly forty years ago, as described in the late Colin Murray's (Reference Murray1981) penetrating analysis, bears a certain resemblance to the situation in the rural Eastern Cape in the period c.2001–12. However, some things are rather different: for the people of HobanaFootnote 2 village, situated along the coast about an hour's drive south-west from the port city of East London, a decade of dramatic economic and social change, which has had overwhelmingly adverse impacts on the surety of migrant labour and thus on the embattled rural homestead, means that quite fundamental uncertainties abound.
One significant point of social fracture is between senior men and women. A significant proportion of the energies of rural men, especially seniors (i.e. in terms of age and as intsika/entloko yekhaya (literally the pillar/head of the home)), has been directed at maintaining their position in the social life of the home and the village. One way to ensure this is through acting out the culturally normative connection between slaughter rituals for ancestor veneration (or, for Christians, for the ‘purposes of feeding those attending the funeral’) and the cattle that men control: that is, forging regularly and repeatedly in everyone's minds the connection between cattle ownership, ritual slaughter to the ancestors, and good fortune or well-being. Thus slaughter rituals go some way towards shoring up this enclaved position (or in Appadurai's (Reference Appadurai and Appadurai1986) terminology, to continuously (re)construct and delimit the ‘commodity candidacy’) of the ‘things of men’ in the rural economy: en bloc, senior men seek to retain the position of cattle (and goats), which they control – and which constitute a social arena from which women are actively excluded – as goods that are symbolically central to the male-interceded and ancestor-endorsed ritual well-being of the homestead and also of the wider community.
But the first decade of the twenty-first century has thus far been unkind to these men – and, surprisingly perhaps, given the stark material deprivations and psychological indignities wrought by apartheid, more so than the preceding one. For the most part, people in rural South Africa are poor and getting poorer. Their homestead units are getting smaller and their offspring, who are highly mobile between town and country, cannot be relied upon to support their natal homes (cf. Posel and Marx Reference Posel and Marx2013). Except for a tiny minority, agriculture and livestock rearing in rural Peddie District is not a viable livelihood option, and a growing reliance on the post-1994 social grant ‘economy’ has emerged and has rapidly become entrenched (Seekings Reference Seekings, Shapiro and Tebeau2011).Footnote 3
For the majority of these men – with their increasingly atomized, desperate shuttling between town and rural areas, their shifting in and (increasingly permanently) out of stable employment, and their struggles with alcohol, women, money, their offspring and each other – the hardship of life on the periphery is unrelenting and becoming ever more difficult (Ainslie Reference Ainslie2005; Hull and James Reference Hull and James2012; Du Toit and Neves Reference Du Toit and Neves2014). The main source of cash income in the majority of their homesteads nowadays is the government old age pension or disability grant rather than the wages for what was in decades past onerous, often dangerous, labour. In consequence, the economic position of senior men – and thus also, to an increasing degree, their social position – is under incredible strain (Bank Reference Bank2002). Not surprisingly, some of these men prove to be unreliable, duplicitous and generally unequal to the task of individually shouldering the responsibilities they must bear in order to maintain their social status – in their homesteads and in the village – as intsika yekhaya and collectively as the voices of their communities. As a result, their corporate, patriarchal control of ritual performance is itself threatened. This further hampers their efforts to temper the chronic uncertainty of the times, and, in the process, to exercise control over women and young people in the fragmented, contested and thus fragile social and economic relationships and configurations that constitute homesteads, village community life and the ‘inbetween’ spaces that are ‘not village–not town’ (Ngwane Reference Ngwane2003: 696; White Reference White2011).
If senior men find themselves emasculated and their social position under threat, ‘their’ women are more assertive than ever – wives, unmarried women, widows and daughters differ markedly from their menfolk in that they frequently find ways to act in mutual groups to support and drive a common social project (Bank Reference Bank2001; Jones Reference Jones1996). Many of these cooperative projects involve the performance of ritual, including the initiation ritual that transforms boys into men, for which the single mothers of initiates turn for financial support to their mutual group. Also, in the case of funerals and other significant rituals, which may attract between thirty and 300 or more people, it is the cultural memory, the practical knowledge and the substantial labours of women working together that underpin the funding, the extensive planning and preparations, and the successful performance of rituals.
In the section that follows, I briefly situate in both time and space the practice of rituals in rural places such as Peddie District, showing how – when compared with McAllister's work (Reference McAllister2001) in the same province (a mere 250 kilometres east of Peddie) – geography and the shifting nature of economic marginalization shape different people's commitment to ritual practice (Bank and Minkley Reference Bank and Minkley2005; cf. Boissevain Reference Boissevain and Wolf1984).
In the second and main section of this paper, I explore the reciprocities that exist in all villages to distribute the relatively high costs associated with hosting rituals across local social networks. These ‘masincedisane’ mechanisms include local burial societies and buying clubs that are almost exclusively the preserve of women. These groups play an important role in building and maintaining relations between homesteads and wider kin in rural areas within the overall context of increased residential fluidity and urban–rural straddling. In the case of better-resourced and better-educated households, the societies and clubs themselves tend to straddle rural and urban areas and constitute an important economic and social bridge between the rural village and the town (or towns) and city beyond.
In the third section of this paper, I briefly examine the rituals that were conducted in Hobana village over a twelve-month period during the calendar year of 2001. I consider which rituals were performed most frequently and what role women working together played in them.
I conclude the paper with the observation that the hosting of rituals serves multiple purposes, not least of which is to underscore the position of the host homestead within the networks of kinship, reciprocity and social affiliation/distance in the village. Hosting a ritual has probably always been a finely balanced social, economic and cultural performance that must, on the one hand, be carefully orchestrated to achieve its effects (see De Wet Reference De Wet1995; cf. Hughes-Freeland and Crain Reference Crain, Hughes-Freeland and Crain1998; Crain Reference Crain, Hughes-Freeland and Crain1998), while on the other hand it is a political act of asserting control over the work and attention of others. Increasingly, it is women, working in close cooperation with each other, who are asserting greater control over this culturally vital space.
SITUATING RITUAL PRACTICE
In order to understand ritual practice, as in all things social, history matters. Without the space here to review the lasting impact of the devastating colonial and apartheid history of this region (see Mager Reference Mager1992; Reference Mager1999; Switzer Reference Switzer1993; Ainslie Reference Ainslie1999), I present a potted history of ritual in the Eastern Cape Province by revisiting McAllister's useful distinction between what he calls ancestor or kinship rituals on the one hand, and beer drinks on the other hand (McAllister Reference McAllister and McAllister1997). Based on fieldwork conducted over more than twenty-five years in the agriculturally active Shixini area of Willowvale District in the former Transkei, McAllister (Reference McAllister and Mayer1980: 211; Reference McAllister2001: 183) argued that ancestor rituals were based on clan and kinship ties, with significant elements played out in the cattle enclosure (widely referred to as the ‘kraal’) of each homestead (umzi; plural imizi). He claimed that these rituals ‘ha[d] little relevance for the nature of everyday social interaction … [and had] a relatively atemporal and formal character’ (see also McAllister Reference McAllister and McAllister1997). Unlike beer drinks, these ancestor rituals had a fairly fixed structure in which oratory and a predetermined spatial sequence featured prominently so as to:
stress genealogical order, the unity of the kin group and the relationship between living and dead, and [had] a timeless quality, largely unrelated to the actual process of everyday life, which [was] based on territorial relations and co-operation between neighbours. (McAllister Reference McAllister2001: 183)
More significantly, McAllister (Reference McAllister and McAllister1997: 282) also argued that the oratory at these rituals not only ‘communicates information about the ritual, but also about values and norms, group boundaries, hierarchies [including gender hierarchies] and social distance, and degrees of inclusion and exclusion’. These rituals were concerned more with normative structural relationships and tended to exclude, or at least clearly delineate, non-kin who may nonetheless be important to the host homestead in everyday situations.
In contrast, the beer drinks he proceeded to study in considerable detail ‘differ[ed] from ancestor rituals … [especially with regard to] the active role of neighbours and local territorial groups’ in the ritual. It was these non-kin participants, McAllister argued, who were more important than kin and clanspeople in overcoming the practical problems of everyday rural life in Shixini, and this was what made beer drinks so interesting. He suggested that, in sharp contrast to ancestor rituals, beer drinks were forums for discussing community affairs, and, as manifestations of the local community in action, they allowed for the expression of important social principles, including ‘locality, neighbourliness, co-operation, sharing and the interdependence of homesteads’ (McAllister Reference McAllister and McAllister1997: 299, 303).
Why should this apparently sharp structural disjuncture between ancestor rituals and beer drinks have existed in people's ritual practice in Shixini? McAllister argued that it had to do with the important change, since about the 1920s, in the ways in which the maintenance of local economic activity in Shixini had come to depend less on kinship and more on cooperative labour and the pooling of resources between neighbouring homesteads. He linked this to the break-up of what were previously larger, extended homesteads; coupled with the increase in male labour migration around that time, this meant that individual homesteads became more dependent on others, especially on their immediate neighbours, for their economic survival (McAllister Reference McAllister and McAllister1997: 296; Manona Reference Manona1999).
McAllister expounded upon what he saw as a more generalized transition from ancestor rituals to beer drinks that followed from a shift from kinship to neighbourhood and a sense of community as ‘the major organising principle’ (McAllister Reference McAllister and McAllister1997: 305–6; cf. Bell Reference Bell1997: 255).
When applied to the ethnographic data I have collected in Peddie District over the period from 2001 to 2012 on the performance of rituals, McAllister's binary distinction between ancestor rituals (stressing the kin group) and beer drinks (emphasizing the more economically significant, everyday relations based on neighbourhood) seems to work less well. I identify four reasons why this might be so. First, in relation to agrarian production, I found that there is far less ‘agrarian-based’ cooperation and interdependence between homesteads in rural Peddie District than McAllister found in Shixini. This relates to the dramatic decline in agricultural activity, especially in field cultivation, across Peddie District since the early 1950s, so that, by the mid-1970s, there was virtually no field cultivation except along the coast where the rainfall is higher. In fact, because of population pressure, there is widespread (arable) landlessness among rural homesteads. This, I suggest, undermined any vestige of an agrarian interdependence between rural people.
By comparison to this alarming decline in agrarian production, the coastal village of Hobana has managed to retain a relatively buoyant agricultural sector. This is partly because some households were allocated 2-hectare plots of land, which were large enough to be subdivided for residential and arable purposes. In consequence, during the 2000–01 growing season, as many as 39 per cent of the 254 homesteads in Hobana village ploughed and planted their arable ‘allotments’ (often equivalent in size to a home garden) with maize, other field crops (oats, legumes, etc.) and vegetables (beans, potatoes, etc.). However, only a small number of these homesteads did so by participating in the type of ploughing companies and other cooperative work parties that McAllister found to be common in Shixini. Thus, even in Hobana, with its higher levels of agrarian activity than elsewhere in Peddie District, the tasks relating to agrarian cultivation are individualized and commoditized. While I found a small number of homesteads that practise forms of non-monetized exchange of factors of production, specifically isahlulo (share-cropping), the majority of households pay to have their fields ploughed and planted by ox- or tractor-drawn plough. Most people also pay for weeding services that are provided by women who, while they often work in groups, are paid a daily rate on an individual basis.
To summarize then, the emphasis in agrarian production in rural Peddie District has shifted in two respects (cf. Bank and Qambata Reference Bank and Qambata1999; Ainslie Reference Ainslie2005). First, in line with a generalized pattern in the rural Eastern Cape, a shift has taken place towards homestead autonomy in terms of engagement in productive activities. Indeed, most cultivation occurs in the more private space of people's home gardens, some of which are barely big enough to warrant ploughing with oxen or by tractor (cf. Bank Reference Bank2002: 637). Second, a more significant shift is evident in which most rural homesteads have moved from being sites of productive agrarian activity to sites of consumption (Ainslie Reference Ainslie1998; Ngwane Reference Ngwane2003: 699). These two factors taken together mean that I found that the kinds of beer drinks that are so vividly described by McAllister as an integral part of cooperative agrarian activities in Shixini were virtually non-existent in Peddie District, because the cooperative element itself is lacking.Footnote 4
A second significant difference when compared with Shixini, and allied to the decline in field-scale agricultural activity, is the fact that in Peddie District there was an earlier decline in the proportion of men engaged in classic, long-distance migrant labour. Instead, men as household heads are either relatively close at hand, being residents of towns and cities in the region, or are resident in the village. Unlike the many men (and women) in places such as Shixini who continue – against the odds – to be employed as long-distance migrants in urban centres and distant mines, and who are thus still plugged into the migrant labour system, town-based Peddie people are less inclined to enter into formal arrangements with their neighbours and kinsmen to keep an eye on their homesteads, arable lands and livestock. This more local habitation, coupled with their almost inevitable reliance on the post-1994 social welfare economy (see below), has fostered an emphasis on economic independence and autonomy at the homestead level, with negative implications for ‘everyday’ mutual assistance and reciprocity between homesteads, at least as far as men are concerned. The subsequent substantial outmigration of women and younger people to regional towns and cities from the late 1990s has in part shifted this balance, as homesteads with insufficient child labour to carry out domestic chores (firewood collection, cooking and herding) are forced to turn for assistance to homesteads with an excess of such labour.
A third reason is that while the local economy in Peddie District is heavily reliant on sources of income derived from outside the district, investing in one's home village is not as attractive as it might once have been (Ainslie Reference Ainslie2005; Reference Ainslie1999). Primary among the sources of income are state-provided old age pensions, disability and child support grants, and grants for people infected with HIV/AIDS. Remittances – although not always regular – from those family members employed in urban centres are important ‘top-ups’ for many rural households. With most reliable, longer-term employment opportunities – which are in diminishing supply – in the region being town-based, people have had to invest in their extended social networks. There exist elaborate and long-standing patterns of rural–urban oscillation between rural Peddie and especially the cities of Port Elizabeth and East London. Mobility between town and country plays a critical role in the circulation of resources, of people, and of information about job opportunities and social news, including of deaths, funerals, weddings and other ritual events to be held in rural villages or in town. While, as White (Reference White2011: 109) puts it, ‘men and women alike are propelled into highly mobile quests for private income’, as far as rural villagers are concerned, the village homestead remains an anchor and a reference point, and thus the ultimate purpose of this mobility is to provide a steady stream of resources in cash and in kind to rural homesteads. Their aim is to seek constantly to bring the town closer to the village (Ainslie Reference Ainslie2005; Bank Reference Bank2002). For village-based homesteads, there are therefore powerful economic, cultural and social reasons for seeking to keep town-based household and lineage members involved in the affairs of the rural umzi.
The economic downturn has had a differential impact on rural homesteads in Peddie District. On the one hand, it has widened socio-economic differences between homesteads in the villages and has put further pressure on the homestead's economic independence that is a feature of people's livelihoods in the rural district. This has generated social tensions as poorer individuals and homesteads apply moral pressure on wealthier homesteads to assist them materially, principally by invoking the masincedisane norm. Compared with the situation in other Peddie villages, these socio-economic cleavages in Hobana are particularly marked; this has found expression in the relatively higher number of slaughter rituals – which, on an individual basis, have a higher redistributive effect than beer drinks – conducted by wealthier homesteads in Hobana. However, this does not mean that beer drinks are unimportant in respect of the commensality they enact, and in supplementing the diets of poorer people. In Hobana, there are a number of poorer people for whom survival from week to week is partly dependent on attending every beer drink held in the village, where they consume significant amounts of nutritious mqombothi (home-brewed sorghum beer) and might be fortunate enough to be served a meal, sometimes in exchange for undertaking a minor task of one sort or another.
A fourth feature of life in Peddie (and presumably this is also the case in Shixini) is something that is part of a longer pattern that has been in evidence since at least the mid-1980s and earlier (see Mager Reference Mager1999), but which has become even more accentuated following the 1994 democratic transition. This is the steady rise in the economic independence and growing assertiveness of especially younger, better-educated women, which has reached a social tipping point. These are women who have found skilled employment as teachers, nurses and government employees, i.e. positions of real social authority, and have increasingly sought to challenge the patriarchal power of senior men in the private sphere of the homestead and the local public sphere of the village. Older women who, since the mid-1990s, have qualified for old age pensions at age sixty, i.e. five years earlier than men (who, until very recently, only qualified at sixty-five years of age), have also found their social position bolstered vis-à-vis men in general. It is clear that these developments – coupled with the tensions caused by the relentless spread of HIV/AIDS – have thrown gender and generational relations in the household and the village, already fractured, into further and significant disarray (cf. Ngwane Reference Ngwane2003; Daily Dispatch 2007).
These serious disruptions in normative relations between differently situated people, which are played out socially and economically, appear to require some form of public expression. One unfortunate form is that of widespread, searing domestic and social violence. In 1996–97, in the other village in which I conducted doctoral fieldwork, four elderly women accused of being witches and responsible for the suspicious death of a ‘healthy’ young woman were severely beaten by a group of young men in the community and then held hostage in a hut until they were ‘ready’ to confess to their supposed crime. The young men were finally persuaded, through the intercession of the police, to release the terrified women. Witchcraft beliefs remain a serious matter and a source of anxiety for many people in the villages of Peddie, and indeed across the province, as they go about their daily lives (on witchcraft in South Africa, see Comaroff and Comaroff Reference Comaroff and Comaroff1999; Ashforth Reference Ashforth1998; Niehaus Reference Niehaus2001; Reference Niehaus2005). Rape and domestic violence against women have reached truly appalling levels (Dunkle et al. Reference Dunkle, Jewkes, Nduna, Jama, Levin, Sikweyiya and Koss2007).
NEW SPACES FOR WOMEN, STASIS FOR MEN
In her incisive study of the Marakwet of Kenya, Henrietta Moore noted that ‘spatial representations express in their own logic the power relations between different groups; they [spatial representations] are therefore active instruments in the production and reproduction of the social order’ (Moore Reference Moore1986: 89). Elsewhere she argues that meanings are not inherent in the organization of domestic space, but must be continuously ‘invoked through the activities of social actors’, an observation that resonates with the approach put forward by the Comaroffs quoted earlier (see Moore Reference Moore1986: 9; see also Ferguson Reference Ferguson1992) and that is evident in the emerging residential arrangements in Hobana village.
The Xhosa umzi is, first and foremost, the (residential) site on which the rituals of an agnatically bounded group of patrilineally related kin are conducted, always under the watchful eye of a male homestead head and his agnatic elders. What this definition means is that many of the women-headed households (except those headed by widows) are disqualified from being recognized socially as imizi. A thirty-four-year-old single mother, Nomakutele, who was a resident of a newer section of Hobana village, put it plainly when she told me that she went to her father's family home in Hobana to conduct rituals (her father himself had relocated to another village after he divorced her mother). ‘Any cow that I [caused to be] slaughtered at my mother's home would not bellow,’ she told me, ‘because those [people] are not my ancestors.’
Whilst town-based umzi members are not reluctant participants in village-centred ritual practice, there are differences in their levels of engagement: the unmarried or separated ‘daughters’ of village homesteads identify most strongly with their rural umzi and value highly their association with their home village. This rests partly on their need to maintain a rural base for young children of school-going age, but it is clear that women continue to do much of the kin- and community-building work. This is demonstrated through their regular visits and their material contributions to their rural homes.
‘Feminized’ residential spaces
Over the past twenty years, women and some economically and socially marginal, unmarried or separated men have set up their own households in ever increasing numbers in ‘inbetween spaces’ in Hobana village. Often these households consist of nothing more than a one-roomed, corrugated tin shack and a minimally fenced ‘site’, with improvements gradually being undertaken as, or if, income streams improve. The ‘informal’ settlement area to the west of the village, known as eNdlovini (literally ‘the place of the elephant’, i.e. a place taken by force), is very much in this mould, and has existed since local people ‘invaded’ this land in 1993 and erected their shacks on it. In contrast, and indeed partially in response, to the social and infrastructural unruliness of eNdlovini, the small, thirty-three-unit Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) block-plan housing development (known as Phola Park, after the infamously violent township settlement in Gauteng Province) was completed in 1999, right in the centre of the village.
On the face of it, what these two settlements represent is a significant ‘decompression’ of the congestion previously experienced within the established homesteads in Hobana. This was what everyone I interviewed about these housing developments in Hobana told me. Within the 245 occupied households in the five established village sections, social relations that had been fraught for a long time were reaching breaking point in overcrowded, economically insecure and thus tense domestic units. Those who could find work in the cities had left the village and the local economic situation was so dire that the local municipal council had applied for RDP funding to initiate a housing project that would address this problem, and would create some employment in construction in the process.
Both eNdlovini and Phola Park threw a lifeline to many local people, especially single and separated women, but also young men.Footnote 5 The upshot was a small but significant rise in households; the households in these new settlements were not only smaller in terms of their numbers of household members, but they were also often socially and economically more precariously placed. The establishment of both settlements was resisted by senior men, who recognized in them their further loss of control over once subordinate categories of people – women and young men. In both cases, they tellingly couched their objection in the language of the loss of grazing land for their cattle – when what they really meant was that their control over the labour and incomes of the members of their imizi was being further undermined and diminished.
Senior men complained bitterly yet perceptively of the inappropriateness of ‘bringing the township to the village’ and about a loosening of morals, and in a sense they were vindicated: a number of the women, upon being handed the keys to their new RDP houses, promptly opened shebeens, while a few were kept in pocket by what were euphemistically called ‘boyfriends’, i.e. relationships based on varying degrees of sex for money, favours or presents. One issue that men pointed to, certainly in Phola Park although less so in eNdlovini, was that the sites were so small that there was no space to construct a cattle byre (kraal or enclosure) and therefore no place to keep cattle. This meant that the houses here are unlikely to ever be regarded as imizi, i.e. real homesteads – the sorts of places where senior men would attend, and through their attendance endorse, the rituals of the members of that homestead. In this important sense, they were non-places that challenged normative cultural categories. Be that as it may, there is also plenty of evidence of women, in their newfound freedom, cooperating with each other to get by, to the virtual exclusion of men.
When I interviewed her, Nomakutele was living with her ten-year-old daughter in her two-roomed RDP house in Phola Park. She told me that, prior to moving there, they had lived with her mother in a one-roomed mud-brick house in the village. She still visited her mother daily to assist her with domestic chores. Nomakutele said that there was ‘no space to conduct imisebenzi [rituals] at my new house’ and nor was the place where her mother lived a ‘home’. By this she meant that these places do not constitute recognized Xhosa homesteads.Footnote 6 For these reasons, she said, once she got the ‘title’ for her new house, her plan was to sell it and use the proceeds to build another house in the village, on her mother's site, which was adjacent to her mother's family's site. Crucially, this would allow them to enter into the formal network of imizi-centred reciprocal relations of hosting and assisting with rituals.
Women's greater capacity to socialize the flows of money
This phenomenon of an increasing number of (smaller) households within rural village communities has become common in much of Peddie District (see Ainslie Reference Ainslie1998). Some of this was undoubtedly driven by the government's use of the nuclear (or single mother-headed) household as the unit of choice for social welfare and development programmes. Thus, the delivery of RDP houses to individual households resulted in larger family units breaking up in respect of their residential arrangements, i.e. atomizing expressly to gain access to the housing benefits on offer. The women who were striking out independently included unmarried, separated and sometimes long-widowed women, emerging from unequal, patriarchal marital and extended social relations in both rural villages and urban settings. They frequently had different social and economic priorities to men and were less inclined to ‘waste money’, as they saw it, on liquor for instance, but also on livestock that ‘died in the drought’. Indeed, many people, both men and women, in rural Peddie District claimed that women ‘held onto’ money better and made it ‘stretch’ further than men.
Although some women succumb to alcoholism and wastefulness, it would seem that, on the whole, they are more inclined than men to be thrifty and socially and entrepreneurially minded. Perhaps this is because they take greater responsibility as the primary, or only, providers for their dependent children. Certainly it is because, on the whole, women tend to display greater interest in apparently ‘feminized’ forms of saving and are comfortable dealing in cash. By working together in church groups, rotating credit associations (imigalelo), burial societiesFootnote 7 and other savings clubs, women both encourage and enforce a discipline upon each other into acting with a remarkable level of financial probity (cf. James Reference James2012).
Wherever practicable, women rely on formal bank accounts in which to hold their money. Rather than invest in cattle, their patterns of consumption indicate an altogether more cash-based approach through which they are more integrated into the market and banking system of the ‘formal’ economy than many men, who tend to harbour a distrust of banks and dislike having to talk to each other about money.Footnote 8 Women are conversant with, and less inclined to be suspicious of, new ‘technologies’, such as automated bank tellers and mobile telephone technology. Women who hail from villages in Peddie District but who work in towns and cities in the region are often members of burial societies and imigalelo there, something that contributes to their greater financial literacy even though their formal educational levels do not differ markedly from those of men.
The policing of ritual spaces
Hosting a ritual, especially one that explicitly invokes the ancestors, acts as a rallying call for the extended patrilineally related kin group. Family members, no matter how geographically dispersed they may be (as far afield as Johannesburg and Cape Town), ignore this call to assist and to participate at their peril. The performance of a ritual allows for assessments of where the often dispersed members of this ‘agnatic cluster’ currently stand in relation to each other. In the process, social constructs that are mobilized during ritual practice include notions about the nature of the ‘family’, ‘tradition’ and ‘home’, and associated expectations of appropriate behaviour and support on the part of the individuals or groups are variously delineated by these constructs (Ngwane Reference Ngwane2003; White Reference White2011: 110–11; cf. Shipton Reference Shipton2007).
Perhaps not surprisingly, given what I have suggested above, two readily discernible fault lines of these attempts at ‘naturalization through ritual’ are those of gender and generation. I found a strict adherence to a gender division of labour in the preparation and performance of rituals to be common in rural Peddie District. Moreover, a constant regulation of space during all rituals, in the sense of policing which people are occupying what spaces, is a feature of this ‘enactment of power’. Why should this be so important? It is because each slaughter ritual must be sanctioned by the ancestors, something that is signalled by the bellowing of the sacrificial beast just before it is killed. There is an ever present threat that, because the ancestors are displeased about something or someone's behaviour, the beast will not bellow. This would be enough to stop the ritual in its tracks, putting paid to the many months of planning, days of preparation and extensive travel by many of those present. As a consequence of this stipulation, which is scrupulously adhered to, each instance of a slaughter ritual provides a potent, heightened sense of drama and an arena for potential public shaming and serious social consternation.
Meticulous differentiation of people in respect of the space they occupy during rituals is undertaken on the basis of several criteria: kinship, affiliation to the homestead conducting the ritual, age and gender. Senior men, for instance, consistently dominate the formal speeches given during rituals. Speakers always stand to address those present, while everyone else in the kraal or rontawu (a round hut, often reserved for ritual observances) is expected to be seated. If a man who is not the eldest non-kin man rises to respond to a speech, he will be admonished and told to sit down. Sometimes, there is a long interruption to proceedings while people wait for the appropriate man to arrive who will address the gathering. The youngest man present has to surrender his seat immediately when an older man enters the kraal or beer drink venue, or find himself berated by the other men present. All other men younger than the person entering have to shuffle along to make available an appropriate place, gauged in terms of the newcomer's position in the age ranking and kinship system. In the cattle kraal, members of the agnatic cluster hosting the ritual and their fellow clansmen sit to the right of the kraal entrance while other men sit to the left. At an indoor beer drink, men are always seated on the right and the women on the left, as seen from outside, facing the entrance to the rontawu.
The same principle applies to women's seating arrangements, which also follow generational seniority, although women often sit on their mats on the floor. Women are not allowed to enter the kraal during a ritual, unless they are patrilineally related to the host family (i.e. they are considered ‘daughters’ of the family). No amankazana (unmarried mothers) are supposed to attend a beer drink, unless they are older women (younger amankazana do attend, of course, but are expected to stay out of view). I was told that women are not allowed to stay indoors once the meat has been cooked and served at a slaughter ritual. Instead, they have to congregate outside in the courtyard, where they eat their food.
The division of meat, brandy, mqombothi and purchased or bottled beer is done on the basis of age and gender, overseen by a respected man who holds the position of injoli (apportioner). Amaxhego (old men) get the biggest share of the available brandy and mqombothi. In general, abafazi (women) are treated as an undifferentiated group when the injoli makes his allocations. The women are seated around the home, not near the kraal. Once the women's share is brought over to them, senior women will oversee the allocations among the different age categories of women present.
Although Moore (Reference Moore1986: 171) argues that ‘[t]he ability of the dominant model to reproduce itself [rests on] its ability to retain control over the principles of the construction of reality, to frame all competing constructions within its own definitions, [and] to maintain and control the socially dominant representations’, slippages in this ‘ritualized enactment of power’ are also apparent. As soon as they can, young men will move to a different room or flat in the same property, away from the attentions of their fathers and senior kinsmen, to consume their share of the mqombothi, brandy and bottled beer. By removing themselves from the site of the ritual, they are also circumventing the scrutiny of their every move by the senior men. Once isolated, there often emerge additional supplies of lager and brandy, as well as gin, for their private consumption.
Similarly, younger unmarried girls may be allocated a bottle or two of brandy or gin to share among themselves. They are required to consume this share discreetly, behind the main house, without inconveniencing the women working there or drawing undue male attention to themselves. The reason why they are given some alcohol, I was told, is that they might refuse to attend rituals in future if their repeated requests for alcohol are ignored.
The work of ritual
Besides ritual occasions, three other important sites for social interactions at the community level are community meetings (including school meetings), church services and weekly oomanyano (women's prayer groups), but all of these generally involve only certain categories of people in the village. I contend that it is precisely the hosting of rituals, rather than cooperative agricultural production, that has become the quintessential ‘cooperative’ work that people constituting dispersed rural and urban households share as they seek to overcome the ‘tyranny of distanced separation’ (Sansom Reference Sansom, Krige and Comaroff1981: 98). In this context, the ritual has become the key performance, with the ancestors themselves harnessed to ensure that the mystique of tradition and otherworldliness is invoked to influence and mould the present.
While rooted in older, more normative, cultural and ritual forms, what the current pattern of ritual practice in rural Peddie District demonstrates is that the need exists for regular opportunities to enact social relations between kin and between neighbours and other villagers, resident and absent from the village, that will build reciprocity and trust between imizi – what I call the ritual as work party. Socially, ancestor rituals, beer drinks and other ceremonies are about making use of, and in the process building and re-affirming, bonds of kinship, neighbourliness and reciprocity. But it is the relative absence of both (1) overlapping relationships predicated on everyday cooperative, agrarian production and (2) a residentially stable rural population that makes rituals here distinct. Rituals in Peddie are themselves harnessed to do the work of instructing a specially constituted group of people, one that is ordinarily dislocated and fragmented, in how they should act towards each other. Rituals also do the work of defining and redefining kinship, clanship and neighbourliness – in short, community – in relation to the past, the present and the future.
There is a further angle to this notion of ‘ritual as work party’. As slaughter rituals have become more elaborate and costly, it has become necessary to engage other households in their preparation. Both the costs and the labour required to host what many rural people regard as important slaughter rituals are increasingly difficult for individual homesteads to fund and organize alone. This is particularly so for funerals, which, by their nature, can seldom be planned in advance and which can attract people from far and wide. In the village context, this makes the actual work of hosting rituals a necessarily cooperative undertaking by local and even town-based people, most of them women, who are assembled for the task of successfully planning and undertaking all the preparations for the ritual.
The frequent enlisting of local kinswomen and neighbours from poorer households to help with the preparations for a ritual plays an important role in both recognizing and subverting economic (and class) distinctions between individuals and households. By enlisting the unpaid help of neighbours, it could be said that wealthier host imizi are exploiting their labour in pursuit of conspicuous consumption for their own benefit. However, such cooperation not only provides valuable opportunities for women to work together, both intensively and on a relatively equal footing, but also affords them opportunities, through their conversations and interactions over the course of several days, to exchange information, to discuss local problems and to mull over the stories and scandals that have come to light in other villages or in ‘town’. In this way, they actively share and reconstitute common, locally informed understandings of social practice, all the while strengthening networks of mutual support across the very real cleavages of socio-economic difference, both within the village and between town and village-based women. Thus ritual ‘work parties’ serve as important sites of sociality by providing the space, especially for women, to socialize and to work together (cf. Hughes-Freeland and Crain Reference Hughes-Freeland, Crain, Hughes-Freeland and Crain1998: 6).
The presence and participation of other villagers at a ritual is no small matter either. Critically, other villagers are implicated in many of the ritual practices of each homestead in the village. Important to the success of the ritual are the contributions of alcohol and money from extended family members, from imigalelo, and, in the case of funerals, from burial societies. Imigalelo clubs, virtually the exclusive preserve of women, are prominent during particular phases of rituals.
Key principles with regard to the role of other villagers during rituals are those of ukuzimasa (to participate) and ukungqina (to witness), which means to endorse and to legitimize the ritual by attending the event and, crucially through commensality, by consuming some of the drink and food prepared for the occasion. Witnessing involves listening to the male host's (sometimes cryptic) explanation of what event has given rise to the ritual and giving a formal response to this explanation. This response is given by the most senior man present who is not related to the host umzi.
Through their attendance and participation, non-kin local people thus contribute to ‘building the homestead’ by recognizing the host homestead (and its ancestors) as one of their own, legitimizing its members and their activities, and bearing witness to its ritual and moral projects (cf. Wilson et al. Reference Wilson, Kaplan, Maki and Walton1952: 206). For this reason, neighbours and other villagers are not expressly invited to a ritual; they are simply expected to attend. The offerings of mqombothi and meat, besides their ritual purpose, are a means of encouraging attendance by other people who are not involved in the work of organizing and hosting the ritual. Critically, it is the attendance by large numbers of other people, especially members of ‘respectable’ local families and town-based people, that provides the sought-after ‘noise’ generated when many people socialize together. This ‘noise’ is an indication of the status of the host umzi and shows the ancestors that the host homestead is respected and being ‘built’ by the entire village. In contrast, the clearest sign of a socially marginal homestead is the small number of people, and the virtual absence of non-kin people, at the rituals they host.
RITUAL PRACTICE IN HOBANA VILLAGE
None of the above should be taken to suggest that the hosting of rituals among Xhosa-speaking rural people is timeless and unchanging, since, as I have argued above, it clearly is not (Wilson Reference Wilson, Argyle and Preston-Whyte1978). Indeed, ritual hybridization and innovation, as well as contingent adjustments, are all in evidence here (Mtuze Reference Mtuze2003: 88ff). As Bell (Reference Bell1997: 256) suggests, what people do ritually and regard as tradition is ‘usually a rather new synthesis of custom and accommodation’ (see White Reference White2011).
Building the home in a resource-poor rural environment requires the continued flow and investment of material resources, people and information from the town to rural villages. The sprucing-up of the homestead (additional building, renovating and painting) prior to hosting a ritual is a clear, if superficial, expression of this investment. Building the home also requires maintaining relationships between kin and wider social networks and between town and country, thereby ensuring that one's rituals are well attended. In the village context, building the home requires engaging one's neighbours in cooperative projects. This is because Xhosa people say that ‘akukho isiko elinakho kuqhubeka abantu bengekho’ (if there are no people present, a ritual cannot proceed/succeed).Footnote 9 These days, such projects place an emphasis on the display, sharing and highly repetitive consumption of the same, specified material resources. As recurring consumptive events, rituals fulfil this role well. The only households that seldom conduct rituals – other than funerals that few people attend – are those that constitute the ‘very poor’.Footnote 10
A significant number of homesteads in Hobana are involved in conducting or materially supporting a wide range of rituals in their respective villages and beyond. While many of these rituals exhibit a dominant Christian character, some indicate the continued relevance of ancestor veneration (Mtuze Reference Mtuze2003: 84; cf. Pauw Reference Pauw and Hammond-Tooke1974: 433, 436–7). Pauw (Reference Pauw and Hammond-Tooke1974: 437–8) discusses the complementarity, or at least the lack of conceptual conflict, that exists between Christian and ‘traditional’ religious or ritual practices. The most important of the ancestor rituals, from the point of view of my informants (both men and women) in Hobana, are mortuary rituals. Besides the actual funeral, the two main mortuary rituals that involve the ancestors are ukukhapa (to accompany) and ukubuyisa (to bring home). Both of these relate to the death of the male – and only the male – homestead head and are generally not conducted openly by Christian families. I found that Christian belief did not always mean that people felt barred from conducting the rituals that are specifically linked to the ancestors, just that they had to finesse their reasons for doing so. However, for the members of some denominations, notably the Seventh Day Adventists, hosting slaughter rituals is unacceptable (see below).
The rituals that people perform include the slaughter rituals that mark rites of passage (especially the rather fraught male circumcision ritual – see Kepe Reference Kepe2010) or other stages in the lifecycle of individuals, and beer drinks through which people communicate with their ancestors, mark transitions in their lives or ‘just socialize’ with their neighbours (cf. Hammond-Tooke Reference Hammond-Tooke1985: 55). Other ‘feasts’ and ceremonies, such as weddings, graduation parties and the unveiling of gravestones, are generally the preserve of a far smaller group of wealthier households. Here, the norm is to slaughter a cow or ox (and sometimes one or more sheep) to ‘feed the people’, i.e. without an express or explicit invocation of the patrilineal ancestors. While they are not strictly ancestor rituals, these ceremonies nevertheless follow much the same pattern, in terms of a gendered and generational mobilization and division of labour during the preparatory, performative and consumptive phases of the ritual. Also, it is worth noting that not all rituals specifically require cattle to be slaughtered in order to communicate with the ancestors. Beer drinks are also ritual occasions at which, for a variety of reasons, supplication of the ancestors is sought. Also, people adapt the actual performance of normative ritual practices to what is affordable and manageable at the current time; as long as this is communicated to the ancestors during proceedings, all should be well (cf. White Reference White2011). Furthermore, most rural people readily accept that different clans and families have slightly different ritual practices and ways of conducting what is a common set of rituals. Needless to say, there is no textbook that lists the precise procedures that should be followed during the conducting of rituals. Rather, older people (specifically older men) are the repositories of knowledge about how the family rituals should be performed (Wilson Reference Wilson, Argyle and Preston-Whyte1978: 158).
Other rituals that involve propitiating the ancestors in times of distress might also require the slaughtering of a cow or ox, although the substitution of a goat, as directed by an igqira (diviner), is more common here. In fact, these rituals are often conducted at the behest of amagqirha (diviners) who have been consulted in connection with a specific problem (which often presents with physical symptoms and afflictions) experienced by a member or members of the household (Hirst Reference Hirst and McAllister1997).
My research points to an increase in the number of rituals that younger, employed women are instigating these days by, for example, dreaming of their ancestors who claim to be thirsty, or by organizing a beer drink to thank their ancestors for their success in securing employment. Once their families have agreed to host a ritual, these women often take the lead in the preparations and purchases for, and the hosting of, the subsequent rituals (especially beer drinks, but also slaughter rituals).Footnote 11 Bank (Reference Bank2002: 648) observed a similar pattern emerging in Mooiplaas Location near East London, and has argued that by taking the lead in ritual and custom, ‘[Xhosa] women are seeking to authenticate their new-found material power by embedding it in a deeper set of meanings, values and activities that increasingly locate [these women] at the social centre of the community’. Women must, however, still defer to a male relative since a senior man must conduct the ancestral invocation, communicate with the people assembled for the ritual and lead the men who will conduct the actual slaughter, cooking and carving of the meat.
While recognizing that women and young people increasingly contest the dominance of senior men in ritual practice, we should take care to delineate the limits of this: we should ask which women are involved, and in relation to which aspects and types of ritual practice such challenges occur. I suggest that we should be careful not to lump all women together, not least because this downplays important social differences that exist between women, such as differences in age, marital status, kinship affiliation in relation to the ritual at hand, their main or current place of residence (rural or urban), and their social standing in other ways. Similarly, economic standing, centred on educational and employment status, and religious affiliationFootnote 12 are important in plotting the different roles that women are able to take up in the context of ritual, and in social life more generally. We thus need to clearly delineate and assess the different trajectories of change and upward mobility – and indeed impoverishment – between women. Many, if not all, of these social differences must also be applied to a nuanced analysis of the role of men in ritual.
More than 103 separate rituals and ceremonies were held in Hobana village during the twelve-month period from November 2000 to October 2001.Footnote 13 This means that a significant proportion of the homesteads in the village hosted a ritual in that time. Clearly, however, not every household conducted a ritual during the course of the year in question. In fact, since some rituals commonly take place in succession, in a number of instances it was the same subset of households that was responsible for organizing a particular sequence of rituals that were explicitly linked to each of their own preceding rituals.Footnote 14 These rituals ranged from just brewing mqombothi to the slaughter of an animal, the provision of mqombothi and brandy, and the preparation and consumption of other food. Certain rituals had the appearance of discrete occasions, but were in fact linked to other rituals that had been conducted before and still other rituals that were scheduled to follow. The rituals conducted in Hobana included twenty-eight different types of ritual (or distinct phases of a ‘multistage’ ritual), with the most commonly held ancestor rituals centred on the complex of mortuary rites, including imingcwabo (funerals), and the ukukhapa and ukubuyisa ancestor rituals mentioned above (see Mtuze Reference Mtuze2003: 25). Other rituals that were part of this complex were ukutshayelela inkundla (to sweep the courtyard), ukunxiba/ukukulula izila (to wear/remove mourning clothes) and ukucitha impahla (to disperse the clothes of the deceased). These various rituals associated with mortuary rites took place on twenty-nine different occasions during the twelve-month period. Other rituals, which usually involved only the brewing of mqombothi and the consumption of brandy, included ukuphuma (to come out/to graduate), which informed the wider community about a particular person's change in social status, ukwazisa (to make a new home known to the ancestors and community), ukuvula’ mzi (to open a new home), umtshato and umendo (wedding ceremonies) and ukucitha iintsimbi (to cast aside the beads of an ancestor who was a diviner).
In forty-three of the 103 rituals I recorded, the ritual consisted of only the provision of mqombothi and brandy (and generally some bottled SAB (South African Breweries) lager as well). This meant that 42 per cent of all the rituals did not involve the slaughter of an animal.
Of the twenty-nine rituals conducted in Hobana at which at least one cow or ox was slaughtered during the twelve-month period in question, fourteen (or 48 per cent) involved mortuary rituals. Nine of the fourteen mortuary rituals were funerals, comprising a Christian service with a cow or ox slaughtered on the pretext of ‘feeding the mourners’ present. On two separate occasions, two cows were slaughtered for this purpose, such were the numbers of people who attended the funeral. Seven of the nine funerals held over the period recorded were to bury elderly women and two were for men (one of these was a man in his early forties). The remaining five rituals that involved slaughtering an ox comprised the ancestor rituals ukukhapa (two occasions) and ukubuyisa (three occasions), which were hosted by widows for their deceased husbands.
People in rural Peddie District undoubtedly place great emphasis on mortuary rituals, whether these are done in terms of Christian burials or more ‘traditional’ Xhosa burial rites, or commonly as a hybrid of these two forms. Funerals are important social occasions and people attend from far and wide. The funeral of an elderly person from a well-known family might be attended by a few hundred people and involve considerable expense for the bereaved family. This has given rise to an industry in which funeral policies and membership of local burial societies provide some financial security and solace to the bereaved family, and have come to feature prominently in the livelihood decisions and social activities of many households (see Lee Reference Lee2011).
There is a widespread preference for burying deceased family members in their home villages wherever this is possible and practicable, even if they have spent most of their adult lives living away from the village. The village is where their ancestors are believed to reside, specifically in the kraal of their home umzi, and this is where their cultural roots are. This practice makes funerals an especially important element in the transfer of building materials, foodstuffs and money from towns to the countryside and gives rise to the movement of large numbers of people between town and countryside every weekend.
CONCLUSIONS
The contemporary salience of ritual practice as people's central means of communicating with their patrilineal ancestors – and, crucially, with each other – is apparent everywhere in rural Peddie District. I have suggested that, at least in part because of the widening socio-economic differences and economic uncertainty both within the village and between town and country, rural people's commitment to conducting a wide range of rituals (including beer drinks) appears to be virtually unassailable for the foreseeable future. The very activities and processes involved in planning, organizing and cooperating to successfully host a wide range of rituals are key sites for negotiating the tensions and reconstituting the moral and material relations within and between the dislocated members of homesteads in villages such as Hobana (Ngwane Reference Ngwane2003; Ngwenya Reference Ngwenya2002).
To conclude, gender relations and family life in rural Peddie District are not imploding across the board, but they are undeniably fraught. This is not new: social relations, including marriage, have been unsettled since at least the 1950s, in response to broader changes in the economy and political landscape of the country and countryside (Mager Reference Mager1998; Morrell Reference Morrell and Morrell2001). One of the significant ways in which women currently seek to deal with profound changes in the status of men is to be far more selective in the relationships they build and seek to sustain with the significant men in their lives. An increasing number of women appear to be steadily erasing men from their more feminized, cooperative social spaces and networks. Female-centred, multi-generational families headed by women and women assuming greater control of associations and local organizations are further indications of such changes.
The many and varied future implications of these changes are not clear, but the searing ‘gender-based’ violence that characterizes the rural Eastern Cape Province is evidence that the patriarchal order, personified and carried forward by younger men, is fighting a desperate rearguard action. This violence will likely succeed only in further alienating women from their menfolk. As men and women, young and old, drift apart, not least through the development of new settlements of ‘matchbox’ houses that are not homesteads in the normative sense, it is rituals as significant sites of social interaction and contestation that still bring the genders and generations together in highly charged, vital spaces.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am grateful to Erik Bähre and Daivi Rodima-Taylor for their invitation to contribute this paper here, and to Keith Hart and Sophie Chevalier for including an earlier version of this paper in the panel they convened at the EASA conference in 2012. I acknowledge with thanks my informants and research assistants in Hobana, and Phil Burnham, Chris de Wet, Deborah James, Leslie Bank, Pat McAllister and Lungisile Ntsebeza for pushing me to think more critically about this material. I thank the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive suggestions for improving the paper. Opinions expressed are my own.
