INTRODUCTION
The relationship between the colonial state and social anthropology has been the subject of robust debate among Africanist scholars since the 1960s. The major point of contention has been whether anthropology as a specialist field of the study of non-Western societies has been implicated in the colonial project, that is, whether, by imposing the notion of ‘tribe’ on much more fluid precolonial African identities, anthropologists employed by the state have contributed to perfecting ‘divide and rule’ policies. Scholars have taken different and often conflicting positions.Footnote 1 This article seeks to complicate this discussion by looking at the way knowledge was constructed through a relationship between the ‘colonial’ expert and the ‘native informants’.Footnote 2 It explores the complex dialogical relationship between Dr. Nicholas Jacobus van Warmelo, chief ethnologist in South Africa's Native Affairs Department from 1930 to 1969, and his local informants (mostly elderly men from ruling lineages, considered as experts or repositories of their traditions) who enabled him to pursue the political enterprise of mapping out the ‘Transvaal Ndebele’. The article also explores the contribution of local researchers, mainly African schoolteachers employed by Van Warmelo, in collecting oral accounts and recording traditions of the Ndebele, and discusses the vernacular manuscripts they produced from the early 1930s to the mid-1960s. These documents form part of an archive called the ‘Dr. N. J. van Warmelo Manuscript Collection’ in the South African National Archives in Pretoria.
To the extent that Van Warmelo relied on African informants' and researchers' accounts, his texts were not simply his own ‘inventions’ but the result of what Lyn Schumaker calls ‘the coproduction of cultural knowledge’.Footnote 3 This article suggests, firstly, that Van Warmelo's writings and interpretations of Ndebele history and society were fundamentally shaped by local informants' perspectives, which were themselves products of old traditions that had been recast in the context of contemporary struggles and changes occurring in early twentieth-century South Africa. Secondly, drawing on Thomas Spear's perceptive critique of the classical ‘invention of tradition’ model, the article highlights the limits placed by the informants and researchers on Van Warmelo's constructions of the Transvaal Ndebele.Footnote 4 As Spear puts it, ‘the case for colonial invention has often overstated colonial power and ability to manipulate African institutions to establish hegemony’.Footnote 5 This emphasis, he argues, has led to a neglect of the ‘historical development and complexity of the interpretative processes involved’.Footnote 6 This article examines the Van Warmelo archive from these complementary perspectives.
Who exactly are the Transvaal Ndebele? The notion of a Transvaal Ndebele has fallen into disuse since the end of apartheid rule in 1994. Since then, official sources identify the Transvaal Ndebele simply as Ndebele, and the people call themselves Amandebele or Matebele, names that have deep historical roots.Footnote 7 The Ndebele are scattered communities of Nguni origin, offshoots of a large Hlubi polity which migrated from the KwaZulu-Natal midlands between 300 and 500 years ago, settling in groups of varying sizes in parts of the Transvaal.Footnote 8 Comprising over 750,000 by the mid-1980s,Footnote 9 these people were named ‘the Transvaal Ndebele’ to avoid confusion with the much larger and well-known Zimbabwean Ndebele, renowned for their profoundly destabilizing impact on local societies during the early 1800s.Footnote 10 The Zimbabwean Ndebele arrived in the Transvaal in 1816 as refugees fleeing Mzilikazi during the Mfecane upheaval. They found the local Ndebele already settled and interspersed among the Sotho and attacked them, along with other local groups, in the 1820s.Footnote 11 In contrast to the newcomers, the Transvaal Ndebele ‘had already been in the country for so many generations that only the direction from which they had come, namely the South-East, was not yet forgotten’.Footnote 12 The dearth of historical scholarship on the local Ndebele stands in sharp contrast to the scholarly attention that has been focused on other groups affected by the Mfecane.Footnote 13
Van Warmelo, who was primarily responsible for documenting the Transvaal Ndebele, was employed by the Native Affairs Department to produce a taxonomy of African ‘tribes’. For ethnographic reasons, he adopted the residual label ‘Transvaal Ndebele’ to describe the Ndebele in South Africa, using geographical location and linguistic/cultural peculiarities to map out and distinguish the local Ndebele from other ‘tribes’. He classified the local Ndebele into Northern Transvaal Ndebele and Southern Transvaal Ndebele on the basis of geographical location; the division roughly mirrored a cultural split between the two groups. His understanding of the Ndebele of the Transvaal relied extensively on the information supplied by his researchers.
In prompting African researchers to collect local traditions and record their research in writing, Van Warmelo was motivated by the twin goals of conserving and salvaging the African traditions from corrosion by Western influences and of creating an archive. As an ethnographer and expert on African cultures, he sought to preserve the knowledge of African customs, manners and institutions contained in folklore in much the same way that James Stuart, a colonial official in Natal, had recorded Zulu cultural practices, and the Swiss missionary Junod had collected material among the Thonga from the late 1890s to the 1920s.Footnote 15 The product of a government ethnologist, Van Warmelo's work provided the kind of scientific evidence that the state required to control Africans. In the early 1960s, as ethnic homelands began to be established, his work was appropriated to provide justification for apartheid social engineering.Footnote 16 Similarly, African intermediaries involved in contemporary struggles over chieftainship drew on his writings to legitimate their own lineage's claims. Neither the African researchers' gathering of knowledge nor Van Warmelo's work in the Ethnological Department was politically innocent.
THE ‘NATIVE EXPERT’, LOCAL INFORMANTS AND PERCEPTIONS OF NDEBELE HISTORY AND SOCIETY
Scholars who have worked on Van Warmelo's biography and contribution to South African ethnography tend to highlight the influence of his mentor, Carl Meinhof, a highly regarded German Africanist linguist, on his thoughts, and to discuss his work in the Native Affairs Department, his unease with theorizing, his impressive linguistic skills (Van Warmelo was proficient in several southern African languages) and possible political implications of his writing.Footnote 17 William David Hammond-Tooke, a prominent South African social anthropologist and one-time colleague of Van Warmelo in the Ethnological Department, declared that he never heard his chief (Van Warmelo was his senior) discuss a theory of any kind. In Hammond-Tooke's view, Van Warmelo was politically neutral.Footnote 18 In contrast, Sarah Pugach points out the political implications of Van Warmelo's classification of African languages and characterization of ‘tribes’. She suggests that his fixing of ‘tribal’ identities provided order to what, for whites, might have appeared an inchoate mass of people whose links to one another were not immediately visible.Footnote 19 Pugach's insights inform my reading of Van Warmelo's differentiation of the Transvaal Ndebele into distinct categories that resonated with apartheid state policies.
Van Warmelo's texts explore the origin of the Ndebele and the relationships between Transvaal Ndebele groups.Footnote 20 He maps their common descent from the original chiefdom under Musi, and outlines the succession battle following his death and the formation of several chiefdoms.Footnote 21 Van Warmelo draws on earlier ideas about the Transvaal Ndebele's antiquity, distinctiveness and kinship, particularly the Transvaal Native Affairs Department's A Short History of the Native Tribes of the Transvaal published in 1905.Footnote 22 This work may in turn have been influenced by the Native Locations Commission (1904–8) which was collecting oral evidence about the history and geographical distribution of African people prior to the South African War (1899–1902).Footnote 23
A second source which Van Warmelo relied on extensively was Hermanus Cornelius Martinus Fourie's doctoral thesis in divinity, completed in 1922 at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands.Footnote 24 Fourie was one of a handful of white South African students who pursued doctoral studies abroad, generally in preparation for careers in academia and government. His thesis called for the establishment of ‘an ethnological bureau’ which would help facilitate the state's knowledge of, and control over, African societies in the country.Footnote 25 In Fourie's words:
The failure to solve the native question in South Africa is largely due to the ethnological ignorance of the authorities … It is necessary that the government of South Africa should as quickly as possible establish an ethnological bureau and a chair in Bantu languages.Footnote 26
In 1925, the year that Van Warmelo began his doctoral studies at Hamburg University, the Ethnological Section was established as a research entity of the Native Affairs Department. Its mandate was to conduct ‘scientific work’ on African societies in the country.Footnote 27 Much of this work was based on the collection of oral evidence. ‘Amandebele of Fene Mahlangu’, A Short History and Transvaal Ndebele Texts drew heavily on African informants' accounts.
Van Warmelo acknowledges his and his predecessors' reliance on local respondents as sources of knowledge. In Transvaal Ndebele Texts he refers to interviews conducted with men and women, old and young, living near the Berlin Mission Station in the Manala section of Wallmannsthal (near Pretoria) since late 1928.Footnote 28 In his work on a small Northern Ndebele group located in Leeuwkraal in the Hammanskraal area just north of Pretoria (see Map 1), published in 1944 as The Ndebele of J. Kekana, he acknowledged, ‘There are no official papers or published literature. The foregoing data were all obtained at Leeuwkraal in March 1944 from the chief, his uncle Abram, and other old and reliable informants’.Footnote 29 He also acknowledges the methodological problems associated with analysing oral traditions:
Our knowledge of Ndebele tribal history is slight, nor do the sources known to me agree on all points. The available information … is, of course, based on tribal tradition, which is seldom absolutely reliable, because individuals that really know the history of their people are rare. Moreover, tradition falsifies history in many ways, especially when it comes to inter-tribal relations, where lost battles usually become victories in course of time.Footnote 30
Map of the Transvaal depicting the Transvaal Ndebele areas c.1930Footnote 14.
Van Warmelo also reflected critically on the methodological implications of his identity as a white researcher writing about African societies. His standpoint on this approach is captured in his discussion of methodology in Transvaal Ndebele Texts:
The practice, in collecting ethnographical data, of allowing people to speak for themselves, is no doubt a sound one. One can then hear them state matters from their own point of view, in their own language and in the correct technical terms. This will have more value for later generations than the observations of a European, who cannot but see things from his own point of view and who usually gets very much in the way when the reader wants to see the object he is studying … As to the passages which, in spite of diligent enquiry, still remain obscure to me, I can only hope that future research will enable us to understand them. The text therefore is what the native actually said; everything else in the book is the product of a European mind.Footnote 31
Since Van Warmelo could not but see things from his own angle as a white scholar, he resorted to a rather ambiguous strategy of letting the subjects speak for themselves at the same time as selecting and ordering their voices. In Transvaal Ndebele Texts, he incorporated their voices in 91 pages of original Ndebele texts, alongside which he provided English translations and a brief commentary, preceded by a brief historical outline and a 10-page discussion of the linguistic features of the Ndebele language. As his principal informants in this text, he singles out two men, Hendrik Paliso Mabhena and his cousin Moses Mbatshazwa Mabhena, from the ruling Mabhena lineage whom he found particularly insightful and of great help. Hendrik was the son of Somratha, son of Silamba.Footnote 32 A cousin to the contemporary chief, he was also a professional inyanga (traditional healer and diviner) and an imbongi (praise poet of family ancestors and chiefs) of the Mabhena family who had learnt his art from his late uncle Cengiwe (Moses's father, also son of Silamba).Footnote 33 The second man, Moses, was less informed in traditional matters than his cousin Hendrik. While Van Warmelo found him less mysterious and more accessible, with no professional status to maintain, he noted his ability to dictate ‘a long coherent description or tale’ without leaving out the detail. The two men were no ordinary informants but experts whose conceptions of Ndebele identity powerfully shaped Van Warmelo's. They were not simply ‘colonial subjects’ who, to borrow Schumaker's words, were waiting passively for ‘colonial actors’ to exercise complete domination over them.Footnote 34 Although he prompted them to talk about certain issues, Van Warmelo was never fully in control of what was being told or how it was being told. Hendrik, for example, would typically not bonga (recite praises of family ancestors) ‘before he had gone through the customary rite which requires all present to take a sip of beer and spit it out for (-khafulela) the ancestral spirits about to be invoked’. Furthermore, he would never agree to do more than three izibongo (praises) on one day and sometimes performed only one.Footnote 35 Although ultimately Van Warmelo retained the authority to select and order his information, he had to negotiate complicated power relations between himself as a white researcher and the African people he studied, and this had an impact on the understandings of cultural and racial difference yielded in the research. In agreeing to tell stories about the history and customs of their people, both informants had their own agendas. They wanted to see everything committed to writing so that ‘all the folklore of their people should be preserved for posterity’. Hendrik wanted to have all the izibongo written down because ‘What is written cannot get lost’, adding rather poignantly that ‘perhaps I might die, and then there would be nobody’.Footnote 36
The anxiety expressed by Hendrik and Moses to commit everything to writing (as well as their adoption of European names) attest to changing economic and social realities. Van Warmelo reported that ‘contact with Europeans and changed economic conditions are affecting the Ndebele equally with the other tribes of the Union’.Footnote 37 Similarly, in her study of the Kekana of Mokopane (a section of the Northern Transvaal Ndebele), Isabel Hofmeyr shows how the veracity of the community's oral historical narratives was threatened by the breakdown of the physical and institutional contexts that governed their correct transmission and reception, resulting from the relocation of the chiefdom from the ‘traditional’ cluster-style homesteads to grid-plan villages under apartheid.Footnote 38 Hofmeyr argues that the disappearance of the kgoro (the courtyards where men discussed the chiefdom's affairs), previously the principal place for the rehearsal of oral historical narratives, and the vanishing more generally of the everyday physical world of the chiefdom, signified the loss of the site of practice of oral narration and of the powerful physical mnemonics for historical memory.Footnote 39 Given a similar erosion of traditions among the Manala, Van Warmelo's two respondents found it imperative to have their knowledge committed to writing. The act of recording the praises and folklore had the effect of upholding the power and prestige of the ruling elites. It might also shore up their lineage's claim to chieftainship at a time of intense and endemic succession disputes across the country. These concerns dovetailed with Van Warmelo's academic and political objectives.
Conflicts among the Ndebele over succession were both a cause and effect of the co-optation and conversion of African chiefs, through the Native Administration Act of 1927, into salaried officials and administrative factotums of the segregationist state.Footnote 40 Succession disputes, according to Hammond-Tooke, were the principal component of the Ethnological Section's work. Perhaps by recording the Manala chieftainship's ‘micro-history in pre-dispute tranquility,’ Van Warmelo was hoping to put an end to these persistent problems.Footnote 41 However, critics have highlighted some of the problems associated with the recording of oral accounts, such as the dangers to succession processes that emanate from recording just one perspective on the story.Footnote 42 In her study of James Stuart's archive on the oral traditions of Shaka, Carolyn Hamilton contends that, once written down, oral accounts became fixed and gained permanence, visibility and new authority.Footnote 43 Through Van Warmelo's published texts, selected narratives of power, authority and succession rights gained the status of trustworthy, even authentic, proof, privileging informants' claims over those of their unwritten counterparts.
VAN WARMELO'S ETHNOLOGY AND THE APARTHEID PROJECT
A key objective of Van Warmelo's research was to establish cultural distinctiveness between two main groups whom he calls the Northern Transvaal Ndebele and the Southern Transvaal Ndebele.Footnote 44 Adopting an essentialist perspective, he posits that the Ndzundza and Manala (Southern Transvaal Ndebele) ‘are purer in blood and have retained the customs and language of their ancestors to a remarkable extent’.Footnote 45 While Van Warmelo considered blood, customs and language as key markers of cultural difference between ‘Southern’ and ‘Northern’ sections among the Transvaal Ndebele, he was hard-pressed to establish these marks of identification:
[The Transvaal Ndebele] are generally considered conservative, and the remarkable extent to which the amaNala, for instance, have clung to tradition, where they were for centuries surrounded by the Sotho, certainly would seem to indicate such a trait in their character. In spite of this, Sotho influence has everywhere been very strong, and I gather that most Ndebele tribes, especially the Northern ones, retain very little of their ancient customs and language. In fact, many self-styled Ndebele are, anthropologically, pure Sotho, and in some places the language is said to be very corrupt. In other places nothing but pure Sotho is spoken nowadays.Footnote 46
The idea that the Manala and the Ndzundza (Southern Transvaal Ndebele) were more culturally conservative than the Langa, Kekana, Ledwaba and others (Northern Transvaal Ndebele) predates Van Warmelo's work. In the 1860s, the German missionaries of the Berlin Mission Society encountered the Langa people for the first time and made observations about their linguistic fluidity:Footnote 47
Grützner [a missionary] calls Mankopane's people a mix of Matebele and Basotho. The people call themselves the former. Nevertheless, our messengers are of the opinion that elements of the Basotho are prevailing. Both languages (Setebele and Sesotho) are spoken and understood by everybody, except maybe by the oldest.Footnote 48
While he did not formally acknowledge the source, Van Warmelo echoed the view that Southern Transvaal Ndebele were ‘culturally conservative’ and thus more authentic than their northern counterparts. This ethnographic ‘evidence’ fed into the apartheid government's homeland policy partly informing the decision to establish KwaNdebele as a ‘home’ for the Southern Transvaal Ndebele in the 1970s. It also led to the expectation that the ‘Sotho-ized’ Northern Ndebele would assimilate and ‘disappear’ in Lebowa and Bophuthatswana.Footnote 49
Language remained the key determinant of culture (and thus of ‘tribe’ or ‘race’) in all Van Warmelo's texts. This emphasis on language, according to Sara Pugach, owes much to the chief ethnologist's training in the 1920s under Carl Meinhof, a highly esteemed scholar of African languages at Hamburg University.Footnote 50 Meinhof held that each African language and culture was unique, and that it was essential to develop and preserve it against external influences. In Pugach's words:
Meinhof was committed to upholding and reinforcing the ‘barriers’ separating Europeans and Africans, even as these groups came into contact with each other. He maintained that each people had its individual position in the world which was best expressed through its language … Meinhof believed that language was a reflection of mental structure … that was particular to each ethnic group.Footnote 51
These beliefs are evident in Van Warmelo's work and gained momentum in the South African state from the 1930s onward, particularly among Afrikaner educators, some of whom – notably Werner Eiselen, a pioneer of Bantu education in the 1950s – had studied in Germany under Meinhof.Footnote 52 Eiselen began to argue for separate school systems and the use of mother tongue instruction from the 1930s.Footnote 53 Trained by Meinhof, Van Warmelo started working in the Ethnological Section at a time of growing segregationist thinking and, although he was not inclined to call openly for separation, A Preliminary Survey indicates that he clearly understood the value of the ‘practical nature’ of his work ‘as far as government and policy are concerned’. His job as government ethnologist entailed making Africans legible and overcoming the problem that ‘many of our tribes remain practically unknown to this day’.Footnote 54 Known and visible, ‘tribes’ could be controlled by the state. The Native Affairs Department's Report of 1950–7 spelled out that ‘the control of the hundreds of tribes of the Union’ was one of the Department's key functions and acknowledged the crucial role played by the government ethnologist, to whom ‘Many inquiries about the rights of Chiefs, questions of succession and tribal disputes are referred … for information, etc’.Footnote 55
Language Map of South Africa is arguably one of Van Warmelo's most important efforts towards making African societies legible to the state. Published in 1952, at a time when the National Party government was gearing up for its ambitious social engineering plan, Language Map provides detailed discussion of the geographical distribution of all the ‘tribes’ in the country, their subdivisions, the languages spoken, statistics and percentages, as well as a map showing different language groups. On the basis of linguistic commonality, he classifies people in the Mokopane and Polokwane regions and the small Kekana group around Hammanskraal as the Northern Transvaal Ndebele.Footnote 56 In his view, the type of Ndebele languages that they spoke had become more adulterated than Southern Transvaal Ndebele and constituted a separate Northern Ndebele language:
This language, which has no literature, is not taught in the schools, and is not officially recognised (in fact is not even generally known to exist), is being overwhelmed by North Sotho against which it has little chance … Various factors, but especially the bilingualism of many of the Northern Ndebele speakers, tend to disturb the accuracy of census figures with regard to the language.Footnote 57
Van Warmelo assumed the Transvaal Ndebele to be ‘naturally’ grouped into the ‘Northern’ and ‘Southern’ sections, using the broad expanse of the Springbuck Flats as the geographical divide (see Map 1).Footnote 58 He classified the chiefdoms situated south of the Flats as the ‘Southern Transvaal Ndebele’ and labelled those located north of this boundary as the ‘Northern Transvaal Ndebele’, regardless of their varied origins.Footnote 59 These new ethnic labels were applied somewhat inconsistently, failing in many instances to pay attention to the realities on the ground. For example, some of the Ndzundza chiefdoms that he classified as Southern Transvaal Ndebele had in fact shifted eastwards in the late 1700s and settled in the Roossenekal area. The Bahwaduba living in the Reserve Swartbooistad in the Hammanskraal district (south of the Springbuck Flats), were classified with the Ndzundza and Manala as the Southern Transvaal Ndebele. And yet the Kekana Ndebele in the same district were classified with their cousins north of the Flats as the Northern Transvaal Ndebele. Van Warmelo's rationalization was that, although the Bahwaduba were Ndebele in origin, they had ‘long lost their original language, and now speak a Kgatla type of Tswana like their neighbours the Ba Mosêtlha’.Footnote 60 While it was probably correct to classify the Bahwaduba as Ndebele in accordance with how they identified themselves historically, from the cultural/linguistic perspective so central to Van Warmelo's model their grouping with the Ndzundza and Manala is somewhat inconsistent.
In 1944, Van Warmelo published two slender volumes on the Ndebele, The Ndebele of J. Kekana and The Bahwaduba, a study of the Southern Ndebele.Footnote 61 Both texts rely on a narrow range of sources and reflect the perspectives of senior members of ruling elites to the exclusion of those of ordinary people. They focus on issues of chieftainship and the genealogical trees of the ruling lineages, key concerns of the Native Affairs Department, but they have little information on the complexities of contemporary Ndebele society, changing social and political institutions, incorporation of non-Ndebele groups and the diverse cultural composition of the chiefdoms. Van Warmelo ignores the evidence of these complexities as recorded by his informants. For example, he does not find it interesting that the vast majority of the subjects of J. Kekana were ordinary commoners, many of whom were non-Ndebele,Footnote 62 or that the cultural heterogeneity of the Kekana followed the displacement of non-Ndebele people (including the Phalane, Mogotlane, Tswai, Ramutse, Madiša and Malete)Footnote 63 who attached themselves to the ruling Ndebele lineage for protection and/or for access to land. Van Warmelo failed to pay sufficient attention to the complex character of Ndebele ethnicity, in part because his essentially linguistic approach did not involve extensive fieldwork research based on ‘living among the natives’, an approach that was central to the anthropological enterprise outside of Volkekundige or apartheid ethnography.Footnote 64 In his defence, Hammond-Tooke argues that Van Warmelo acknowledged some of the problems of his classificatory model and quotes him as saying:
This classification is based on a blending of all sorts of criteria. While it has a certain practical usefulness, it also has the defect that it creates a false impression of clarity where actually there is nothing but problems. It is a misleading over-simplification.Footnote 65
That simplification and practical value would have been precisely what the apartheid state needed from Van Warmelo's work.
LOCAL INTERLOCUTORS AND THE MAKING OF THE DR. N. J. VAN WARMELO ARCHIVE
Overshadowing Van Warmelo's published ethnological studies was the more ambitious and ongoing project of collecting vernacular manuscripts, a project initiated in the 1930s. The vernacular manuscripts formed the basis of an archive named the ‘Dr. N. J. van Warmelo Manuscript Collection’, stored initially in the Ethnological Section, but later moved to the national archives.Footnote 66 This collection was made up of the contributions of Van Warmelo's African interlocutors. From the 1930s, the Ethnological Section began to encourage African writers and other educated persons, mostly schoolteachers, ‘to record folklore and other information they could obtain from elderly and reliable members of the tribes’.Footnote 67 A substantial body of manuscripts of ethnological significance was acquired in this way and ‘prepared for use as a source of information or for publication’.Footnote 68 While African researchers tended to present the perspectives of the ruling lineages, a preoccupation that clearly resonated with Van Warmelo's interests, the distinctiveness and significance of their work lies in the intricate detail they recorded of social relations within the communities and interaction with other groups. This detail is absent from Van Warmelo's publications. Van Warmelo's diaries suggest that the authors were remunerated for the manuscripts they produced for the Ethnological Section.Footnote 69
Van Warmelo's methodology was unsophisticated. Chris van Vuuren, professor of anthropology at the University of South Africa, who worked in the Ethnology Department between 1983 and 1989 (while Van Warmelo was still nominally attached to it), recalls hearing that Van Warmelo used a standard questionnaire sent out to the researchers, which served as a manual for collecting oral accounts from local respondents.Footnote 70 Van Warmelo himself alludes to sending questionnaires to his African researchers in his 1942 diary.Footnote 71 In a letter addressed to Van Warmelo, dated 5 January 1942, Elias N. Sethosa, a local researcher and teacher in the village of Makoeng in Zebediela, alludes to the importance of word-of-mouth communication in finding informants: ‘I humbly send these few news, particularly directed to you. As I was told by our Head Teacher R. J. Mogoba at our school [sic]. That: news are [sic] needed by the Department. Therefore I tried my little best to introduce something’.Footnote 72 It is possible that an official from the Ethnology Section, probably Van Warmelo himself, may have sent out a memorandum via the educational authorities to the various African schools, soliciting interested teachers to collect accounts of local histories and customs from reliable informants. In a letter dated 2 October 1944, A. S. Mosehle of Tšatane Primary School at Molepo (in the Northern Transvaal), expressed concern that he was unclear about what he was supposed to be collecting and proposed a personal meeting with Van Warmelo in Pretoria so he might get proper guidelines.Footnote 73 Mosehle's letter enclosed manuscripts about divorce, inheritance and other matters among the Pedi.
Van Warmelo's research yielded several hundred manuscripts (a total of 11,535 pages) that contain richly textured accounts of local traditions and histories. Collected from the 1930s, these sources have so far not been utilized by historians and other scholars. Almost all of them are written in the vernacular languages.Footnote 74 Despite collecting and meticulously cataloguing these manuscripts, Van Warmelo showed no interest in interpreting them, relegating this task to future researchers. His primary work, according to Hammond-Tooke, revolved around producing five volumes on Venda law with W. M. D. Phophi (a Venda author and Van Warmelo's research assistant) and extensive detail on chiefly genealogies, local politics and ‘tribal’ histories intended to resolve endemic succession disputes over the chieftainship.Footnote 75 This fixation with cataloguing and archiving genealogies has recently come under attack for its effect in ossifying oral history and indigenous systems of law and for obliterating the essential ‘fluidity’ of history and law. Such fixing, Carolyn Hamilton argues, ‘may undermine [the resilience of oral accounts] and disempower precisely those people who are deemed to have the greatest need of the history that the oral accounts contain’.Footnote 76
A fundamental feature of these manuscripts is that they were written by people who were in many respects ‘insiders’ of the communities they were writing about. Most lived among their subjects of study and spoke local languages. At the same time, they were ‘outsiders’ in several other respects. Virtually all of them went to school at Christian missionary institutions, and most were not ‘children of the soil’ in that they did not originate from the communities they were studying.Footnote 77 Even so, the data they collected do shed some light on the contested nature of identity, the contradictory ways in which local people constructed images of the ‘self’ and how they understood their relations with others. Moreover, they provide perspectives which Van Warmelo, as a white researcher, may not otherwise have been able to capture.
My archival research identified about twelve African researchers who together produced over thirty manuscripts of varying lengths and quality on the Northern Transvaal Ndebele. All but one was written in Northern Sotho.Footnote 78 I focus here on six of these interlocutors. Elias Sethosa's 23-page manuscript is interesting for what it tells about the nature of precolonial wars between African societies and the use of war medicines (muti) concocted from different ingredients, including body parts cut off from fallen warriors of the enemy camp.Footnote 79 Sethosa comments on issues of identity pertaining to the Ndebele of Moletlane (the Kekana of Zebediela) and their neighbours, the Letoaba/Ledwaba, a splinter group from the Maune chieftaincy. About the former, he writes that ‘The setšhaba (chiefdom/community) of Moletlane is well known as a section of the Matebele. They are the great-grandchildren of Tsutše (Ndzundza, son of Musi). In fact it would be more appropriate to call them the Matsutsa (the Ndzundza)’.Footnote 80 He stresses kinship ties between the Ledwaba and the Kekana of Moletlane, insisting that ‘Letoaba was, in the early days, a Letebele (singular of Matebele), of Moletlane’. He describes Letoaba's birth from a junior moloko (lineage) within the ruling house, and comments on his courage. After fighting with his elder brother over succession in Maune, Letoaba sought an alliance with the Moletlane people to help him in battle. ‘But then because they were cowards’, Sethosa suggests, ‘they said to Letoaba, “Come with us, we will give you land to stay among us”. He claims that he was afraid of his elder brother who had defeated him’.Footnote 81 Sethosa describes the different ways in which Ledwaba proved his valour among the ‘gutless’ Moletlane people and how the latter conspired against him until the Pedi King Sekhukhune interceded on his behalf.Footnote 82 And so he explains the physical proximity of the Ledwaba to the Moletlane Ndebele.
Sethosa's view of identity has a parallel in J. S. Mahapa's six-page ‘History of the Lamola tribe’, the community he identifies as ‘a splinter from the large chiefdom under the Langa chief’.Footnote 83 Mahapa seeks to explain how this section of the Matebele ended up purchasing Rosenkranz (farm no. 974) in the Blaauwberg area. This is where this Ndebele group achieved autonomy from chiefly rule and came to be directly under the Native Affairs Department, something Mahapa seems to applaud.Footnote 84 He argues that, following the killing of their headman by the tyrannical Langa Ndebele chief, Mankopane, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, the Lamola section fled eastward and sought refuge under the chief of the Matlala, a Sotho/Pedi section. However, the lives of the Lamola took a nasty turn during the reign of Sekgwari Matlala between 1908 and 1920, a chief who ‘liked money so much’ that ‘he often sold his people to the mines in Gauteng (Johannesburg)’. But the killing of a senior Lamola mokgomana (councillor) by the chief, observes Mahapa, prompted another move in their quest for a place where they could live peacefully away from the despotic chiefs, culminating in their purchase of the farm.Footnote 85 Both Sethosa's and Mahapa's manuscripts indicate that ethnicity was insufficient as a basis for political alliance or preventing conflicts between the different Ndebele groups. Sethosa suggests that the Ledwaba Ndebele in fact paid allegiance to the Pedi chief and sought his protection against their Kekana Ndebele neighbours. Mahapa shows that the Ndebele identity of the Lamola was irrelevant in their seeking protection from the Matlala chief.
In contrast, in 1962, William Gwangwa submitted a manuscript over four pages long, entitled ‘How Mokopane's war with the Boers started’. Locating the root causes of the Makapansgat siege of 1854 in the hostile encounter between a detachment of the emigrant Boers and the Maraba Ndebele chiefdom in the Polokwane area in the period leading up to the siege, Gwangwa suggests that there was some degree of solidarity between the different Ndebele chiefdoms in the area. Following the Boers' ransacking of the chiefdoms of Maraba and Moletši and the killing of their leaders, Chiefs Kekana of the Mokopane and Mapela of the Langa were so infuriated that ‘they hatched a plot to punish those whites of the Voortrekkers’.Footnote 86 This resulted in sporadic attacks and killings of individuals and small parties of Boers along the main road from the south passing through the Kekana chiefdom, orchestrated by both chiefs.Footnote 87 It is notable that Gwangwa wrote his manuscript in 1962, over two decades after Sethosa and Mahapa. Perhaps this temporal difference explains their different versions of Ndebele identity. By the 1960s, Ndebele ethnicity was beginning to crystallize and some measure of ethnic solidarity was being forged between different groups within the context of surrounding homeland politics.Footnote 88 It is possible that Gwangwa may have been an ethnic nationalist (or influenced by them) striving for the recognition of the Ndebele as a distinct group from the 1960s to 1980s.
Local researcher C. M. Mokgohlwe, a teacher at a local school in Zebediela, sent several manuscripts to the Ethnological Section describing the customs, beliefs and traditional games of the Sotho, as well as the mourning and burial rites and taboos of the royals and commoners of the Zebediela chiefdom.Footnote 89 In a seven-page manuscript, he deals with the ancient customs of the chiefdom without applying the overarching label ‘Ndebele’. Archival records are silent on whether Mokgohlwe was an ‘insider’ or ‘outsider’ of the community. As a local teacher, Mokgohlwe seems to have been aware of the cultural diversity of the people, made up mostly of the Sotho and Ndebele, and the prevalence of Sotho culture over Ndebele. His description of ‘Sotho customs’ on the one hand, and the ancient burial rites of the Kekana on the other, reveals the complexity and cultural heterogeneity of the Zebediela chiefdom.Footnote 90 European observers had noted this complexity in relation to other Northern Transvaal Ndebele communities.
The author's keen eye for cultural nuance is reflected in his discussion of the burial rites, where he distinguishes between the ‘proper Kekana or Matebele’ who in the past had buried their dead in a sitting position facing southeast, the direction from which their ancestors had arrived in the area, and the Sotho commoners who had similarly buried their dead with the corpse facing the direction from which they originated.Footnote 91 While Mokgohlwe mentions the word ‘Matebele’ once, throughout this and other manuscripts he identifies the community as ‘setšhaba sa Moletlane’ (‘the nation, community or chiefdom of Moletlane’), ‘ba Moletlane’ (‘those of Moletlane’) or ‘ba ga Sebitiela’ (‘the people or subjects of Sebitiela’). This naming mirrored contemporary notions of identity. Regardless of their cultural differences, the people saw themselves primarily as subjects of their chief.
Matthew Eucherius Ledwaba, a teacher at St. Theresa's School at Lunsklip near Mokopane collected local oral histories and traditions for the Ethnological Section. Ledwaba came from the royal family, the son of a royal councillor (mokgomana).Footnote 92 In his opening statement he asserts that ‘Ba ga Mašašane ke Matebele’ (‘The Mašašane people are Ndebele’).Footnote 93 He describes the community in a way that reinforces conceptions of the chiefdom as culturally homogenous. He goes a step further than simply locating their place of origin in Natal and points to kinship ties with various other Ndebele groups:
The Mašašane group when they arrived here in the Transvaal it is said that they settled around Tshwane (Pretoria), at Moretele under the chief Manala, Ndzundza's brother. But the majority of the group broke away with Ndzundza and settled along the River Moutse because they had been defeated, and Manala's group remained behind (at Tshwane) … There were the Ndzundza, the Ledwaba, and the Kekana.Footnote 94
In this account, the Ledwaba people were related to surrounding Ndebele groups even though these blood bonds did not foreclose violent conflicts between them.
A sixth African researcher of Ndebele identity is Jonathan Mabangula Maraba, a schoolteacher and first son of Chief Morwasethula Maraba III.Footnote 95 Like Ledwaba, Maraba declares in his manuscript that ‘The Mašašane people are the Ndebele’.Footnote 96 He questions the view that the name ‘Ndebele’ was an imposed identity. The Mašašane people, he declares, ‘walked over the huge mountains of South Africa (Drakensberg Mountains) and then arrived in the Transvaal, where they settled at Magashula (Smithdorp), where they began to identify themselves as Matebele of Ledwaba of Maladji’.Footnote 97 This is the official history of the chiefdom and Chief Mašašane's endorsement is illustrated by the stamp on the cover page of the manuscript.
Born on 30 November 1909, Maraba taught at several schools around the Mokopane-Polokwane region before his untimely death on 13 January 1977.Footnote 98 The people in the Mabangula area of the Mašašane chiefdom used to come to him for advice on matters related to chiefly responsibilities and for mediation in local conflicts. His position as a member of a royal lineage provided Maraba with a motive for recording the history of the Mašašane people.Footnote 99 As a literate member of the ruling elite, Maraba was conscious of the inextricable link between culture and power. Those in possession of written documents had gained the upper hand in chieftainship struggles and land claims, especially after the chieftainship was incorporated through the Native Administration Act of 1927.Footnote 100 Maraba's manuscript covers the ‘Zulu origins’ of the Ndebele and describes their migration to the Transvaal. He also discusses external relations between the Mašašane and neighbouring groups – both Ndebele and non-Ndebele – particularly during periods of warfare. However, he provides no real discussion of internal relations between the rulers and the ruled. This emphasis on genealogy reflects the elites' anxieties about maintaining their positions in the face of constant disputes over chieftainship.Footnote 101 Unlike Mokgohlwe, Maraba seems not to have any qualms in disregarding the presence of the non-Ndebele within the chiefdom. His first sentence declares boldly that ‘Ba ga Mašašane ke Matebele’ which means, ‘The people of Mašašane are Ndebele’.Footnote 102 But even Maraba concedes that openings along the chiefdom's boundaries had once allowed people to move in (and out). He acknowledges that different unrelated groups had at some point in the precolonial past been incorporated into the Ledwaba chiefdom when they settled at Marabastad (near Polokwane). In his words:
During the time of Chief Milentde he moved with a section of the Matebele and established the chiefdom at Marabastad where they found the pre-existing communities of the people of Teffo, Legodi, Sekhaulelo, Papo, Kganyago, Khotda, Masenya, Mokoatlo, Mashao, Mokonyama, and Leopeng. All these groups fled when the Matebele arrived. The kgoshana (junior chief) of the Mokoatlo group informed Chief Milentde that these people did not have a chief, upon which they were brought back to form part of the Matebele.Footnote 103
The groups listed in the quote were a complex mixture of Sotho, Swazi and others who had become incorporated into the Mašašane Ndebele chiefdom. This mixing suggests a degree of porousness and mutability in ethnic boundaries in the nineteenth century.Footnote 104 Given their cultural diversity, the subjects of the different Ndebele chiefdoms existed within a reality of multiple, overlapping and alternative collective identities. Having been a feature of these chiefdoms for a long time, cultural intermixing had much deeper historical roots. This diversity could still be seen in the 1930s and '40s when these local researchers were writing.
These African perspectives profoundly shaped Van Warmelo's writings since he depended on local informants and researchers. However, since his task was to identify and fix ‘tribes’ on the basis of language, he did not dwell on the complexities of social interaction contained in the interlocutors' accounts. Nonetheless, by urging his local researchers to write manuscripts, the chief ethnologist made it possible for an extremely rich archive to be established.
CONCLUSION
This article has demonstrated the importance of acknowledging the pivotal role played by African researchers and informants in making African societies fathomable to white ethnographers. It has shown, following Lynn Schumaker, that cultural knowledge is fundamentally a result of co-production and that Van Warmelo's perspectives, like those of other ethnographers, were profoundly shaped by the African informants and researchers with whom he worked. Through their influence, his work became Africanized. Further, following Tom Spear, this article has argued that it is misleading to suggest that Van Warmelo ‘invented’ the Transvaal Ndebele. Rather, he reinterpreted Ndebele ideas, traditions and customs through the prism of his training as a linguist and ethnographer, in light of what his local informants and researchers were saying. As Spear so succinctly puts it, there are powerful limits to the invention of tradition:
Intellectuals need historical raw materials to construct their stories if their reinterpretations are to ring true. Precisely because struggles over tradition, custom and ethnicity are so embedded in local discourse and so emotionally fraught, they are readily evoked but not easily created. The limits of invention are great, challenging us to account historically for changes in meaning and significance.Footnote 105
Van Warmelo's knowledge, with all its misconceptions of the cultural features of the Ndebele chiefdoms in the Transvaal, is as much shaped by the local interlocutors' perceptions of their identities as by his understanding of Africans as ‘tribal’ subjects under the authority of chiefs. Ultimately, his writing and collection of vernacular manuscripts were, politically, neither innocent nor inconsequential. His work provided material both for the apartheid state's scheme of ethnic separatism and the ambitions of Africans engaged in struggles over chieftainship to claim scientific support for their desires. His archival contribution awaits the critical engagement of future scholars.
