“Anthropology (…) requires that we understand something of the situations in which particular practitioners worked and wrote.”Footnote 1
IntroductionFootnote 2
In the Max Gluckman Papers housed in the Archives of the Royal Anthropological Institute in London is an undated manuscript entitled “Conflict and Cohesion in Zululand: An Historical Study in Social Organization.” Circumstantial evidence suggests that it was completed in mid-1946 and probably submitted to the Boston publishing firm of Little, Brown, at the suggestion of Gluckman’s friend, the Johannesburg psychiatrist and author of Black Hamlet, Wulf Sachs.Footnote 3 The manuscript was never published but is important for several reasons.
The introduction emphasized the centrality of treating Black and White as a “single social body” not only in terms of material bases and personalities, but “Whites are part of the very fabric of modern Zulu thought, figuring in life from childhood, and so Blacks in White thought – there are not only cultures in contact, but people living interdependently with one another.”Footnote 4 In this manuscript Gluckman saw his ethnography as shaped by history. Zulu history, he argued, contra Malinowski, was important for two reasons: it explained and rationalized the personalities and groups subjected to contemporary analysis and it would enable Gluckman isolate any social pressures. The manuscript focused on how social alignments were formed and how conflict and cohesion arose from cooperation as much as from divergence of culture and led to economic problems which were ultimately insoluble, epitomized by official dilemmas of whether to promote policies of peasantization or proletarianization.
Not surprising given his hectic work schedule as Director of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute and scurrying about to welcome and train his newly arrived sociologists, the proposed volume is largely a reprise and a considerably expanded elaboration of his already published works.Footnote 5 This is not surprising given that Gluckman had lost most of his Zulu fieldwork notes in a fire at his camp in Loziland in 1941. However, what makes the manuscript important is that it contains an original chapter in which Gluckman describes how he did fieldwork. This chapter, the second in the manuscript, is the chapter presented here. In the prospectus Gluckman suggested that he was uncertain about including it: “[W]hether it can be retained depends on whether it is objective – i.e. I can show that any social anthropologist would have found similar problems – and not possibly due to my personal character.”
What gives added value to this manuscript is that it was written in Livingstone when Gluckman was at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute and thus he wrote against the background of his recent Barotse fieldwork. While Gluckman does not directly refer to his Barotse experiences, the comparison was constantly in his mind. Thus on his overland trek on the “Whores Road” to Mongu he confesses to his wife Mary:Footnote 6
In Zululand I was one of the people, even if I was “our White man.” But I slept in huts with them, drank beer, hunted; they crowded into my hut while I ate, slept and washed; even pulled my leg. Here I am always “Mulema” (“Lord”).
Safely ensconced in Katongo, his field site, he admits to Mary:Footnote 7
I have realised that I shall never with the Lozi be able to use my Zulu techniques of being absorbed as a semi-Zulu, and I think it was a mistake ever to have tried. Here I am already part of the social system, Mwakpweka, “the White Man of Katongo,” the learner of customs, and it is sufficient – or at any rate as much as I can achieve.
What is remarkable as well, is his reading in the field. Gluckman was seriously studying logic and philosophy, as to try to work out an epistemology suitable for social anthropology and this shows in his discussion of objectivity in this “Fieldwork Chapter” and his attempt to go beyond the directly observable. It is a manifesto to move anthropological research beyond “text” collecting and in many ways directly anticipates many of the concerns and issues which the Manchester School made famous such as the “extended case method,” “situational analysis,” and bringing colonialism into the analysis. Max Gluckman’s fieldwork in Zululand is important for many reasons of which two in particular stand out. First, the essay “An Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand,”Footnote 8 commonly referred to as “The Bridge,” as David Parkin has claimed, because of the “colossal impact it generated, not all of it acknowledged, has been the most important single work in British social anthropology.”Footnote 9 Certainly it is widely viewed as the paradigm-setting text for what later became known as the Manchester School of Anthropology, but its influence went far beyond Manchester as Terry Evens and Don Handelman’s volumeFootnote 10 and Bruce Kapferer’s introductory essay to this article attest. Second, during his Zululand fieldwork, Gluckman distinguished himself by becoming the first anthropologist to be banned from his field-site, a story well chronicled by Macmillan based on State Archival material.Footnote 11 I suggest that these events are not unrelated when seen in the context of Gluckman’s fieldwork strategies.
There have been several attempts to explain how “The Bridge” came to be written.Footnote 12 Most recently Chris Wingfield has suggested that it was largely a response to the introductory essay by Malinowski in Methods of Study of Culture Contact in Africa – published in 1938 by Lucy P. Mair, Monica Hunter and Isaac Schapera – while Gluckman was engaged in fieldwork.Footnote 13 In it Malinowski rather stridently criticized Gluckman’s friends and fellow South Africans, Fortes and especially Schapera, for suggesting that the missionary and trader should be treated as an integral part of tribal life when analyzing culture change. Gluckman would agree, but also lists other factors, such as the impact of Bateson’s notion of schismogenesis and that he was bored with “library research,”Footnote 14 although he might well here be making a virtue out of necessity given the restrictions placed his access to the Government Archives. The “Fieldwork Chapter” read in conjunction with a consideration of the wider socio-economic context suggests a much more complicated situation.
How and Why Gluckman Chose Zululand as a Research Site
Social and cultural conditions shaped Gluckman’s interest in contemporary Zulu politics. The late twenties and early thirties were an exciting time to be involved in “Bantu Studies,” because while the Afrikaans-language Universities were concerned largely with “the Poor White problem,” the English-language Universities were increasingly concerned with “the Native problem” (more accurately labelled “The White Dilemma”) and the interplay between these two priorities made for highly engaged debate, discussion and even violence on campuses especially by prominent student leaders like Gluckman, who was Secretary for the Bantu Studies Department of the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) as well as Leader of the Liberal Party in the NUSAS Parliament.
The native law and administration courses taught by Gluckman’s mentor, J.D. Rheinallt Jones, centered on the implications of the 1927 Native Administration Act, a key piece of legislation which facilitated the internal pacification of the native areas by allowing for the limited recognition of customary law and, importantly for the recognition of the governor-general of South Africa as the supreme chief of all the Africans. This legislation, modelled largely on how Whites thought the great Zulu chief Shaka behaved, allowed the governor-general to rule Africans by proclamation.Footnote 15 The general election of 1929 featured the so-called “Black Manifesto” which shamelessly exploited the so-called Native Question and led to a National Party victory.
Gluckman’s hand-written Honours thesis completed in May 1933 for the module on the economics of native life was “A Comparative Study of the Economic Position of the Chiefs in Certain Southern Bantu Tribes.” It was long: 150 pages. Apologetically, he claimed to have originally intended to cover “changes in the Bantu environment under the influence of European control,” and how the chiefs in their “economic functions had reacted to change” but the “unexpected development of the work made this impossible.”Footnote 16 He concluded in vintage Malinowskian terms: “The Bantu chief is like a spectroscope – through him the blinding light of society is transfixed, and shows in all the colors of social values. It is no wonder that the Native Economic Commission desired the Native Reserves to be developed through the chief.”Footnote 17
Having received a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford where he was awarded the first doctorate in Anthropology for a library-based thesis.Footnote 18 Clearly Gluckman’s major intellectual stimuli while in the United Kingdom were Evans-Pritchard and Fortes. Fortes recalled that most of their discussions in this period centred on ethnographic fieldwork.Footnote 19 Not only were they academically close – it was no accident that Gluckman was to be hired to Oxford in 1947 where both Evans-Pritchard and Fortes were teaching – but socially as well. Fortes and his wife Doris, and Evans-Pritchard and his South African-born wife Ioma, daughter of C. Heaton Nichols, the Zululand politician, visited the Gluckman family in Johannesburg, and in 1940, when Ioma’s first child was still-born, she sought comfort and solace by staying with the Gluckmans in Northern Rhodesia. Indeed when the time came in 1942 to draft a will naming a guardian for their first-born, John, the Gluckmans were torn between naming the Fortes or the Evans-Pritchards.
When Gluckman attended Malinowski’s famous seminar it had a clear focus on chieftainship and how it related to the practical issues concerning “Indirect Rule.”Footnote 20 Not only had Hilda Beemer given a seminar on the topic earlier in the year, but the week before Max presented his own paper on Zulu chiefs at the seminar, P.J. Schoeman, the Afrikaner anthropologist, had given a paper on Swazi chiefs. Indeed the papers – which were eventually published as Methods of Study of Culture Contact in Africa –Footnote 21 were originally delivered at London School of Economics Seminars in late 1933, and many criticisms raised later by Malinowski were first raised there.Footnote 22 Interestingly, Malinowski’s introduction to the book did not single out Schapera and Fortes but critiqued all the papers in the volume except the one by Audrey Richards.
While Gluckman had major difficulties with Malinowski’s theories and indeed was to publish the first substantive critique of them,Footnote 23 he was profoundly impressed by Malinowski’s ideas about fieldwork and Malinowski’s call for the anthropologist to “relinquish his comfortable position in the long chair of the missionary compound, Government station, or planter’s bungalow, where, armed with pencil and note book and at times a whiskey and soda, he has been accustomed to collect statements from informants. (...) He must go out into the villages, and see the natives at work.” In short, he should practice “open-air anthropology,”Footnote 24 but one also detects early on in his correspondence a certain scepticism, Malinowski is referred to as “the legendary figure, the fieldworker.”Footnote 25 Perhaps this scepticism was fuelled by the fact that both Fortes and Gluckman had first-hand experience of the colonial situation. Possibly indicative of this scepticism is the fact that perhaps the most famous photograph of Malinowski is that of him in his “Fieldworkers Tent,” yet I could not find a single photograph of Gluckman doing fieldwork either in Zululand or Barotseland. Indeed the closest I could find was a picture taken by Schapera of the car Gluckman used for fieldwork.Footnote 26 Moreover, Malinowski’s plea for an “Effective Colour Bar”Footnote 27 must have stuck in the craw of someone who followed Radcliffe-Brown and Schapera in viewing South Africa as a single social system and, as an avowed liberal, believed in the “Common Society.” In addition, Malinowski’s airy dismissal of history must also have upset an ardent bibliophile like Gluckman who had very effectively used history in his Honours thesis and when, while in the field, was asked to contribute a chapter to what became a classic, African Political Systems, essentially mined this thesis for his Marxian inspired historical analysis of how rebellions contributed to state maintenance.
In early 1935 Gluckman applied to the International Institute for African Languages and Culture (IIALC) for a twelve month fellowship starting in October 1936 to study Zulu chieftaincy. As motivation he pointed out that while there was much knowledge of “old” Zululand, little had been done on culture contact; he quoted the South African Inter-University Committee on African Studies (IUCAS) report that in Zululand “no work at all appears to have been done, despite the favourable opportunities for observation of this nature offered by Natal.” He went further and pointed out that many valuable comparisons could be made between Swaziland administered by the British Colonial Office and Zululand administered by the South African Government, “especially as the Union’s policy has broken down the Zulu nation, ostensibly, and the Swazi King has been left untouched.”Footnote 28 Moreover, he pointed out, he had taken two years of Zulu language at University and thus had reasonable linguistic competence.
Faced with impending Foundation funding cutbacks IIALAC decided not to make any awards that year to an exceptional field of fifteen applicants and to refer his application to South African sources. Eventually the newly instituted South African Council on Educational and Social Research awarded Gluckman a grant of 300 pounds to study “The Working of the Economic, Legal and Governmental System of Zululand, including a Study of both European and Native Organization; and their Respective Roles and Importance in Zulu Life.” So successful was his work that the next year the Council, again on the recommendation of IUCAS, provided Gluckman with a further 400 pounds to complete his work on “The Legal, Political and Economic Systems of Zululand.”Footnote 29
The Romance of Zululand
Zululand has long occupied a special place in the imagination of White South Africans where tales of Shaka and Zulu martial resistance to British encroachment in the late nineteenth century generated a sometimes reluctant admiration from even racist Whites. But the image can jar with reality. Zululand had been incorporated into what became known as Natal in 1897 and a few years later the 1904 Zululand Lands Delimitation Commission recommended that 3,887,000 acres be set aside for Zulu occupation while 2,613,000 acres was open for European occupation. As a primitive precursor to the notorious Native Land Act of 1913, Zulu were not to be allowed to rent or purchase land that had been reserved for Europeans and thereby maintaining a tradition of breaking numerous promises that Zulu land would not be alienated. Despite recommendations like that of the Beaumont Commission, which suggested that the unoccupied “White crownlands” be returned to the Zulu, White Natalians argued that Zulu accepted White settlement as a consequence of the Anglo-Zulu War. Zulu supposedly accepted this alienation because, being warriors, they knew and accepted the right of conquest. The area was seen by the government as providing potential for settling poor Whites, and to discourage speculation, sold off or allocated small holdings of between 300 and 2,000 acres with compulsory personal occupation. This was not a success and led to the checkerboard character of the area. Initially settlers were encouraged to grow cotton but this failed and so they turned to cattle but again without success. By the early thirties most of these English settlers had left the area and were replaced by Afrikaner farmers, who buoyed by large government loans and a lower standard of living apparently survived by growing sugar cane and raising cattle.Footnote 30
The settler lobby, ably led by their Member of Parliament C. Heaton Nicholls, managed to extract many subsidies. Europeans did not believe that Zulu were suffering from land shortage and the 1936 Native Lands Act only recommended an additional 3,000 acres be purchased despite significant population increase. Between 1921 and 1936 the population increased by 46% to stand at 137,881 and then increased at a slightly decreased pace of 15.6% to 157,574 in 1946. Cattle too, showed significant increase. Between 1921 and 1948, despite efforts at cattle culling, the large livestock increased by 133.75%.Footnote 31 The journalist Oliver Walker was alarmed at the problem of over-grazing.Footnote 32 Rather than simply cull, the Department of Native Affairs had embarked on a strategy of trying to obtain the consent of chiefs and people for limits, but were countered by the argument that rather than cull they needed more land. While the cattle auctions introduced in the mid-thirties were financially successful, they did not decrease the overstocking.Footnote 33 Cattle were the “grand theme-song” throughout Zululand and its legacy was long sweeps of treeless veld with ever increasing dongas since erosion was aggravated by periodic floods that would wipe away much topsoil.Footnote 34 Other changes were also occurring. Walker was struck by the fact that there were no young men about – they were off laboring on the mines and farms. By 1942 when long-term Native Commissioner H.P. Braatvedt returned to Nongoma, the Administrative headquarters, he was saddened and astounded at the misuse of intoxicating liquor. The traditional nutritious beer, tswala was now made more potent by adding sugar to promote fermentation. Braatvedt noted a huge increase in sugar sales and that Nongoma had small fields of sugar cane scattered all over. But it was the vice-like grip of dagga (L. cannabis sativa) that struck him. Historically, it had only been used by elders but now it was being extensively grown and smoked by all and sundry and transported to urban areas for sale.Footnote 35
Gluckman’s field-site, Mapopomas, was located 13 miles from the Nongoma that had in 1935 been upgraded to a senior magistracy and was regarded as the unofficial capital of northern Zululand. Administering its population of some 30,000 Zulu, divided into three tribes under chiefs (one of whom was the lineal head of the Zulu Royal House), was a commissioner, an assistant native commissioner, a European clerk and court messenger supported by three Zulu clerks and backed up by three European non-commissioned police and a two dozen Zulu police. They in turn were supported by a number of European technical officers in agriculture, veterinary, education, public works and health supported by their staffs. In addition non-civil service residents included a garage and hotel proprietor plus the obligatory number of traders, giving it a European population of approximately fifty. Scattered around the district were a number of mission stations and mission-run medical facilities run by the Methodists, Catholics and Lutherans.
Banned for Going Native
Gluckman’s banning from his Zululand field-site was clearly a turning point not only in his own biography but also in the history of southern African anthropology. It was, after all, the first case of an anthropologist being banned for trying to engage in what might be called intensive fieldwork, not the comfortable tent of Malinowski some distance from the action, but living in a hut as part of a larger kraal. While Gluckman long held deep suspicions about the role of Afrikaner anthropologists in facilitating his banning,Footnote 36 in his published accounts and unpublished account (reprinted here) he gave a different version.
There is also the official Native Affairs Department version that emerged, in November 1939, as a result of Mrs. A.W. (Winifred) Hoernle – his Wits mentor – writing to the Secretary of Native Affairs, Douglas Smit, asking him to allow Gluckman to return to finish his Zulu fieldwork as he had been awarded a grant from the South African National Bureau of Educational and Social Research – while he had a position with the newly created Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in Northern Rhodesia, the outbreak of the War meant that there was uncertainty as to whether he would be given funding to undertake research there. Indicative of her sense that there were other issues at play, Hoernle specifically mentioned that Gluckman was now married.
To examine the “Official Version” as found in the National Archives: Hoernle was clearly willing to use her network to facilitate Gluckman’s return. She first asked Lugg, the chief native affairs commissioner for Natal, who was an old acquaintance – he had been one of the few officials to do Hoernle’s Diploma in Bantu Studies. Lugg referred her to Secretary of Native Affairs Smit, another person she knew, who telephonically informed her that the reason for the ban was because Gluckman had camped out among the “Natives: and tried to live with them under the same conditions and that he had interfered in a Chiefly disciplinary matter.”Footnote 37 Always professional and seeking documentation, Smit called for full particulars which Lugg then supplied courtesy of the acting native commissioner and police sergeant at Nongoma.
Acting Native Commissioner Langfield promptly interviewed Regent Mshyeni, who interestingly also does not mention the flogging incident which Gluckman was to make the centrepiece of his fieldwork difficulties in his unpubished chapter and quoted him as saying:
I do not want him here – he was here long enough before. I have heard that he wears a “beshu” at times when out at Matolona’s kraal. I do not like Europeans who want to live in Native Kraals.
He is always asking people how they are treated, if they are over-taxed, whether they are oppressed and whether the Chiefs and Indunas like the feeling of being under European rule. I think he is working for someone undisclosed. In fact, the man may be a Communist whom we are warned against.
His questions at times are too intimate regarding our sexual life. I ask that he not be allowed here but suggest that he worry other districts for a change.
In addition Langfield also interviewed the local police sergeant who averred:
I have to inform you that although I know of nothing against the applicant, I do not consider it advisable for him to have permission to mix with the Natives. He is pro Russian and he does not know the Native and his work amongst them would only tend to make the Native believe that his was on the same or higher plane that (sic) the European.
Langfield reported that Gluckman had lived in a hut at Matolane’s kraal, not one specially built, but loaned to him and that he had tried to subsist on the local native diet. “By bringing himself down to their level” he hoped to obtain the best information “in the belief that if they regarded him as one of them they would divulge information.”Footnote 38
While Langfield personally disagreed with Gluckman’s methods, he could not truthfully say that he resented his presence. While Gluckman had, according to him, “rather extreme social views” and was an “avowed atheist,” he did not detect any communist tendencies and concluded by suggesting a compromise: to allow Gluckman back for a month to finish his work and then requiring him to move to another district. Moreover, he observed, if Gluckman were allowed back, in accordance with the new rules he would not be allowed to reside in the reserve.
Lugg disagreed with the recommendations of Langfield and emphatically did not want Gluckman to return and, trying to further justify his viewpoint, added that Gluckman had taken Headman Matolane’s surname of Ndwandwe implying that he was a “brother.” The assault had taken place in November 1938 in the town of Vryheid and while the Regent had been incensed, it had never been brought to “official notice.” Lugg concurred with the remark that police regarded Gluckman as pro-Russian. The cautious Smit then telephoned E.N. Braatvedt, newly appointed president of the Pretoria-based Native Appeals Court for Transvaal and Natal, who had been native commissioner in Nongoma during Gluckman’s fieldwork. Indeed Gluckman thought so highly of Braatvedt that he had listed him as a referee for his Rhodes-Livingstone Institute job application and Braatvedt had given him quite a complementary recommendation.Footnote 39 Braatvedt, Smit noted, claimed that while friction had arisen concerning the assault case, Mshiyeni had exaggerated the events. Gluckman had indeed lived in a kraal and, according to Smit, spoilt the “Natives.” While he was a negrophiliast, he was not pro-Russian and had “many sound views,” nevertheless he felt that Gluckman should not be allowed to return to the field. Eventually, at the end of November, Smit wrote to Hoernle informing her that on the basis of information received he could not give him permission to visit any Native area. Apart from providing valuable material for an ethnography of bureaucratic functioning and Mshiyeni’s keen appreciation of officials’ phobias – communism and cross-racial sex – empirically there was no evidence that Gluckman was indeed transgressing these bogeys. Most importantly, one fails to detect Gluckman’s side of the argument or issue.
“I Am My Own Guinea Pig”
Going into the field, judging from his quite copious correspondence with Fortes, Gluckman seems to have been obsessed with three issues. First, that he was a “sissy” going to such a “tame” place as Zululand compared to the challenging fieldwork situations Fortes and Evans-Pritchard had to contend with. Second, he was concerned with finding a job, either during or after fieldwork. Indeed jobs for anthropologists during this period were practically non-existent, so Gluckman wrote with some pride that on landing in Cape Town, Schapera had encouraged him to apply for a junior lectureship in Native Administration, a position which eventually went to Jack Simons in 1937. Visiting Wits, A.W. Hoernle encouraged him to finish his Law degree and apply for a position there as lecturer in Native Law and Administration but the position went to Julius Lewin. Gluckman did however give a series of lectures for Hoernle when she was ill and while he was on medical leave from the field, gave several well-received public lectures at Wits on topics like “The Community Imprisoned” to the Wits University Wives Club. It is uncertain whether he applied for A.W. Hoernle’s position that was eventually filled by Audrey Richards, although he did encourage Fortes and Evans-Pritchard to apply.Footnote 40 The third issue, and perhaps the immediate dominating one, was his relationship to Doreen Greig.Footnote 41 He was not in love with her, he confessed to Fortes, but obsessed with her. Such was his obsession that he went into psychoanalysis with the pioneering South African psychiatrist Wulf Sachs, who became until his death a close family friend. These three concerns combined in important ways. Given Max’s personalityFootnote 42 it is likely that he wanted to go one step further than Fortes and Evans-Pritchard had done, by getting close to “native,” but at the same time this was tempered by the need to find employment so that he could not afford to antagonize influential people, while some of the advice (provided by Fortes and Sachs) in trying to break this obsession with Doreen might, I will later suggest, have contributed indirectly to his banning from Zululand as well.
A few months after arriving in Zululand, Gluckman confided in Fortes:Footnote 43
I feel most worst because after all my years of theoretical training I haven’t acquired a technique for dealing adequately, let alone analysing, the ordinary day-to-day activities that make up social life. (…) It is too facile, it seems to me, to describe the people who plough, how they plough, how the food is distributed. I notice that the Zulu, like Europeans, automatically go about their economic duties.
Gluckman thus proposed to describe his fieldwork in great detail because it formed the basis of his interpretation of the social structure. He felt the attitudes of Zulu towards Whites was important and described and used them in his analysis because it influenced the information he gathered and he wanted to see how far he could generalize it to the experience of other fieldworkers. At the same time Gluckman realised the importance of White attitudes towards Zulu as well. Zulu gossip about the behavior of Whites was ubiquitous and vice versa, and undoubtedly influenced their behavior. Indeed as the official version of Gluckman’s banning suggest, he was the victim of hearsay evidence, otherwise known as gossip. As Gluckman observed in the chapter reprinted here, Zulu and Whites engaged in exaggerated stereotypes of the “Other” because they had limited social relationships.
The Gate-Keeping Symbiosis of Mshiyeni and Lugg
Clearly two of the key players in facilitating Gluckman’s fieldwork were Regent Arthur Mshiyeni kaDinuzulu and Chief Native Affairs Commissioner for Natal and Zululand Harry Camp Lugg. Both of them had assumed office shortly before Gluckman arrived. Who was exploiting who was an open question. Shula Marks captures the situation well with the title of her book The Ambiguities of Dependence in South Africa.Footnote 44
Described as “a good-looking man of fine build, spruce and tailored with a Bond Street air (…) [Mshiyeni] had spent most of his time in Durban and Johannesburg, filling various positions of trust with big employers of native labour, for his rank enabled him to discipline Zulus away from their kraals.”Footnote 45 Chief Native Commissioner Lugg was unstinting in his praise of the regent. He wrote in June 1934 that:Footnote 46
Mshiyeni is an agreeable person to meet: he is abstemious, particular about his appearance and polished in manner. As a man and as a Chief, his conduct has hitherto been entirely satisfactory. As to his domestic affairs, perhaps I may mention that he has only two wives, as against his predecessor’s forty-seven.
Three year later, in 1937, Lugg encouraged Mshiyeni to accept nomination as patron of the Zulu Cultural Society whose purpose it was to define and promote “wholesome traditions, culture and rules of etiquette.” This society – founded by Chief Albert Luthuli, later president of the ANC and Nobel Peace Prize winner in 1960 – was the recipient of a government subsidy of 250 pounds. Patrons included the minister for Native Affairs, the secretary of Native Affairs as well as the chief Native Affairs Commissioner for Natal.Footnote 47
Lugg went further and successfully campaigned to have Mshiyeni’s stipend increased, and eventually supported the regent’s elevation to “Acting Paramount Chief” in 1939, arguing: “It is necessary that we should have a powerful weapon to counter the insidious propaganda which is being disseminated amongst our urban Natives, and this can best be secured by strengthening our tribal system in Natal.”Footnote 48 Indeed many officials were concerned at the African reaction to the so-called 1936 Hertzog Bills, which dealt with the African political representation and land consolidation.Footnote 49 The lesson was clear to almost all Native Affairs Department officials and their academic associates. Fears of the power of Zulu kings were trumped by the need to counter the rising tide of African politicization and the bogey of “detribalization.” For Zulu nationalists, both “traditionalists” and kholwa (the Christian and educated urban Zulu-speakers), this was an important step towards having the paramountcy or Ingunyama (“Lion”) restored.
Mshiyeni became a prominent booster of government policy persuading the northern Natal Zulu in 1938 to accept “without demur” the government decision to destroy their cattle as part of their campaign to stamp out foot and mouth disease.Footnote 50 He also enthusiastically supported the government’s war recruitment efforts, although this probably had more to do with asserting Zulu notions of martiality than a desire to defeat Hitler. Being interested, like many traditional authorities, in the promise of increased land under the Hertzog Native Land Trust Act as one of the nominated and more conservative members of the Native Representative Council, Mshiyeni could be counted on to hold the line against the educated urban intelligentsia and the increasing politicization of Blacks, making speeches proclaiming the need for collaboration with the government. Indeed he continued to support the government even after he was no longer regent. With such an obliging regent, clearly minor indiscretions could be readily overlooked and small appeasing favors done like banning Gluckman.Footnote 51 Being a regent in this era called for exceptional juggling skills in dealing with both Zulu and Europeans, and Mshiyeni managed to keep several balls in the air simultaneously.
Mshiyeni’s patron, Harry Camp Lugg (1882–1978) came from an old “Pioneer Zululand” family and joined the Natal Department of Native Affairs in 1899 and became a licensed Zulu interpreter and translator in 1906. He retired in 1941 but was kept busy by being appointed a member of the Local Health Commission and then in 1946 was commissioned by the Provincial Administration to write a history of Natal in an effort to highlight the importance of the province.
A keen amateur ethnologist of antiquarian bent, in retirement he reminisced that: “The best thing I ever did was to let Mrs. Hoernle persuade me to take the Witwatersrand Diploma in Bantu Studies. It opened my eyes for the first time to the meaning of so many Zulu customs. She was a wonderful woman, Mrs. Hoernle,” and the obituarist wondered how many “authorities” on “native affairs” would admit that they could learn anything from a university diploma.Footnote 52 Despite, or precisely because of this, Lugg felt threatened by Gluckman’s presence.
Given the administrative structure of the Department of Native Affairs, officials took their queue from Lugg and sought official approval. So, for example,Footnote 53 the native commissioner at Hlabisa sought permission (18 June 1938) to tell Gluckman about simple and probably readily available gossip in the Nongema pub about whether Zulu sought guidance and assistance from the commissioner, and what the commissioner’s daily routine was, and what brought Zulu to the office, and how Zulu reacted to government schemes. Lugg decided that supplying such information was “not desirable” and complained further that Gluckman had asked the Agricultural Department a long list of questions that Lugg felt was so technical that they would not be able to answer them (2 June 1938). To be safe and to sabotage the request with bureaucratic inertia – see below – Lugg referred the request to Secretary Smit. Smit had no objection to the supply of such material and a compromise was reached whereby commissioners could provide such information but that it would be listed as data collected by Gluckman and officials not cited. Scribbled at the bottom of the memo was “Mr. Lugg does not feel happy about this young man’s activities.”
Even letter press books prior to 1907, which would help Gluckman reconstruct Zulu history, were denied to him, although according to the Archives Act he could have access to documents written prior to 1901 and then only those deposited in the Archives. So it took over three months for his request to consult this material to be refused, in sharp contrast to the efficient response to Smit’s request for information about Gluckman. Lugg went further and warned the Pietermaritzburg archivist (located in the same building as the chief native commissioner) “to be vigilant that only Government Regulations and Blue Books be allowed perusal.” Foot-dragging could be a fine art as when the archivist took more than six months to respond to a later request for information to inform Gluckman that he was denied access to the Archives of Native Affairs “as per circular 21/1941” except for court records. Gluckman had good grounds to suspect that there was a deliberate informal policy to deny him access to official material.
Of course one must also consider the organizational culture of the Department of Native Affairs in which the Natal “old garde” like Lugg and the Braatvedt’s had to operate. Until 1924 the department constituted something of a marginalized elite group, but then Prime Minister Hertzog saw it as an opportunity to create employment for poor Whites and numerous educated Blacks were forced out and replaced by Afrikaners. There was very little opportunity for educated Blacks in the department. In 1946 out of some 136 Black matriculants who applied for positions within it, only eight were hired.Footnote 54
While the senior “old garde” in the Department still had a professional ethic, this was changing and certainly amongst their younger colleagues who were encouraged by institutional arrangements. For promotion, Schapera complained:Footnote 55
Officers of the Native Affairs Department must speak the official languages of the country, and pass the Civil Service Law Examinations; but they are apparently not required either to speak the languages of the peoples with which they are most directly concerned, nor is any special knowledge demanded from them of the Native laws and customs which they have to administer.
In the two year Lower Civil Service Law Diploma, Bantu law was only an optional single course. Indeed, as Schapera showed, officials who took time off to study for a Diploma in Bantu Studies at one of the six South African Universities offering it, were discriminated against, losing three years of seniority. A cursory survey of Annual Reports of the Department of Native Affairs shows that very few officials took advantage of the financial bonus to study a Black language. This racism was not restricted to the Department of Native Affairs, but was deeply embodied in the very structure of South African society. Despite the fact that “Bantu law” was of critical importance to over 70% of the population even in the law schools of liberal English-speaking universities, it was hardly taught at all.
No wonder that Brookes, an early expert on Native Administration, and later Senator lambasted the department for possessing a “more than ordinary lack of imagination and much red tape and (…) inflexible regulations.”Footnote 56 Walker, the journalist who wrote about his experiences in the Department in his book Kaffirs are Lively, entitled his chapter on the department “The Native – Is he Human?” Not only was he struck by the often open racism, but officials had “no goal, no set plan, no conviction,” about the future of Blacks,Footnote 57 perhaps the ultimate expression of power. Clearly with such a changing organizational culture the Natal “old garde” must have felt insecure and under threat and thus we can understand Native Commissioner H.P. Braatvedt’s concern when he wrote to Lugg concerning the nettlesome succession issue that “[t]here are scores of ‘Native Administration Experts’ (self-styled) who are waiting to heave stones at us.”Footnote 58 Intimidations of this were apparent in Gluckman’s reception by the Native Farm Labour Commission. Established in 1937 its mandate was to study the critical shortage of farm laborers and Gluckman gave evidence at its hearings in Nongoma. Some commissioners apparently objected to Gluckman’s evidence as based on hearsay and its lack of statistics, so Gluckman was forced to write a memorandum explaining and justifying his expertise.Footnote 59
This fear of potential criticism shaped the department’s approach to Gluckman because he was not the only anthropologist to do fieldwork in Zululand during this period, nor was the department’s approach to anthropological fieldwork consistent. At the end of June 1939 Mshiyeni protested about Aubrey Myburgh, an Afrikaner ethnologist doing fieldwork in his area, because of Gluckman’s “peculiar behaviour,” but Lugg agreed that Myburgh could continue to do research in a neighboring area and that the Regent could raise the matter with the Minister of Native Affairs on his visit to Natal a month later.Footnote 60 In fact, Myburgh managed to total a year’s fieldwork between 1938–1940 and published in 1944 Ezakwazulu: ’n Volkekundige beskrywing van die Zoeloe in die volkstaal (1944) funded by the same source that funded Gluckman: the South Africa Bureau for Educational Research. It was, in fact, the first ethnography published in an indigenous language.
Indeed, while the Inter Universities Committee on African Studies had declared Zululand a priority area in 1934, it was not a fieldwork res nullius when Gluckman engaged in fieldwork. His fellow Wits student, Eileen Jensen Krige, had not only published an article on Zulu transitions, co-authored with a Zulu inspector of schools,Footnote 61 but also compiled a huge library-based compendium which was published as The Social System of the Zulus.Footnote 62Siliwa, the Zulu, a pioneering ethnographic film, had been made there in the late twenties by the Italian anthropologist Lidio Cipriani and the Austro-German ethnologist Viktor Lebzelter had also visited and published on the region. At least two MA theses had been produced in Stellenbosch in 1936 and 1937 – probably under P.J. Schoeman’s aegis – on different aspects of Zulu culture.Footnote 63
The “Platzgeist”Footnote 64–: What is Left Unsaid
Thus far this paper has examined the various official and semi-official archives, but it is also necessary to examine other sources: activities that are hinted at, but not recorded, and which influence the written record. There were several interlocking stereotypes and events which combined to create a “Zeitgeist” based largely on anti-semitism and anti-intellectualism in which it was almost inevitable that an independent thinker like Gluckman would be denied permission to return to Zululand and that he would write his famous essay.
Anti-semitism was rife in South Africa in the thirties and Gluckman was centrally involved in disputes and challenges to it as a student leader in NUSAS. Anti-semitism was found not only in official and public practices,Footnote 65 but behind closed administrative doors as well. Japie Basson claims in his political memoirs that the most important reason why he resigned from the National Party in the early fifties was that Hendrik Verwoerd, then Minister of Bantu Administration, refused to allow White investment in the Bantu Homelands.Footnote 66 In the privacy of the National Party Native Affairs Study Group caucus, Verwoerd explained that the “real” reason for not allowing European investment into the Bantu Homelands was because it would open the gates for Jewish investors who would insist on open facilities. Apart from the usual, still common, anti-semitic idioms in Afrikaans, like calling a cash register a Jewish piano and terming shady business practices a “Joods bedrog” (“Jewish deception”), there were also ones pertaining to sexuality. It is important to emphasize that anti-semitism was not restricted to Afrikaners. The Greyshirts, a Nazi clone,Footnote 67 claimed to be particularly successful in rural Natal among English-speakers. In the 1938 elections they fielded three candidates of whom two candidates were in Natal in the Vryheid and Weenen constituencies which were adjacent to Zululand. Both candidates retained their deposits.Footnote 68 Such was the depth of anti-semitism that as late as 1947 there was talk of creating a Hitler Center in Newcastle.Footnote 69
As if to address these issues, in her two and a half page reference letter in support of Gluckman’s grant application, his Wits mentor A.W. Hoernle, pointed out that Gluckman not only already had experience working well with Africans, but also had “the personality necessary to immerse himself in fieldwork and the insight to grasp the fundamental principles which control and integrate it. (…) The very fact that Mr. Gluckman is a Jew gives him a special advantage in this respect, since he is not the type of acquisitive Jew, but the reflective Jew, who through the experiences of his race knows already much of the bitterness, many of the problems facing a people who are in a nation but not accepted as of it.”Footnote 70
But in this era of increasing attempts to regulate sexuality epitomized by the passing of the so-called “Immorality Act” (1928) prohibiting marriage between Europeans and other races, one of the most potent insults in rural Southern Africa was to call someone “an illegitimate son of a Jew” – libido and anti-semitism made for a potent mix. Clues to the potency of this submerged sexuality anti-semitism are found in numerous places, such as Hoernle’s comment that Gluckman was “now married” in her 1939 letter asking that Gluckman be allowed to return to his field site. Gluckman’s himself comments about the stories he heard about the sexual escapades of the Stellenbosch anthropologists and his hope that they would dismiss similar stories about him, but feared that they would not – see below in Gluckman’s text. Similarly Mshiyeni’s comments that Gluckman was asking “embarrassing questions concerning our sexual practices” and was a “communist” adroitly fed into what was commonly called the “Jewish-communist myth” but also with strong sexual undertones. Reading the Gluckman Papers it is clear that his “sexual questions” were not nearly as complete, obsessive nor as in-depth as those of some other Afrikaner anthropologists who were doing fieldwork in Zululand during more or less the same period.Footnote 71
The Whites of Nongoma were a community ripe for flourishing gossip. Walker was particularly struck by the air of suspicion that surrounded local Europeans; one did not drop by for a friendly chat, a view shared by other observers.Footnote 72 In his memoir Braatvedt – who spent the early forties in Nongoma – averred that local Europeans often had a low standard of honesty.Footnote 73 Gluckman was a romantic, and – probably in an effort to break his obsession with Doreen – wrote love poems to at least one White female teacher in Zululand while doing fieldwork, and this must have spread like wild-fire in the European community of Nongoma. For many years Gluckman believed that the Afrikaner anthropologists P. J. Schoeman and Hans Holleman had been responsible for his banning because they had seen him wearing a beshu, a traditional garment while on a visit to a Nongoma trade store. Holleman, however, denied this and claimed the White trader had taken umbrage at Gluckman’s dress.Footnote 74 White gossip was important and local Whites expressed scepticism about Gluckman’s ethnological project because they believed he spoke no Zulu. In such settler-style communities, as Gluckman was later to show, gossip had important consequences, and in this case his fieldwork methods were to lead to what some sociologists called “deviance amplification.”Footnote 75
Fragmentary anecdotes suggest that the paranoia concerning the communist bogey was not only widespread, but deeply felt, especially in the African Reserves. For instance, Julius Lewin, a contemporary of Gluckman and a liberal-socialist “African law lecturer,” recorded how when in the early forties he wrote an advisory pamphlet for Blacks on their legal rights, at least one native commissioner took it to the police to inquire whether such material could be freely circulated!Footnote 76
This, coupled to Gluckman’s rather unconventional behavior, living in a kraal and occasionally wearing a beshu, must have unsettled the European community. As Herbert Spencer recognized, long before Foucault, the most basic kind of government is the government of ceremonial observances. It has the largest share in regulating men’s lives. Spencerian “government by ceremonial observances” is crucial for understanding. Central to this project in the colonial situation was the prevention of “insolence” by the colonized which disrupted the colonialists image of moral authority, and thus Gluckman’s behavior was seen as undermining a situation already fraught with insecurity by engaging in behavior deemed improper.
Perhaps most significant though was the organizational culture of mainstream Liberals centred around the Hoernle and Rheinallt Jones, Gluckman’s main South African mentors, which called for a “soft” approach when dealing with the Native Affairs administrative apparatus, in both public and private interactions: one simply did not antagonise, criticise or dare to bring them into the analysis. This was the approach drummed into her students and which raised the ire of Rheinallt Jones’s left-wing political opponents like Hymie Basner and Margaret and William Ballinger.Footnote 77
The Afterlife of Zulu Fieldwork
Having started his new job at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, “The Bridge” was written while Gluckman and his wife Mary Brignoli were living for two months in Livingstone with the RLI director, Godfrey Wilson and his anthropologist spouse Monica, who were then discussing and writing their underrated classic The Analysis of Social Change.Footnote 78 Its emphasis on scale provides a striking resonance with “The Bridge.” In private correspondence Gluckman appears irritated, if not offended, that Godfrey did not acknowledge the input of others, including of course his own. Indeed Gluckman was shocked at Wilson’s lack of acknowledgements to people and books in his last essay – it was scientifically dishonest he felt.Footnote 79 Thus, for example where he wrote of repetitive and changing social systems,Footnote 80 the Wilsons made the same distinction but labelled it “ordinary” and “radical” change. Proper acknowledgement was something that Gluckman was later to make into a near fetish in his own books and articles.
Max readily admitted that his “Bridge” papers were incomplete – not surprising, given his banning – but felt that publication was one aspect of inter-scientific cooperation which could not wait for a complete monograph to influence other anthropologists. All scientific investigation was by nature incomplete and had to be judged by the measure of sufficiency, whether there was a reasonable degree of certainty that the ideas would stand up to application elsewhere and that the ideas were good and worth testing. As he wrote to Mary, the “social situation” paper had “made Hilda and induced Audrey to see the light; Godfrey won’t admit it, but its influence is apparent in all his thought. Hermia Oliver, who is coming into the anthropological fold wrote to me that I was one of the two South African anthropologists producing useful stuff. Jack Simons got ideas from it. (…) As I give ideas freely in conversation, so I wish to on paper.”Footnote 81
Max thought sufficiently enough of his efforts to submit them to the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Wellcome Medal competition. In 1940 there were four submissions: Leo Austin’s short essay in Oceania, Max’s “Analysis,” Audrey Richards’s “Bemba Marriage,” and Godfrey Wilson’s “Economics of Detribalization,” the latter two published by the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute. The judges were unanimous in selecting Richards’s essay. Margaret Read was dismissive of the “Analysis” while Firth thought it had merit but was encumbered by a rather pretentious terminology.
Two years later, in 1942, Max submitted its sequel, “Some Processes of Social Change,” and despite it being the sole entry that year, the judges unanimously dismissed it. Herman Braunholtz, curator at the British Museum and president of the Royal Anthropological Institute, objected to its abstract formulation for very complex phenomena, which he felt was not applicable to other situations. Gluckman, he stated, was simply restating simple things in a complex way using a lot of jargon. Overall, he felt the essay had little practical value to administrators. Margaret Read was again dismissive; while it was ingenious, she objected to the use of new terms like endo-culture and exo-culture, and found the argument wholly unpersuasive. Hobley, a long-term native administrator, first objected to the anonymous nature of the entry and then protested that one would conclude from reading the essay that armed conflict was imminent. Where were the instances of collaboration? The essay was simply an experimental effort to explain social change using a complicated new terminology like “repetitive and changing social systems” with little practical value. Lucy Mair, however, was the most dismissive, calling the essay an ambitious attempt to formulate general laws of culture change and believed the essay to be of poor quality. The generalizations were simply pretentious truisms unsupported by evidence.Footnote 82
Unsurprisingly “The Bridge” was not only studiously ignored by Afrikaner volkekundiges even when it would have been of direct relevance. But what is surprising is that South African social anthropologists like Adam Kuper, David Hammond-Tooke, Dennis Reader and Max Marwick ignored it as well. Indeed “The Bridge” essay does not feature prominently in the citation indexes of the Library of Science, scoring a measly forty-eight citations up to 2013. Gluckman’s most cited essay is the one on gossip and scandalFootnote 83 with more than five times as many citations which speaks not so much to social anthropology as the rise of “media studies.” I would suggest that it was his first hand experiences among the settlers in Zululand and later Northern Rhodesia that led him to appreciate the social implications and politics of gossip.
What this contextualization essay suggests then is that “The Bridge” was not the result of single actions but rather the result of a complex concatenation of events and relationships which built up to provide a proverbial tipping point. Perhaps most underrated one in this regard was a non-professional factor: his marriage to Mary Brignoli, an activist member of the Communist Party, whom he had met while skiing during the festive season of 1938–1939 and married within a few months. As he confessed more than once in letters to her, it was “writing my Zulu social situation papers that made me realise what professionally I owed to the stimulus of your ideas and outlook.”Footnote 84 It was Mary who pushed the implications of Marxian universalism. “The Bridge” was completed and submitted in October 1939 when Gluckman clearly knew he was persona non grata. His banning was an intellectual liberation. With little prospect of returning to his field site he did not have to fawn over the administrative presence or overlook their presence as most fieldworkers were indirectly forced to do, but could bring them into the analysis. In this case having burnt his Bridge with the administration he was able to open up new avenues of analysis.
Robert J. Gordon currently holds appointments at the University of the Free State, the University of Vermont and the University of Cologne. He is the author or editor of numerous books including, most recently, Recreating First Contact – Expeditions, Anthropology, and Popular Culture (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 2013), co-edited with Joshua A. Bell and Alison K. Brown, and is currently doing a biography of Max Gluckman. E-mail: rgordon@uvm.edu
Conflict and Cohesion in Zululand: an Historical Study in Social Organization
H. Max Gluckman
Chapter 2 – “The Research Situation” (page 73)
Obviously many difficulties beset an anthropologist in this situation, especially if he comes to study race-relationships themselves. He cannot walk around asking about these and his presence always disturbs the people. I did not drop as an isolated individual into Zulu life, recording with superior impartiality what I observed. I came as a White – and the Zulu had to fit me in as an eccentric and highly suspect member of the dominant White group. As a White, I was a “chief” and that created about me latent political power. I early became conscious of attempts by the Zulu to use me for their own advantage and to play me against both Black and White personalities. I did my best to keep out of these struggles, but noted carefully the way local pressures operated on me. I was in a sense my own “guinea-pig.”
I describe my position in Zululand at some length for a number of reasons. It is fairest to give an account of the situation in which I collected by field-data, because that gave me one basis for my interpretation of the social structure. The attitude of the Zulu to me was influenced by their general approach to Whites, and a description of it will therefore provide data for the main analysis of this book. I describe it here, as well as using it in the body of my argument, because I must indicate how it affected the information I got. My relationship with the Zulu also affords an example of the fields of personal relationships, varying from the normal, which individual Whites and Blacks create. It will be shown that these fields are always affected by the norms, even (page 74) where their situation, as with an anthropologist, is typical. My later data on general White-Zulu relationships shows that what happened to me was not the unique result of my character and views, though it was affected by these, but crystallized the form of Zululand social structure itself.
The Zulu’s first concern when I came to live with them was to fit me into their categories of Whites. The mass of them had no particular interest in what they regarded as my camouflage of recording their culture and history. Matolana Ndwandwe, in whose village I made my base-camp on the advice of the native commissioner, Mr. E.N. Braatvedt, agreed to accept me for specific material gains: I had to promise to lift him in my car, to pay 5/- [shillings] a month for my hut and to help him with tobacco and sugar. The field-worker, bringing in a car, a horse, and a bicycle, with which he often helps people, and distributing gifts, is of material value to the locality and is accepted gladly and used as such. My behavior here in which I seemed to give more that I got, for they could never see what I gained from watching their ceremonies or taking texts from them, on the other hand heightened their suspicion. For what White gives something to Blacks without expecting a return at great interest? “Whites treat Blacks as they do fish. At first they throw meat into the water and the fish eat it. It is good. The next day there is a hook in it.” “Who would pay you just to study?” The mass of Zulu, to the end I fear, regarded me as ifokisi (a Government spy or detective)Footnote 85 and there were complaints to the Paramount Chief Mshiyeni, because he had so much to do with me. I am sure that a lurking fear that this was my work remained even in the minds of the people of Kwada6azi, Matoiana’s sub-district, where I lived and worked longest and where there was real affection between myself and many of the people. Many (page 75) challenged me time and time again about my business. When I first arrived, a popular thesis was that I planned to open a store and was smoothing the paths of my investments by giving gifts to the people. Others thought that I was going to become a missionary and was first learning, like many other missionaries, their customs. At the end of my stay my closest friends solved the problem, I was moving on to study the Tembe of Maputaland: therefore I was a wise man who after learning the laws of many tribes would get rapid promotion in Government service. They paid me the compliment of saying that they would like that as much as having Intsingizi (“the Secretary-bird,” Mr. Braatvedt) as their administrator. A few people did appreciate my purpose of recording old Zulu culture; I found it very difficult to explain, as I always did, that I was studying the present. Among those who understood this were the Regent Mshiyeni and a number of educated men. But even among these people I became involved in rivalry. The Zulu Cultural Society, supported by the Regent and the Native Affairs Department, was beginning to record Zulu history and culture. It attracted many well-educated Zulu and frequently I was conscious that they regarded me as a competitor. It was noticeable that they flaunted to me the greater ease with which they could move about among and speak to Zulu, while in my uneasy position I butchered their language.
The Zulu had as much difficulty placing me among the ethnic divisions they make in the White group, as in determining my economic and political function. They classify Whites into English, Boers, Jews and Germans (all others), with unimportant sub-divisions. For each group the Zulu have a stereotype. The Boers are oppressors, treating Blacks harshly; the English are more liberal; the Jew is a hard grasping trader, out only for money. I was English-speaking, come from England, but they (page 76) judged from my appearance that I was not English. To my face they called me Muntonenhlahla (Lucky-man, a translation of my surname), or Ndwandwe (the clan-name of the village where I lived), but behind my back, at first at any rate, I was uJalimane, the German. They were always skeptical when I said I was a Jew. They decided I was joking, especially when their relatives returning from Johannesburg described how my family had fed and helped them. Had I not teased them by saying that a very popular clerk at the magistracy was a Boer, when anyone could tell from the kind way in which he approached them that he was English?
They also pressed me to place myself among the many churches that work in Zululand. My skepticism and atheistic outlook, which I did not conceal, was a laughable as my statement, made and taken as a joke, that I was “a missionary for the ancestral spirits.” All in all, I fitted into no stereotypical position politically, functionally, economically, racially, religiously, I was eccentric. The final attempt in this aristocratic society where unfortunately lineage is important to give me accepted status by relating me to the British royal family, was equally vain.
Fortunately human beings are very adaptable. Personal relationships eased my anomalous position. Matolana rented me the hut in which his council used to meet, at one tip of the horns of his village, and men began to drift in to it. In the evenings it was brightly lit and there were chairs for important men, and snuff. Gradually they resumed their habit of treating it as the council-hut for all except the most confidential matters, and after discussing council affairs they would drink beer and philosophize while I listened. I became an accepted figure at law-sessions and weddings and beer-drinks, and at the dip. I was called by the clan-name of Matolana, and in the maghbandwe (sic) lineage of the Ndwandwe, and the (page 77) closely related Ntombela, began to address me not only as nkosana (little chief), but also by kinship-terms, treating me as son to Matelana, and by my age-regiment name. Many enjoyed talking to me, the feeling of superiority they got from teaching me their language and customs, and learning from me. I must stress that I was not in the least “adopted” into the tribal system, or “went native;” I was always a stranger, a White, but in the close personal relationships which I established in what I think of happily as my “home area” I had a niche in which I grew to love the people and at least [was] liked by them. The relationship was always a centre of conflict, expressed in mutual teasing, of me by the Zulu and of the Zulu by me. I noticed that my European friends feeling the difficulty of assuming my close personal relationships, teased my Zulu friends more than I did. In this niche I could move freely seeking information and above all observing. Any attempt on my part to behave like a Zulu would have been useless. The Zulu used to laugh at and enjoy my initial and increasing knowledge of their history and culture. When I visited Chief Mqiniseni Zungu I claimed relationship with him for I had been placed in the care of Matolana’s Zungu wife, his sister; the assembled men roared with delight. When by sheer unconscious imitation I used the chorus “Ndabezita” or “Mageba” to the Regent they were as amused as I.Footnote 86 Outside of Matolana’s area I established similar friendship with many Zulu of different districts and categories. Generally, however, I was accepted as “Matolana’s White,” working and questioning with the approval of the government and above all, of the Regent Mshiyeni, or of the rival Mandlakazi Zulu chief, Bokwe. When I began to travel with Mshiyeni to other chiefs, he introduced me publicly as “umlungu wakithi,” “our White,”Footnote 87 and chiefs and others agreed to give me information on their customs and history. However, outside the circles of my friends and close acquaintances. I was always regarded with open – some illegible handwriting here – (page 78) suspicion. Some White approached the royal-village where the sacred Zulu inkata is kept: men hurried to the Regent to complain that “the White who is studying our laws has been to see the inkata.” It was a difficult position in which I moved warily, and I was aware that it required only one ill-advised action to upset the balance of the relationship. The difficulties of the White-Black relationship could crystallize at a moment on my head.
Here I may best express my gratitude to the Zulu people for the many happy months I spent among them, and for bearing with my inquisitiveness of which they were so suspicious. To Matolana and his family, to Richard Ntombela, Philemon Zungu, Juda Zulu, and the other people around Mapopoma, my debt is greatest. I remember them with regret that I could not work there all my life. Outside of Mapopoma, I owe much to Regent Mshiyeni, to Chief Bokwe, to Gwala and Nkala and Gilbert Mkhize, Major Matunjwa, Daniel Vilakazi, and Charles Mpanza. I select these by name because they bore with me the most, but the data of this book derives from many other Zulu. They regarded me as a spy, and what I have recorded may convince them I was. But I told them what I was searching for, and plead that the truth, which I believe I have set out, may ultimately help them.
I must make clear that the basis of my analysis of the modern system, in which I was primarily interested, could not be studies by questioning informants or even directing conversations. I had no important informants of this type, but all Zulu and all situations were my informants. Casual conversation overheard, reports of returned labor migrants, law cases, political debates, in short observed behaviour, provided the most of my data. It was illuminated by happenings around my own person.
As a South African, I did not come into Zululand without a local background. My family and friends visited me, and Zulu in Johannesburg called on my family for help. As it (page 79) happened. I had old schoolfellows among government officials and became friendly with other Whites. Through me, some of them were drawn into close personal relationships with “my Zulu,” and reactions within these relationships gave me additional insight into what was occurring about me. From the beginning, my “whiteness” had brought to me Zulu who thought I could secure for them favours from officials.
To the extent that I was an observer of their way of life, interest-groups and personalities attempted to influence the data I collected. They asserted their rights and prestige, for there were of them who were sure I would report to Government. While I was in Zululand the revival of Zulu nationalism was moving to a temporary climax, in the recognition by Government of Mshiyeni as social head of the Zulu, and the establishment under his aegis of the Zulu Cultural Society. The Mshiyeni party poured on me accounts of their welcome throughout Natal and Zululand, of the chiefs who obeyed the Regent’s behest of how Government used the Regent, and equally cried down the power of the Mandlakazi chief, head of dissident North-eastern Zululand. The Mandlakazi house emphasized the extent of their domain and their victories in the civil wars of the eighties. Pagans bemoaned the changing mores of youth; Christians asked how could a people advance when they were saddled with polygamous pagan chiefs and princes? Had not the whole Ngenetsheni tribe subscribed to buy farms? – then why should the polygynous princes be allowed to take so undue a portion of the land? Throughout my field-work I was conscious of these and other pressures of the over-compensation inherent in a tense situation. I studiously avoided the temptation of gaining information by playing parties against each other. I allowed in my research and my conclusions for the overstatement, essentially stereotyped, of every case, and balanced social attitudes as expressed in words against behaviour in various situations. (page 80)
One example illustrates well the way in which Zulu attempted to play me, like others, in their own interests. When I had been in the field some time, a party of anthropologists from Stellenbosch University pitched camp in a nearby chieftaincy, some ten miles from my base. The first I heard of their arrival was when Zulu from the area where they were working came visiting to Mapopoma. Here were Whites doing the same as I. They immediately began to tell me and the Zulu there stories comparing us, to my advantage. The others were Boers, harsh and unsympathetic, with no fellow-feeling with the Zulu. At the capital this was a frequent theme. For some time men of the area made the trip to flatter me, in hope of material reward, and the discrediting tales became more lurid: my rivals were intoxicating the local youths with brandy and seducing the maidens! In this crude form I epitomize the dominant characteristic of modern Zulu polity. Naturally, I neither believed these tales nor rewarded the flatterers, and I hope the other party was equally skeptical of what they were told about me: though from rumours I have heard, I fear they were not.
To work at all in the highly organized Zulu kingdom, I had to enter with the permission and support of the Regent and his subordinate chiefs. While I was learning the language and gathering basic data on social organization, I did not go near the capital. In addition, Regent Mshiyeni was away in the south working for Government. When he returned, I visited him on several occasions, staying only for a day at a time. He later planned a great national meeting in Durban and gladly accepted my offer to drive some of his nieces, children of the late Paramount Solomon, to attend it. I travelled with him there, staying at his capital before leaving and after our return, and during a break in our journey back camped with him at a chief’s on the Tugela River. In Durban I was with him most of the time, and he introduced me and explained what I was doing to chiefs and massed meetings. I again went with him on a state (page 81) visit to Mtubatuba, the rich and powerful Mpukunyoni chief, where I camped with him. I frequently drive to the capital, Mahashini for the day, but Mshiyeni was obviously hostile to my hints that I would like to reside there, and so were his councillors.
It was a difficult relationship. Mshiyeni’s position had many satisfactions but was very trying. He appeared in his glory, uniformed on a white horse, at the head of a cavalcade of mounted warriors and infantry. Chiefs and people from the whole of Natal thundered the royal salute to him. Power and position in his own court, abroad, and in government’s machinery were his, and his every action was marked by the respectful observances of his courtiers and subjects. Yet he was the fulcrum of many ill-weighted forces. He was Regent for his older brother’s unknown heir at a time when the Zulu nation was reuniting. For patriotic and personal reasons he was following his brother in leading this drive for reunion. As Regent he was under constant observation by his people, suspicious from their history that the Regent would attempt to usurp the throne. When Bokwe became chief of the Mandlakazi Zulu house he sued the regent, Mciteki, for abuse of their father’s herds and money, and litigation from this was going on after many years. Mshiyeni was doing all he could to avoid being placed in a similar position, but he required money to support the growing prestige of the Royal House.Footnote 88 His late brother had become very unpopular with the administration, and with many Zulu, because his extravagance had necessitated tribal levies to pay his debts.
One basis of Zulu nationalism in the new situation was the (page 82) reaction against the White-group, across the colour-bar; yet Government was increasingly using Mshiyeni as representative of the nation, without giving him administrative political power, to settle disputes in other tribes, who statutorily were not under his rule. The very Zulu who wanted him recognized as Paramount Chief were suspicious of his relationship with Government. Since his own tribe, the Usuthu of Nongoma district, were administratively under him, and politically he felt secure with them, he was very often away from Nongoma, on travels to the urban areas and other rural districts where he wished to win, or regain, the allegiance of the chiefs. He could not neglect the less secure outside contacts. After the first meeting of the Native Representative Council he held meetings to explain the discussion of the Council in Natal, without holding one for his own Usuthu. Naturally the Usuthu began to grumble; some of them said he was providing for the day when Solomon’s heir would be installed as Paramount Chief. They accused him of courting Government and the Zulu a6asesilungwini (in White country – i.e. outside the Zululand reserves)Footnote 89 so that when he retired he would there get a “throne” of his own. There was constant conflict between his pagan and his educated Christian adherents, who were gaining power. The pagans resented his monogamous Christianity. Of course, the court was rife with the personal rivalries and jealousies of all princes and councillors. Finally, he resented intensely the superior status of Whites. I have seen White wattle-cutters, seeking for labourers, stroll casually up to his house and ask him for me. They addressed him carelessly as “Mshiyeni;” to them he was a slightly superior Black, who could help them solve an immediate problem. He was a civilized man, but he was not received by any but a very few Whites. It was an irksome and restricting situation for a man of his intelligence and energy. His domineering disposition had been heightened by years of respect freely given by Zulu, (page 83) since he was next to Paramount Chief Solomon in royal birth. For many years he had been a “policeman” on the Rand mines. He was quick in temper as he was in thought, the former added to by constant illness, the latter by clear observation. He prided himself on his knowledge and deeply resented any suggestion that Whites were more intelligent than Blacks. Like all Zulu, he deeply resented the refusal to grant them arms. He saw the coming of the World War, and felt that his warriors, with all their martial pride rooted in the tradition of a conquering people, defeated only by superior weapons and not in courage and spirit, were being treated as women. Above all, he was trying to rule, without material power, a state within a state torn by internal conflicts, a people hostile to the values of the supreme government, a proud people reduced to subservience. He saw that a prosperous future for the Zulu lay in growing food and earning money: “I am a chief of the plough, not of the spear.” Money for him was the key to the well-being of his people, to good housing, food, and health; European techniques were the road to money. He urged his people to go out to work: they thought he was bought by the labour recruiters. He pressed for more and more education, and insisted that the royal children and his councillors’ children go to school to learn European ways. Zulu nationalists were driving for a revival of Zulu culture.
I sympathized deeply with him in his political difficulties. I too needed sympathy in my attempt to maintain a working relationship with him. I spent many pleasant hours with him and his charming wife but a casual remark, or what he regarded as a trespass on his friendship, would precipitate hostility from the conflicts I have described. Once at KwadlamahlahlaFootnote 90, the village of the late Paramount Chief Solomon, (page 84) he showed me a house he was re-decorating. I carelessly asked: “For whom?” and he replied angrily, “That is my business.” I had touched on a matter which he feared might reflect on his regency. I cite this small example; it was but one among many.
It was perhaps inevitable in this situation that he and any White close to him should quarrel seriously. He held a big meeting at Vryheid 80 miles across the hills from Nongoma. He asked me to help him by bringing some of his councilors in my car, and persuaded me to drop another trip to do this. At Vryheid he lived at the railhead depot of the native Recruiting Corporation of the Rand Mines. Some 6,000 Zulu gathered around him. One evening he came to speak to the recruiting representative in his office. As he went out, a drunken African sitting on the back verandah said to him as he passed: “You know nothing.” I do not know whether it was by Mshiyeni’s orders, but shortly afterwards a prince and an induna threw the drunk on the ground and began to flog him with sjamboks. It was difficult for us to stand by, and eventually the recruiter asked me, since he did not speak Zulu, to stop them. I restrained the induna as the secretary of the Zulu Cultural Society restrained the prince. I then handed over the drunk to an employee of the Corporation, who expelled him from the yard. The inevitable crisis had come. The next morning I was told Mshinyeni was too busy to see me. I drove his indunas to the big meeting that afternoon; he did not fulfill his promise to introduce me to the crowd, a promise given to persuade me to place my car at his disposal. Matolana told me the Regent was very offended with me. I must apologize. I was sure that I had acted rightly from every point of view, and refused to. Matolana pleaded that I was “spoiling” his (page 85) relationship with the Regent, and our friendship induced me to make the first approaches to Mshiyeni. We discussed the situation and shook friendly hands. For the rest of our stay in Vryheid Mshiyeni was friendly, though not as warmly as before. Meantime the whole uneasiness of the situation was crystallizing about the incident. Many councillors (sic), with reason, could point to the danger of having a White hanging about the Paramount. Had not the White companions of the late Solomon fleeced him, driven him to waste money in a way which had discredited him with government? I heard that this was occurring, and Matolana himself told me that his rivals, jealous of his favoured position with the Regent, were using me as a weapon against him. Ultimately, while Mshiyeni generally treated me, except just before I left Zululand, in the most friendly fashion, I heard that he had asked Government to order me to leave Nongoma, because “I was interfering in his district.” I could not get official confirmation of this, though I learnt that it was over the Vryheid incident. I wrote to the Native Commissioner to explain what had happened: and was told that if I had stood by and watched a flogging without interfering, he would have asked me to leave the district. The unfortunate sociologist, like everyone else in Zululand, is caught in irresoluble conflicts between divergent political pressures. I finished my period in the field, but I gather that the administration made this incident one ostensible reason for restricting the entry of anthropologists to the reserves.
The news of my breach with Mshiyeni was soon known to most Zulu. I immediately became aware that the tone of the information I was getting about him changed. Previously, it had mostly been laudatory; now Zulu thought they would bring complaints to what they expected would be a sympathetic audience. They did not find it. (page 86)
I have described my position in Zululand at some length and in later pages I will perforce enter again. I have done so to make clear the situation in which I collected my data and to indicate the difficulties with which I had to contend, since these themselves were one of the lens” of my insight into modern Zulu society. They also serve as the best introduction to the interplay of conflict and cooperation between personalities and groups which are analyzed in the body of this work.
My work is therefore not based on data collected in passive receptivity. Nor does it come from political aloofness. I doubt if any South African can claim the latter. We are all involved day by day in events arising out of the ethnic heterogeneity of the Union which affect our earnings, our standards of living, our ideas of justice and morality, our status as members of colour-groups, even our personal safety. The fundamental thesis of anthropological discipline is that social forces operate on all individuals in a society, and the sociologist who claims that he is uniquely immune is merely deceiving himself. In this tense situation objectivity, defined as freedom from political views, is spurious. A fictitious aloofness may well cover a refusal to see the conflicts in modern Africa, and this could be shown in the works of several anthropologists.
Objectivity in social research is attained by careful and honest observation within the framework of recognized techniques. These include the taking of censuses and genealogies, figures on cattle-sales, labour migration, material possessions, etc. and above all the detailed observation of different kinds of Zulu acting in many different situations. When I collected my data while working in Zululand, and from Government records and the writings of missionaries and (page 87) travelers, I tried studiously to take account of every fact which I observed or which has been recorded. More than that, I searched for facts to contradict my every generalization, and I omitted no relevant fact because it was hostile to my argument. In the course of my research I frequently had to alter my emerging picture of Zululand to accommodate new facts. Of course I have selected and simplified from the mass of data which I accumulated, but selection and simplification, implying a certain distortion, are inevitable in disciplined analysis. I have begun by presenting typical examples from my field-work to validate my subsequent argument. My notes can be consulted, as can the many books which record life in Zululand at different periods from the viewpoint of administrator, missionary, trader, hunter and Zulu. The records from the various magistracies in Zululand are deposited in the Archives at Pietermaritzburg. The daily press and the reports of Government Commissions gave many other facts I have used, and the attitudes of Zulu were reflected in Bantu newspapers and novels, and the debates of the Native Representative Council. The fairness of my own observations can thus be checked, at least partially, from many independent sources.
The objective worth of any study can also be tested logically. Is the analysis internally consistent, if inductive and deductive tests are applied to it? How far does it fit in with developing sociological theory? Does it fit in with other studies of similar situations in Africa and elsewhere in the historical and modern world? Does it accommodate wide ranges of similar data which are available to those who read this book?
Any set of data can be interpreted by a variety of hypotheses, and I have no doubt that in social research a worker’s political ideals and his interpretations influence each other. This is not the place for me to show, as I might, how the political views of my colleagues enter into their (page 88) analyses. It may, however, be asked of me that I make my own standpoint clear, by setting out any “inarticulate premises” which may be implicit in my theoretical framework, since I am likely to be charged with lack of objectivity. All disciplined work is guided by some theory – and social values permeate sociological principles.
For example, there are in South Africa anthropologists who write in an apparent sympathy with the Africans and their “folk-culture.” Throughout these studies there runs an evaluation of native culture in emotional terms as possessed of intrinsic values which satisfy the deepest aspirations of the Africans: they describe a contented well-balanced tribalism in which the old and orphaned, the indigent and unfortunate, are happily cared for in the motherly embracing kinship system. Trade unionism for them threatens tribal solidarity and social security weakens the strength of kinship ties. They emphasize the disruptive effects on indigenous relationships of “westernization” and neglect the new forms of social organization emerging in new conditions. These anthropologists are the staunchest upholders of the policy of segregation and of what is called parallel development, the theory that Whites in their own areas of the Union should be upholders of White “civilization” while Africans develop their own culture in their own areas. Other anthropologists say they are strictly neutral, and this appears indeed in their studies. Their descriptions of native life today skim over deep conflicts in political organizations. For them, too, native culture survives by an inherent vitality. As I see it, native culture survives not only because of the inherent vitality which all cultures have, but also as a reflex of the struggle between the colour-groups of the Union. It is maintained by conservatism and by tribal (page 89) pride, and by the lack of opportunity for change offered to Africans in the present trans-cultural situation. Those who do wish to change meet constant frustration. It is significant, as we shall see later, that among the Zulu those most attached to ancient culture include old pagans and highly educated men who have re-acted back to their mother-culture from the White civilization to which they aspire, but which they are denied. Each group’s culture becomes an index of its identity within Union society: negrophobes and Zulu nationalists unite in admiring the virtues of pure Zulu culture.
However much I admire the virtues of Zulu culture, I believe it is too late to preserve it in its entirety. Many of its elements are incompatible with Western technology, and the things Zulu desire from factories. History cannot be set back, and White culture is dominating the comparative fragility of native cultures. These have not the reserves of Eastern civilizations. But they have values which may persist even if the Zulu “become modern people.”
Zulu culture cannot remain isolated from modern scientific knowledge, and from the religion and philosophy of Western civilization. Western, and not Zulu, medicine will bring health to the Zulu people; and tractors and fertilizers, not the hoe and first-fruits ceremonies, will produce fruitful gardens. First-fruits ceremonies may still express the national pride of the people; African themes and art-styles triumph in Mofolo’s tragedy Chaka. The basis for any development in this way of Zulu culture must be a modern technology in which the Zulu own a fair share of the means of production. Their social organization will have to change to accommodate this. Tribe and trade-union and management cannot function together in a modern factory, though in small enterprises kinship-groups may be the core of cooperatives. (page 90)
As contracts between unrelated people become more numerous, Zulu courts will cease to be conciliatory tribunals. Modern systems of social security in which the state accepts responsibility may or may not be compatible with an extended kinship system but they must be part of future Zulu society.
The study of present-day Zulu society must reflect the conflicts in the situation if it is to analyse the direction of change. To achieve this, we must see the community studied against the background of the wider society of which it is a part. In that society the problems referred to above are important; they affect the Zulu in the towns and in his reserves. We may isolate one section of the Union for analysis, but in it we observe the problems of the whole Union – and of western civilization.
From the Natal Mercury 20 August 1946: “One Native was killed and about nine others were badly wounded when two factions of the Zulu royal clan clashed in the Nongoma district on Friday afternoon.
“The one faction represented the supporters of Cyprian, son of the late Solomon ka Dinuzulu and heir presumptive to the paramount chieftainship of the Zulu people. The other warriors were supporters of a rival claimant to the paramount chieftainship. No political significance, however, is attached to the clash.”
“The two groups are reported to have attended as spectators, a wedding with which neither side was connected. As they arrived fully armed they were asked by the induna in charge of the wedding to leave in order to avoid trouble but they joined battle down the valley on the way home.”
“The man who was killed is reported to have been an induna, Mgoxo Nkwanyane.”
“The arrival of a posse of South African Police on Saturday prevented a renewal of the battle, the two factions having yelled challenges across the valley all night. Some (page 91) arrests were expected to be made last night”
[Then follows a report from the Natal Mercury, dated 28 August 1946, reporting that Mshiyeni had resigned the acting Paramunt Chieftainship owing to differences with his nephew Cyprian Bhekezulu ka Solomon, for whom he acted as Regent. Mshiyeni was lauded by the newspaper for his efforts to recruit Zulu for military service and persuading the northern Natal Zulu to peacefully accept “the Government’s desire to destroy their cattle in 1938 in an effort to stamp out foot and mouth disease.”]