Introduction^{Footnote 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}

Safely ensconced in Katongo, his field site, he admits to Mary:^{Footnote 7}

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 volume^{Footnote 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:

In addition Langfield also interviewed the local police sergeant who averred:

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 personality^{Footnote 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}

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}

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}

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 62}Siliwa, 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 scandal^{Footnote 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.