Posted on October 16, 2009

Enocent Msindo
By Enocent Msindo, Rhodes University

In Southern Africa, issues in heritage studies and history in general tend to generate so much debate and at times emotions especially amongst the university intellectuals and the educated general public that follow these debates. This shows that contrary to the general decline in student numbers in the humanities, especially for hard-core disciplines such as history, history still matters perhaps much more than ever. Although the developmental state of South Africa is trying hard, (perhaps like China has done) to exalt scientific knowledge above the greater questions in heritage and historical studies, perhaps with the view to erode popular political (and other forms of) critical consciousness, it is however true that most of the people in South Africa do often deploy history and heritage politics in negotiating rights and in laying diverse claims in post-Apartheid South Africa. In South Africa as in most parts of Africa, the language of rights and historically based claims among the formerly oppressed black peoples have little to do with the vexed questions of legality but are mainly issues debated within the larger framework of assumed indisputable heritage. I do not mean that legality is not an issue in claims today, for people often resort to the law in laying such claims, however the motivation for such claims is not first and foremost issues raised within the framework of legality but are issues informed by specific definition of rights derived from notions of shared culture, indigeneity and other factors. The acceptance of an existing 'objective' heritage depends on assumed overarching recognition of indigeneity; indisputable 'traditions'; historical geography; ethnic cultures, and other elements. Unfortunately, claims based on these alone are subjective, and for that reason, liable to contested debates and often dismissal as claims based on imagined identities; imagined traditions; imagined notions of heritage and so on.

In some cases, historians and other social scientists have been accomplices in dismissing such claims - and one of the tragedies of Africa is that the more we think about issues surrounding African history, heritage and politics, the more dismissive we tend to be and the more it would seem to suggest the illegitimacy of African institutions, African cultures and African traditions. Colonialism is cast as a very sharp, effective creative force that changed, if not razed to the ground and buried all African systems that were in place; replaced them with invented artificial ones that Africans had to live and crave for; and dehumanized the Africans to the point that they were reduced to mere subjects meant to mimic their superiors. Do Africans have agency; do they have traditions; do they have a heritage of their own? There could be some bit of truth in the assumption about the creative force of colonialism but one could ask a few questions like: Wherein is the resilience of African systems? Can't we locate certain continuities within change? How do we locate and represent African social histories of the pre-colonial and colonial episodes within the post-colonial era? What of the idea of hybridity? Although colonisers brought with themselves particular assumptions about Africa and Africans and tried to impose ideologies over the ruled, they were not always guaranteed of success. At times these inventions were resisted outright and at times Africans incorporated some of those ideologies into their own with the result that the product was a hybrid identity - which is not purely African or purely 'Western'. This applies very easily for instance to what is now called African ethno-music, which from the 1920s became a combination of both the so-called traditional genre and Western style. What are now called Xhosa or Venda traditional dresses and material culture is not what it was before colonialism, but an imitation of the past within the colonial context and the post-colonial present. Traditions are often being reconstituted on the basis of evolving ideas of beauty; economic affordability; political and social relevance, and other factors.

Recently, some African scholars, mainly historians on www.H-Net.org sparked by the desire to move beyond the limits of what was viewed as colonial cartography or broadly colonial nomenclature have fallen into a frenzied discussion about what would be the appropriate language to use in representing the past, its peoples, geographies and historical episodes. The terms 'indigenous people';' South Africa'; 'Xhosa, Zulu, et al'; 'first people'; 'traditional'; 'the people living between such and such rivers/mountains' and so on, have come under the spotlight - and all counter suggestions demonstrate how difficult it is to move beyond the dominant categorizations and naming that we have received from our past. The assumption is that by deconstructing these, we help deal with the associated stereotypes and misrepresentations, and therefore, we become more responsible agents in representing the past. In one way this is correct, but on another, we might find ourselves to be just playing with words.

The term South African for instance is not of antiquity, being itself a colonial appellation (Lily Saint, discussion on H-Net, 27 August 2009). It is also a legalistic term that might have less historical significance the more we get into the past. However, it is a reality and it would be foolhardy to simply dismiss it because it's a colonial creation. In the same vein, Lily found it difficult that we have to be obsessed with origins to the point that we want to deconstruct colonial, pre-colonial and post-colonial as legitimate divisions in the African past when there is no useful purpose served from so doing. Lily was perhaps responding to Georgina Barrett's argument that the use of the terms 'colonial' or 'pre-colonial' and related others tend to limit us to simply defining people on the basis of 'the colonial moment' or on similar stereotypes. Georgina's argument about being careful about the terms we use in depicting the Africans past and attempting to find more accurate terminology was indeed a brilliant one and was worthy considering. From my analysis of the quality of the different responses on H-Net, one wonders though if we have any easy answers to these concerns.

To run away from terms like Xhosa or Zulu in preference to terms like the 'originals of the land'; or 'the people of southern Africa'; or as Clapperton Mavhunga suggested in his agreement with Paul Landau that we adopt for instance terms like, 'the people of the place' or 'the inhabitants of such and such a geographical place'; or 'people of such and such a chief', and so on creates another problem. It is another way of ring-fencing people for by saying these were the people of Shaka, we are not sufficiently problematising contests of power and the nature of governance in 19th century Africa. Today we can't dismiss the fact that people did change chieftaincies through raids, rebellion, marriage, community destruction, and various factors to the point that chieftaincy as an identity was not fixed at all but entirely negotiable and liable to change in form and personality. If we limit people to geography then what do we do about the glaring fact that, with a few exceptions, people did migrate from place to place and also that certain geographical spaces were contested and did not 'belong' to any specific group of people - for instance the Matopos which was an important religious shrine not only for the Kalanga but for the people that lived in the place we call Mashonaland today. In this case, studies of shrine heritage therefore need to adopt a more holistic analysis and represent the different struggles for the control of shrine culture; the rain making cult, and so on.

The other problem is ethnicity. A popular train of thought is that we can't call people by their ethnic groups because at some point in history before the coming of those who colonised parts of Africa, people were not known as belonging to ethnicities but in fact as belonging to chieftaincies (Norman Etherington, Ranger, and many others). I think that this argument is interesting to read but might not be a fair characterisation of African history. First, this assumption arises from the failure to read into Africa's deep social history and the inner workings of the African society - a failure that was characteristic of our earlier pioneers of African history whose concern was mainly political histories because this fed directly into the cause of African nationalist intellectuals who required a usable past. Secondly, scholars have mistaken ethnicity for its politicised variant termed Political Tribalism (Lonsdale, 1992; 1998; 2004). Today it serves no purpose to repeat this tired argument but it is perhaps useful to admit that ethnic identities did exist but it was not the only valid identity nor did it exist in isolation to other multiple identities of the 19th century and before (Msindo 2004; Steven Feierman 1970; Lonsdale, 1992). But perhaps what is important for heritage studies on this aspect is that we need a more careful portrayal of ethnicities. The emphasis on Xhosa as the dominant ethnic group in the Eastern and Western Cape has been at the expense of other ethnicities. Where is Fingo identity today and its associated material culture? Does it not need to be researched again and identified? The same applies to groups of people in KwaZulu Natal that have unfairly been labelled as Zulu, a regional identity that has less to do with ethnicity than it has to do with power-politics in contemporary South Africa, yet you hear people and heritage specialist speak as if they know of a distinctly Zulu material culture.

Today, what does it mean and is it correct to say, for instance, 'Leopard's Kopje tradition' or 'Leopard's Kopje Culture'; or 'Rozvi state' or 'Rozvi Empire', or 'Rozvi nation'? Is there anything called Xhosa heritage, or even English or Afrikaner heritage for that matter other than what we have chosen to make of it? It's a yes and no answer. Do the public beneficiaries of this 'heritage' and 'heritage sites' view these as unproblematic? Do they have a different understanding of heritage and their own ways of making meaning out of the concepts that we as intellectuals do not want the world to know?

It does seem to suggest then that although obvious exaggerations of the past must be corrected, one might continue to make use of certain terms in a slightly differentiated way so long one makes it clear what he/she implies otherwise we are going to have endless problems with these concepts. Another challenge might be that radical change in conceptual usage risk playing into contemporary political correctness yet at the same time creating problems for the future. To this however, one might shoot back and say, 'Should we perpetuate the old stereotypes'. It is therefore a conundrum which others could respond to. Don't say I didn't tell you that Africa and African studies, like all fields of enquiry, are problematic.