Siyamfenguza: The Creation of Fingo-ness in South Africa's Eastern Cape, 1800–1835

Fry, Poppy

doi:10.1080/03057071003607303

Cited by 27 publications

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“…If we accept that raiding indeed constituted a social institution, it becomes possible to revisit historical interpretations of raids as social pathology. In some cases, raiding certainly aimed at rebuilding depleted herds or asserting political independence (see, for example, Fry 2010: 30, 32–3). However, to interpret accounts of raids by certain chiefdoms as indices of distress without further enquiry into their social context ignores a wealth of potential interpretations.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cattle, raiding and disorder in Southern African history

King¹

2017

Africa

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Cattle raiding is iconic of the colonial frontier in Southern African history and historiography. Incorporating settlers and Africans as aggressors and victims alike, archives and ethnohistories depict raiding as thieving, subverting authority, and inciting conflict. Despite the in-depth anthropological attention given to ‘Bushman raiding’ and frontier commandos, comparatively little work has focused on the social and cultural function of cattle raiding within chiefdoms: that is, examining cattle raiding as socially embedded rather than simply transgressing authority and property ownership. This article explores how these narratives of ‘disorder’ have been constructed, and some alternative perspectives on nineteenth-century cattle raiding as a social institution. Through vignettes drawing on archival, archaeological, ethnographic and folkloric evidence, this article offers glimpses of what narratives of the recent past could look like if views of raiding-as-disorder were revisited and revised. I draw attention to where raids were illegal versus illicit, the role of cattle as social agents, and the logic underpinning designations of raiding as resistance. Developing a view of raiding as social practice permits us to interrogate archival perceptions of raiders as outlaws and raids as analogues for warfare, thus enabling more nuanced investigations of conflict in Southern Africa's past.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cattle, raiding and disorder in Southern African history

King¹

2017

Africa

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“…She argues that one of the factors that may have led numbers of Xhosa-speakers (and others) to begin embracing a distinct identity as Fingoes was their increasing orientation towards the colonial world of trade and commercialising agriculture as against the 'Xhosa' world of chiefly authority and homestead-based economies. 98 One can speculate that a similar orientation was part of what fed into notions of being Lala in colonial Natal, at least until the destruction of the Zulu kingdom in the 1880s.…”

Section: Moving Beyond Olden Timesmentioning

confidence: 96%

A.T. Bryant and the ‘Lala’

Wright

2012

Journal of Southern African Studies

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For the first time in more than two decades, historians and archaeologists are beginning to research the making of collective identities in southern Africa's pre-colonial past in some detail. Long-established notions about these identities are once again coming under critical scrutiny. Building on earlier research with Carolyn Hamilton on the historical meanings of the term amalala, this article looks at how Alfred Bryant examined the idea of who the 'Lala' were and where they came from in a series of influential works first published in the early twentieth century. In brief, Bryant saw the Lala as a group of related tribes that constituted one of several offshoots of the 'Nguni' peoples who supposedly migrated from the interior of southern Africa into what are now the KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape regions after about 1500. This article argues that there was very little basis for these notions in the earlier literature, and that Bryant's ideas were mainly the product of his own particular interpretation of scrappy and contradictory information derived from conversations with unnamed Africans. Such evidence as exists on the subject today lends itself to a very different set of interpretations.

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Colonizing Consent

Thornberry

2018

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During the first decade of the nineteenth century, the young Xhosa chief Ngqika abducted Thuthula, the wife of his uncle Ndlambe. In the Eastern Cape, this story is remembered for its political consequences. Ngqika's act was widely condemned, and Ndlambe seized the chance to lead a rebellion of Ngqika's followers. Although Ngqika survived the rebellion, his authority never fully recovered. Ngqika's abduction of Thuthulaan act that "even today his descendants consider reprehensible"was a scandalous contravention of the sexual mores of precolonial Xhosaland. 1 In Xhosa histories, the abduction of Thuthula is remembered as the incident that ended Ngqika's independence. As S. E. K. Mqhayi and Jeff Peires have argued, the story has been used to explain a major political shift that probably owed more to the gradual encroachment of the colonial armed forces. 2 Yet, if the emphasis on the family drama behind Ndlambe's rebellion obscures the culpability of the colonial state, it also overshadows the sexual politics at the heart of the episode. Most accounts of Thuthula's story pay little attention to Thuthula herself. Did she go with Ngqika willingly, attracted perhaps by his greater political authority or by the physical beauty with which the praisepoets credit him? Did she resist, wishing to remain in her respectable position as Ndlambe's wife? Could she even consider the possibility of voicing her own desires to the men involved?The absence of Thuthula's own perspective from stories of her abduction flows from the belief, widely accepted in precolonial Xhosaland, that female sexuality should be controlled by a woman's family. According to this view, the most relevant consent to any sexual encounter was not that of the participants but rather that of the 1

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Siyamfenguza: The Creation of Fingo-ness in South Africa's Eastern Cape, 1800–1835

Cited by 27 publications

References 0 publications

Cattle, raiding and disorder in Southern African history

Cattle, raiding and disorder in Southern African history

A.T. Bryant and the ‘Lala’

Colonizing Consent

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