Dear Elizabeth
There is a chapter on the Mfengu migration and subsequent relations between them and the Xhosa by Dr Cecil Manona in "Ciskei - a South African Homeland", edited by Nancy Charton, published by Croom and Helm: London, 1980. An interesting alternative to Chaka's expansionism as the reason for them leaving Natal has been put forward by Dr Julian Cobbing of the history department at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa. Phone: 0461 318111.
Regards
Monty J Roodt, Department of Sociology, Rhodes University
Grahamstown, South Africa
Monty's reply is a model of scholarly understatement. The history and identity of the Mfengu is one of the cornerstones of the Mfecane debate. I don't know if Elizabeth wants to be drawn into the historiographical mire, but there is a nice summary of the debate in Switzer, Les. Power and resistance in an African society : the Ciskei Xhosa and the making of South Africa. (Madison, Wis. : University of Wisconsin Press, c1993) 56-60.
On Mfengu: See Alan Webster, "Unmasking the Fingo: The War of 1835 Revisited" in C. Hamilton ed The Mfecane Aftermath, JHB and PMB, Wits Univ Press and Natal Univ Press, 1995. (The essay is based on Webster's interesting MA thesis supervised by Julian Cobbing.) You might also find it useful to read John Wright's comments on the essay in the sectional introduction in the same vol. (Beyond the concept of the "Zulu Explosion": Comments on the Current Debate)
If we are talking about the Mfengu historically, it is going to be very difficult to avoid the historiographical mire, in Keith's phrase. Elizabeth is dead right: the snapshot of the historical stereotype which she gives us is out of date on many counts, but for better or worse there is no simple replacement.
Three points here. First, the term Mfengu itself has become a subject of historical debate. Like many other ethnic labels in Africa, Mfengu derives from a non-ethnic noun, the Xhosa word imfengu, pl. amamfengu, meaning, according to Kropf's dictionary, a destitute, homeless person. In the 1830s the word could be applied to white people as well as black. When and how and why did the non-ethnic word imfengu become the ethnic label Mfengu? The history of Mfengu ethnic identity has hardly begun to be researched, but I suspect the process begins to gell in the second half of the 19th century. It is an extrapolation from a later period to see the amamfengu of 1835 as ready-made Mfengu. Which is why Julian Cobbing and Alan Webster prefer to use the anglicized term 'Fingoes' when talking of the amamfengu in the 1830s. Maybe a blanket category should be avoided altogether in writing the history of this pre-Mfengu period.
Second: the common notion that the Fingoes (to use a blanket category) were refugees from Shaka. Cobbing and Webster reject this notion and argue that the Fingoes were mainly marginalized people from within Xhosa society. Their identity as refugees from Natal was foisted on them after 1835 by British missionaries and Cape colonial officials to try to cover up the illegal seizure of large numbers of Fingo captives by British forces in the war of 1835.
My own researches at the Natal end indicate that the notion of the Fingoes as refugees from this region is largely another overblown colonial stereotype. Largely, but not entirely - there seems little doubt that some groups of people dislodged from Natal in the upheavals of the 1820s (not caused simply by the Zulu) ended up among the Xhosa.
But the idea that Fingo/Mfengu identity was created at short order simply by British missionaries and officials is crude. Certainly they played a role in the process, but so did the people who took on this identity, in a long-drawn-out process which, as I say, still needs to be researched.
Third: the notion, put forward by Cobbing and Webster, of many Fingoes as captives seized by the British in the war of 1835. I find this difficult to accept. Certainly the colonial stereotype of British missionaries and soldiers 'rescuing' thousands of grateful refugees from oppression at the hands of the Xhosa needs to challenged. But it is difficult to conceive of Cape colonial frontier society in the 1830s as having the capacity to hold large numbers of unwilling forced labourers from well-established neighbouring societies. And the notion fails to explain why, after 1835, numbers of Fingoes were spreading over the eastern parts of the colony looking for wage-work and engaging in trade.
My own feeling is that Alan Webster has nevertheless put us onto an important new track in conceiving of the Fingoes as mostly drawn from Xhosa society. Sixty years of cattle-raiding by Boers, Khoekhoen, and British, and twenty-five years of land-grabbbing by the British must surely have produced large numbers of largely landless and cattleless, and therefore socially marginalized, people in the various Xhosa chiefdoms. Numbers of them cohered round mission stations from the 1820s onward; numbers of them were probably only too glad in 1835 to seize what chances came their way of resettling themselves under some kind of British protection. Among them were a number of relatively coherent groups under the authority of chiefs, some of genuinely chiefly descent, others possibly poseurs, originally from Natal. It seems to have been round these groups that the major Fingo communities eventually formed, and from their chiefly families that these communities took on generic identities, in what was certainly a long and complex process, involving missionaries and colonial officials as well as Fingo powerholders, intellectuals and commoners.
Hope this helps, Elizabeth. In addition to the references given by other contributors to this dicussion, see also the piece by Anonymous (a well-known former historian, now unfortunately an obscure ANC backbencher in the national parliament) in Leroy Vail, ed., The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa (1989), ch. 14.
John Wright, University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg
wright@history.unp.ac.za
I wanted to respond to some of John Wright's commentary on issues raised by Elizabeth Isichei's query about "the Mfengu" in South Africa.
One point is that there is a piece in the most recent _History in Africa_ addressing some of these issues, I think by Alan Webster. It fits in with John's characterization of the usefulness of the questions being raised about received accounts of Mfengu identity, in contrast to the overconfident assertion of alternative accounts.
Secondly, an interesting place to look for the formation of Fingo/ Mfengu identity is the evidence of 1883 Cape Native Laws Commission. There is clear evidence of a Fingo identity being employed, apparently restricted to Africans. Also the Wesleyan missionary Ayliff, the inventive villain of Webster's account, figures prominently in the commission and the interviewing of Fingo witnesses. Yet at the same time, a lot of complexities appear. "Fingo" is not a generic ethnic category exactly, but rather seems to be very location-specific, "Fingoes of thus-and-such," suggesting specific community identities. Moreover, the testimony reports open public debates over who spoke for "the Fingoes" in various places, and over what those claiming to speak for communities said.
The locational specificity suggests a possibly useful line of inquiry, which would be looking for comparative information on the construction of refugee communities and the reconstruction of displaced communities in the early and mid-19th centuries. Tim Keegan's work on Tlokwa/ eastern OFS may have some relevance in such a project, as may work by Leonard Thompson, Elizabeth Eldredge and others on the formation of Lesotho. I would also think the histories of people eventually categorized as speaking Xhosa language but politically not Xhosa (Xesibe, Bhaca, Mpondo, Thembu) would be relevant, not all in the same way.
A particularly interesting case might be the people of Edendale in Natal. As Sheila Meintjes has pointed out, the Edendale community was largely "Swazi" (although at the time they were becoming refugees that English gloss on Ngwane identity was just perhaps coming into being), but had a core of people of other more disrupted, complex and geographically shifting identities, who put their particular stamp on the community through "leadership" roles despite the potential Swaziness of the majority. Yet over time, some rather ambiguously identified leaders and their children came to recognize themselves and to a degree to be recognized in Swaziland by the royalty as Swazi, as various uses of such identification came to be recognized.
This raises a question about "northern Nguni" refugees in the formation of Fingo/ Mfengu identities. I'm quite open to John's reading of the best way to take up Webster's argument. But as I read some of the evidence Webster cites in the _History in Africa_ piece, clan surnames from northern areas pop out periodically.
Webster quite rightly points out that names only take you so far, especially once intermarriage starts, in terms of the cultural ancestry of people in a place at any given time. But on the other hand, if fairly small groups of northern refugees were moving into an area with enough visible group distinctiveness to become alternative foci for aggregating marginalized people, with northerners in leadership positions, it would seem both that such "northern" identities would have explicable attractions, and be something worth paying attention to. Then again, maybe "northern" names weren't concentrated or foci of leadership.
A second interesting aspect of the Edendale case for comparison to the Fingoes/ Mfengu and for thinking about the Cobbing & Webster approaches is the role of the Reverend James Allison in Edendale's history. Allison in some respects might lend credence to Webster's view of missionaries. Among other things (and like several other Wesleyan missionaries) he gave up being a missionary after a bit and went into business for himself. And he led/ brought/ (would Cobbing and Webster say took, stole?) 800 or so Africans and "Coloureds" from one place to another, settling them on land over which he tried to assert control, organized their labor and benefitted from it, etc.
Yet he was very far from owning these Africans or their labor. Eventually as various aspects of the emergent colonial situation in Natal clarified themselves, and as he came into conflict with the Edendale Africans, his ambitions settled on the land. But the Edendalers fought him for it and won.
There are two points here relevant to the Mfengu case and to Cobbings' approach more generally. First, missionaries might have been deeply venal and intent on making money or other things they valued off of exploiting African labor and resources, without being slave-traders. A very odd aspect of Cobbing's approach to the labor and slavery questions is his apparent disengagement from the ways that reconstruction of forms of labor exploitation and its ideological justifications in Britain, its colonies, and the emerging wider capitalist world affected events and motives in southern Africa.
Second, in the case of one missionary (Allison) where venality and exploitive aims were clearly issues, although not sole motives, his methods and struggles involved not only labor but even more centrally land, and his cultural idiom was not slavery but patriarchalism (including participation in the widespread ideological projection of biblical images of patriarchalism as "natural" to Africans). Moreover this difference made a difference, because it meant that the Edendale Africans were forming their community in an institutional and legal and practical labor context that gave them space to fight back against him, successfully, in part by drawing on cultural idioms independent of his which they had sociological space to reinstitute in novel ways, which in many ways differed from the forms used by their grandparents, but which refused to conform to his hopes and demands.
The point here is not that the Mfengu case(s) resembled or differed from Edendale in any particulars, but that the general process of identity formation, re-formation and invention was a process with lots of room for contestation, not one of simple imposition. Keletso Atkins book _The Moon is Dead_ points some useful directions here.
Chris Lowe
<chris.lowe@reed.edu>
Two brief comments on Chris Lowe's nuanced and suggestive posting on the Fingo/Mfengu discussion.
First: in his discussion of 'northern Nguni names', Chris seems to imply that we are reading Alan Webster differently. As far as I can make out, we are both making very much the same point about 'northern' identities as having attractions for numerous marginalized amamfengu.
Second: The article in the latest History in Africa which he refers to is by Tim Stapleton, not Alan Webster. I have strong reservations about this article: it takes us back to reductionist notions of ethnic identities being imposed from the top down by colonial missionaries and officials, with no notion of how, over a long period of time, different categories of amamfengu might have been involved in the making of Fingo/Mfengu identity.
John Wright
University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg
wright@history.unp.ac.za
Hi John Wright,
Thanks for your response to my post, and for correcting my error about Tim Stapleton's authorship of the History in Africa piece. Your pithy critique of it is well-taken.
I agree that we're not really disagreeing. I think your earlier post points to a new set of research problems. I wanted to re-emphasize that a northern refugee dimension ought to remain part of the redefined set of problems, having just read (hurriedly) Stapleton's piece, which might suggest otherwise.
Part of the reason I mentioned names is that I wonder if they might not be used as part of a form of linguistic evidence. Obviously there are many problems here. For instance, Monica Wilson's observation many years ago now that in a polygynous patrilineal society rich men's names will tend to be reproduced more widely than poor men's has a bearing on the hypothesis that refugee communities would be re-forming around people with social and cultural resources; later distributions of names might reflect prestige and its consequences rather than inceptional patterns of social origins.
That in itself would be interesting in looking at identity-formation, of course. Moreover, one would have to look at such a question in relation to the more general fact that southern African societies historically generated new clan or lineage names as a matter of course. In turn, remembering that fact might suggest that it's a mistake to place excessive focus on the "inventedness" and novelty of new identities in new or reconfigured communities, with the implication that such inventedness is inauthentic or merely spurious, even when it was shaped by new situations created by colonization.
But it may be that in some cases, including perhaps the Mfengu, that there are other possibilities. Maybe family oral histories would allow some reconstruction of social origins of wives as well as of male lines. Perhaps the widespreadness of Christianity has implications for monogamy that in turn can be worked with by historians. Perhaps relatively widespread early literacy and church and missionary records would allow use of family history methods involving documentary sources inapplicable in most 19th century African contexts. (This may be grossly optimistic too, I realize).
A final question. When did the shift from "Fingo" to "Mfengu" occur, and to what degree was it an assertion by African intellectuals, vs. perhaps one by ethnographers in the name of science (or some interaction)?
Chris Lowe
History Dept, Reed College, Portland OR 97202, USA
<chris.lowe@reed.edu>
I'm glad I sparked off such aninteresting discussion. Am I right in assuming th Mfengu speak Xhosa. A related interesting question is why the Thembu and Mpondo, who also speak Xhosa, are regarded as separate ethnicities.
Best
Professor Elizabeth Isichei, Religious Studies Department,
University of Otago, P.O. Box 56, Dunedin, NEW ZEALAND
--- Elizabeth Isichei wrote:
Am I right in assuming that Mfengu speak Xhosa. A related interesting question is why the Thembu and Mpondo, who also speak Xhosa, are regarded as separate ethnicities.--- end of quoted material ---
Tim Stapleton in his History in Africa piece quotes an Mfengu informant who said "'Fingoes and Xhosas speak the same language, no difference.'" Stapleton indicates some debate on whether there is presence of Zulu-derived vocabulary in Mfengu Xhosa, says there hasn't been any real study of the question, argues that there is no evidence for missionaries standardizing Zulu-derived words out, then speculates with no evidence that missionaries injected Zulu words into vocabularies as part of an invention of ethnicity project.
To the extent that Thembu, Mpondo and other identities of people who speak Xhosa are regarded as "separate ethnicities" (not always the case, as when the Inkatha Freedom Party labels President Mandela with Xhosa rather than Thembu ethnicity) it is because the indigenous sense of nationality or peoplehood in southern Africa was political rather than linguistic. Apartheid policies worked to create linguistic nationality, in some cases by distinguishing new written languages (e.g. siSwati), in other cases by using blanket linguistic designations to blur historical political/ethno-national identities (e.g. Xhosa blanketing Thembu, Mpondo etc.). People with Thembu, Mpondo and other "ethnically non-Xhosa" Xhosa-speaking identities trace their distinctiveness (insofar as they do trace it) to histories of having had distinct political communities before conquest.
All of the linguistic markings and divisions in question among "Nguni" languages are at least partly traditions in the formalization and naming of written versions of the languages, initially by English- or German-speaking foreigners, subsequently interpolated with efforts at ethnographic typologizing. If we were to try to unpack the history of this I think we'd have to look for information on the interaction of spoken local dialects within a continuum of broad mutual intelligibility from eastern Mpumalanga through Swaziland, Kwazulu-Natal, down into the eastern Cape, with spatial distribution of missionary organizations, African political areas, and colonial political boundaries.
Maybe John Wright or Carolyn Hamilton have comment on this?
Chris Lowe
<chris.lowe@reed.edu>
To reply briefly to Chris Lowe:
We need to be wary of the notion that the formalizing and naming of written versions of the Nguni languages, and other African languages for that matter, was done 'initially' by foreigners. Presumably African intellectuals would have been involved in the process from the very beginning.
And to add to what Chris has to say about Inkatha labelling President Mandela as a 'Xhosa'. Yes, when Inkatha supporters want to insult him, they call him a Xhosa rather than a Thembu (he is a member of a Thembu chiefly house). Recently, when there was discussion in Inkatha circles about inviting the President to address a 'Zulu traditional' gathering, a historian from the University of Zululand with close Inkatha connections told the media that Mandela would be invited on the basis that he is a Zulu. The historian went on to explain that he made this identification because the Zulu and the Thembu are historically related. Like most Nguni-speaking peoples, they probably are, but so far back in time that there is no recorded genealogical link. Mandela as a Xhosa, a Thembu, a Zulu - I suspect he would call himself first and foremost a South African.
John Wright
University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg
wright@history.unp.ac.za
This is a rejoinder to the recent converstation between Chris Lowe and John Wright
The debate about how the boundaries of a language are constituted applies equally to other parts of Africa. My work focuses on the Ewe (Ghana and Togo), and it is relevant to ask, in this context too, whether contemporary linguistic classifications were imposed in colonial times. Certainly, these distinctions between linguistic groups seem to be upheld today, and have been extended to incorporate ethnic identities, in spite of the wide range of linguistic variation between various Ewe sub-groups.
Nadia Lovell
University of Kent, UK
Also germane is Terence Ranger's work on the invention of [language and] ethnicity in Zimbabwe - part. with ref. to how Ndebele speaking peoples suddenly found it attractive to "become" Shona if it meant making use of grazing lands set aside by the colonial rulers for particular groups.
At 09:20 AM 10/05/96 +0000, you wrote: This is a rejoinder to the recent converstaiton between Chris Lowe and John Wright
The debate about how the boundaries of a language are constituted applies equally to other parts of Africa. My work focuses on the Ewe (Ghana and Togo), and it is relevant to ask, in this context too, whether contemporary linguistic classifications were imposed in colonial times. Certainly, these distinctions between linguistic groups seem to be upheld today, and have been extended to incorporate ethnic identities, in spite of the wide range of linguistic variation between various Ewe sub-groups.
Nadia Lovell
University of Kent, UK
Peter Limb
University of Western Australia
Nedlands, 6907, W.A. AUSTRALIA
email: plimb@library.uwa.edu.au
phone: +61 9 380 2348
fax: +61 9 380 1012