Sifuna umlando wethu (We are Searching for Our History): Oral Literature and the Meanings of the Past in Post-apartheid South Africa

Abstract

Sifuna umlando wethu” (We are Looking for our History): Oral Literature and the Meanings of the Past in Post-Apartheid South Africa Mbongiseni Buthelezi In post-apartheid South Africa, working through the distortions of identity and history of the formerly colonized, as well as the traumas suffered by black South Africans as a result of the alienation of land by European settlers is an ongoing project of the state. The state’s attempts to formulate an appropriate national myth with founding heroes and significant events that resonate with the majority has resulted in the promotion of certain figures as heroes. Not all black South Africans who are exhorted to identify with these figures consider them heroes. Some trace the beginnings of the fragmentation of their historical identities to the conquest actions of these figures. Shaka kaSenzangakhona, founder of the Zulu kingdom, is one such figure who is being promoted as the heritage of all Zulus by the state, especially at the level of the province of KwaZulu-Natal, for purposes of constructing a heritage for the province and of encouraging tourism. This promotion of Shaka is seen by some as the perpetuation under the post-1994 dispensation of the suppression of their histories and the disallowing of engagement with a longer history than the reorganization of chieftainship from 1927 and the seizure of land belonging to Africans from 1913. Hence has sprung up groups convening around pre-Zulu kinship identities since the early 1990’s in which people attempt to find answers to the question “Who am I?” For most people, this question is driven by a sense that their conceptions of the country’s past and of their historical selves (i.e. of the experiences of their predecessors that have brought them to where they are in the present) have been either influenced, mis(in)formed or distorted by the national master narratives that crystallized under European colonial rule and apartheid, even as they were simultaneously being resisted. Informed in part the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of the late 1990’s and the state’s attempts to “redress the imbalances of the past,” many feel they need to work through the meanings of the past in their personal lives in order to inhabit the present with a fuller sense of how they have come to be who they are and so that they can imagine and create different futures for themselves. In this project I examine the attempt of people who trace their history to the Ndwandwe kingdom that was destroyed by Shaka’s Zulu forces in the 1820’s who have organized themselves into an association named the uBumbano lwamaZwide (Unity Association of the Zwides) to engage with questions of identity and the meanings of the past. The association comprises a group of activists in different parts of KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng provinces who have been meeting since 2003 to attempt to bring together on a large scale people of Ndwandwe, Nxumalo and other historically-associated clans to recall and/or construct a heroic past in post-apartheid South Africa. Implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, the assembly of the Ndwandwe calls into question the definition as Zulu of those Ndwandwe whose forebears were incorporated into the Zulu kingdom in the 1820’s.I analyze the use of the idiom of heritage as well as a traditional idiom of kinship that has come to be handed down as a Zulu language for mediating social relations by the uBumbano in ways that challenge the centrality given to Shaka in narrations of the past. I argue that the uBumbano is using these idioms against how they are commonly understood – heritage as a mode of engaging with the past for its feel-good features and kinship as a Zulu idiom in KwaZuluNatal province. Through an analysis of three closely related oral artistic forms – the izibongo (personal praises) of Shaka in his promotion and the ihubo lesizwe (‘national’ hymn), izithakazelo (kinship group or clan address names) of the Ndwandwe as well as the personal praises of Zwide, the last Ndwandwe ruler before the fall of the kingdom – I argue that the uBumbano is deploying these forms in subtle ways to overturn the dominance of Shaka in public discourse. Moreover, I contend, the uBumbano is turning on its head the permission to recall their ancestors under the authority of the Zulu ruling elite that Ndwandwe people who were incorporated into the Zulu kingdom have been permitted for almost two centuries. I demonstrate how the language of being an isizwe (‘nation’) was permitted and perpetuated a Ndwandwe identity that has held the potential to be asserted more forcefully to overturn its secondary position to an overarching Zulu identity. In Chapter 1 I examine the unprecedented promotion of Shaka since the 1970’s for political purposes by the apartheid collaborationist Inkatha, which ruled the Bantustan of KwaZulu from 1975 until the end of apartheid in 1994 and the province of KwaZulu-Natal until 2004. I argue that Inkatha’s promotion of Shaka forced a politics of ethnicity in which the national ruling party, the African National Congress, had to play by Inkatha’s rules in order and wrest recourse to Zuluness from Inkatha in order to win elections in the province. Hence the province was locked into the renovation of colonial stereotypes of Shaka and Zulus and their new promotion in the new dispensation as the heritage of the province. Any attempts, therefore, to work through the meanings of the past is forced to engage with what Shaka means, I argue, as the state’s own project of working through the past stops in the early 20 century and thus disallows engagement with the longer past. Asking questions about the meanings of the Zulu past is further forced to be subtle and strategic as powerful interests in the society are invested in holding Shaka as the center of the heritage and identity in the ‘Zulu Kingdom,’ so named for purposes of tourism. In Chapter 2 I argue that the need to tread with care when recalling the still symbolically powerful Ndwandwe kingdom and identity has fostered the use of two interlocking idioms: heritage as the mode of engaging with the past that the state promotes, and kinship as a way of presenting the uBumbano’s project as continuing the veneration of Ndwandwe ancestors as a subset of the overarching Zulu identity that has been allowed under Zulu authority for almost two centuries. I demonstrate how this Ndwandwe recall of their ancestors has held in place potential for the subversion of such Zulu authorization and of the identity of the Ndwandwe as Zulu because the Ndwandwe ‘nation’ that has been recalled includes those who settled in other polities in other parts of southern Africa, such as the Gaza kingdom in today’s Mozambique. This subversive potential is being released by recalling Zwide more publicly, I argue, and demonstrate how the use of Zwide’s name encodes the subversion of Zulu authority. In Chapter 3 I examine three versions of the praises of Zwide kaLanga, the primary figure on whom pre-Zulu Ndwandwe memory and identification attach, to probe how a putative father of the ‘nation’ comes to be remembered more than 185 years after his death in what is considered the appropriate manner of remembering an important male ancestor when his praises have been suppressed almost out of memory. My argument is that the Ndwandwe look to the Zulu model for an appropriate manner to commemorate important founding figures. Hence they are attempting to reconstruct Zwide’s praises in order to recall him in the same manner as Shaka is recalled. I show how fragments of Zwide’s praises have survived even as the memory of Zwide and his recall were being suppressed under Zulu authority. Chapter 4 goes into the detail of how the uBumbano is cashing in on the wide usage of the Ndwandwe hymn and clan address names among the people activists are attempting to mobilize. I demonstrate how these forms are embedded in the quotidian and ritual practices of a wider set of Ndwandwe people than those whose have so far been mobilized and persuaded to attend the association’s heritage celebrations. I argue that the use of these forms in their own lives by a Ndwandwe public primes the reception of the uBumbano’s mobilization efforts by setting up a framework for interpreting the association’s use of the more widely prevalent oral artistic forms. The use of the forms at the association’s events finally decenters Shaka and Zuluness in more public ways.