Writing Apartheid: Ethnographic Collaborators and the Politics of Knowledge Production in Twentieth-Century South Africa

Abstract

Abstract Knowledge production in apartheid-era South Africa was a profoundly collaborative process. In particular, throughout the 1930s–1950s, the joint intellectual labor of both Africans and Europeans created a body of knowledge that codified and celebrated the notion of a distinct realm of Zulu religion. The intertwined careers of Swedish missionary to South Africa Bengt Sundkler and isiZulu-speaking Lutheran pastor-turned-ethnographer Titus Mthembu highlight the limitations of overly clear demarcations between “professional” versus “lay” anthropologists as well as between “colonial European” versus “indigenous African” knowledge. Mthembu and Sundkler’s decades-long collaboration resulted in a book called Bantu Prophets in South Africa ([1948] 1961). The work is best understood as the joint output of both men, although Sundkler scarcely acknowledged Mthembu’s role in the conceptualization, research, and writing of the book. In an era of racial segregation, the idea that African religion occupied a discrete, innately different sphere that the book advanced had significant political purchase. As one of a number of African ideologues supportive of the apartheid state, Mthembu mobilized his ethnographic findings to argue for innate racial difference and the virtues of “separate development” for South Africa’s Zulu community. His mysterious death in 1960 points to the high stakes of ethnographic research in the politically fraught climate of apartheid South Africa.