Historical and political background
The ethnography of Southern Africa is intensely bound up with the politics of the region. Colonial powers included Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, Portugal, and South Africa itself. The region comprises hunter-gatherer and pas-toralist societies, small-scale agriculturalists and industrial and mining-based economies. It also includes every kind of political organization, from communities with consensus politics only, to traditional empires (that ruled from Great Zimbabwe, built from the eleventh to the fifteenth century, and the Zulu empire of the nineteenth century), as well as modern democracies. Thus it is useful to think of Southern Africa as a single region only in the sense of its collective politico-economic situation, while in other senses parts of the subcontinent (Khoisan, Bantu-speaking and European-influenced) may themselves be considered ethnographic regions within its geographical boundaries. Precisely where those geographical boundaries lie is open to debate, but Southern Africa includes broadly the modern nation states of South Africa, Lesotho, Swaziland, Botswana, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and sometimes also Angola, Zambia and perhaps Malawi.
Bantu-speaking Southern Africa
Bantu-speaking Southern Africa can be divided into two linguistic and cultural units: Central and Southern, while the Southern Bantu-speakers may be further divided into Nguni, Sotho, Venda and Tsonga linguistic units which coincide more-or-less with cultural ones. The term ‘Bantu-speaking’ (rather than simply ‘Bantu’) is usually preferred in this part of Africa because of the derogatory usage of ‘Bantu’ as a singular noun during the apartheid era. In any case, the term comes from the plural form of a word for ‘person’ in several of the languages, and the Bantu family as a whole comprises the largest and most widespread of Africa’s language families.
The Southern Bantu branch of the language family comprises Nguni and Sotho divisions, and the smaller Venda and Tsonga groups. The Nguni are largely coastal peoples, namely Xhosa (in the south) and Zulu and Swazi (in the north), with offshoots such as the Ndebele of Zimbabwe who migrated there in the nineteenth century. The typical pattern of settlement among Nguni is in relatively scattered, isolated homesteads, with livestock kept at each homestead and cultivated fields nearby. Nguni are hierarchical peoples, with traditional kings or chiefs. Some of them, like Shaka Zulu in the early nineteenth century, wielded considerable power, and the threat of Shaka’s 50,000 warriors led directly to the mass migrations of both Nguni and Sotho population groups at that time. Styles of political control varied. To put it somewhat simplistically, Zulu kings ruled through male relatives geographically dispersed among their subjects, while Swazi kings have traditionally ruled through marriage to the daughters of local chiefs within the realm. To add to the complexity, the Swazi kings have at times shared power with queen mothers, been assisted by inner and outer councils, and by dispersed chiefs, as well as by ‘bond-friends’ — commoners who protected the king from his patrilineal relatives and potential rival claimants.
Sotho groups have also had kings and chiefs. Modern Lesotho, like Swaziland, is a traditional kingdom, although its king today has fewer powers than the Swazi monarch. The settlement patterns of Sotho peoples vary in part according to the terrain, for example with mountainous Lesotho creating different challenges from desert Botswana. That said, typically, where conditions allow (as in Botswana, especially), settlement is in large or small villages, with separate cattle posts and farmlands. In Botswana, it is often the old men and young boys who live at the cattle posts, with women who tend the maize and sorghum fields living on the lands, and others who inhabit the villages. Villages are centred on the kgotla (or meeting place) and are geographically divided into wards each consisting of related individuals under a headman.
Central Bantu-speaking groups include the closely related Herero, Mbanderu and Himba peoples of Botswana and Namibia, as well as a number of northern Namibian population groups collectively known as Ovambo or Owambo. The Herero and related peoples are famous in anthropology for their strong cattle-based economy and their ^double-descent system, with sacred cattle inherited tpatrilineally and ordinary cattle (and political authority) inherited tmatrilineally. They are more famous in the public domain for their distinctive dress styles for women, with colourful, missionary-influenced long, full dresses among Herero and Mbanderu, and leather thongs and skin smeared with fat, ochre and ash among Himba. The Ovambo are agricultural as well as livestock-rearing peoples and, like other Central Bantu-speakers possess matrilineal descent organization. Both Ovambo and Herero-speakers tend sacred fires, which are placed in the centre of each homestead and are not allowed to burn out except upon the death of a chief.
Ethnographic studies of the Bantu-speaking peoples of Southern Africa have been prominent in the British and the South African anthropological traditions. Functionalists such as tIsaac Schapera (1938), tHilda Kuper, and ^Eileen and Jack Krige (1943) emphasized political organization and kinship structures. In this tradition, often the political structures were seen as encompassing the modern as well as the traditional, and European-dominated power structures as well as indigenous. Others, such as Phillip Mayer (1961) and ^Monica Wilson (Monica Hunter 1936), looked at conflict between Western and local values. tMax Gluckman (e.g. 1963), along with several others associated with the ^Manchester School and the ^Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, preferred to see Southern Africa as composed of social processes with institutionalized ritual conflict between traditional factions or age groups, as well as conflict between traditional and modern forces. Some in this school, such as tJ. Clyde Mitchell (1969), focused instead on social networks. In this tradition too,
John and Jean Comaroff (1992) have focused more specifically on the hegemony of cultural as well as political forces, including the authority of missionaries during the colonial era.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the increasing use of force and intimidation by the apartheid regime on the South African population at large caused many in South African anthropology to rethink their positions. The works of Karl Marx were banned, but anthropologists moved explicitly towards Marxist theoretical positions. This had the effect of creating a distance between the ‘liberal’ tradition, which retained an emphasis on population groups (if not on ‘cultures’ in the sense of American or indeed Afrikaner anthropology), and a new Marxist tradition emphasizing class differences over ‘culture’ or ‘race’. The crisis in South African society hit home when David Webster, an anthropologist turned activist on behalf of apartheid detainees, was murdered by South African security forces in 1989. The beginning of South African democracy in 1994 marked the end of an anthropology based primarily on ethnicity and, with the eventual merging of Afrikaans and English-language professional associations, the renewal of an anthropology emphasizing social concerns, as well as development, migration, and medical and legal issues (see Sharp 2006). In 1996, another anthropologist and activist, Mamphela Ram-phele, became the first Black vice-chancellor of the University of Cape Town.
Khoisan Southern Africa
The Khoisan peoples comprise the Khoekhoe and the San (Bushmen), the latter including some who in fact speak Khoe (Central Bushman) languages which are related to Khoekhoe. The exact relations among Khoisan languages are in dispute among linguists. The boundary between herders and hunters is not precise either, but in general it is the ‘hunters’, known as Bushmen, San or Basarwa, who have attracted most ethnographic attention.
The first intensive studies of Bushmen were with /Xam in the nineteenth century. These were carried out not in /Xam territory in the Northern Cape, but among prisoners who had been taken to Cape Town. The folklorist and linguist W.H.I. Bleek and his sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd managed to persuade the governor of Cape Colony to release some into their custody, and these became the first generation of Bushman anthropological informants. Bleek’s daughter Dorothea worked with Naro and other groups in the 1920s. Modern studies began in 1950 with the Marshall family among the G/wi and Ju/’hoansi (then known as the !Kung), and professional anthropology entered the scene with prominence only with ^Richard Lee’s work (e.g. Lee 1979), also with the Ju/’hoansi, in the 1960s. These peoples live in the Kalahari, a semi-desert region of Botswana and Namibia, where there is sufficient vegetation to maintain sparse human hunter-gatherer settlement as well as large populations of grazing animals, but in most areas insufficient surface water for agricultural development. Bushmen also live in the Okavango swamp and river areas of northern Botswana, Namibia and Angola, and formerly in parts of Zimbabwe, South Africa and Lesotho.
The significance of Bushman populations for anthropology lies especially in the field of ecological anthropology. Contrary to popular belief before then, well-known studies from the 1960s (and some lesser known ones before then) revealed that Ju/’hoansi and other Southern African hunter-gatherers spend very little time in work activities. This is because they know and can utilize their harsh environments effectively, and also partly because they value free time over the accumulation of property. That revelation led ^Marshall Sahlins (1974: 1-39) to the conclusion that hunter-gatherers represent ‘the original affluent society’. Beyond ecological anthropology, the significance of the Bushmen within anthropological theory is related very much to the question of the degree to which these are autonomous peoples (as in the traditionalist assumptions of ^Marshall, ^Lee and others) or are part of a larger political economy. The latter view is represented by the ‘Kalahari revisionists’, especially Edwin Wilmsen (1989), who has argued from historical and archaeological research that trade networks and food production have been a mainstay of ‘hunter-gatherer’ groups for several centuries. In his view, San are less a distinct set of population groups, and more an underclass in the larger economic structures. In his view, their apparent isolation is caused at least partly by the masking effects of colonial and nation-state domination over the last 150 years.
Whatever the merits of the revisionist critique, Bushman societies are characterized by widespread systems of sharing and reciprocity, by the extension of kinship classification throughout social networks, by relative gender equality, and by the absence of almost any social hierarchy. Traditional politics is by consensus, and leadership is mainly of task groups only and without inheritance of individual positions of authority. In general, food-gathering is carried out by women, and hunting by men. In some areas there are staple vegetable foods which provide good subsistence in spite of the semi-desert environments. In many areas, there is, or has until recently been, an abundant supply of large game, sufficient to feed small hunter-gatherer populations. Meat is widely shared, not stored, and this encourages solidarity of kinship links across band and band cluster (or ‘nexus’) territories. Bushman religion is essentially monotheistic, but with a distant creator-god and an emphasis more on rituals of curing than on theology. Curing rituals involve the whole community, with one or more men (and sometimes women) entering a trance state in which they are believed to be capable of removing physical illnesses or even social ills from people’s bodies.
Khoekhoe cattle and sheep-herders live mainly in Namibia. The two main groups there are the Nama and the Damara, and each is divided into several autonomous tribes each headed by a chief. Chiefship passes patrilineally and chiefs are usually, but not always, male. In the past, Khoekhoe groups lived in South Africa too, and the modern ‘Cape Coloured’ people are in part of Khoekhoe descent. Indeed, many today have reclaimed their Khoekhoe heritage. In the past, Khoekhoe were hunters as well as herders, and in many respects are culturally and linguistically similar to Bushmen, especially to Central Bushmen such as Naro and G/wi. However, Khoekhoe have localized, but in former times often nomadic, patrilineal descent groups. Livestock were used for both food and (in the case of oxen) transport.
Since the early 1990s there has been a greater emphasis than in the past on political issues, and in particular the question of separate ‘indigenous’ rights for the former hunter-gatherer populations of Botswana and Namibia. Sidsel Saugestad (2001), among others, has argued the case for indigenous status and indigenous rights for the San of Botswana. In opposition, "Adam Kuper (2003) has argued vehemently that to grant such rights would be to return to false anthropological notions of cultural purity and to the invidious political system of apartheid which was built partly on such notions.
Other ethnic groups
Since Dutch settlement at the Cape in 1652, Southern Africa has had significant non-indigenous populations. Dutch settlement was reinforced by French Protestant (Huguenot) and German immigrants, and this group eventually became the Afrikaner people. They, or rather some of them, instituted the iniquitous system of apartheid which operated during the period of Afrikaner National Party rule, from 1948 to 1994.
Other members of Afrikaans-speaking communities are descended from Muslim slaves from the East Indies, from Khoekhoe, and from formerly Bantu-speaking individuals, as well as, in part, from the European settlers. If these ‘Coloured’ groups are one ‘people’, they are so mainly because of the effects of apartheid, rather than because of any singular identity or set of cultural facts. They include such diverse populations as the Cape Malay people (Islamic and centred in Cape Town) and the Griqua (actually two largely Khoekhoe rural populations, with unique religious traditions and rival political claims). These groups are the subject of increasing interest in anthropology, especially within South Africa, but have yet to achieve the international anthropological notoriety of the Khoi-san proper or the Bantu-speaking majority population groups. Perhaps this is partly due to the persistence of South African anthropologists in studying, as Schapera argued as long ago as the 1930s, the ‘social system’ within which people live, rather than ethnic groups in isolation.
