Abstract
Caroline Hamilton and Nessa Leibhammer’s two edited volumes, Tribing and Untribing the Archive: Identity and the Material Record in Southern KwaZulu-Natal in the Late Independent and Colonial Periods, embody a timeous and welcomed intervention into current debates concerning processes of epistemological decolonisation in South Africa, as well the role of history and the archive. The two volumes include 21 essays written by an inter-disciplinary group of scholars (history, art history, language studies, archaeology and anthropology), as well as curators and intellectuals with experience working in museum and art gallery spaces. It is this rich diversity of contributions that has allowed the political and historical insights brought to the fore within these volumes to far surpass their primary aim. That aim is to recover the ‘archival potential’ of certain materials which have historically been deemed as ethnographic objects, and evidence of traditional culture, rather than being ‘constituted as archival and understood to be evidence of history’ (p. 6).
Their attempt to expand the epistemological concept of the archive to include so-called tribal objects – usually stored in ethnographic collections in museums or art galleries – is motivated by the belief that such a move could ‘inspire, illuminate and enable’ new ways of thinking about the past. They also take the view that these new ways of thinking may transcend the ‘insidiously resilient stereotypes’ premised on ‘the pernicious combination of tribe and tradition [which] continues to tether modern South Africans to ideas about the region’s remote past as primitive, timeless and unchanging’ (p. 14). Drawing heavily on Hamilton’s notions of ‘backstory’ and ‘biography,’ the essays demonstrate how ‘nameless’ and ‘timeless’ objects held in traditional or ethnographic collections in art galleries and museums can be recovered as archival resources and used progressively for understanding the ‘pre-tribal’ past in southern Africa. The 21 essays have been organized into two volumes, each of which has been divided into two thematic sections. Volume 1 includes an introduction by the editors followed by essays under the subheadings ‘Mortified, Marooned, Mobilised’ and ‘Layered Landscapes, Segregated Spaces.’ The essays in Volume 2 fall under the subheadings ‘Significant (Mis)identifications’ and ‘Archival Biographies’ and are followed by an epilogue by Mbongiseni Buthelezi.
The volumes focus, geographically, on the area broadly south of the Thukela River – once the Natal Colony – shading into what is the present-day northern part of the Eastern Cape Province. It was chosen ‘because of the particular complexity of identity ascription activities involved there in the eras before British colonialism and in the colonial period when much of the available record pertinent to these periods was laid down’ and because ‘it was the place, perhaps the first, where the idea of tribe was systematically developed and imposed by British colonial powers’ (p. 14). These complex identity ascription activities associated with this specific time and place are scrutinized throughout both of the volumes, but particularly in the essays comprising Section Two of Volume 1. John Wight and the late Jeff Guy show that the way in which this area – its peoples, socio-political formations and its items of material culture – has been subsumed within the ‘over-determinedly tribal’ category ‘Zulu’ is both historically inaccurate and politically problematic. These authors, and others, engage critically with the concept of identity politics and the processes by which certain identity categorizations, such as tribal and traditional, were imposed, resisted, adapted, and mobilized differently by people in the area south of the Thukela River during the late 19th century. In so doing, they bring history into theory, dispelling racist myths, which persist today, of terra nullius or ahistorical conceptions of a timeless and homogeneous ‘Zulu’ cultural and political hegemony in the area.
Thus, one of the main questions raised by these volumes is: If not tribes, then what were the socio-political formations present in southern Africa prior to the arrival of the concept in the region along with the British colonizing forces of the 1860s? This question, and its present-day significance for state and popular politics in South Africa, is tackled directly within Mbongiseni Buthelezi’s epilogue, entitled ‘We Need New Names Too’. Drawing on Guy’s two contributions, Buthelezi argues that terms such as ‘isizwe/izizwe (the “people” of a particular polity; the body politic) and izwe/amazwe (an area and the people in it)’ are useful alternatives for the English terms ‘chiefdom’ and ‘clan.’ These latter terms are conventionally used to refer to the people and social organizations of South Africa’s past, and fall radically short of describing or accounting for the kind of accommodation people actually lived in (p. 598). In making this claim, Buthelezi hints at what is perhaps the most significant drawback to these volumes; that many of the contributing authors have failed to apply the same critical treatment of the politics of naming to the concepts of chiefdom,’ ‘clan’ and ‘kraal’ as they do to ‘tribe.’
However, a number of essays, specifically in Volume 2, which deal directly with objects of material culture, highlight how many of the objects which have and continue to be presented and treated as evidence of traditional, pre-colonial ‘Zulu’ culture, were neither evidence of ‘Zuluness’ nor some kind of unfettered pre-colonial ‘tradition’ at all. Many of the objects labelled as ‘Zulu,’ and thus associated with the Zulu Kingdom in the north, were created by peoples in the southern Natal area who actively distinguished themselves, their collective identities, and, in some cases, their language, as autonomous or different to ‘Zulu.’ Sara Byala and Ann Wanless, for example, analyse the backstory and biography of the Clem Webb Collection at the Museum Africa in Johannesburg. They argue that the processes of ‘Zuluization,’ which this collection has undergone since its acquisition in 1910, has resulted in over 900 objects being problematically associated with an undifferentiated ‘Zulu’ material culture and tradition (p. 580). In analysing the objects in the Clem Webb Collection – including its labels and other forms of associated metadata where available – the authors highlight the challenges researchers face when trying to engage with such ‘tribed’ collections, arguing that ‘even if it had been accurate, the label “Zulu” would have been of no particular use, since it meant too much and thus, in fact, too little’ (p. 580).
Analysing a selection of mid-19th century objects from the Christy Collection at the British Museum, Catherine Elliott Weinberg demonstrates how, ‘At a stroke, the classification of these objects changed from one “tribe” to another… their present classification gives a rather skewed and false impression of common provenance and cultural homogeneity’ (p. 479). Supporting claims advanced in Section Two of Volume 1, Weinberg adds, ‘It is well to remember that historically, within what is now the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal, there “was not a clearly articulated and bounded culture, nor a singular identity,” hence the classification of the objects as “Zulu” further obscures cultural nuances and contextual differences’ (p. 479). This is why interrogating the notion of difference, and the complex and changing history of identity politics within the region, are central to processes of ‘untribing’ with which the two volumes are centrally concerned.
To borrow from Buthelezi, what these volumes show is that we need ‘new vocabularies’ so that we do not slide into the old colonial assumptions with which we are so familiar. He is right to suggest that the two concepts of ‘tribing’ and ‘untribing’ are also examples of the kind of new terms and ideas which are needed – and which have been offered by this edited collection of essays (p. 597). In this and a number of other ways Tribing and Untribing the Archive: Identity and the Material Record in Southern Kwa-Zulu Natal in the Late Independent and Colonial Periods is undoubtedly an important contribution to debates concerning decolonization and one which offers us strategies for moving past the tendency ‘of thinking that tribes were the only kinds of entities that existed and that to own the past means to identify with a tribe, which only came into existence as a concept and an entity in the later 19th century’ (p. 598).