Genealogy and history of the tribes and area in South Africa.

Genealogy and history of the tribes and area in South Africa.

Genealogy and history of the tribes and area in South Africa.

Genealogy and history of the tribes and area in South Africa.

Genealogy and history of the tribes and area in South Africa.

This book is an account of the history of the abaThembu, from the reign of uKumkani Nxeko in c.1650 to the death of uKumkani Dalindyebo in 1920. The importance of this cut‑off date lies in the fact that uKumkani Dalindyebo’s reign was characterised by relative stability compared to those of his predecessors. His prestige, however, was demeaned by the Department of Native Affairs’ Secretary whose instruction was that uKumkani Dalindyebo should not be addressed as a ‘paramount chief’ as that title applied exclusively to the government, thereby strengthening the government’s position and elevating it to be above customary law. AbaThembuland was – and still is – central to the history of the former Transkei region and South Africa. Not only does it form part of the former Transkei region, but it also constitutes South Africa, and so divisions, conflicts, developments and/or underdevelopments in abaThembuland inevitably affected not only the former Transkei region but also the greater part of South Africa in no small measure. Thus, the history of abaThembuland and the divisions thereof overlap with the history of the former Transkei region and South Africa.

First published in 1974, The Bantu-Speaking Peoples of Southern Africa is a revised and rewritten version of I. Schapera’s ethnographical survey of the Bantu-speaking tribes of South Africa. New South African contributors place on record all the known facts of the physical characteristics and traditional cultures of these peoples, as well as documenting the important social, cultural and economic changes that have occurred since the coming of the white man. This book will be of interest to students of anthropology, sociology, African studies, and history.

In this groundbreaking study, Jacob A. Tropp explores the interconnections between negotiations over the environment and an emerging colonial relationship in a particular South African context—the Transkei—subsequently the largest of the notorious “homelands” under apartheid. In the late nineteenth century, South Africa’s Cape Colony completed its incorporation of the area beyond the Kei River, known as the Transkei, and began transforming the region into a labor reserve. It simultaneously restructured popular access to local forests, reserving those resources for the benefit of the white settler economy. This placed new constraints on local Africans in accessing resources for agriculture, livestock management, hunting, building materials, fuel, medicine, and ritual practices. Drawing from a diverse array of oral and written sources, Tropp reveals how bargaining over resources—between and among colonial officials, chiefs and headmen, and local African men and women—was interwoven with major changes in local political authority, gendered economic relations, and cultural practices as well as with intense struggles over the very meaning and scope of colonial rule itself. Natures of Colonial Change sheds new light on the colonial era in the Transkei by looking at significant yet neglected dimensions of this history: how both “colonizing” and “colonized” groups negotiated environmental access and how such negotiations helped shape the broader making and meaning of life in the new colonial order.