Building a community on the Zulu frontier: The history of the Machi chieftaincy from the early 19th century to 1948

This study traces the history of the KwaMachi chieftaincy, southwest of KwaZulu-Natal province, South Africa, from the early nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century. KwaZulu-Natal province is often confused with popular notions of ethnic history that sees Africans living in KwaZulu-Natal as AmaZulu. This universal outlook does not only fail to acknowledge the significance of unique history of pre-Shakan communities. It also does not take into consideration borderland communities whose history has been shifting in time, and who should be understood in terms of their history. The notion of ethnicity was essentially a construction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.;Analysis of the processes of community building in what became KwaZulu-Natal shows that it is often difficult to categorize people along a single ethnic line. People of various backgrounds in the region influenced the development of their own communities and also the definition of "Zuluness". Locating my case study of the KwaMachi community in Harding (south coast KwaZulu-Natal) within this context, I argue on the basis of extensive archival and oral research that official and rigid distinctions are not completely dominant due to ongoing interaction through migrations, creation and shifting of colonial boundaries, and marriages and other alliances, all of which clouded and undermined ethnic homogenization. Such distinctions rarely have been incorporated into the subject literature. African communities have been shaped by diverse socio-cultural transformations. Being "Zulu" in Harding thus requires reconstruction and reformulation to appropriate Zulu identity to fit neatly into a society ordered along boundaries. KwaMachi, part of what was defined as "No Man's Land" before the 1860s, is a place where multiple identities operated in parallel and intersecting lines, where cultures were modified as people incorporated many cultural elements at local level.;This case study suggests that socially and locally constructed identity resulting from such interaction does not always have an official name; rather the feeling of being "Zulu" is accompanied by a sense of difference among people who embrace an imagined uniform of identity in the construction, negotiation and manipulations that accompany the processes of community building in any changing system. Various stages and contours of this transition could be studied by following the evolution of the community, its geographical position, language, way of life and other aspects. Using KwaMachi as a case study, this dissertation demonstrates that being a Zulu person in the KwaZulu-Natal province was not a fixed practice; it underwent various processes defined by social and political dynamics emerging at different times in history.