Ethnicity and identity: Struggle and contestation in the making of the Northern Transvaal Ndebele, ca. 1860--2005

This dissertation documents the complex ways that Northern Ndebele ethnicity was made, negotiated and reconfigured by different interest groups including missionaries, anthropologists, chiefs, African schoolteachers, migrants, and youths with different political agendas over time. The key markers of Northern Ndebele ethnicity which have constantly shifted as society was changing over time were a distinct language drawing from both Nguni and Sotho influences, shared historical origins from the Hlubi, and common clan names and totems. It challenges the "invented traditions" scholarship by showing the existence of Ndebele ethnicity as an amorphous, fluid and contested identity tied to shifting boundaries in the precolonial era. It also looks at the construction of rigid ethnic boundaries by the colonial and/or apartheid states' projects of simplifying African societies through various forms of social engineering, as well as responses to these projects. Based largely on oral historical accounts and a significant body of archival material, this project probes the specific role of local Northern Ndebele intellectuals or ethnic nationalists who, at key historical moments from the 1940s, but especially between the 1960s and 1980s, expressed a distinctive ethnic identity through different acts of writing and organizing political movements. After a short interlude of militant youth activism between 1985 and 1994 which negated ethnic nationalism in favor of a unitary nonracial nationalist vision informed by anti-apartheid politics, there was a resurgence of Northern Ndebele nationalist mobilization in post-apartheid South Africa. The impact of these developments has had lasting consequences for our understanding of ethnicity.