Talking Peace, Living Conflict: the Mental and the Material on the Borders of Apartheid
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TALKING PEACE, LIVING CONFLICT: THE MENTAL AND THE MATERIAL ON THE BORDERS OF APARTHEID By ROBERT SHANAFELT A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 1989 Copyright 1989 by Robert Shanafelt To Michael Kananelo Shanafelt Ha u phele ke khotso le ka bolokolohi Mawuphile ngoxolo nengenkululeko May you live in peace and freedom ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The research on which this dissertation is based was funded by a grant from the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Abroad program and administered through the Center for African Studies at the University of Florida. While in Lesotho the author was affiliated with the Institute of Southern African Studies at the National University of Lesotho. The Department of Anthropology at the University of Florida kindly provided seven weeks of financial support for the final stages of the writing. In my endeavor to speak and learn the Sotho language I have incurred a number of debts. Fiorina Pheko of the United States Peace Corps in Maseru deserves special mention for efficient management of the Peace Corps' language programs. Participation in such intensive training was a first step in making me feel at home in a new language. I shall always owe a special debt of gratitude for all the help I have received in the subtleties of Sotho language and culture over the years from my friends 'Me' 'MaClass, Ausi Nkalimeng, Abuti Maseru, Ntate Mokalo M. , 'Me' 'MaPutsoane, 'Me' 'Ma'Muso, 'Me' 'MaLiqela, 'Me' Lerato, Ntate Ts'ehleng, and 'Me' 'MaBaruti. Ke lebohile banabeso. Le lumele hie. Ha ke tsebe ke tla le bona neng hape. empa . ke le hopotse. Similarly, I have been treated with particular kindness and generosity by the Xhosa-speaking people with whom I stayed in Lesotho. Ndibonaile abantu kaFosi nekaTvhal i kakhulu . The Vundle chieftainess and her family insured that my stay was a happy and fulfilling one. Three assistants, 'Me' 'MaLigela, 'Me' 'MaLekhobe, and •Me' NoMbulelo aided in the collection of the survey data and also provided help with translations. Mark and Sheila Woods, dedicated agriculturalists whose experience in Lesotho began at the same time as my own, opened their home to me during my stays in Maseru. Their commitment to agriculture and the people of Lesotho is truly enviable. May they have many years of reward for their service to others This dissertation would not have been possible without the advice and collaboration of my mentor, Professor Ronald Cohen. He has taught me much about the craft and science of anthropology and has always been willing to put in long hours to help me improve and clarify my thinking and writing. It has been a pleasure indeed to work with a man who enjoys scholarship and learning as much as he does. Dissertation committee members Drs. R. Hunt Davis, Robert Lawless, Anthony Oliver-Smith, and Art Hansen have been exemplary professors who manage to combine high levels of scholarship and teaching with sincere concern for individual students. Each has introduced me to new realms of learning Dr. Davis to the complexities of South African historiography, Dr. Lawless to social science classics previously unopened by me and to the riches of his ethnographic experience, Dr. Oliver-Smith to a better understanding of Marxian literature and perspectives from Latin America, and Dr. Hansen to comparative perspectives on Malawi, Botswana, and Zambia. Peter Malanchuk, the Africana bibliographer at the University of Florida, has been untiring in his efforts to obtain sources which haven enriched this dissertation considerably. Special thanks also go to Professor Dunbar Moodie for making possible my use of the documents discussed in chapter nine. I would like especially to thank my family for their untiring mental and material support of my intellectual endeavors. I have been blessed with parents who have never tried to force me down paths I did not care to travel and who have not balked when the paths I have chosen are new to them. Finally, my gratitude and thanks go to my wife, Mpho. She has been my greatest teacher, colleague, and friend in Lesotho. Unfortunately, our own peculiar brand of labor migration (she in Lesotho, me in the USA) has separated us for the period involved in writing this dissertation. she deserves much of the credit for any insight I may have about Lesotho, but none of the blame for any mistakes in this dissertation. PREFACE Despite its relatively small size and obscure place on the world scene Lesotho has attracted a considerable amount of scholarly attention. Since the 1970s there has been a flood of published and unpublished information about virtually every aspect of life there. Much of this work reflects an interest in general South African issues but a number of foreigners have also come to know Lesotho through their experience with the "aid and development industry" (I happen to be of that sort.) The hospitality with which foreigners have generally been received also typically makes Lesotho a congenial place in which to live and conduct one's research. Since the 1970s American and British students have done more than a dozen dissertations on Lesotho in the fields of economic history, anthropology (specifically in medical anthropology, development, the situation of women, anthropology of religion, and sociolinguistics) , political science, geography, and religion. One may quite justly ask, then: what is the value of one more such study? Firstly, although previous studies, in general, represent important contributions to their respective fields they frequently have been unnecessarily confined to the domain of Lesotho itself. Although there are exceptions, generally, they have VII not been concerned with synthesizing perspectives in order to account for relationships between worldviews, material conditions, and historical processes in southern Africa. In addition, most of the previous studies have focused chiefly on the village level without examining in much detail urban life or local perspectives on the nation as a whole. One of my purposes is to draw together information from the previous literature and my own field work to present a coherent account of contemporary life as it is experienced by a variety of people in Lesotho and other parts of South Africa's periphery. This will also include discussion of a hitherto neglected group, Lesotho's Xhosa-speakers. This work is primarily an account of working life, culture, and identity, but it is organized to include ideographic as well as nomothetic information, humanist as well as scientific perspectives, and psychological as well as socioeconomic data. Central to the discussion is the relationship between "ethnicity," "nationalism," "occupation" and other aspects of identity and the historical-material conditions of Lesotho and its people. I view such categories as "ideal types," in the sense of Burger (1976), around which to organize my fieldwork and to engage in interpretation and explanation. Although I have not discussed the work of Godelier (1986) in the text, his stress on the interrelationship between thought and material vm conditions is implicit throughout. His influence is obvious in that the subtitle of this work echoes his own title. I went to Lesotho with the intention of learning about folk conceptions of skin color, we/they dichotomies, status and self-perception, and the possible relationships between such conceptions and one's place in a polity and a system of production, distribution, and exchange. Categories such as "status" and "class" are ideal types because they deliberately forsake some of the unique details of individual cases for the purpose of generalization. They may be also aptly termed "metafolk" categories in that they are explications of explications. Similarly, the models which may be developed from such concepts are folk models about folk models. Admission of this does not invalidate them as unscientific or necessarily commit one to a position of cultural relativism. Ideally the models of social scientists are built on detailed cross-cultural and historical studies and a conception of homo sapien as a species with a particular, biological evolution. 1 The folk models of any given society are limited to the extent that the view of its people is restricted—by poverty, language barriers, isolation from the flow of international information, and so forth. In South Africa the speech community consists of various degrees of interaction between the two Indo-European languages, the several distinct Bantu ones, and the languages of South Asia. There is an ongoing interaction which cannot be understood outside the power and authority relationships in which they take place. Conditions of political and economic subordination have pushed English and Afrikaans to the fore at the expense of indigenous languages. Yet, the consequent desire to master English and the subjects of Western formal education have been inhibited by the Bantu education system and inequitable access to resources. 2 The categories I am using then should not be reifed, but instead used as pointers and view finders, directing one's attention to particular aspects of social reality. While I use ideal-typical categories, I also try to be skeptical of them. Too much attention to one category may lead one to define too much in its terms. This has already been the case all too often in studies of "race" and "class." Still, the problem of observer bias is an inevitable one because the interpreter must always perceive, not only in reference to the categories of research, but also against the background of his or her own experience and interests. My goal in fieldwork has been to achieve a holistic understanding that not only was personally useful for explaining things in Lesotho, but one that was personally useful for getting along there as well.