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Elizabeth MacGonagle has produced a study long awaited by scholars of southeast Africa. Crafting Identity in Zimbabwe and Mozambique offers a longue durée reconstruction of ethnic consciousness among the Ndau of the Mozambique-Zimbabwe borderlands. MacGonagle questions the prevailing orthodoxy that ethnic identity was an outcome of colonial rule, co-produced by Africans and European administrators. That orthodoxy has seen revision, but it still stands, and Crafting Identity is a welcome correction, placing the origins of Ndau identity in the precolonial era. MacGonagle explores the relatively thick documentary record, a product of an early and ongoing Portuguese presence, twinning this data with evidence from more than 200 interviews.
Opening chapters introduce the historiography of identity and the history of southeast Africa, with following chapters examining constitutive elements of Ndau identity. MacGonagle considers how 'ethnicity was used for political purposes and ethnic boundaries were drawn within overlapping political structures' (p. 40). Here her analysis especially draws on Portuguese documents; from their coastal and Zambezi-valley settlements, the Portuguese tried mightily to control the local gold trade (at the western end of Indian Ocean networks), and so they were keen observers of southeast African polities. In subsequent chapters, MacGonagle uses their reflections together with copious interview data to analyze clan totems, marriage practices and rules of succession; adornment practices (clothing, jewelry and tattooing),...