Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
INTRODUCTION
The relationship between the colonial state and social anthropology has been the subject of robust debate among Africanist scholars since the 1960s. The major point of contention has been whether anthropology as a specialist field of the study of non-Western societies has been implicated in the colonial project, that is, whether, by imposing the notion of 'tribe' on much more fluid precolonial African identities, anthropologists employed by the state have contributed to perfecting 'divide and rule' policies. Scholars have taken different and often conflicting positions.1 This article seeks to complicate this discussion by looking at the way knowledge was constructed through a relationship between the 'colonial' expert and the 'native informants'.2 It explores the complex dialogical relationship between Dr. Nicholas Jacobus van Warmelo, chief ethnologist in South Africa's Native Affairs Department from 1930 to 1969, and his local informants (mostly elderly men from ruling lineages, considered as experts or repositories of their traditions) who enabled him to pursue the political enterprise of mapping out the 'Transvaal Ndebele'. The article also explores the contribution of local researchers, mainly African schoolteachers employed by Van Warmelo, in collecting oral accounts and recording traditions of the Ndebele, and discusses the vernacular manuscripts they produced from the early 1930s to the mid-1960s. These documents form part of an archive called the 'Dr. N. J. van Warmelo Manuscript Collection' in the South African National Archives in Pretoria.
To the extent that Van Warmelo relied on African informants' and researchers' accounts, his texts were not simply his own 'inventions' but the result of what Lyn Schumaker calls 'the coproduction of cultural knowledge'.3 This article suggests, firstly, that Van Warmelo's writings and interpretations of Ndebele history and society were fundamentally shaped by local informants' perspectives, which were themselves products of old traditions that had been recast in the context of contemporary struggles and changes occurring in early twentieth-century South Africa. Secondly, drawing on Thomas Spear's perceptive critique of the classical 'invention of tradition' model, the article highlights the limits placed by the informants and researchers on Van Warmelo's constructions of the Transvaal Ndebele.4 As Spear puts it, 'the case for colonial invention has often overstated colonial power and ability to manipulate...