‘Colonial’ Experts, Local Interlocutors, Informants and the Making of an Archive on the ‘Transvaal Ndebele’, 1930–1989

Abstract

The perspectives of African informants and researchers profoundly shaped the writings of government ethnologist Dr. Nicholas Jacobus van Warmelo who not only collected information from local African informants but also relied on African researchers who wrote manuscripts in the vernacular that would constitute part of his archive. This study explores the process of producing knowledge on the ‘Transvaal Ndebele’, and provides an analysis of Van Warmelo's texts and of his researchers' manuscripts. By looking at the role of local interlocutors, I make a case for African agency in shaping the ‘colonial’ expert's conceptions of Ndebele identity. This article provides an account of the co-production of cultural knowledge. Van Warmelo was employed by the South African Native Affairs Department to identify and fix ‘tribes’, a highly political enterprise, and in the process generated an archive. His work was as much appropriated by the apartheid state for social engineering as by Ndebele interlocutors involved in contemporary struggles over chieftainship.

Revisiting the Mystery of Life in the Hereafter: Reflections of Fr Augustine Urayai of Zimbabwe

“…Oral history has become a growing discipline and methodology to deal with narratives of previously marginalised people and their voices. Several scholars have popularised the craft of oral history in South Africa (Denis and Ntsimane 2008;Field 2001;2007;2012;Landman in Plaatjies-Van Huffel and Vosloo 2013;Lekgoathi 2009;Mokgoatšana 1998;2020;Mathebula and Mokgoatšana 2018), to name but a few. Because dominant historical discourses are concerned with master narratives shaped by hegemonic discourses of power, oral history offers a fresh look at alternative discourses.…”

Ethnography from the Mission Field

“…The biographical information on Hoffmann's interlocutors not only contributes to situating their narrations in time and space, but also highlights the importance, when trying to make sense of oral history, of perceiving the "field situation [as] a dialogue … and [as such] largely a learning situation" (Portelli 1991, x). Considered in this way, the articles should indeed be read as the co-production of a missionary ethnographer and the African Christian interlocutors who were teaching him as they reminisced (Lekgoathi 2009). The knowledge thus constructed, much as it affirms a particular version of African tradition, also entails the African Christians' critical engagement with their own modernity-a reflective nostalgic (Boym 2001) negotiation of the colonial present by contemplating what had been lost.…”

Political and Socio-Economic Dynamics on the Access to Oral Sources at National Archives in Zimbabwe and South Africa

“… 60. Sekibakiba Peter Lekgoathi, “Colonial’ Experts, Local Interloctors, Informants and the Making of an Archive on the ‘Transvaal Ndebele’, 1930–1989,” Journal of African History , 50 (2009): 61–80. …”