Shosholoza: Political Culture in South Africa between the Secular and the Occult

Abstract

In this article, I explore the relationship between two central strands in contemporary political culture in South Africa, the secular and the occult. These two strands are often seen as running parallel to one another and perceived as mutually exclusive, where one is dominant while the other is confined to obscurity and rendered invisible. Contrary to this view, I argue that historically both strands have co-existed in South Africa, and further that they animate one another. Indeed in South African politics the secular and the occult co-exist interdependently; their separation is a practice that legitimates specific forms of politics and the formation of political culture. I explore and illustrate the co-dependency and intertwining of these political strands through ethnographic data collected in Mpumalanga between 2002 and 2006 relating to witchcraft accusations. I relate this material to scholarly literature on South African capitalism and generational hierarchies. Through this analysis I wish to contribute to current discussions about political culture in order to transcend narrow understandings of what constitute politics in South Africa and beyond.

Notes

^*I wish to thank the Brighton Syndicate (Alpa Shah, Dennis Rodgers, Toby Kelly and Lars Buur), as well as Andrew Jefferson for comments on earlier versions of this article. I also wish to thank the anonymous reviewers of JSAS along with editor, Joost Fontein for their succinct responses to my work.

¹ The notions of the secular and the occult are loaded concepts in scholarly work on Southern African and elsewhere, which often relate to religious discourse in different ways. In this article, however, I do not consider the multiple religious imperatives and practices in South African political culture.

² See, for example, G. Ter Haar and S. Ellis, ‘The Occult Does Not Exist: A Response to Terrence Ranger’, Africa, 79, 3 (2009), pp. 399–412; T. Ranger, ‘Scotland Yard in the Bush: Medicine Murders, Child Witches and the Construction of the Occult: A Literary Review’, Africa, 77, 2 (2007), pp. 272–83; A. Ashforth, Witchcraft, Violence and Democracy in South Africa (Chicago, Chicago University Press, 2005); S. Ellis and G. Ter Haar, ‘Religion and Politics: Taking African Epistemologies Seriously’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 45, 3 (2007), pp. 385–401; I. Niehaus, Witchcraft, Power and Politics: Exploring the Occult in the South African Lowveld (David Philips, Cape Town, 2001). West Africa has generated multiple studies of the relationship between the occult and politics. See, for example, P. Geschiere, ‘Globalization and the Power of Indeterminate Meaning: Witchcraft and Spirit Cults in Africa and East Asia’, Development and Change, 29, 5 (1998), pp. 811–37 and D. Pratten, The Man-Leopard Murders: History and Society in Colonial Nigeria (Edinburgh, University of Edinburgh Press, 2007).

³ The song and its different contexts can be enjoyed on You Tube. The author recommends the gumboot version. See, for example, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = xhpFNdNiQBU, accessed on 27 October 2011.

⁴ See J. Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London, Verso, 2004).

⁵ See, for instance, H. Marais, South Africa – Limits to Change: the Political Economy of Transformation (London, Zed Books, 1998); S. Terreblanche, A History of Inequality in South Africa 1652–2002 (Durban, University of Natal Press, 2003) for left-wing perspectives. Democratic Party literature provides perspectives from the economic right.

⁶ D. Nina, Re-thinking Popular Justice: Self-regulation and Civil Society in South Africa (Cape Town, Community Peace Foundation, 1995).

⁷ S. Jensen, ‘The Battlefield and the Prize: ANC's Bid to Reform the South African State’, in T. Hansen and F. Stepputat (eds), States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Post-Colonial State (Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2001), pp. 97, 122; L. Buur, ‘The Intertwined History of Security and Development: The Case of Developmental Struggles in South Africa's Townships’, in L. Buur, S. Jensen and F. Stepputat (eds), The Security–Development Nexus: Expressions of Sovereignty and Securitization in Southern Africa (Uppsala, Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2007), pp. 109–31.

⁸ B. Anderson, Imagined Communities (London, Verso, 1983); E. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism: New Perspectives on the Past (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1983).

⁹ TRC quoted in C. Crais, Politics of Evil: Magic, State Power and the Political Imagination in South Africa (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 4, fn. 12. See also, Ashforth, Witchcraft, Violence and Democracy in South Africa.

¹⁰ Crais, Politics of Evil, p. 4.

¹¹ J. Comaroff and J.L. Comaroff, ‘Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction: Notes from the South African Postcolony’, American Ethnologist, 26, 2 (1999), pp. 279–303.

¹² Crais, Politics of Evil, p. 4.

¹³ Crais, Politics of Evil, p. 213.

¹⁴ For an excellent account of how occult and secular impulses animated the urban insurrection, see B. Bozzoli, Theatres of the Struggle and the End of Apartheid (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2004).

¹⁵ S. Jensen and L. Buur, ‘Everyday Policing and the Occult: Notions of Crime, Witchcraft and the “People”’, African Studies, 63, 2 (2004), pp. 193–212; L. Buur, ‘Horror of the Mob: The Violence of Imagination in South Africa’, Critique of Anthropology, 29, 1 (2009), pp. 27–46.

¹⁶ See, for instance, M. Mayekiso, Township Politics: Civic Struggles for a New South Africa (New York, Monthly Review Press, 1996).

¹⁷ A. Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2001).

¹⁸ For a similar point see Ellis and Ter Haar, ‘Religion and Politics’.

¹⁹ ‘Religion in Security Politics: New Themes and Challenges’, 29–30 March 2007, Danish Institute for International Studies.

²⁰ I am indebted to Shula Marks for suggesting that ‘strands’ might be a useful concept.

²¹ Butler, Precarious Life, pp. 22–24. In a similar attempt at conceptualising this, Joost Fontein invokes the concept of proximity as a way to understand how seemingly unrelated occurrences and events are strangely connected in historical, material and affective ways (See J. Fontein, ‘Graves, Ruins, and Belonging: Towards an Anthropology of Proximity’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 17, 4 (2011), pp. 706–27).

²² As mentioned above, I have excluded important religious strands. However, this illustrates how difficult it is to find a language that describes these phenomena in ways that enable clear-cut distinctions. In many ways, this is also the problematic that infused the debate on the occult, referenced above.

²³ See earlier references, especially in footnote 3.

²⁴ Ellis and Ter Haar, ‘Religion and Politics’.

²⁵ B. Meyer, ‘Response to Ter Haar and Ellis’, Africa, 79, 3 (2009), p. 415.

²⁶ Ranger, ‘Scotland Yard in the Bush’.

²⁷ R. Connell, Masculinities (Cambridge, Polity, 1995); R. Morrell, Changing Men in Southern Africa (London, Zed Books, 2001).

²⁸ The study of the transition from peasantry to a proletariat received much attention in Marxist literature in the 1980s. See, for instance, William Roseberry's call to move from peasant studies to studies in capitalist accumulation and de-peasantisation, which, he argued, should be studied within the realm of proletarianisation studies (W. Roseberry, ‘Peasant Studies to Proletarianization Studies’, Studies in Comparative International Development, 18, 1–2 [1983], pp. 69–89).

²⁹ G. Sider, Culture and Class in Anthropology and History: A Newfoundland Illustration (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986).

³¹ This is a particular South African form of walking or dancing, and one of the symbolic embodiments of the struggle.

³² Maria, – whom I knew very well and had done so for several years, only told me this story in June 2004, many years into our friendship, after I had told her about my interview with Luckeye.

³⁰ Luckeye's story could be accurate but I was not able to corroborate it. In relation to another similar incident a year earlier, my informant also said that he had tried to prevent the killings and only incidentally, or because of other people's jealousy, had been convicted. Several witnesses to the murders suggested that my informant had played a leading role in the murders. As these remarks indicate, the killings are persistently shrouded in secrecy. This is why it took me almost six months to identify perpetrators and victims of the murders.

³³ G. Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1929–1937 (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1985).

³⁴ For an elaboration on prison and political struggle, see the Special Issue of the Journal of Southern African Studies on ‘Histories and Legacies of Punishment in Southern Africa’, JSAS, 37, 3 (September 2011), edited by Jocelyn Alexander and Gary Kynoch.

³⁵ Comaroff and Comaroff, ‘Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction’; B. Meyer and P. Geschiere, Globalization and Identity: Dialectics of Flow and Closure (Oxford, Wiley-Blackwell, 1999).

³⁶ See also Niehaus, Witchcraft.

³⁷ The relationship between witchcraft, generation, gender and political power has been a constant element in much of African Studies. For accounts of Zimbabwe and Uganda, for instance, see D. Maxwell, Christians and Chiefs: A Social History of the Hvesa People, c. 1870s to 1990s (Edinburgh, University of Edinburgh Press, 1999); S. Heald, Manhood and Morality: Sex, Violence, and Ritual in Gisu Society (London, Routledge, 1999).

³⁸ According to a survey I conducted in Nkomazi in 2006, more than 40 per cent of all income was from welfare benefits.

³⁹ S. Jensen and L. Buur, ‘The Nationalist Imperative: South Africanisation, Regional Integration and Mobile Livelihoods’, in L. Buur, S. Jensen and F. Stepputat (eds), The Security-Development Nexus: Expressions of Sovereignty and Securitization in Southern Africa (Uppsala, Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2007), pp. 63–85.

⁴⁰ B. Oomen, Chiefs in South Africa: Law, Culture and Power in the Post-apartheid Era (London, Palgrave, 2005); M. Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1996).

⁴¹ N. Nattrass, The Moral Economy of AIDS in South Africa (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004).

⁴² Many intervention agencies and health service providers assert that the taboo is produced by ignorance. Without going into detail, recent fieldwork suggests that this explanation is far too simple. See also F. Le Marcis, ‘The Suffering Body of the City: Aids Itineraries in Johannesburg, Public Culture, 16, 3 (2004), pp. 453–77; J. Steinberg, Three-Letter Plague (Cape Town, Jonathan Ball, 2008).

⁴³ S. Jensen, ‘Security and Violence on the Frontier of the State: Vigilant Citizens in Nkomazi, South Africa’, in P. Ahluwalia, L. Bethlehem and R. Gunio (eds), Violence and Non-Violence in Africa (London, Routledge, 2007), pp. 103–123.

⁴⁴ This case exists in detailed form in Jensen, ‘Security’.

⁴⁵ Niehaus, ‘Witches and Zombies of the South African Lowveld’; C. Blakemore and S. Jennet (eds), Oxford Companion of the Body (London, Oxford University Press, 2001).

⁴⁶ These rumours, as Stewart and Strathern assert, can ‘lie unused for years but […are resources] that can be pulled out in subsequent contexts of change and conflict’ (P. Stewart and A. Strathern, Witchcraft, Sorcery, Rumors and Gossip (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004).

⁴⁷ The rural élite who are related to tribal authorities are constantly shrouded in rumours of occult capabilities. In the village in which the 1986 witch burnings occurred, the chief's uncle is said to command considerable occult abilities. My research assistant once looked at him in awe, saying that ‘he really knows how to witch’. Another informant told of an incident where he had incurred the wrath of this particular man, who subsequently publicly threatened to bewitch him. This goes to the core of the debate about whether witchcraft does in fact exist. In most studies, witchcraft is seen as an effect of accusations, and witchcraft is ‘reduced’ to discourses of witchcraft. However, arguably there are people who engage in different occult practices. Furthermore, whether acts qualify as witchcraft depends on perspective. The ‘anti-witchcraft’ acts of some might be construed as witchcraft by others. See Harry West for an eloquent discussion of the reality of witchcraft in Mozambique: H. West, Ethnographic Sorcery (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2007).

⁴⁸ Whether these stories are true is difficult to ascertain. The police in Nkomazi denied knowledge of it but acted on witchcraft allegations nonetheless. I was caught up in such rumours while doing fieldwork. Allegedly a priest and the man with whom I boarded had been busy obtaining body parts, which they sold to a white man by the bridge (presumably me). The story emerged after a bag of hands and other body parts was allegedly found in a nearby village. While I can testify that the first story is untrue, much more persistent rumours, also among people I trusted, could testify to the second story. Although hardly constituting any final proof, one police officer, normally refusing to entertain such stories, informally corroborated this story.

⁴⁹ Ranger, ‘Scotland Yard’, p. 278.

⁵⁰ C. Bundy, The Rise and Fall of the South African Peasantry (Cape Town, David Philip, 1988).

⁵¹ J. Peires, The Dead Will Arise: Nongqawuse and the Great Xhosa Cattle-Killing of 1856–7 (James Currey, Oxford, 1989).

⁵² C. van Onselen, The Seed is Mine: The Life of Kas Maine, a South African Sharecropper 1894–1985 (Oxford, James Currey, 1996).

⁵³ C. van Onselen, A Small Matter of a Horse: The Life of ‘Nongoloza’ Mathebula, 1867–1948 (Johannesburg, Ravan Press, 1984).

⁵⁴ J. Steinberg, ‘Nongoloza's Children: Western Cape Prison Gangs During and After Apartheid’ (Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, Johannesburg, 2004).

⁵⁵ Steinberg, ‘Nongoloza's Children’, p. 80.

⁵⁶ J. Crush, ‘Inflexible Migrancy: New Forms of Migrant Labour on the South African Mines’, Labour, Capital and Society, 25, 1 (1992), pp. 46–71.

⁵⁷ D. Moodie, Going for Gold: Men, Mines and Migration (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1995).

⁵⁸ Mamdani, Citizen and Subject.

⁵⁹ J. Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine: “Development”, Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1994), pp. 148–51.

⁶⁰ Jensen and Buur, ‘The Nationalist Imperative’.

⁶¹ H. White, ‘Tempora et Mores: Family Values and the Possessions of a Post-Apartheid Countryside’, Journal of Religion in Africa, 31, 4 (2002), pp. 457–79.

⁶² Niehaus, Witchcraft; A. Ashforth, Maduma: A Man Bewitched (Chicago, Chicago University Press, 2000).

⁶³ The healer is the richest man in Dombe and president of the local association of traditional healers. As few can afford his services in Dombe, most of his clientèle are outside the country, especially in South Africa.

⁶⁴ This account has kindly been provided by Helene Kyed, who conducted fieldwork in Dombe where she interviewed the nyanga. It was with no little amusement that we realised that there existed a link between our two field sites. According to the nyanga, Mhlangu came roaring into the village in a cortège of expensive cars, probably paid for by the South African government. We can, of course, only speculate as to what Mhlangu wished to achieve in Dombe. However, as the electoral victory of the ANC was assured, his real political opponents were located within the top echelons of the ANC.