Anne Kelk Mager and Phiko Jeffrey Velelo, The House of Tshatshu: Chiefs, Power and Politics west of the Kei river 1818-2018 (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, September 2018).
In the late 1820s, the descendants and followers of the Thembu chief Tshatshu moved west of the Kei river, opened up new territory and encountered the advance guard of British imperialism. In 1852, the colonial governor expelled them from the area, declared that the name of their chief would cease and scattered the remnants of his people. In 2003, the chieftaincy of the amaTshatshu was officially recognised for the first time in 170 years. This story entails exploration of the meaning of 'belonging' or identity and nearly two centuries of struggle to regain a name.
This book begins with conquest and ends with the politics of restitution; it spans the former Ciskei and Transkei bantustans and tracks the shifting landscape of chiefly politics from conquest, through colonialism to democracy. It is concerned with power, gender and land and also with belonging, identity and naming. It foregrounds lives, loves and labour and the ways these are shaped by colonial and apartheid duplicities and cruelties. This book unsettles structuralist accounts of chiefly authority and unpacks conflicts between royal families, municipalities and government departments and the impasse created by this quarreling and disputation.
The book is timely. Chiefs have not gone away in democratic South Africa. Over 17 million people in the rural areas live traditional authorities of one kind or another. Opportunities for chiefly resurgence are created by the failures of local government, the need for rural leadership and the attraction of stipends. Rural people drawn into these politics have diverse stories to tell. Neither modernists, liberal and Marxist, who view chiefly authority as patriarchal, authoritarian, anti-poor and undemocratic, nor post-modernists who see the institution as tainted by western attempts to amend it have adequately explained the resilience of the chieftaincy. Similarly, structuralist critiques of the oppressive effects of traditional power on women and gender relations fail to come to grips with the complexities of rural society in South Africa. This book opens up these critical areas for scrutiny and reflection. In so doing, the book aims to shed light on the failure of land reform and development strategies in rural eastern Cape.
Co-authored by historian Anne Kelk Mager and Jeff Phiko Velelo, agricultural economist and councilor to the Tshatshu chiefs, the book generates, explores and captures tensions at the same time as it seeks out and amplifies voices silenced in the historical record. It retrieves evidence that the colonial state sought to obliterate and draws the disempowered into the process of making history.