The Indigenous System of Social Relations (1934), with an Introduction By

The indigenous system of social relations (1934), with an introduction by

Isak Niehaus

Agnes Winifred Hoernlé [a] and Isak Niehaus[b]

[a] Department of Bantu Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.Deceased (born 1885, died 1960)

[b]Anthropology Division, Brunel University, London, United Kingdom

Corresponding author. Email:

This article reproduces, with minor editorial changes, a previously unpublished paper presented by Agnes Winifred Hoernlé to the New Education Fellowship Conference in Johannesburg in 1934. Hoernlé argues that education is vitally important in preparing the next generation of Africans for life in a complex emerging civilisation, in which European social patterns are imposed on African ones. Hoernlé acknowledges that many Africans live in towns and on white-owned farms under conditions far removed from tribal life. In this context, she argues, education should not aim to (re)produce cultural autonomy, but should rather “stimulate a healthy spirit of South African citizenship, which can animate both Blacks and Whites.” Hoernlé sees African kinship systems and African traditions, such as bridewealth and age-sets, as possessing great strength and vitality, even in modern conditions. In her opinion, Africans can be transformed into a civilised people, without ceasing to be true Africans. She condemns Whites for failing to understand these traditions, but also for denying African children access to scientific knowledge. In his introduction to the article, Isak Niehaus suggests that Hoernlé’s address shows an early quest to understand cultural differences within an emerging industrial society, rather than seeing cultures as singular and different from each other and in functionally integrated terms.

Keywords: early social anthropology; education; South Africa; Winifred Hoernlé

Introduction

Isak Niehaus

Whilst reading Isaac Schapera’s papers, housed in the manuscripts collection at the University of Cape Town Library, I found an intriguing unpublished manuscript, 22 pages in length and typewritten, entitled “The Indigenous System of Social Relations.” [1] It contained the handwritten inscription of the possible author, “Mrs A.W. Hoernlé.” A quick glance through the article suggested that it comprised notes on tribal customs that Agnes Winifred Hoernlé, lecturer in ethnology at the University of the Witwatersrand between 1923 and 1938 [2], had sent to Isaac Schapera at the University of Cape Town. A closer analysis revealed, however, that the text comprised the basis of her presentation to the New Education Fellowship Conference in Johannesburg in 1934. There are clear parallels between the text and a far shorter précis of her contribution contained in the proceedings of this conference (Malherbe 1937, 406–407). In this introduction, I place the manuscript in the context of Hoernlé’s professional biography and show why it is important for an understanding of early social anthropology in South Africa.

Born in Kimberley in 1885, Agnes Winifred Hoernlé (née Tucker) studied philosophy at the University of Cape Town, and read anthropology under Alfred Haddon and William Rivers at Cambridge. Here she also worked in the laboratory of Charles Myers, who had been responsible for conducting psychological tests during the famous Torres Straits expedition of 1898. (At this time, women were not entitled to enrol for Cambridge degrees.) During her European sojourn she also attended Wilhelm Wundt’s lectures in Leipzig, and visited the Sorbonne to read sociology under Emile Durkheim. She returned to South Africa in 1912, and undertook two expeditions to the Richtersveld and to German-controlled South West Africa (now Namibia) to collect ethnographic material on the Nama. This made her one of the first trained women social anthropologists to do fieldwork (Hoernlé et al. 1987).

In 1914, she married the philosopher R.F. Alfred Hoernlé in England and accompanied him to Harvard, where he had secured a teaching position. But she returned to South Africa in 1920, after developing bronchitis during the severe Massachusetts winters. Her return overlapped with the arrival of Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, whom she knew from Cambridge. They both served on the publications committee of Bantu Studies, and began a fruitful period of intellectual collaboration (Bank 2014). Radcliffe-Brown supervised Hoernlé’s third expedition to South West Africa, now a South African mandate. She did fieldwork on Nama residents in the urban locations of Windhoek, and used his concepts of “social value,” “joking relationships” and “the sib” to analyse her material on ritual and kinship (Hoernlé 1923, 1925a, 1925b). Her report to government told a tragic story of dispossession, poverty and ill health, criticised the withdrawal of government rations, and bemoaned prohibitive taxes. An incensed official scribbled “Politics not Science” on its front page (Carstens 1985b, xiii).

After her appointment to the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in 1923, Hoernlé distinguished herself as an excellent teacher, whose cohort of students included Max Gluckman, Hilda Kuper, Ellen Hellmann, and Jack and Eileen Krige. She introduced her students to evolutionism, diffusionism and to the preferred Durkeimian sociological approach, and insisted that they read ethnographies by Boas, Lowie and Junod (Kuper 1984, 194–196). At the time, Hoernlé was engaged in the liberal South African Institute of Race Relations and grew increasingly critical of government. During the South African elections of 1924, J.B.M. Hertzog’s National Party defeated Jan Smuts’ South African Party. Hertzog entrenched the “colour bar” and implemented a “civilised labour policy” to ensure favourable employment for Whites. He also sought to counter African urbanisation through policies of retribalisation, including the bolstering of chiefship and development of agriculture in the reserves. Hoernlé opposed these policies, advocating instead “the integration of Africans and Whites — and other ethnic groups — within a single social system” (Gluckman 1975, 55). [3]

Hoernlé was well acquainted with Isaac Schapera, Radcliffe-Brown’s most prominent student in Cape Town. She acted as external examiner of his MA dissertation, and his subsequent library- based Ph.D. — published as The Khoisan Peoples of Southern Africa (1930) — drew heavily on her work (Bank 2014, 26). In 1931, when Hoernlé took leave of absence, she invited Schapera to teach her classes at Wits and continued to correspond with him after he had secured a teaching position at the University of Cape Town. Early in 1934, they wrote a joint report in support of a request by Sobhuza II, paramount chief of Swaziland, to introduce the traditional age-grade system to the country’s educational system. In it they argued that age grades could counter social disintegration (Cocks 2000, 31–32). [4]

During the early 1930s, Hoernlé was increasingly drawn to the attempts by Bronislaw Malinowski and the International Africa Institute of re-orientating the discipline towards the study of “culture-contact” and “change.” She visited Malinowski in London, and arranged for her students to study under his direction. In 1934, she and her husband hosted Malinowski at their home in Johannesburg, when he attended the New Education Fellowship Conference. The conference had been convened, shortly after Hertzog’s and Smuts’ parties had merged to form a “fusion government” (Krige 1997), in order to debate trends towards the secularisation of knowledge. To give Malinowski a feel for the texture of social life in the city, the Hoernlés arranged visits to mining compounds, locations and townships, and invited a Native chief for lunch and “educated natives” for dinner. [5]

In their respective contributions to the conference, Malinowski and Hoernlé outlined very different visions for education in South Africa. Malinowski’s talks received great recognition and were lauded by an educational correspondent for their “incisive brilliance” (Viking 1934). He spoke on the necessity of sex education, the family as agent in the transmission of knowledge, and in Native education. His third lecture attracted about 2 000 listeners, was chaired by Jan Smuts, then the South African Minister of Justice, and held in the Great Hall at Wits. Malinowski began by highlighting the burden of Natives who were compelled to labour, and even fight battles, for Europeans. He then made a passionate plea for Native self-government: “[j]ust as the Afrikaans speaking Afrikaner wanted his own, wanted what he loved, wanted self-determination, he as a Pole, desired the same. So the native too would ask for home-rule, political and economic independence, and the right to self-determination.” [6]

Malinowski argued that it was inappropriate to press schooling, based on systems developed in Europe, “upon people in simple tribal conditions of Africa” (1936, 489). Although Africans do possess the mental capacity for European-style education, such schooling estranges them from “traditions still controlling the tribe” (494). He lambasted mission schools for teaching children contempt for the ways of their parents, and for raising dangerous ambitions that could not be satisfied. South African Whites, he argued, are “not prepared to grant a native, however educated and intelligent, that place to which he is entitled by training” (496). Instead, African children should be trained for the capacities in which they are to be employed. They “must acquire some elements of the invading culture,” but should be taught by fellow tribesmen in a manner congruent with traditional pedagogy. Schooling must be harmonised with the education children receive at home. “The vast majority of Africans still live in an African world from which they have to emerge, but partially and occasionally” (501).

Hoernlé presented her paper “The Indigenous System of Social Relations” in a parallel session (along with contributions by Schapera, Monica Wilson and Werner Eiselen) and attracted a far smaller audience. Unlike Malinowski, she did not argue for cultural autonomy, and expressed no fear about “detribalisation” per se. Hoernlé observed that South Africa represents a complex emerging “civilisation” in which two “societies” or “moral systems” are “superimposed” on one another. She acknowledged that many Africans live in towns and on white-owned farms, in conditions far removed from tribal life. In this context, she argued, the official education system should stimulate a “healthy spirit of South African citizenship, which can animate both Blacks and Whites.” Moreover, she did not see African traditions as uniquely appropriate to the Native Reserves. She saw these traditions as elastic, adaptable and capable of growth, and to possess special strength and vitality that enable Africans to survive the impact of Western civilisation. She gave three examples of how African traditions had proven adaptable to modern conditions: first, thousands of men relied on the support of kin whilst they roamed the streets of Johannesburg in search of employment; second, bridewealth transactions created stable marriages in unstable contexts of labour migration and urbanisation; and, third, traditional age sets instilled discipline and respect for authority, imparted knowledge, provided sex education and prepared young people for marriage. These traditions, she argued, were in harmony with the spirit of Christianity, and showed that Africans can be transformed into truly civilised people, without ceasing to being true Africans.

Hoernlé condemned a lack of understanding of these customs by Europeans, but felt as strongly about the fact that African children were being denied scientific knowledge. As such she pleaded for the removal of barriers to African advancement. In viewing African traditions as essential ingredients for a new, emerging “civilisation,” Hoernlé’s manuscript provides something of a “missing link” to the early development of social anthropology in South Africa. In many respects Hoernlé, in collaboration with Radcliffe-Brown, lay the foundations for understanding Africans as integral actors in the modern world, and for viewing South Africa as a single, interdependent, fi eld of social interaction. The manuscript highlights her aim of understanding cultural differences in a rapidly industrialising country, rather than identifying cultures as holistic and functionally integrated entities, different and separate from each other, as suggested by Malinowski. [7] The difference between Malinowski and Hoernlé highlights the early diffraction of anthropological thinking into the models of segregation versus assimilation, which subsequently morphed into the well-known division between volkekunde and social anthropology. It also underscores the close links between academic practice and political ideology.

The indigenous system of social relations[8]

A.W. Hoernlé

I

Education is one of the most important functions of every living society. Through education it perpetuates itself in its own younger generations: moulding them to its pattern, communicating its traditional method of dealing with life’s practical problems as well as its traditional world view. Native education is full of perplexity for all of us because it is a function, not of one living society, but of two — and these two always in contact, sometimes in conflict, and one of them super-imposed on the other. Correspondingly, there are two social patterns, two sets of practical methods, two religions, two moral systems — for short, the White and the Black. My task, today, is to deal with this perplexing problem from the angle of Native, or “African,” society.

There are two ways in which I can best be of use in this conference. First, by describing, briefly, certain selected, but fundamental features of the social organisation of Africans in South Africa: (1) the village community system and its modifi cations; (2) the lobola system; (3) the age set system; (4) the system of sex education. Second, by presenting these features from a definite point of view — the only really helpful point of view, I believe, for determining the right policy in

Native education, which is after all, only the explicit and deliberate part of that complex process of culture-contact and culture-change, forced upon Africans by the establishment of Whites as permanent settlers in, and rulers of, South Africa. This point of view is that the African’s traditional social organisation has elements of great positive value which we must not seek to destroy but to use. It has inherent strength, vitality and power of self-adaptation to changing conditions which make it eminently fi t to be maintained and developed as a vehicle through which fundamental features of our civilisation may be gradually incorporated into African society. As such, the African may be transformed into a truly civilised man without ceasing to be a true African, and thus may be helped to play his proper part in the South African community of the future.

Let me, therefore, say right at the start and with all the emphasis at mycommand that I believe we must look to the strength of the African’s social organisation for the reason why, unlike other uncivilised people in contact with European civilisation, they have not gone under but survived. It has stood as a buffer between the African peoples and the tremendous shocks to which they have been subjected by the intensity and continuity of the impact of European civilisation upon them. The African’s social system has proved its vitality, moreover, in withstanding our, often deliberate, attempts to destroy part, or the whole of it. I believe that it is based on sound principles of social relations, that it is at once strongly integrated, yet also elastic, adaptable, capable of growth. I believe that, if we try sympathetically to understand it, to use it, to develop its latent possibilities, we shall go much further and faster in the civilisation of the Africans than if we work against the solid inertia with which it resists destruction, and against the deep-rooted attachment of the Africans to what they cherish as their very own. I believe that by working, in principle, with thesystem, not against it, we shall most rapidly spread among the Africans those more enlightened methods of agriculture, of cattle culture, of hygiene and treatment of diseases, which the leaders of the Africans want and which it is most urgent that the Africans should have, both for their own good and for the good of South Africa as a whole. I believe, moreover, that there are many elements in that system which teachers of Christianity to Africans may with advantage retain, if only these teachers will seek to communicate the living spirit of Christ and trust the African to find forms for the expression of that spirit in accordance with his own traditions, instead of mixing up their Christian message of salvation with European forms of social organisation which are often only of local significance, and not always even in inner harmony with the spirit of Christ.

II

Among the Bantu-speaking people of the Union, there may be said, in the main, to be two sub-types of one basic culture. These are the Sotho-Tswana and the Nguni or Zulu-Xhosa. The numbers of the two groups are very nearly the same, being something over three million in each, if we include the populations of the three British protectorates — Swaziland, Basutoland and Bechuanaland — in the total number.

All these people were organised into tribal groups, which can be defined as groups owning their own specific territory, claiming independence of other similarly constituted groups, and organised on the basis of loyalty to a common head who was an hereditary chief. The vast majority of Bantu in the Union today still claim tribal affiliation, in spite of the fact that many of them are completely urbanised, and that over 1.6 million are living scattered on European-owned land, in many cases far removed from the realities of tribal life. The numbers in a tribe vary from a few thousand to many thousand, while in two cases at least we can speak of something like a nation, since many different tribes, or sections of tribes, have been welded together into an organic whole under the control of a paramount chief and his council.