The political economy of tribal animosity: A case study of the 1929 Bulawayo location 'faction fight'

Date
1978-08-17
Authors
Phimister, Ian
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
'Faction fights' and urban disturbances have been an almost permanent feature of southern and central African ghetto life since the late 19th century, yet with few exceptions they have never been subjected to detailed scrutiny. The fact that they have been dismissed by a historian as 'brutal inter-tribal riots', or simply ignored by anthropologists and sociologists is clearly far from satisfactory. If 'faction fights' were and are so blatantly 'tribal', why have the anthropologists not looked at them? Alternatively, if the fights are better interpreted as particular manifestations of 'crowd behaviour' and class conflict, sociologists and historians working in southern African studies have been painfully slow to draw inspiration from the imaginative European studies of scholars like Eric Hobsbawm and George Rude. Although East Africa can at least boast Frank Furedi's work on the crowd in Nairobi, the position elsewhere is rather more bleak. As far as South Africa is concerned, only contributions by Eddie Webster and by Dudley Horner and Alide Kooy relieve an otherwise barren historiographical landscape, while for Southern Rhodesia the silence is absolute. This is particularly unfortunate because what this silence masks is a form of disturbance which erupted with sufficient frequency and intensity in the urban locations, and especially the mine compounds of Southern Rhodesia, to warrant its inclusion alongside desertion and strike action as an important index of working class frustration and despair. In Bulawayo itself, 'faction fights' had occurred at least since the turn of the century; Christmas Day 1900 witnessed an attack by 250 Ndebele on a 'Zambesi' encampment near the town, apparently as revenge for the murder of a Xhosa and an Ndebele by the northerners. After the Boer War, there was 'trouble' between the Xhosa and the Ndebele, again a few years later between Ndebele and 'Zambesi Natives', and by 1930 'native disturbances' had become a familiar part of Bulawayo1s Christmas and New Year holidays for some years past.
Description
African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented 17 August 1978
Keywords
Zimbabwe. Economic conditions, To 1965, Zimbabwe. Politics and government, 1890-1965, Ethnicity. Political aspects. Zimbabwe
Citation