"AmaShangane, the Destroyers": Ethnicity and National Belonging in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Abstract

This thesis tackles an oft neglected area of study in South African scholarship, the question of ethnic stigma and national belonging. It aims to interrogate the question of the historical marginalisation of the Tsonga-Shangaan as a group whose status as an “authentic” or “autochthonal” cultural identity has been put to doubt. The thesis uses autoethnography, participant observation, and semi-structured interviews to survey inter-ethnic relations among the ?heterogeneous population mostly living in the Mpumalanga province’s Thembisile Hani Local Municipality area. However, because of Covid-19 restrictions and the limitations imposed on social interactions, the thesis also relies on digital ethnography or data generated from social networking sites to extend its depth and reach. Additionally, it incorporates scholarly sources, media reports and, to a limited extent, archival material to situate its topic into a broader context beyond the research site. The thesis demonstrates that the Tsonga-Shangaan are not the only ethnic group whose members have come to see themselves as a marginalised group in South Africa. Accordingly, it interrogates the status of other similarly stigmatised groups such as the Southern Ndebele who – much like the Tsonga-Shangaan who are often conflated with their Mozambican counterparts – are also conflated with their namesakes in Zimbabwe and similarly castigated as foreign to the South African nation-state. The thesis argues that such groups are rendered prone to stigmatisation partly because they confound civic and ethnic conceptions of citizenship and belonging, rendering them betwixt and between a foreigner and citizen status. These findings shed some light on why some South Africans also feature as victims in xenophobic attacks, a question which is often glossed over or explained away as a “residue of tribalism” inherited from South Africa’s colonial and apartheid past. The thesis contends that such an analytical approach reduces ethnic antagonisms to an atavism, and proposes instead that the violent treatment of foreigners and other perceived cultural outsiders in the country should be read as a corollary of emergent practices of stigmatised ethnicisation, processes which are in turn imbricated with the crisis of the nation-state, or its failure to reconcile a civic citizenship with forms of attachment which often proliferate on its margins.