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The ‘House’ and Zulu Political Structure in the Nineteenth Century1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

Adam Kuper
Adam Kuper
Affiliation:
Brunel University
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Extract

The rise of the Zulu power in the early nineteenth century has conventionally been treated as the outstanding example of a contemporary southern African process of ‘state-formation’, which was associated with revolutionary social changes. This paper advances an alternative view, that there were strong continuities with established forms of chieftaincy in the region, and in particular that the Zulu political system was based on a traditional, pan-Nguni homestead form of organization.

The Zulu homestead was divided into right and left sections, each with its own identity and destiny. This opposition was mapped into the layout of ordinary homesteads and royal settlements. It was carried through into the organization of regiments. The homestead and its segments provided both the geographical and the structural nodes of the society. The developmental cycle of the homestead ideally followed a set pattern, creating a fresh alignment of units in each generation. The points of segmentation were provided by the ‘houses’, constituted for each major wife and her designated heir. Each of these houses represented the impact, within the homestead, of relationships sealed by marriage with outside groups, whose leaders threw their weight behind particular factions in the political processes within the family.

Type
Reinterpreting South African History
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 34 , Issue 3 , November 1993 , pp. 469 - 487
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

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References

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22 Holleman, , ‘Die twee-eeinheidsbeginsel’, 65–7.Google Scholar A case in point can be reconstructed in some detail from the Stuart Archive. See Webb, C. de B. and Wright, J. B. (eds.), The James Stuart Archive (4 vols.) (Pietermaritzburg and Durban, 1976–1986), iv, 84–6.Google Scholar

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28 Four volumes of the James Stuart Archive see n. 22, have been published by the University of Natal Press. More volumes are planned. This is a resource which has transformed the basis of Zulu historical scholarship.

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48 The most interesting analysis of the isiGodlo and of marriage is to be found in Hamilton, ‘Ideology’, ch. seven.

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51 Hamilton, , ‘Ideology’, 449.Google Scholar There was also the house of Hamu. Hamu was fathered by Mpande for his full brother, Nzibe, who had died without an heir. Hamu was treated by both Mpande and Cetshwayo as an independent chief, and even had his own isiGodlo. He became a major player in the Zululand of Cetshwayo. Nzibe would have represented the junior house of Mpande's side of Senzangakhona's family, and so Hamu was a largely autonomous baron in the generations of Mpande and Mpande's sons. See Laband, J. and Thompson, P., ‘The reduction of Zululand: 1878–1904’, in Duminy and Guest, Natal and Zululand, 205–15Google Scholar; James Stuart Archive, iii, 267; iv, 117–8, 301.

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