Indigeneity and Nation

G. N. Devy, Geoffrey V. Davis, G. N. Devy

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000192131
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Part of the series Key Concepts in Indigenous Studies, this book focuses on the concepts that recur in any discussion of nature, culture and society among the indigenous.

The book, the third in a five-volume series, deals with the two key concepts of indigeneity and nation of indigenous people from all the continents of the world. With contributions from renowned scholars, activists and experts across the globe, it looks at issues and ideas of indigeneity, nationhood, nationality, State, identity, selfhood, constitutionalism, and citizenship in Africa, North America, New Zealand, Pacific Islands and Oceania, India, and Southeast Asia from philosophical, cultural, historical and literary points of view.

Bringing together academic insights and experiences from the ground, this unique book with its wide coverage will serve as a comprehensive guide for students, teachers and scholars of indigenous studies. It will be essential reading for those in social and cultural anthropology, tribal studies, sociology and social exclusion studies, politics, religion and theology, cultural studies, literary and postcolonial studies, Third World and Global South studies, as well as activists working with indigenous communities.

1

INDIGENEITY IN SOUTHERN AFRICA

Brendon Nicholls

Any reflection upon ‘indigeneity’ and critical practice in African Studies should inspire a degree of ambivalence. To set this out in terms, we might learn something from the indigenous practitioner. It is likely to be something learnt about practice, not indigeneity. As a critical marker, ‘indigeneity’ poses specific challenges to African Studies. With the exception of African language debates, in which ‘indigenous languages’ are opposed to the global linguistic primacy of English, the term ‘indigeneity’ has been surprisingly seldom deployed in African post-independence debates. This tendency is changing. However, despite the evident strategic usefulness of the term ‘indigeneity’ and its undoubted applicability to a wide variety of African contexts and communities, it remains comparatively unarticulated, at least in its commonly understood sense, which Māori film director Barry Barclay has pithily formulated as ‘remnant prior peoples who live on their former lands on the margins of nation states.’¹

Incontrovertibly, there are widely recognised indigenous African communities in a political sense. Their indigenous character is typically structured by a relation to threat, such as incursions into their former lands, mining, militarisation and deforestation, among others. Broadly speaking, such communities are understood in terms of a primarily displaced relation to the means of agrarian production, whether they are historically hunter-gatherers – such as the Efe, Mbuti or Twa (‘Pygmies’), the San (‘Bushmen’) – or agro-pastoralists – such as the Khoi (‘Hottentots’) – or large-scale micro-minorities within nation-states such as the Ogoni. These communities’ struggles to retain land, environment, resources, health, languages and cultures place them squarely within wider Fourth World or First Peoples’ political movements – global movements to which African indigenous communities increasingly attach themselves. As actors whose minority status often places them on the sidelines of national self-definition, or indeed in transnational interstices – positioned across national boundaries, often without certain any claim on space – African indigenous communities face both infrastructural and identificatory challenges.

However, in the vast majority of cultural and academic discourse, indigeneity in a decolonised, post-independence African context has seemed a claim upon the world that is too immediately obvious, too self-evidently validated, to make any sense as a social category with useful political leverage. In other words, to say that one is indigenous in a situation in which almost everybody else is ‘indigenous,’ too, is to erase the marker of difference upon which indigeneity’s oppositional and critical potential would seem to rely. Indigenous cultural formations and their decolonising political leverage risk become diluted even as their key descriptor is formulated.²

If the term ‘indigeneity’ has occurred with comparative infrequency in post-independence African cultural politics, then it would be worth adding that the sentiments or ideas that characterise indigenous community in the Fourth World are abiding concerns in wider African cultural formations. These characteristics are: an emphasis upon the authentic, the originary or the organic; a custodial attachment to the land; the persistence of oral forms and ancestral belief as modes of cultural memory; strong ties of blood community; and a history of resistance to colonialism (Allen 2002: 200). So while the term indigeneity has had little cultural currency, its overriding symbolic concerns of ‘blood,’ ‘land’ and ‘memory’ (Allen 2002: 196) have resonated very strongly in an African register of feeling.

In Nigeria, the word ‘indigenous’ emerged prominently to describe the struggle of Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Ogoni people for political self-determination. It became associated with the Ogonis’ bid to rescue their mineral and environmental resources, to protect their minority rights, and to prevent the Shell oil company’s exploitation and pollution of the Niger Delta.³ But there are also a number of concomitant problems with Ogoni claims upon the indigenous. The term ‘indigeneity’ seems descriptively inadequate when it is deployed as a marker of resistance against successive Nigerian governments, who have been – in terms of heritage, though perhaps not in political practice – indigenous, too. Ken Saro-Wiwa implicitly concedes as much when he refers to the Nigerian ethnic majorities practising ‘indigenous colonialism’ upon the Ogoni (1998: 333).

Furthermore, when read against the larger historical background of Nigeria’s struggle for national independence and the subsequent secession of Biafra and the calamitous Biafran war, the assertion of Ogoni indigeneity – in order to decolonise ‘indigenous colonialism’ – always runs the risk of repeating Nigeria’s disastrous follies of ethnic secession. Saro-Wiwa (1998) himself would not have dissented from this conclusion. In fact, he refers more than once in an interview to the need for ethnic minority self-determination in a confederation of Nigerian states, precisely in order to prevent a repetition of the Biafran disaster. Hence, the localised claims that we might associate with the indigenous, even when expressed with caution, approach a potentially explosive ethnic register. In interview, Saro-Wiwa finds a precedent for Ogoni self-determination in the relative autonomy that the Ogoni experienced under the British colonial regime. But whatever the very real injustices of the Ogoni’s situation and whatever the pressing urgency of the call for Ogoni self-determination, this ‘political precedent’ risks making a virtue of the British colonial policy of Indirect Rule and thus risks perpetuating colonialism’s most divisive effects. In a highly sceptical view, the indigenous begins to read like a nostalgia for colonialism, even as it contests ‘indigenous colonialism.’⁴ There is a tangle of terms here, whose effects work to relativise the indigenous (Ogoni, Nigerian) and the colonial (British, Nigerian), in order to more effectively distinguish the ethnic (Ogoni).

And yet, a more subtle reading of Saro-Wiwa is possible, in which indigeneity is an internally divided, and therefore strategically mitigated, claim. Saro-Wiwa’s terms ‘indigenous’ and ‘colonialism’ split along their own axes so that both become ambivalently inflected. It is impossible to think the valence of either term without reflecting upon the ambiguity with which both are already loaded. In short, Saro-Wiwa is not incautiously entering into a revisionist history (in which Nigerians were the real colonisers of the Ogoni). The Ogoni, of course, are Nigerians, too, and would remain so under a confederate arrangement. Indeed, Saro-Wiwa’s allegiance during the Biafran war was to the Federal side (see Saro-Wiwa 1989). We need to see a tactical inversion of understanding at work even as Ogoni sovereignty is invoked. This inversion destabilises the idea of the indigenous, too. Built into Saro-Wiwa’s apparent ethnic centre is the refusal of all centres. Saro-Wiwa’s insight relies upon a devolution of authenticity (British or Nigerian colonialisms may be indigenous allies but in very different ways and with very different mechanisms and effects). In Saro-Wiwa’s decentering discourse, we see territorial distribution and the political devolution of claim – the momentary allegiance to one precedent or another – upon which indigenous assertions of sovereignty so often rely for their tactical purchase.

As we have seen, indigeneity risks becoming a relativised term within broader discourses of African decolonisation. To put this another way, a bi-cultural or bi-racial understanding of indigenous political relations to a history of settlement (such as we find in Australia or New Zealand Aotearoa) is difficult to sustain in decolonised African frameworks of political understanding (see Saro-Wiwa, earlier). First, in incautious usage, indigenous self-definition risks collapsing into straightforward ethnic division. Minorities, where they co-exist in conditions of precarity, may not always benefit from ethnic division. Second, there is the problem of the lingering colonial epistemological inheritance. Indigeneity carries the baggage of Imperial fantasies of the ethnic. Formal knowledge systems about indigenous peoples have long been underpinned by and compromised by such ethnic fantasies. Third, there is the ongoing imaging of the indigenous as a placeholder for sentimental global media fantasies of originary humankind.⁵ The global media endlessly produces, packages, circulates and resells the indigene as a primitive good, a raw resource, for consumption. What is peddled is the authentic, the organic, the premodern, the near-naked but morally unperturbed, the undiscovered, the spiritual, the endangered and disappearing, and so on. Indigeneity sells. The rarity, scarcity or disappearance of an indigenous community inflates its value and drives its commoditisation. The market, it seems, prizes death. Indeed, Keyan Tomaselli has insightfully argued:

TV channels like Discovery continue to trade on myth and stereotype, especially about Africa. Their use of often anthropologically incompetent producers, who appear to form the lifeblood of that Channel, inevitably tilts global discursive power in favour of the myths which John Marshall and Rob Gordon identify as genocidal.

(1999: 134)

In such indulgent media schemes, the indigenous is a melancholic marker. The indigene is what we would like to think we once might have been. The indigene, therefore, is a lost and abiding object expressing all that we (modern) consumers are no longer, but also all that we never really were in the first place (Landau and Kaspin 2002). The indigenous is a nostalgia our own former plenitude, but it is also a fantasy of our own contemporary absence. That is to say: the indigenous is an ever-receding index of what little our lifeworld has not yet touched or altered. The genocidal danger in such media myths of the indigene is that cultural narratives rapidly become twinned with worldly institutions: charitable campaigns, aid and development programmes or tourist initiatives. Such interventions carry fabricated and wildly sentimental assumptions about the communities that they propose to assist (see Weinberg 2000: 16). The relationship between media simulation and political outcome forms the bearing of the sharp analysis of the Ju/’Hoan leader, Tsamkxao =Oma, who said in 1988:

There are two kinds of bioscope [movies]. One kind shows us as people like other people, who have things to do and plans to make. The other kind shows us as if we were animals, and plays right into the hands of people who want to take our land.

(quoted in Biesele and Hitchcock 1999: 137)

At stake in Tsamkxao =Oma’s taxonomy of film is the unintended consequence of the image. Images set to run in wider global culture may rebound upon indigenous communities in unforeseen ways. If, as Robert Gordon once claimed, ‘Some films can kill’ (1992: 1), then there is an ethics of the image that is very difficult to anticipate and to guard against. One has to reflect not only on what one shows, but also on what others might see and choose to understand as a basis for action or intervention. Images rapidly decontextualise and mystify. Not infrequently, images claim performance as unmediated ethnic truth. Moreover, the capacity for damage within imaging links to a further challenge posed by the indigenous to African Studies. Indigenous communities are often highly mediated (Weinberg 1997). Around them, a surfeit of supposedly benevolent gatekeepers and co-constructors circulate. As Tony Weaver puts it, ‘The San have seen academics, writers, photographers, aid workers, priests, philosophers and filmmakers come and go and become famous on their story’ (2000: 23–24). The authentic, the genealogical, and even cultural memory, exhibit the pressures of institutionalisation within their emergence. Indeed, Tomaselli has drawn attention to the San community’s framing within ‘the extraordinary international focus of photographers, TV and film directors, anthropologists and environmentalists, development agencies, artists, zoologists and tourists, and all manner of academic enterprise.’ (1999: 131). Weaver offers a first-hand account of a visit to the Nyae Nyae conservancy which supports Tomaselli’s view:

Our host, Arno Oosthuysen, told us that National Geographic had booked several rooms… . ‘La...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Indigeneity in Southern Africa
• 2 Oceanic Identities: trans/national formations in New Zealand and the Pacific Islands region
• 3 Storied nationhood: literature, constitutionalism, and citizenship in Indigenous North America
• 4 Finding nation: the nation and the state in F. Sionil Jose’s Mass and Edwin Thumboo’s A Third Map
• 5 Indigenous peoples and nation interface in India
• 6 African indigeneity: the Southern African challenge
• 7 Two poets of the Pacific: Hone Tuwhare and Haunani-Kay Trask
• Index