Political Centralisation and the Making of Social Categories East of the Drakensberg in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries

This article examines the establishment of social categories in the increasingly centralised polities of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries east of the Drakensberg. It looks at the ways in which cultural and historical materials were used to shore up ideological claims and how they set limits on what could be claimed. Rulers manipulated and managed pre-existing ideas about origins, affiliations and cultural inheritances, as did those who resisted domination. The discussion reveals tenacious continuities over time of certain elements of cultural practices and understandings of origins, and the modification of others. When read alongside the article by Simon Hall, this points to the existence across a wide region of a shared cultural logic governing processes of political assimilation, incorporation, centralisation and expansion. The article further draws attention to the way in which congealed ethnographic stereotypes skew interpretation of the historical evidence.