From Homeboy Networks to Broader Ethnic Affiliations: Migrants from Zebediela and Shifting Identities on the Rand, 1930s–1970s

This article is about changing patterns of collective identities among Rand-based migrants from Zebediela between the 1930s and 1970s. Based on archival and oral sources, the article shows how, in the face of a hostile and alienating urban environment, these migrants promoted a sense of group identity from the bottom up by clustering around people from their home areas and establishing organisations that looked after their interests. During the 1940s and 1950s, these migrants formed groupings not on the basis of ethnicity but on the basis of a shared geographical place of origin or home, i.e. the area of Zebediela, as well as on the basis of allegiance to chieftaincy back home. However, these localised collective identities would soon give way to broader ethnic affiliations in the following decades the moment the state started using ethnic differences to determine the allocation of resources to different groups. The central argument of this article is that whilst prior to the 1950s the kinds of collective identities developed by migrants found expression in the formation of region-based associations that looked after their immediate interests in cities as well as in the countryside, by the 1960s and 1970s many of these migrants had been drawn into a larger, more ambitious and explicitly ethnic organisation that agitated for a separate ‘homeland’ for all Ndebele people in South Africa.