Apartheid’s Moral Scaffolds: Personhood and the Making of Difference from Below along the Southern African Frontier

This article explores how moral communities that emerged along frontiers of settlement in southern Africa mediated colonial categories of difference. The existing literature’s emphasis on assimilation as the political tradition of Africa’s settled peoples has muted an enquiry into how indigenous institutions can themselves fashion difference and segregate settling populations even as they assimilate newcomers into political and cultural life. This article explores these dynamics of settlement and identity along the frontier in Noni Jabavu’s ethnographic writing. Jabavu considers personhood, or ubuntu in her isiXhosa vernacular, as the key moral consideration that fashions identity along the colonial frontier. She foregrounds travelling and dwelling as mutually reinforcing moral practices that confirmed personhood and facilitated how people settled together on the land without fixed racial and cultural boundaries. Jabavu argues that while the ways of personhood encourage reciprocal transactions of care between people, both African and Afrikaner nationalisms segregate them, mainly according to race. I use the same material to pursue a different argument, which is that, while the moral repertoires of personhood do indeed fashion highly porous frontier identities, at the same time they also consolidate regionalist and cultural distinctions from below. Jabavu’s work illuminates the everyday moral situations where ordinary people embraced difference and the practical and narrative repertoires that they relied on to discriminate between themselves and hold themselves apart in the competition for moral reputation. I suggest that the segregationist logic of colonial governments in southern Africa could establish its racial and ethnic categories on this moral scaffold of Africans’ own elaboration of difference from below.