Natures of Colonial Change: Environmental Relations in the Making of the Transkei

4. Remapping Historical Landscapes: Forest Species and the Contours of Social and Cultural Life

4 w Remapping Historical Landscapes Forest Species and the Contours of Social and Cultural Life There were many realities shaping Africans’ experiences of and responses to resource access in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries outside of the colonial changes to political economies and ecologies described thus far. People participated in and adjusted to complex social and cultural dynamics in their lives, and forest resources were often deeply implicated in these experiences. Understanding how people viewed and negotiated changes in resource access thus requires an exploration of the meaning of different forest species in people’s negotiation of their changing social and cultural worlds. More often than not, such dimensions of forest use existed beyond the full attention or knowledge of foresters reporting from the field. Yet colonial officials also relied upon simplifications of Africans’ resource practices and interests to legitimize their management agendas. By emphasizing that Africans ’ resource needs were merely economic and “simple”—sufficient wood for huts, kraals, and fires—authorities could then further justify restructuring forest access and limiting popular forest rights to these minimal “livelihood” requirements. Such narrative frames disguised the extent to which differently situated Africans regularly sought access to forest trees and plants as crucial social and cultural resources. In colonial KwaMatiwane, many men and women relied upon a wide range of forest species for use in male socialization and initiation practices, as sources of physical and spiritual healing and protection, and as charms for mediating everyday social tensions. These resource interests were very specific, in terms of both the particular species utilized in different locales 125 You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. and the particular social and cultural needs of different individuals—of varying social age,1 gender, and status—at certain moments of their lives. As the colonial state imposed its own evaluations of forest species and reserved access to them accordingly, its policies interfered and contended with local people ’s very different, diverse, selective, and complex estimations of trees and plants. While people responded to the shifting needs of their social and cultural lives, they brought such realities to their understanding and negotiation of local changes in species access. accessing a social resource: forests, male initiation, and stick-fights Both written and oral sources offer especially illuminating insights into the role of resource access in one local group’s social practices in particular: male youths. As they attained the age for initiation into manhood, young males intensively sought the specific tree types that most directly contributed to the various ritual and socialization practices of this process. From the early 1890s onward, as the presence of forest officers and guards expanded in KwaMatiwane , they regularly contended with young men during the initiation season as the latter harvested wood for their ritual seclusion huts. Male youths also scoured local forests during these periods to secure the most desirable weapons for organized stick-fighting. Facing social pressures to be impressive fighters, youths employed diverse strategies to maintain their access to resources they viewed as vital to their entry into manhood. An important component in the annual series of rituals associated with the initiation process in turn-of-the-century KwaMatiwane was the initiates’ hut, the isuthu (pl. amasuthu).2 The hut’s framework was typically built out of wood and required dozens of long sticks or tree saplings for its construction , which abakhwetha (initiates, sing. umkhwetha) usually cut and gathered themselves from nearby forests. As one elder in the Tabase region, Samuel Qina (SQ), recalled: SQ: There were indigenous trees in the forest there. I don’t know then what type of trees were they called, but they used to, to make this ungquphantsi,3 this like the hut for the abakhwetha. JT: The hut for the initiates. So, they used a certain type of wood for that? SQ: Yeah, they used it for making roofs.4 126 w Chapter 4 You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. Abakhwetha had additional interests in accessing forests during the initiation process. Fumanekile Sithelo recollected local practices in the...