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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 August 2020
Umkhosi wokukhahlela is an annual ceremony in the KwaBhaca Great Kingdom (Eastern Cape, South Africa) that celebrates virginity among young women and girls. Not regularly practiced for decades, it has recently made a comeback, having been strategically adopted by King Madzikane II as a tool of empowerment in the fight against the HIV pandemic, the rise in teen pregnancies, rape and school dropouts, as well as the abuse of women in general. This article investigates the return of Umkhosi wokukhahlela through Antonio Gramsci’s notion of ‘articulation’. As we shall see, the ritual is a particularly engaging and thoroughgoing example of how local communities intertwine the past with the present to reshape their own identity, borrowing from tradition to articulate specific life lessons germane to the present – and future – of the Bhaca people.
This work was supported by the European Union (HUM/2010/1-271) and the Newcastle University School of Arts and Cultures Strategic Research Fund. We wish to thank Ian Biddle, Justin D. Burton, Ali Colleen Neff and audiences at the University of Edinburgh, Newcastle University and the University of Canberra for their thoughtful comments in response to earlier versions. We are also grateful to the editor of JRMA and the reviewers (one of whom was Barbara Titus of the University of Amsterdam) for their helpful suggestions.
1 KwaBhaca is located in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province, formerly the Transkei region, situated between the cities of Kokstad and Mthatha.
2 Alelisiwe, ritual participant, 12 years of age. Interview, 2016.
3 King Madzikane II and the elder sisters made the request that the confidentiality and privacy of young ritual participants be maintained. As a result, we share the participants’ first names only in this article. Assurances that authors would use only first names in the published article were discussed with participants and their families prior to the interviews and at the start of focus-group discussions.
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35 Coplan, ‘Sounds of the “Third Way”’, 114. Another popular South African music form that, like maskanda, became closely associated with Zulu tradition is mbaqanga. Mbaqanga as a term came into wide use as a label for the local style of African jazz during the 1950s. When in 1960 jazz was decreed by the apartheid government to be a ‘public hazard’, a campaign of censorship ensued, limiting opportunities to play or record jazz. The government instead sanctioned the playing of ‘traditional’ music, at which time mbaqanga was reapplied to such groups as Mahlathini and the Queens, a group that had become known as ‘the leopard-skin-bedecked Mahlathini and his Zulu headdressed, beaded beauties’, which performed ‘antiphonal Zulu vocals […] backed up by an electric guitar band’ (Coplan, ‘Sounds of the “Third Way”’, 110). Mbaqanga’s link to ‘Zuluness’, therefore, was part of a ‘reinvented performative traditionality’ (ibid.) that, as Louise Meintjes writes, continues today. Contemporary mbaqanga musicians, in their continued attempt to ‘sound Zulu’ further purport an ‘undecidability about the agency entailed in the category of Zuluness’ (Meintjes, Sound of Africa!, 207), which shifted ‘between Zulu as victim and perpetuator of violence, Zulu as object and subject of death, Zulu as themselves and as Other, Zulu as difference with which they identify, and Zulu as rhetorical category’ (ibid.). The Bhaca’s integration of maskanda in the ritual Umkhosi wokukhahlela points to yet another example of the complexities behind notions of ‘Zuluness’.
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54 Anonymous interviewee, 2013.
55 Ibid.
56 Anonymous panel member. Interview, 2016.
57 Ibid.
58 Anonymous visiting chief. Interview, 2013.
59 Anonymous panel member. Interview, 2016.
60 Ibid.
61 Anonymous panel member. Interview, 2016.
62 Alelisiwe. Interview, 2016.
63 Siphephelo. Interview, 2016.
64 Anonymous ritual participant. Interview, 2016.
65 Bongile. Interview, 2016.
66 Anonymous ritual participant. Interview, 2016.
67 Langalibalele. Interview, 2016.
68 Ibid.
69 Anonymous interviewees. Interview, 2016.
70 De Jong and King Madzikane II, ‘Umkhosi wokukhahlela in the Fight against HIV/AIDS’.
71 Ntombifuthi, 18-year-old ritual participant. Interview, 2016.
72 King Madzikane II. Interview, 2016.
73 Chuma, male leader attending event. Interview, 2016.
74 King Madzikane II. Interview, 2016.
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96 Ibid.
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