Gender and nationalism: A study of a quiet rural community on the eve of the new South Africa

This study investigated the relationship between male and female sexuality and nationalism. It was based on a one-year fieldwork study in 1992, and followed by primary and secondary source research, of a rural community of between seven and eight thousand Tsonga speakers located in the then eastern Transvaal Province of South Africa. One chapter analyzes the effects of "rootlessness" in relation to ethnic and national sentiment. Some popular preconditions for national identity are questioned namely territorial fixity, linguistic commonality, shared historical origins and land occupation, especially as state intervention was to affect Tsonga patterns of migration, settlement, reproduction and production, household demographics and gender relations, and these transformations would interact with the promotion and curtailment of ethnic and national identities. In 1992, Nelson Mandela, President of the African National Congress, the favored party in the first democratic elections in 1994, urged both the establishment of harmonious ethnic relationships in the Transvaal and sexual discipline to promote a unified nation, (and to stem the spread of AIDS). The next chapter focuses on both these issues and through three case studies explores the shifting relationships between male sexuality and nationalism, noting the particularity of "big men" politics and the competing interests of different male groupings, ethnic or generational. Chapter four, which explores female sexuality, considers the putative absence of witch hunts in the "quiet" community (in contrast to its neighbors) and situates female sexuality and politics. It analyzed death and birthing rituals and the alienable body substances of blood sweat and semen, as symbols, commodities and as extensions of the human body, to uncover the layers of female sexuality so vital to shaping the particular forms of local, particular and often gendered understandings, interpretations and actions, some of which related to gendered participation in the formation of the "New South African" nation. Thus male sexuality and female sexuality, while mutually dependant, exist in different relationships to national identity, and it is primarily female sexuality which is potentially dangerous to both men and the national project. And while men began to ritualize politics, women appropriated the politics of rituals.