The focus of the thesis is a comparative history of two neighbouring ethnic groups in Songea District and their agroecological environments: the Ngoni, a branch of the Mfecane migrations from South Africa which dominated southern Tanzania in the late nineteenth century; and the Ndendeuli, one of numerous indigenous groups that were created by partial incorporation into the expanding Ngoni State. Under British Indirect Rule, the egalitarian, stateless Ndendeuli were ruled by authoritarian Ngoni Native Authorities, and the character of the two ethnic groups diverged, with the Ndendeuli enthusiastically adopting tobacco production, and Islam, while rejecting the European Christianity that had taken hold among the Ngoni. As the colonial economy developed, Europeans characterised the Ngoni as conservative and indolent- a 'deteriorating tribe' - while the Ndendeuli were increasingly recognised as industrious and progressive. These representations informed divergent patterns of intervention including coercive agricultural programmes for the Ngoni and forced resettlement of the Ndendeuli. In the early 1950s, a successful campaign for Ndendeuli selfrule emerged, which quickly transformed into mass support for TANU while their Ngoni counterparts allied with European interests. Despite forty years of nationalism, ethnic tensions between the Ngoni and Ndendeuli were sustained by a District Council and Cooperative Union which straddled the two regions, until July 2002 when Songea District was divided into two along a 'fault-line' that can be traced back to pre-colonial social and spatial organisation. The starting point for analysis is the insight that Undendeuli is the frontier of Ungoni, with a rapidly increasing population and unstable pattern of settlement and land use that developed in a region of indeterminate political and moral authority. The thesis examines how the people who became known as Ndendeuli created their society and culture out of the materials of a shared frontier experience, under economic, ecological and sociological conditions common to innumerable internal frontiers throughout Sub-Saharan Africa. In doing so, the thesis adapts Kopytoffs model of ethnogenesis and social change given in The African Frontier. The discussion explores the extent to which Ndendeuli history can be seen as an endogenous movement to build a new society in opposition to that found at the Ngoni centres of power. An interdisciplinary methodology was employed including sequenced historical mapping of settlement patterns, political organisation and land use; archival research, oral histories and interviews; participatory appraisal techniques and participant observation. The thesis is structured both thematically and chronologically, exploring in turn: pre-colonial settlement, political control and ethnic identity; colonial administration and the politics of representation; colonial religious identities and educational opportunities; the cultural economy of cash crop production; settlement and resettlement; and post-War political reform and resistance. The conclusions show how long-term settlement dynamics can offer new ways to frame and understand rural development trajectories and ethnic identities in other African districts.

The thesis is an annotated edition of Limba folktales or "oral literature". This is unusual in recent British anthropology in spite of the earlier interest in the subject, mainly because of the reaction against evolutionism, and the more recent structuralist and functionalist approach. Various approaches to folktales and myth are laid aside as irrelevant or unhelpful. The senses in which linguistic, structural and, in particular, sociological approaches are relevant to the present study are discussed, and various criticisms made of the narrowness or misleading implications of the more recent "sociological" attitudes to oral literature in non-literate societies. The present approach is to treat such material as having the status of literature ("oral literature"), rather than as being in some way utilitarian, and to relate the stories to their social background, discuss their contents, categories, delivery, and narrators systematically, and discover something of what they mean to those telling and hearing them.

My thesis reconsiders Du Bois’ role in creating a black aesthetic, challenging prevailing notions about his opposition to the New Negro Renaissance and broadening the scope of his contributions in developing an indigenous, self-determined aesthetic. Currently, Harlem-centric historiography remains over-reliant on Du Bois’ own interpretations and unconcerned about his motives for misrepresenting the catalysts and the outcomes of the aesthetic and intellectual debates that define the period. By examining aesthetic controversies outside his dominant ‘failure’ interpretation and beyond the narrow geographical perimeters of a romanticized Harlem, the vital contributions Du Bois made to an intellectual dialogue that inspired artists to articulate a black aesthetic can be recognized. While some scholars have acknowledged the history of the renaissance has been unfairly shrouded in failure, none have explored Du Bois’ role as an aesthetic visionary, a position complicated by his categorical denunciation of the New Negro Renaissance. My research repositions Du Bois as a major ideological force at the genesis of the Black Aesthetic, both as an advocate and antagonist of the aesthetic ideals that define the movement. By tracing his intellectual evolution throughout the first quarter of the twentieth century, my thesis identifies how ideological conflicts within the NAACP and intellectual rivalries with Marcus Garvey, Charles S. Johnson, and Alain Locke impact Du Bois’ vacillating beliefs, and how his writings about art and his leadership as editor of The Crisis define the intellectual foundation and embody the racial dilemmas through which New Negroes create a revolutionary aesthetic. Du Bois’ insistence that artistic decadence and deleterious white commercial interests undermine the renaissance is reconsidered, allowing him, ironically, to be recognized as the New Negro Renaissance’s most important intellectual force in defining the Black Aesthetic.

Over the last sixty years anthropological interest in San has focused on their status as hunter-gatherers and, more recently, as an economically and socially marginalised minority group. In this thesis, I examine the different ways in which this indigenous minority population in Botswana manage and negotiate their relations with one another and with the broader society in which they are embedded. The research comprised eighteen months of fieldwork (April 2010 to December 2011) in Gaborone city, and a largely Naro-speaking village in Gantsi District in the west of Botswana. The participants comprised a small but relatively highly-educated cadre of elite San men who self-presented as advocates for San-related issues in the wider community but also San men and women in the towns and villages of the region. Early in the research process I recognised the need to make sense of the ethnography in terms of a variety of markers. Whilst this included what San actually said it also encompassed what they did and how they did it: that is their behaviour, dress and bodily techniques and practices – all of which I describe as voice. The research intersects with issues of gender, language, culture, class, identity and self-representation in the daily lives of San. I emphasise the tensions that San face in their daily struggles for recognition as human beings of equal value in Botswana’s society. As the public face of this struggle, San advocates were in a difficult and ambiguous position in relation to the wider San community. As a consequence of this, I explore egalitarianism as a set of political and social relationships rather than as a ‘sharing practice’. I identify a number of areas for further research, for example, to work collaboratively with San to incorporate aspects of what San called ‘personal empowerment’ and training. I show that the research has wider implications for other minority groups and indigenous people worldwide who have also been subject to highly politicised and overly deterministic definitions of their identity. My work suggests possibilities for working with emerging indigenous ‘elites’, who mediate most visibly the contours of these categories of identity by purposefully combining, conflating and straddling these labels.

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In 1991 a private town for Afrikaners was established on the bank of the Orange River, in the semi-desert of South Africa’s Northern Cape Province. As a deliberately Afrikaans, and thus white, community, the town’s aims and existence are controversial, but both its principles and practicalities are not unique. Endeavouring to build an Afrikaner homeland in multiracial South Africa seems incongruous, signalling a retreat from social heterogeneity as a fact of the contemporary world. It raises questions about what people do following a social, political and economic paradigm shift, and about what is occurring within a country with multiple and contradictory accounts of history and a traumatic recent past. It also means resisting the pressure to deal with the past, and therefore the present, in a certain way. Consequently, the frequent question of whether or not the town as an enterprise, or its residents, are racist, reveals instead a complex ordering of society. Life in Orania is filled with ordinary everyday activities of earning a living, raising and educating children, socialising, and practising religion in a town where Christian principles are explicit, each combining elements of intentionality and contingency. Once superficial similarity between residents can be taken for granted, the focus shifts to the differences between them, which rise and fall in importance, highlighting the circumstantial nature of group solidarity. This raises the question of what the differences within the community are, how deeply they reach, and where fundamental commonalities lie that prompt them to choose to build a future together. For the few hundred people involved in the enterprise, Orania is the only way they think they will have a recognisable future: they fear the demise of Afrikaners as an ethnic group through cultural assimilation or dispersal, emigration, and population decline. Their position of victimhood and vulnerability, shaped by the past, shapes their present actions in turn. Afrikaners’ interpretation of themselves as victims is easily supported by the popular historical narrative that Afrikaners have always struggled against outside authorities to be self-determining. This ethnographic study reveals that Orania is a concrete response to the fear that there may not be a place for Afrikaners in South Africa’s future, in the country to which they feel they belong and where their identity is rooted.