An Accommodation of Patriarchs: Theophilus Shepstone and the Foundations of the System of Native Administration in Natal

As remote as the arguments in this paper might appear, they should be seen as part of the process of developing a response to an urgent, contemporary issue: the claims to formal authority under the new constitution bymore than three hundred chiefs inKwaZulu-Natal. At the moment the debate tends to move towards two extremes. The one links today’s chieftainship directly with political authority in a pristine pre-colonial past. The other sees the chieftainship as the unwanted relict of a colonial fraud. Such views revive two old standbys of African historiography – ‘resistance’ and ‘collaboration’. This paper seeks to go beyond such polarities and identify areas of agreement upon which the colonial administration in Natal was established. It posits the view that much of the common ground upon which Theophilus Shepstone, Secretary for Native Affairs, and leading Africans, negotiated their claims to political authority was their masculinity. To be more specific it attempts to demonstrate that it was upon their masculinity manifested as power over women and subordinate men, that is, as patriarchy, that an accommodation between white and black authorities was reached. I want to make two points initially. Patriarchy, it has been argued, has been used ahistorically and has thereby lost much of its explanatory value. While recognising that it still needs greater contextualisation and definition I believe that it serves its purpose well enough here. I have just said I use it to refer to masculine power in practice, and although the social roots of the two examples used in this paper, African and European, were initially quite distinct, once they made contact in this colonial situation, there was a sufficient degree of commonality to form the basis of an agreement over a division of authority. The parties to this agreement did