Gather Your Ancestors

Southeasternmost Africa is home to a large variety of speech communities, including Nguni, East Bantu, Khoi, and San-the legacy of a long and complicated history of migration, interaction, assimilation, and disaggregation between many peoples. With detailed, careful analysis, Raevin Jimenez guides readers through a thousand years of human movement, cultural interaction, and social development in this region. Taking a historical linguistics approach to Nguni, she sheds new light on this history by focusing on Nguni speakers' use of gendered practices-including initiation, marriage, and avoidant speech known as hlonipha-to blend multilingual and culturally diverse communities. Use of gendered institutions inaugurated variable social spaces that could either elide or accommodate difference, and thus enabled a multiplicity of community types. Contrary to previous assumptions about the roles of men and women in precolonial southeasternmost Africa, Jimenez shows that gender impacted life and social interactions across a large variety of important domains and became a way of forming, negotiating, and maintaining community. These developments still impact and remain visible in Southeastern African communities today, and understanding them is vital to understanding the region's long history and current society.