Queering Colonial Natal: Indigeneity and the Violence of Belonging in Southern Africa

by T.J. Tallie

How were indigenous social practices deemed queer and aberrant by colonial forces?


In Queering Colonial Natal, T.J. Tallie travels to colonial Natalestablished by the British in 1843, today South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal provinceto show how settler regimes “queered” indigenous practices. Defining them as threats to the normative order they sought to impose, they did so by delimiting Zulu polygamy; restricting alcohol access, clothing, and even friendship; and assigning only Europeans to government schools. 

Using queer and critical indigenous theory, this book critically assesses Natal (where settlers were to remain a minority) in the context of the global settler colonial project in the nineteenth century to yield a new and engaging synthesis. Tallie explores the settler colonial history of Natal’s white settlers and how they sought to establish laws and rules for both whites and Africans based on European mores of sexuality and gender. At the same time, colonial archives reveal that many African and Indian people challenged such civilizational claims. 

Ultimately Tallie argues that the violent collisions between Africans, Indians, and Europeans in Natal shaped the conceptions of race and gender that bolstered each group’s claim to authority. 

Genres: History, Africa, Gender

240 pages, Paperback

First published October 15, 2019

Reviews

[Melissa Rudder · Rating 5 out of 5]

T.J. Tallie’s Queering Colonial Natal: Ingenuity and the Violence of Belonging in Southern Africa is a valuable book that stretched the boundaries of my knowledge--both by introducing me to a focused study of Natal, a region that this past (very Euro- or American-centric) history major had to look up on a map, and by introducing me to queer theory and critical indigenous studies, which both built on and improved upon my basic background in deconstructionism and post-colonial criticism. (I mention my background because I anticipate my reading of the text, which was essentially introductory, differs from that of academics who are more well-versed in the region and theories and are able to better appreciate the moves Tallie makes to refocus and reexamine work of past scholars.)

Tallie’s text, which focuses, chapter by chapter, on marriage, alcohol, friendship, missions, and education in Natal, a settler colony remarkable in the British Empire for its sustained majority of indigenous Africans to European settlers, studies the way that settlers attempted to use writings, actions, and laws to establish African practices as “queer” in order to bolster their claims to hegemony in spite of their being outnumbered. The strength of Tallie’s book, however, comes from the way that his use of queer and indigenous studies consistently highlights and works to explain complexity, whether emphasizing Africans’ subversive adoption or outright rejection of settler values; analyzing how settlers attempted to restrict the behavior of other settlers to create a unified norm; highlighting the various negotiations necessary to account for Indian migrates, creating a dynamic racial hierarchy in response to both Indian and African resistance and European defensiveness; demonstrating shifting tactics and attitudes as settlers recognized their population’s ascent into majority was not happening or Africans were strategically embracing European values to increase their claims to power… Queering Colonial Natal unsettles the discourse so common in discussions of empire, which creates a false narrative in which a united settler front enacts policies on an inactive indigenous population.

My favorite part about Queering Colonial Natal is the way in which the complex arguments presented are so well supported by primary documents. While working within a sophisticated framework, clearly established with the foundation (and sometimes rejection) of the work of other historians, and covering over half a century of legislation, Tallie manages to make primary the humanity of those he discusses, uncovering documents that are immensely personal and utterly engaging. His juxtaposition of the reactions to Martin Swindells, a white settler who regularly engaged in drunken behavior, and Solomon Kulalo, a Zulu Christian convert who, someone heard, may have once been publicly drunk, for instance, effectively illustrates his claims about how perceptions of alcohol were used to police the behavior of both white settlers and Africans in an attempt to uphold European claims of racial superiority, however unsupported by facts, while also emphasizing the real impact this racist perception had on individuals.

My review is going long, so I’ll conclude with the note that I was, of course, most interested in the exciting marriage and alcohol chapters, but was surprised by how much I enjoyed the rest, especially the chapter on missionaries, which did really cool stuff by analyzing rhetoric surrounding both clothing and buildings, by evaluating the writings of a Zulu-language Christian newspaper that featured texts authored by settlers and Zulu converts, and by looking at the dramatic change in approach to evangelization upon acknowledging the improbability of a white settler majority in Natal. I highly recommend the whole book.

[Erin Becker · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a reader interested in queer studies and South Africa, I was very excited to discover this book. I don't have an academic background in history or social sciences, but still found this to be fairly readable (definitely more readable than other social oriented histories from academic publishers Ive tried to read in the past). This book is not about this history of queer communities, individuals or legislation in what is now Kwa-Zulu Natal, but rather the author applies principles of queer studies to interrogate how indigenous practices and people were othered or "queered" in the British colony of Natal between the 1840s and early 1900s. I learned a lot about South African history and queer theory. I was also very pleasantly surprised by the inclusion of some book passages in isiZulu, which I am studying. Highly recommend this work for anyone with interests in these areas.

[Anna Shuff · Rating 4 out of 5]

really great!

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Africanist Historian T.J. Tallie’s 2019 book, Queering Colonial Natal: Indigeneity and The Violence of Belonging in Southern Africa shows how White European Settlers in Colonial Natal (which is part of the present-day province of KwaZulu-Natal of South Africa) justified their governance of the colony by making the cultural practices of the Black and Indian populations in the colony not normative. T.J. Tallie is the Director of Africana Studies at the University of San Diego in California. Tallie uses the framework of Queer Studies to examine Colonial Natal. Tallie writes that “a queer reading can offer an exploration of how lines of assumed order are skewed by ideas, actions, or formations. If settler colonialism itself is presented as a form of orientation, of making a recognizable and inhibitable home space for European arrivals on indigenous land, then native peoples and their continued resistance can serve to “queer” these attempted forms of order” (Tallie 7). Different chapters of Queering Colonial Natal examine how different aspects of Black and Indian cultures in Colonial Natal were attempted to be controlled by the White settlers in Colonial Natal. The book then shows how the blacks and Indians responded to both the policies of the government of Colonial Natal and of other white-controlled institutions such as the Christian mission churches of Colonial Natal. The book shows how the White Settlers of Colonial Natal were aware of events in other settler colonies around the World. Tallie’s book, Queering Colonial Natal is an excellent study of Colonial Natal.