Mutualism Despite Ostensible Difference: HuShamwari,Kuhanyisana,and Conviviality Between Shona Zimbabweans and Tsonga South Africans in Giyani,South Africa

Abstract

This ethnographic study explores forms of mutuality and conviviality between Shona migrants from Zimbabwe and Tsonga-speaking South Africans living in Giyani, South Africa. To analyse these forms of mutuality, we draw on Southern African concepts rather than more conventional development or migration theory. We explore ways in which the Shona concept of hushamwari (translated as “friendship”) and the commensurate xiTsonga category of kuhanyisana (“to help each other to live”) allow for conviviality. Employing the concept of hushamwari enables us to move beyond binaries of kinship versus friendship relations and examine the ways in which people create reciprocal friendships that are a little “like kin.” We argue that the cross-cutting forms of collective personhood that underlie both Shona and Tsonga ways of being make it possible to form social bonds across national lines, such that mutuality can be made between people even where the wider social context remains antagonistic to “foreigners.”

Introduction: Navigating Relationships in Giyani

Giyani is a small town in the north-eastern part of Limpopo Province of South Africa. Created in the 1960s by the apartheid government as the capital of the Gazankulu Bantustan, Giyani was the administrative centre of the Tsonga people’s so-called “homeland.” ¹ The town previously existed on the margins of South Africa’s racialised capitalist economy and its economy remains predominantly rural, with small-scale cattle ranching and subsistence agriculture, historically supplemented by labour migration to other parts of South Africa, forming the basis for many livelihoods. However, recent years have also seen something of a retail boom, as Giyani has become an important trading centre in the district and has seen new development of shopping centres and the rise of multiple chain stores. As a result, the town has also become an important receiving town for migrants from neighbouring Zimbabwe and Mozambique. In this article, we focus on the experiences of Shona-speaking Zimbabwean migrants to Giyani, within this post-colonial, multi-cultural, and pluralistic context. While a great deal of the work on Zimbabwean migration to South Africa has centred around Zimbabweans in established urban areas such as Johannesburg or Cape Town (e.g. Kihato, 2013; Morreira, 2010, 2016; Sibanda, 2010) or as migrant workers on farms (e.g. Bolt, 2016), little work has been done on migration to semi-rural areas. Because it is a semi-rural area and because of its location, Giyani has gained a new geopolitical value, as it has become an immediate destination of Zimbabweans fleeing their home country, despite assumptions that most migrants head for cities (Chekero and Ross, 2018). As it is still developing, the area gives migrants and locals opportunities to improve their lives. Most studies on migration in South Africa have focused on rural-to-urban and urban-to-urban migration (Betts and Kaytaz, 2009; Morreira, 2010, 2016). Against that backdrop, the present research provides important insights into social engagement and survival of migrants within an everyday expanding semi-rural area such as Giyani. Work in Giyani enables new insights into the creation of everyday social relationships across ostensible difference in non-urban settings.

In this article, we examine how Shona migrants from Zimbabwe who settled in Giyani navigated the space and their relationships within it. Despite high incidences of xenophobia and the profiling of migrants as “outsiders” by the South African state, migrants in many everyday local contexts were able to create spaces for conviviality and mutuality across ostensible difference. Thus, “outsider” or “insider” status in semi-rural Limpopo is heavily influenced not only by documentation but also by sets of relationships. Establishing robust relationships enables belonging for migrants and facilitates access to healthcare services and livelihoods. The data we present demonstrates that social relationships (both structured, such as savings groups and churches, and semistructured, such as hushamwari friendships that expand beyond these group settings) and the cultivation of conviviality play a pivotal role in migrants’ lives in Giyani, despite both state-based and individually implemented processes of excluding and marginalising migrants, particularly undocumented ones.

The data we present here are qualitative, drawn from ethnographic work conducted by Chekero in Giyani in 2017 and 2018, as part of a broader project on migrants’ access to healthcare and from Morreira’s ongoing ethnographic work on Shona personhood conducted between 2010 and the present. Chekero worked particularly with Shona-speaking ² Zimbabwean migrants who had been in South Africa for a period of not less than two years, and South Africans they encountered in Giyani who had been living there for much longer, often with familial links going back a few generations to the founding of the “Bantustan.” Although our aim was to allow for the capturing of detailed experiences of Shona migrants from Zimbabwe in semi-rural South Africa, particularly with regard to access to healthcare, a side effect was that we were able to see the ways in which those migrants who had stayed in the country for a longer period of time were able to build convivial relationships with South African residents. In this process, ideas of hushamwari – that is, making formal, reciprocal friendship relations that are a little “like kin” – emerged.

Stories on access to healthcare form the backdrop of much of what we speak about here. However, our focus here is more on what these stories about accessing healthcare told us about how social relationships were formed and maintained and what that tells us about the concepts from the global South that we can use to theorise and to think with, in the global South and beyond. Nyamnjoh (2018), who we return to below in thinking through knowledge generation from the South, has argued that there is a pressing need for social science to move away from the dualisms and binaries that it has historically worked with and to recognise the “interconnections, relatedness, open-endedness, and multiplicities” (Nyamnjoh, 2018: 19) that are frequently at play in knowledge-making outside of universities in Africa. He argued that in order to rethink social science, there is a need “for African researchers and scholars to (re)immerse themselves and be grounded in endogenous African universes and the interconnecting global and local hierarchies that shape and are shaped by them” (Nyamnjoh, 2018: 21). In this article, through notions of hushamwari and kuhanyisana, we try to do just that as a means of moving away from the binaries traditionally at work in the social science of movement and migration: dualisms between locals and foreigners, legal and illegal, documented and undocumented, xenophobic, and welcoming. Instead, we begin with interactions on the ground between people in order to surface endogenous knowledge concepts through which to conduct social analysis. We explore the creative schemes that migrants employ to cushion and subvert the effects of their institutionalised exclusion. In particular, we explore the ways in which the Shona notion of hushamwari (which loosely translates as “friendship” but, as we show in the article, encompasses a deeper meaning that this English translation allows for) and the commensurate xiTsonga category of kuhanyisana (loosely translated as to help each other to live) allow for conviviality and social cohesion. Conviviality does not guarantee that xenophobia or other forms of structural violence have been resolved, but rather gives us a frame for thinking through how social life is enacted with and through others (Nyamnjoh, 2018; Ross, 2015), despite structural violence, and for strengthening such ties across ostensible differences.

Background: Migration and Personhood

South Africa is a prime destination of choice for many Zimbabweans, for economic and geographic reasons, even though post-apartheid South Africa has not been particularly welcoming to migrants. Many Zimbabweans coming to South Africa tend to fall between state-based categories, in that they do not fit into the category of (legitimate, documentable) refugee or the category of (legitimate, documentable) economic migrant (Betts and Kaytaz, 2009; Morreira, 2016). As such, they are particularly vulnerable to a lack of documentation and consequently are at risk of socio-economic rights violations (e.g. being denied healthcare, as we discuss below; Crush and Tawodzera (2014: 1) described such “negative attitudes and practices of health professionals and employees towards migrants and refugees” as “medical xenophobia”). Thus, contemporary state-based policy and discourse are not welcoming to non-South Africans (Bloch, 2008; Morreira, 2015). As in other parts of the world, migrants also make convenient scapegoats for state failures, such that, for example, in the run-up to national elections in 2019, a great deal of anti-immigrant sentiment was propagated by prominent political figures in South Africa, across multiple political parties. There is currently an upsurge in the use of xenophobic sentiment for political reasons. However, fieldwork in Giyani shows the possibility of something different occurring in practice in actual day-to-day relationships between Shona-speaking migrants and South Africans.

We see hushamwari and kuhanyisa as concepts that embody what Nyamnjoh (2018) has referred to as the “conviviality” that lies at the heart of Southern African personhood. Nyamnjoh wrote that conviviality “emphasises the repair rather than the rejection of human relationships with fellow humans as well as with the non-human world. It is more about cobbling and less about ruptures. It is fundamental to being human – biologically and socially – and necessary for processes of social renewal, reconstruction, and regeneration” (Nyamnjoh, 2018: 21). At a time when difference and exclusionism is on the rise globally (whether through border walls in the United States or camps for migrants in Europe, or anti-immigrant sentiment in South Africa), we feel it important that such perspectives of conviviality in local spaces are foregrounded, as a means of resisting the current exclusionary discourses and of presenting a different set of tools with which to think about movement, mobility, and belonging.

The anthropological concept of personhood refers to the ways in which social persons are created in different societal contexts. Conklin and Morgan (1996) argued that “Euro-American” personhood is based on the social construction of individualism, and that

Western ideologies of personhood prize egocentrism, self-containment, self-reliance, and social autonomy. This individualistic emphasis is evident in key values such as privacy, personal freedom, independence, and economic self-interest. (Conklin and Morgan, 1996: 664)

However, individualism is not only a means by which social groups have made sense of what it means to be a person. Comaroff and Comaroff (2001: 267) argued that “the autonomous person,” that familiar trope of European bourgeois modernity, is a Eurocentric idea. In the historical context of the social life of the Southern Tswana in the late colonial period, in which they base their ethnographic analysis,

Personhood was everywhere seen to be an intrinsically social construction. This in two senses: first, nobody existed or could be known except in relation and with reference to, even as part of, a wide array of significant others; and, second, the identity of each and every one was forged, cumulatively, by an infinite, ongoing series of practical activities. (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2001: 268 )

There is no one “natural” way, then, of being a person: we inhabit social worlds and construct ideas of what it means to be a person within the context of those social worlds. All ways of being in the world, that is, lie somewhere along a continuum between the individual and the shared (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2001). Further, it is worth remembering that

Formalized notions of personhood are not to be construed as descriptive of a static, preordained, social world; they are instrumentalities which people actively use in constructing and reconstructing a world which adjusts values and goals inherited from the past to the problems and exigencies which comprise their social existence in the here and now. (Jackson and Karp, 1990: 28)

The “problems and exigencies” facing Zimbabwean migrants forced them to leave their families and homes in Zimbabwe and make new lives elsewhere. In so doing, they needed to find new ways of making belonging, both for material reasons – to access resources in a context of poverty – and for reasons of identity. Where personhood is made collectively rather than individually, belonging matters greatly. In the context of rural KwaZulu Natal, South Africa, Wickström (2010: 541) wrote that in spaces of what she called a “collectivist orientation,” “belonging is of such great importance that it influences how (people) view themselves” (p: 541). Where personhood is social, such forms of belonging are often structured through kinship relations. For migrants, however, existing kinship relations may no longer be useful in one’s immediate day-to-day environment, and new forms of belonging have to be made. Diphoorn and van Roekel (2019: 7) wrote that “whereas kinship speaks to formalised and fixed social relations, with clear expectations and duties, friendship embraces doubt and ambiguity as central.” Practices of huShamwari – of making formal, reciprocal friendship relationships that are a little “like kin” – made it possible to remove some of the ambiguities and doubts that migrants faced. Let us begin by turning to an examination of Shona migrants’ practices in Giyani, and the ways in which notions of hushamwari and kuhanyisana emerged during fieldwork. We start by using some examples from Giyani to work through the differences between how migrants were treated by state representatives and by ordinary people, and the ways in which hushamwari was used to mediate those ordinary relationships away from difference towards mutuality.

Hushamwari as a Structured Force for Conviviality

Madhuve was a Shona woman aged thirty-eight years and a mother of four, who originally came from Chipinge, a town in south-eastern Zimbabwe, close to the border with Mozambique. After finding urban life in Chipinge increasingly untenable, as a result of the livelihood challenges presented by the country’s economic decline, Madhuve’s husband migrated to Giyani, South Africa, in 2010. From there, he sent back remittances of food parcels and money to his wife in Zimbabwe. After two years, Madhuve followed her husband to South Africa.

Madhuve had come to Giyani for reasons like many other migrants: the economic hardships of daily life in Zimbabwe, with limited opportunities for survival, let alone advancement, had drawn her across the border in search of a better life. At the time of our fieldwork in 2017, Madhuve had been in Giyani for five years. Chekero met Madhuve at a dancing ceremony, where he was intrigued by her because of the symbolic mismatch between her language – chiShona, a Zimbabwean language – and her dress – a xibelani, a traditional outfit that is commonly worn by South African Tsonga women during special ceremonies. During an unstructured interview, Madhuve explained that she wore the xibelani as it forged a way for her to develop a hushamwari with locals in Giyani. Madhuve had been a tenant of one of the organisers of traditional Tsonga ceremonies, a woman who was very well respected in Giyani. Later, Madhuve became her close friend. Some of the ceremonies would be hosted at the residence where Madhuve was living; thus, Madhuve was invited to the ceremonies, and came, over time, to move from spectator to participant. In this way, she met a lot of influential community members with whom she formed social networks . By wearing the xibelani and taking part in traditional ceremonies, she opened the door for new relationships that were very deliberately navigated across ostensible cultural differences.

Madhuve was not the only Zimbabwean in Giyani to use dress as a strategy for localising one’s presence. Given the prevalence of undocumented migrants in Giyani and the South African policy of arrest and deportation for those who could not prove their belonging, there were frequent police roadblocks, particularly at an intersection called Gaza Beef. Gaza Beef was a key route used by migrants arriving from Zimbabwe. The targets of these roadblocks were primarily migrants without legitimate documentation for their presence in South Africa. A conversation with some migrants one afternoon revealed their understanding of the process. The strategy used by police at the roadblocks began with them stopping all minibus taxis and asking everyone inside for papers that showed whether they were legal and documented. If papers could not be produced, the language was next used as a marker of belonging, with questions asked of the taxi’s passengers in Tsonga, Venda, and sePedi. Where passengers could answer in the right tongue but the police remained suspicious about authenticity – languages can be learnt, after all, but this is not the same as a documented right to belong – clothing was used next as a means of determining legitimacy. The story (as Chekero was repeatedly told by his interlocutors) went that Zimbabweans, particularly new arrivals, were stereotyped by the police as poor and jobless; as such, those riders of minibuses who did not seem quite South African enough were marked out as Zimbabwean by their “cheap” outfits and, on the basis of such flimsy identification, fined or arrested by the police (presumably based on the logic that a badly dressed South African would be able to rectify this error at the police station, whereas a badly dressed Zimbabwean would not). Thus, migrants such as Madhuve dressed in the ways that the police expected locals to dress when travelling around Giyani – in branded clothing or “smart” outfits. Such are some of the ways in which outsiders become insiders or at least try to pass as such.

Madhuve met Tsakani, a Tsonga woman who worked as a nurse, at a traditional ceremony. Tsakani was attracted by the way the xibelani fitted Madhuve. This sparked a conversation between the two, from which a carefully maintained connection developed. In attempting to access healthcare, migrants’ stories carried echoes of the same bureaucratic xenophobia, with people turned away from clinics because they could not produce the right papers, despite a constitutional provision for undocumented persons to be afforded the same care as citizens. At a state level, due to structural constraints and individual prejudices, such constitutional safeguards tend to fall away (see Chekero and Ross, 2018). In meetings with state representatives, then, whether at a clinic or police roadblock, migrants found it hard to create convivial relationships. However, there were ways around this bureaucratic xenophobia, other ways of making oneself into an insider based on the deliberate creation of shared conviviality rather than on subterfuge. Madhuve’s relationship with Tsakani provided one such way. Madhuve explained that she and Tsakani bought each other gifts and attended parties and gatherings together, which opened up new opportunities. Madhuve referred to this relationship as one of hushamwari – of careful, cultivated conviviality with an aim to build and nurture new, structured social relationships. The development and maintenance of hushamwari with Tsakani, who was a registered nurse, allowed for Madhuve to access medical care. Tsakani recognised the cultural pattern of the relationship between herself and Madhuve because, despite their different national origins, the Tsonga idea of kuhanyisana (loosely translated as helping one another to live) fulfilled a similar role. The women became close enough that Tsakani transgressed the rules of the medical institution where she worked to bring medication to Madhuve, as she knew that Madhuve would be turned away if she were to visit the facility. Excluded by (informal) policy at state hospitals, Madhuve used local forms of conviviality to ensure the provision of medical services. She explained that such was the power of hushamwari, a semi-formalised variety of friendship that fits with Tsonga conviviality as enacted through kuhanyisana.

Such relationships were common in Giyani: for example, on a Sunday afternoon at Dzumeri Four Way, an impromptu discussion on ways of navigating life in Giyani broke out between multiple Shona-speaking Zimbabweans. Dzumeri Four Way was a shisa nyama owned by a Zimbabwean named Respect: a place where people came together to buy meat from the Dzumeri Four Way butchery and cook it on the open fires provided. Shisa nyamas are common in South Africa and Zimbabwe as spaces for sociality. In the case of Dzumeri Four Way, space was mainly, but not entirely, utilised by Shona-speaking Zimbabweans.

During the talk at Dzumeri Four Way, most participants described sociality with locals from Giyani as a crucial tool for navigating daily life. The conversation began with the role of churches in sustaining social and economic relationships between migrants and locals. Churches, especially the Conquerors Ministry in Dzumeri and the Saints Ministry in Section F, which were particularly welcoming to migrants, were seen as platforms where migrants could create and sustain the social bonds of hushamwari with the locals who attended. For example, one woman explained how she formed a relationship with a pastor which enabled her to then call upon others in the wider community for help when she needed it, which in turn enabled her to develop bonds with them. She went on to explain that “the very same healthcare practitioners who have denied us access to healthcare when we came to the clinics and hospitals will now bring medication to church. They give it because we have built up a hushamwari relationship.”

This was partly due to the cultivation of hushamwari with someone influential: the pastor’s position in the community meant that having him as an ally had wide implications with the wider Tsonga community. Thus, hushamwari built bridges and linked people, spaces, and places. It inspired imagination and innovative ways of seeking and consolidating the good life for all. Therefore, spaces like churches facilitated associations between South Africans and non-South Africans. Churches in Giyani have become sites of transnational and local networks that migrants draw on for social and spiritual capital, emphasising a shared Christian identity and habitus (Nyamnjoh, 2017) that allowed them to develop formalised kuhaniyisana/hushamwari friendships that cut across national belonging: in Church, forms of religious belonging mattered more than nationality. Interlocutors in Giyani reported that South African healthcare workers with whom they shared a hushamwari relationship would also invite them to receive covert healthcare in their own homes. In such ways, migrants were recognised as part of social institutions, even as the formal medical institutions that were legally obliged to provide services excluded them. Thus, the structure of social network ties between migrants and church opens up a wide range of opportunities for integration and access to healthcare. While medical xenophobia and the denial of healthcare at the state level is real, a different story unfolds in other kinds of relationships.

Hushamwari relations straddled the divide between informal friendship and structured, formal relations and between a gift and a market economy. They were also frequently used to navigate economic difficulty, and to provide social support across gendered lines. For example, again in the suburb of Dzumeri, there was a popular migrant money-rotating club called Fushai (a Shona word that means “preserve for future use”), of which all the members were women. This informal savings group (stokvel, in South African parlance) ensured a level of food and health security and acted as a safety net for women living on the economic margins. Chekero met members of the association, most of whom were Shona migrant women from Zimbabwe. Hushamwari between migrants was created and maintained by the stokvel, but bringing in non-locals also allowed hushamwari and kuhanyisana to develop and be nurtured in relationships with Tsonga women as well. Stokvels are invitation-only clubs of twelve or more people serving as rotating credit unions or savings schemes, where members contribute fixed sums to a central fund on a weekly, fortnightly or monthly basis. Belonging to a stokvel invokes trust: new members are introduced to the group by existing members so that one member vouches for the trustworthiness of the next. As such, they worked to build community amongst migrants who had come to Giyani from many different parts of Zimbabwe, and between migrants and the Tsonga women they met in Giyani.

The “snowball” nature of stokvel membership meant that many of these organisations existed within migrant or local communities rather than across them: nonetheless, they were still able to be mobilised as spaces for developing and maintaining hushamwari and kuhanyisana between locals and foreigners. Most women in the group said that they used Fushai as a means of saving money; it was also a gendered form of community-making, as putting money into Fushai meant it could not be given to husbands or male partners. Ross’s work on rotating credit associations in Cape Town in the 1990s showed a similar phenomenon, such that Ross categorised them as “a womanist economic system” (Ross, 1990: 7). The same gendered economics was seen to play out in Giyani nearly three decades later and, with it, Fushai enabled a space for the creation and maintenance of new relationships. Fushai acted as a means through which money could be classified as different from ordinary household finances. The women said that their male partners usually knew little about the amounts they invested. Members of Fushai would make the arrangements amongst themselves, without their husbands present. The information above shows how women are able to negotiate some sets of relations on their own, as women. Membership in Fushai helped individuals with money when they faced adversity. In such times of crisis, its members extended emotional support towards each other but also gave material goods. Most migrant women confirmed receiving emotional support and comfort from Fushai in the event of sickness or death in their families. One participant said:

When my husband died, I had no one to turn to except my friends who are members of Fushai. They saw me through the grieving moment of the untimely death of my husband. They helped with household chores such as cleaning the house, cooking and even making sure my children have washed and got food. They were right here with me singing throughout the night. They even accompanied me to Zimbabwe for the burial.

This narration reflects the solidarity between migrant women and locals, created through a stokvel. In addition to receiving financial support, Fushai members reported receiving assistance from other members with practical tasks, such as assistance with cleaning, doing chores, and assisting with childcare. These actions enabled the bereaved to grieve in the community of others. Fushai is thus a dependable form of social capital that allows social networks, which are crucial in times of need. One participant explained the help from Fushai as follows:

When my son got sick, Fushai helped me to pay the hospital bills at Kremetart Health Centre. I used Fushai money and my husband was very pleased at how I managed to pay bills and buy medication without him paying any money. My husband was broke, and he did not have money. Zvakange zvakadzvanya [the situation was tough] and he was not working, but because of Fushai we sailed through.

Again, the above narration shows that the most significant spaces for social support lay in people’s everyday associations. It is important to note that relations founded on saving and exchange are a pertinent part of everyday existence between migrants and locals in Giyani. These structures with economic foundations were found to be an important means of creating and maintaining networks and enabling support.

Intimate knowledge of members, seasonal requirements, individual and household capacities to repay, as well as social pressures for both lenders and borrowers to retain their good standing in the community, shaped the availability of funds and support at any given time. These informal savings groups allowed migrants to circumvent the difficulties they faced in establishing formal bank accounts, where they are required to provide official documentation such as work or residence permits and proof of residence in order to open an account. Fushai, which met every two weeks, operated as a collective effort that helped each woman spread the shocks and stresses of life in Giyani. It also provided prospects for participants – both Shona and Tsonga – to network and support each other through conviviality.

Fushai members were able to obtain interest-free loans from the group, removing the transaction costs and risks associated with accounts at formal institutions. The amount of money contributed every month varied according to the amount any one member was able to acquire during that month. One of the women explained Fushai’s benefits in the following way:

Money lending can happen out of our own homes. We can combine finance with other business such as healthcare access. The services provided are outside the review and control of the monetary authorities. Fushai provides a space to network with local people in positions of power.

These sentiments largely represent the opinion held more widely among migrant women. Members were able to transform relationships that originate from Fushai into linking capital that they could use to off set the uncertainties of everyday life and the shocks it contain. Strong traditions of mutual assistance and reciprocity meant that individuals who needed funds could call on other members or the group leader for help. Acceptance of such help obligated the borrower to reciprocate by providing non-financial services or by supplying funds when the lender needed to borrow. The borrowing was also strategic. Members confirmed that lending money to South Africans opens up a semi-formal transactional relationship, which builds hushwamwari and social obligations between people. When nurses borrowed money, for example, they then found themselves within an intimate relationship that ensured that they would provide health care services to Fushai members, even if they did not have documentation. Thus, rotating credit associations allowed for the development of hushamwari between migrant members, and between migrants and locals. Over time, trust has developed between locals and migrants who share hushamwari, such that migrants come to join the stokvels that locals also frequent – thus creating a new community.

Collective Personhood and Social Bonds

A common feature of the above examples is the disjuncture between Shona migrants, encounters with an unwelcoming state and its attendant bureaucracy – through police roadblocks, an unreceptive healthcare system, and government-mandated bank requirements that ensure the undocumented cannot access formal banking – and the ways in which they were able to use social relationships to navigate those obstacles. Despite both state-based processes of exclusion and the xenophobic actions of individuals, even where the state is supposed to provide services to foreigners (such as where nurses turn away Shona migrants seeking medical help), the broader story to emerge from Giyani is one of the possibilities of using commensurate indigenous concepts and practices to create reciprocal relationships. Of course, the existence of such practices did not mean that other ways of knowing and navigating the world fell away. The above examples also show an entanglement of social forms being called upon as a means of making and maintaining hushamwari, as seen through religiosity, for example, or the ways in which hushamwari/kuhanyisana relations straddled the gift and market economy. Where relations of hushamwari and its concomitant Tsonga concept kuhanyisana were nurtured and developed in such ways, it was possible for mutuality to take precedence over differences in citizenship or nationality. Where relations were structured in this way, the local community was receptive to Shona ways of making community and validating personhood. A foray into Southern African cosmology and philosophy tells us why this might be.

In Southern Africa, ideas of personhood are closely entwined with the construction of an ethical being (for Zimbabwean literature on this point with an emphasis on Shona ways of being, see Chimuka, 2001; Mawere, 2010; Morreira, 2016). The ethical Shona person is constructed in relation to the social world, which is composed of both living persons and ancestors (as is the case across Southern Africa). Chimuka (2001) argued that an ethical person is one who embodies hunhu. Chimuka translated hunhu variously as humanity (2001: 27), as a commendable character (p: 26) and, drawing on Ramose (1999), as “the ontological, epistemological and moral fountain of African philosophy” (Chimuka, 2001: 29). Conceptually, unhu is very similar to the South African moral concept of ubuntu. Indeed, Samkange and Samkange’s treatise Hunhuism or Ubuntuism: A Zimbabwe Indigenous Political Philosophy (1980) holds the two concepts as identical. Similarly, Chimuka (2001) cited Ramose’s (1999)- arguments around ubuntu in order to argue that “Ubuntu (Hunhu) philosophy (constitutes) the basis of ontology and epistemology for the Bantu-speaking people, of which the Shona is part” (Chimuka, 2001: 29). Some Shona philosophers hold unhuism and ubuntu as mutually translatable.

The cornerstone of unhu/ubuntu is that of group solidarity and collective humanity and dignity, in which personhood is seen as collective rather than individual – one’s humanity is intimately tied to the humanity of others, whether they are from your immediate community or not. A key point here, which ties into the commensurability of notions of hushamwari and notions of kuhanyisana, is that despite generations of boundary maintenance across “tribal” and national lines, much of Southern African cosmology shares a similar foundation, across which much common ground can be found. We argue in this article that hushamwari and kuhanyisa take us beyond broad stroke ideas of ubuntu/unhu, to give us a pair of operationalisable concepts with which to think differently about how people work to make daily life convivial, centring as they do a set of formalised relationships which focus on producing mutuality rather than difference.

Chimuka has written further about the ways in which intergroup relations were maintained in precolonial Shona society as a means of exploring the possibilities for developing peace-building interventions towards strong inter-group relations in present day Zimbabwe. He wrote that “post-colonial Zimbabwe is riddled with tensions and antagonism where intolerance seems to be rife…Given that, there is a need to work out solutions. One such remedy is to invoke the ideas from our past, which had been very instrumental in the promotion of peace and stability” (Chimuka, 2008: 123 ). One of the ideas that Chimuka invoked in his “conceptual archaeology” (Chimuka, 2008: 112 ) of Shona precolonial traditions towards social cohesion is that of hushamwari. Fieldwork in Giyani shows that this concept is still alive and strong in the present, although it is no doubt somewhat altered by time and circumstance.

Chimuka noted that hushamwari’s peace-building strength emanated from the fact that it provided precolonial society with a place of relationship making outside of kinship networks and provided a kind of relationship building within kinship networks that was something more than kin. It is worth quoting at length:

In the traditional nyika (territory) members knew each other personally on the basis of hukama (blood), but more than this, they sought hushamwari (civic friendship). This was an important bonding factor, which few writers recognize and highlight. Hushamwari found room in Shona civic relations due to the realization that hukama had limitations as a moral and political fibre…Friendship was a very effective civic bond, hence the saying hushamwari hunokunda hukama (friendship is much stronger than blood ties). It was even encouraged that blood relations be friends because it encouraged mutual respect and understanding. Obviously not any type of friendship would do, but that which was mutual and regarded the other person as an end – an embodiment of hunhu. (Chimuka, 2008: 118 )

In making hushamwari bonds with other migrants, and with local Tsonga people in Giyani, Shona migrants were invoking a form of civic friendship that is deeply rooted in local cosmologies and ways of being in the world. To make hushamwari or kuhanyisana is to do something more than is translated into the English notion of friendship: as such, the concepts provide tangible ways of creating social cohesion and mutuality across ostensible difference. Chimuka noted that spaces for creating and maintaining hushamwari occurred where members of social groups who may not have known each other well had fairly structured opportunities to interact – for example, through nhimbes (cooperative ventures) or mukwerere (rain-making ceremonies) (Chimuka, 2008: 118 ). We argue that the dancing ceremonies, stokvels, and marriages we have described above provide a similarly structured space for hushamwari relationships to emerge in the present, such that a formalised civic bond is established that encourages cohesion and that follows a long-held cultural script about how one makes strangers into a kind of kin.

Conclusion

Nyamnjoh commented that “there is almost total discontinuity between the idea of knowledge in African universities and what constitutes knowledge outside universities” (Nyamnjoh, 2018: 19). With the rise of pressure to decolonise knowledge systems in postcolonial settings, this situation is starting to change. We have argued in this article that to make sense of mobility and forms of belonging in contemporary Africa, Southern ways of knowing need to be taken seriously. Southern African cosmologies and cultures are complex and provide a sound basis of concepts for the theorisation of social worlds. Such concepts and ways of knowing are also not necessarily separate from other ways of knowing. As Nyamnjoh further noted, Africa is a space of “frontier realities,” a space in which knowledges have been meeting each other and intertwining since long before colonisation. The ways in which kuhanyisana and hushamwari have been mobilised in Giyani are entangled with other ways of being in the world. For example, we can see in the ethnographic examples above that Christian religiosity is commensurate with the concepts, as are forms of market and gift accumulation and distribution through savings clubs or bringing medication from the clinic to a “foreign” friend. The point, then, is not that the inhabitants of the semi-rural space of Giyani are somehow more “traditional” than the people present in the urban spaces in which much of the literature on contemporary Zimbabwean migration focuses. Nor is it the point that other ways of knowing and being in the world should be disregarded simply because indigenous knowledges and practices are also present. Rather, we have sought to show that a shift in lens and focus on the part of social scientists as analysts, in which we bring local concepts to the fore, allows for an understanding of ways in which strangers can become like kin that would not have otherwise been possible. Nyamnjoh used the notion of the frontier to discuss how Africans negotiate change and continuity “by reaching out and taking in what they encounter and bringing into conversation various dichotomies and binaries” (Nyamnjoh, 2018). Much of conventional social science has been steeped in dualisms, but beyond the academy, frontier realities seek to find ways to straddle the divide. In this article, we have focused in on some of those entanglements as seen in the commensurate concepts of hushamwari and kuhanyisana.

In African discourses of ubuntu and unhu, and frontier Africa more broadly, the collective matters. There are individuals, of course, in the narrative we have presented here, Madhuve is one, Tsakani another, as are the philosophers, the money-merchants, and ourselves as fieldworkers and as authors. Yet, despite what the current neoliberal order would suggest and despite ongoing practices of difference and diaspora, there are spaces in which conviviality and recognition of the collective are essential. Nyamnjoh argued that within Southern Africa, there is a rejection of the notion that “a unified and singular self is the only unit of analysis for social action. In the absence of permanence, the freedom to pursue individual or group goals exists within a socially predetermined frame that emphasises collective interests at the same time that it allows for individual creativity and self-activation” (Nyamnjoh, 2018: 21). As the examples from Giyani show, collectives do not need to be split into national groupings, but can and do form across such ostensible differences, even in post-apartheid South Africa, even in an ex-Bantustan, even in spaces that were specifically designed as spaces of exclusion, intended only for one “tribal” grouping under the apartheid state. Being social is not limited to only interacting with the people one has always known, or those who are kin; rather, it is expected that even strangers benefit from sociality, such that they eventually become known.