Passive Resistance to Western Capitalism in Rural South Africa: From Abantu Babomvu to AmaZiyoni

Western encroachment into the south-eastern region of South Africa,formerly known as the Transkei, gave rise in the latter half of the nineteenth century to two distinct social groupings among the isiXhosa-speaking people, namely Abantu Babomvu, or Red People, and Abantu Basesikolweni, or School People. The former were more prominent in the Transkei than the latter. The Abantu Babomvu resisted Western Christian “civilisation” and Western capitalism, while the Abantu Basesikolweni embraced these. The Abantu Babomvu continued to dominate the Transkei region during the first half of the twentieth century, and even in the 1960s almost half of the isiXhosa speaking people in this region continued to identify themselves as Red traditionalists; however by the end of the twentieth century the Abantu Babomvu were gone. With the decrease in, and then the eventual disappearance of the Abantu Babomvu in the Transkei, there has been a substantial increase in the AmaZiyoni, or membership of the Zionist-Apostolic churches, from those who were previously Abantu Babomvu. In this paper I argue that (1) the decline of the Abantu Babomvu and the concurrent rise of the AmaZiyoni is not a coincidence; (2) the AmaZiyoni have succeeded the Abantu Babomvu as the result of ongoing renegotiation of collective identity as a response to colonisation of self and changing socio-economic conditions which have been brought about by the capitalist transformation of the world; and (3) that like the Abantu Babomvu, the AmaZiyoni are also engaged in passive resistance to attempts by Western capitalism to “colonise the self”