Religion as Race, Recognition as Democracy

• Author: Noah Tamarkin
• Published date: 01 September 2011
• Date: 01 September 2011
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0002716211407702

148 ANNALS, AAPSS, 637, September 2011

Apartheid South Africa enacted physical, structural,

and symbolic forms of violence on racially marked

South Africans, and postapartheid South Africa has

enacted ambitious—though also limited—laws,

policies, and processes to address past injustices.

In this article, the author traces the South African

political histories of one self-defined group, the

Lemba, to understand how the violence they col-

lectively experienced when the apartheid state did

not acknowledge their ethnic existence continues

to shape their ideas of the promise of democracy to

address all past injustices, including the injustice

of nonrecognition. The Lemba are known interna-

tionally for their participation in DNA tests that

indicated their Jewish ancestry. In media discourses,

their racialization as black Jews has obscured their

racialization as black South Africans: they are pre-

sented as seeking solely to become recognized as

Jews. The author demonstrates that they have in

fact sought recognition as a distinct African ethnic

group from the South African state consistently

since the 1950s. Lemba recognition efforts show

that the violence of nonrecognition is a feature of

South African multicultural democracy in addition

to being part of the apartheid past. The author

argues that the racialization of religion that positions

the Lemba as genetic Jews simplifies and distorts

their histories and politics of race in South Africa.

Keywords: Lemba; ethnicity; multiculturalism;

chieftaincy; race; DNA; identity;

South Africa

The postapartheid South African state is

at once “nonracial” and “multicultural,”

enshrining an official commitment to liberal

Religion as Race,

Recognition as

Democracy:

Lemba “Black

Jews” in South

Africa

By

NOAH TAMARKIN

Noah Tamarkin is a doctoral candidate in anthropol-

ogy and feminist studies at the University of California,

Santa Cruz and a dissertation fellow in African and

African diaspora studies at Boston College. This arti-

cle is based on ethnographic research funded by

Fulbright IIE and conducted while a visiting research

fellow at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic

Research at the University of the Witswatersrand in

Johannesburg, South Africa.

NOTE: The author would like to acknowledge Juno

Parrenas, Lisa Rofel, Carolyn Martin Shaw, Mark

Anderson, Eric Worby, and Rhacel Parrenas for

their comments and suggestions and Jed Tamarkin

for his assistance.

DOI: 10.1177/0002716211407702

RELIGION AS RACE, RECOGNITION AS DEMOCRACY 149

democracy unmarked by racial distinctions alongside official protection of cultural

difference (Comaroff and Comaroff 2004). The constitutional joining of nonra-

cialism and multiculturalism reflects, on one hand, the legacies of colonialism

and apartheid, in which full citizenship was denied to the majority of the popula-

tion on the basis of race and, on the other hand, models of liberal democracy that

espoused pluralism and diversity as key features of democracy. In keeping with its

“rainbow nation” slogan, South Africa’s nonracial multicultural democracy recog-

nizes eleven official languages. South African multilingualism forms a primary

basis of postapartheid multiculturalism, despite the association of different lan-

guages with discrete ethnic groups, which under apartheid ideology and policy

were “nations” or “races” that were held to be naturally both separate and unequal .

The slippage in apartheid South Africa between ethnicity and race has been

resolved in postapartheid South Africa—in the constitution, anyway—such that

race is the former basis of oppression and therefore must be overcome (the non-

racial state replaces the racist state), and ethnicity is the marker of cultural differ-

ence and traditional practices, which must be protected.

Theorists of race and identity such as John Jackson have rejected the assertion

that race is a problem to be overcome (Jackson 2005). But in African contexts,

it is the second part of this formulation—that ethnicity should be protected—

that has generated the most controversy. Many social theorists of ethnicity and

democracy in Africa argue that ethnicity is an actual or potential obstacle to equal-

ity (Berman, Eyoh, and Kymlicka 2004; Mamdani 1996, 2001; Ramphele 2008).

The decision to institutionalize traditional leadership as part of South Africa’s

democracy is one dense site where anxieties play out about the compatibility of

democracy with ethnicity and culture. Mahmood Mamdani held that chieftaincy

was fundamentally undemocratic because it entrenched the inequalities of indi-

rect rule and limited the rights of rural residents—who remained subjects of

chiefs with or without their consent—to be full citizens (Mamdani 1996). Basil

Davidson argued that the manipulations of indirect rule can and must be over-

come, and that traditional leadership should best be understood as a positive

force toward democratization and social order (Davidson 1992). Based on ethno-

graphic research, Barbara Oomen shifts the debate: she argues that traditional

leadership and legal pluralism are not at odds with the democratic state but fos-

tered by it, and that those subject to traditional authority overwhelmingly support

it not just because of an attachment to or respect for tradition but also because

of its official status within the democratic state (Oomen 2005). This article builds

on Oomen’s argument about the productive power of state recognition through an

analysis of both the productive power and the violence of nonrecognition. It is

based on 14 months of ethnographic and archival research conducted between

2004 and 2006 on Lemba identity and politics in the Limpopo Province of South

Africa.

Apartheid South Africa enacted physical, structural, and symbolic forms of

violence on racially marked South Africans, and postapartheid South Africa has

enacted ambitious—though also limited—laws, policies, and processes to address

past injustices. In what follows, I trace the South African political histories of one

self-defined group, the Lemba, to understand how the violence they collectively