Human beings have throughout the years been able to produce identity and character by association and attachment, where belonging to a certain aggregate or collective gives one a sense of security that all is well and good. As social animals, we comprehend our general surroundings by taking a gander at others and emulating conduct that we esteem as the correct method to act, and this structure bunches where we feel comprehended and ensured. According to works in psychology, behavior is learned, imitated, copied, modeled, and reinforced, thus people often find conforming to groups and collectives easily. Non-conforming leads to exclusion and loss of belonging, hence people conform out of fear of being excluded. According to Yuval-Davis (2006), belonging has a wide array of categories. One cannot simply assign themselves according to a specific identity category only such as race, various hubs of distinction come into play such as gender, class, age, and so forth.
To more readily comprehend the concept of belonging, it is crucial to understand and separate the three expository stages where belonging is comprised. The primary point concerns social areas, it is a person’s distinguishing piece of proof, that is, emotional and physical attachment to the place or collective with which they belong, and thirdly, the moral and governmental value organizations with which people judge their own and other’s belonging (Yuval-Davis, 2006). These levels are interconnected, but may not be cut to each other, as numerous political undertakings will in general acknowledge. The following reflective essay will dwell on belonging to a community, I will look at how having a sense of belonging is beneficial to a person. I will further examine the difference between belonging and the politics of belonging against citizenship.
Who Am I? (The History of AmaBhaca)
Introducing oneself as an individual of African plunge is considerably more mind blogging and complex on account of our profound roots, a legacy with a deep heritage, as it entails a lot of detail on origin, ancestry, and ethnicity. Being African is to originate from a place where there is intricacy, it is to live with the revulsions of the past, yet welcome the fervor of the unknown future. It is far deeper and wider than being just black or white, male or female, and all the other categories of identity used in social locations.
I identify myself as Ibhacakazi (the 'kazi' at the end shows gender, being female), belonging to the ethnic group of people known as AmaBhaca. My genetics are traced from the entire specimen, but I pay tribute to uNtu, the precursors of all the Bantu people. AmaBhaca are a minority ethnic group of people from the deep rural areas of Transkei in the Eastern Cape. Nations such as AmaBhaca, AmaHlubi, AmaMbo, and others have been overlooked and constrained to acclimatize to other ethnicities. 'Ukubhaca' means to flee. AmaBhaca had been migrating even before the wars of Umfecane of the 1800s. Mfecane comes after the early stages of colonialism, whereby Europeans were concocting ways in which they could take over Africans’ domains by partitioning and overcoming. Under the orders of the British colonialists, African nations would strike one another. For illustration, beneath the government of Hamilton Hope, AmaGcaleka (nowadays known as AmaXhosa) pursued war on Sotho nations. This was happening whereas AmaZulu were moreover pursuing wars over the other nations such as the Moshoeshoe individuals who at that point fled to Lesotho. Mfecane disturbed numerous African kingdoms, particularly those in the southern locale of Africa. This has brought about social and dialect mastery.
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To Where Do I Belong?
AmaBhaca, like numerous other communities who fled to Zimbabwe, ran from the lands of Zululand when it was beneath the curb of the ruler Shaka Zulu. They settled in numerous lands in the Transkei such as Mount Frere, Tsolo, Qumbu, and others (Hammond-Tooke, 1952). Transkei is in the deep rural areas of the Eastern Cape. For most of my childhood, I identified with that ethnic group and dwelled in the Transkei, Mount Frere, but had to move to Port Elizabeth for better education and more opportunities. Upon moving to Port Elizabeth, my experience as a minority was unpleasant as people found our dialect different from isiXhosa, and hence I was made to feel inferior because of what made me unique to the majority. Being in a place where your sense of belonging is almost non-existent is hard because locals look at you as of a lower standard than them. I’ve had people refer to me as Zulu because my own ethnic group is not even considered among the official ethnicities in South Africa. In the early years of having migrated from the rural areas to the city, it took some time to adjust and get used to people’s shock and awe when I’d tell them I was from the Transkei. I was astounded to learn that the place where I came from was actually no place at all to the minds of the city people. When you are in a place where you are unfamiliar, your sense of belonging is threatened, and hence end up facing a lot of discrimination, bullying, and exclusion.
Citizenship and Belonging
As a South African citizen, I have gotten used to interacting with people from throughout the entire African continent. I am South African, but I am constantly reminded that I am African because I meet Africans of every description in my surroundings on a daily basis. Many have fled war and terrible crimes in the countries in search of better opportunities and education in South Africa. It is them and my fellow countrymen who bring former president Thabo Mbeki’s speech to life and remind me that I am an African, this is my place in the world are my people.
The concept of belonging ascribes one to associate to a group with which there are many similarities and common interests. Hence in many cases, citizenship asserts belonging. Lister (2003) defines citizenship as being a member of a community, having rights and obligations that flow from that membership and equality. In the politics of belonging, Yuval-Davis raises the notion of active and activist citizenship, intimacy, consumerism as citizenship, and multicultural and multi-layered citizenship. She focuses on issues related to the politics of belonging, giving light to issues of contemporary citizenship. There is a gulf between citizens and their governments, along with a rather conflicting unparalleled penetration of state surveillance, according to Yuval-Davis. She uncovers how having dual citizenship challenges the basic rationales of the twentieth-century politics of belonging, which are focused on state citizenship. According to Sisonke Msimanga's article 'Belonging - Why South Africans Refuse to Let Africa', “In an era in which borders are coming down and becoming more porous to encourage trade and contact, South Africa is introducing layers of red tape to the process of moving in and out of the country. The outsider has never been more threatening than s/he is now”. People often feel the need to politicize and articulate their citizenship when they feel like their sense of belonging is being threatened, thus the xenophobic attacks that took place in our country.
Conclusion
The concept of belonging to this one class and this of belonging to those people or age brackets have in general, both endow the person with a common location in the social and historical process and thereby somehow limit them to a particular range of experiences, predisposing them for a specific distinctive manner of thinking and experience. The sense of belonging is not contingent on engagement with or closeness to others. Instead, it relies on perceptions about this level of interaction. Thus, belonging reflects one's knowledge of his or her interests in the structure or location. The common sense of belonging fulfills the individual’s inherent mental drive to relate to groups and to participate in important social interactions, thus affirming their positionality and presence in groups. Belonging thus is not only about cultural locations and structures of personal and collective identities and attachments but also about the choices these are respected and evaluated. Closely associated with that are particular attributes and ideologies concerning where and how personality and categorical limits exist, described in exclusionary and less permeable ways. It is in the field of these contestations in these moral and philosophical matters and the ways they use cultural locations and stories of identities that we make from the kingdom of belonging into that of the politics of belonging.
References
- Hammond-Tooke, William David (1952). A General Ethnographic Survey of the AmaBhaca (East Griqualand). University of Cape Town.
- Lister, Ruth (2003). Citizenship: Feminist Perspectives. New York University Press.
- Mjoli, Noluvuyo (n.d.). IsiBhaca-Speaking People of South Africa. University of Cape Town.
- Msimanga Sisonke (2014). Belonging - Why South Africans Refuse to Let Africa in. https//africasacountry.com. Accessed 17 February 2020.
- Yuval-Davis, Nira (2006). Belonging and the Politics of Belonging. Patterns of Prejudice, 40:3, 197- 214, DOI: 10.1080/00313220600769331.
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