Gather Your Ancestors: Gender, Language, and Belonging in Southeast Africa (Africa and the Diaspora: History, Politics, Culture)

Historically, southeasternmost Africa has been home to a large variety of speech communities, including Nguni, East Bantu, Khoi, and San-the legacy of a long and complicated history of migration, interaction, assimilation, and disaggregation between many peoples.With detailed, careful analysis, Raevin Jimenez guides readers through a thousand years of human movement, cultural contact, and social development in this region.Taking a historical linguistics approach, she sheds new light on this history by focusing on Nguni speakers' use of gendered practices-including initiation, marriage, and avoidant speech known as hlónipha-to blend multilingual and diverse communities. Use of gendered institutions inaugurated variable social spaces that could either elide or accommodate difference and thus enabled a multiplicity of community types.Contrary to previous assumptions about the roles of men and women in precolonial southeasternmost Africa, Jimenez shows that gender impacted life and social