Archives of Times Past

Conversations about South Africa's Deep History

Cynthia Kros, John Wright, Mbongiseni Buthelezi, Helen Ludlow, Geoffrey Blundell, Jan Boeyens, Amanda Esterhuysen, Rachel King, Lize Kriel, Sekibakiba Peter Lekgoathi, Grant McNulty, Hlonipha Mokoena, Fred Morton, Muchaparara Musemwa, Ndukuyakhe Ndlovu, Sifiso Mxolisi Ndlovu, Himal Ramji, Justine Wintjes, Cynthia Kros, John Wright, Mbongiseni Buthelezi, Helen Ludlow, Cynthia Kros, John Wright, Mbongiseni Buthelezi, Helen Ludlow

• Publisher: Wits University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781776140343
• eBook ISBN: 9781776147304
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: History of Art
• Index: History

Archives of Times Past: Conversations about South Africa's Deep History explores particular sources of evidence on southern Africa's time before the colonial era. It gathers recent ideas about archives and archiving from scholars in southern Africa and elsewhere, focusing on the question: 'How do we know, or think we know, what happened in the times before European colonialism?' Historians who specialise in researching early history have learnt to use a wide range of materials from the past as source materials. What are these materials? Where can we find them? Who made them? When? Why? What are the problems with using them? The essays by well-known historians, archaeologists and researchers engage these questions from a range of perspectives and in illuminating ways. Written from personal experience, they capture how these experts encountered their archives of knowledge beyond the textbook. The book aims to make us think critically about where ideas about the time before the colonial era originate. It encourages us to think about why people in South Africa often refer to this 'deep history' when arguing about public affairs in the present. The essays are written at a time when public discussion about the history of southern Africa before the colonial era is taking place more openly than at any other time in the last hundred years. They will appeal to students, academics, educationists, teachers, archivists, and heritage, museum practitioners and the general public.

Part I

FIRST THOUGHTS ABOUT THE ARCHIVE

CHAPTER

1

Exploring the Archive of the Times before Colonialism

Cynthia Kros, John Wright, Mbongiseni Buthelezi and Helen Ludlow

Foregrounding the archive

This book is concerned with the times before the establishment of European colonial rule in southern Africa. Colonial rule began in the south-western Cape in the 1650s and gradually extended eastwards and northwards. It reached the areas that are now northern Limpopo Province and Zimbabwe in the 1890s. The focus of the book is on exploring a range of materials that historians and others have used as sources for finding out about the history of African societies before these dates.

When we first started thinking about this book, our aim was mainly to challenge and displace what we saw as common stereotypes and misconceptions about southern Africa’s history before colonial times. As we began to investigate where these stereotypes came from, we thought more and more about the question of where historians find their source materials. We shifted our focus to thinking about the sources for histories of the past before the establishment of colonial rule. What are these sources, and where do we find them? The chapters in this book tackle these questions from a number of different angles.

Records of the past in all societies are always incomplete. Researchers who specialise in studying the past have to work with what traces or remains of the past they can find. Historians and other scholars who specialise in researching the history of southern Africa before colonial times have learnt to identify traces of the past in certain ideas, physical materials and social practices that exist in the present.

For a start, oral accounts of the past told by knowledgeable people today can be useful sources. Then there are many oral accounts of the past told by Africans in colonial times and recorded in different written forms. These include unpublished documents, newspaper articles, history books, novels and plays that we can still find in libraries today. Other kinds of written material also come to mind. Here we think of books written by travellers in the past who visited African societies, and unpublished letters and reports written by missionaries and officials who worked in, or visited, African societies.

Also important are collections of materials of other kinds from the past: photographs, films, paintings, maps, material objects such as are found in museums, objects found in archaeological excavations, recordings of music and, nowadays, digitised copies of all these. In addition, we can think of the great number of rock paintings and rock engravings found in many parts of southern Africa. Beyond that, landscapes that show traces of human activity in the past before colonial times can also be used as sources of historical evidence. In a different field are certain social practices in the present such as healing and divining, and performances of music, dancing and singing. People adapt these practices and change them over time, but scholars today work with them to read for traces of the past.

If we think of these ideas, practices and material objects together, we can imagine that they make up what we can call the archive of southern Africa’s past before colonial times. This leads us to think about the word ‘archive’. What does the word mean? Many people think of an archive as a building where collections of old documents are stored. Or else they think of an archive as the collections of documents themselves. But the concept of ‘archive’ refers to more than big buildings and materials from the past. It refers specifically to materials that people imagine as belonging together as sources of historical evidence. An important question is, what leads them to think in this way?

It is probably easiest to answer this question if we think of a body of objects, such as books or photographs. These objects form an archive when people deliberately select them, bring them together, curate them (meaning organise and manage them) and take steps to conserve them over time. They take these steps because they think that these objects carry traces of a valuable past. They might also think in this way about intangible items such as oral histories, songs, dances, rituals and landscapes. All these objects and items together can be seen as forming an archive of the past.

This perspective on the archive leads to other questions. What objects from the past are most likely to survive or leave traces in the present? What objects are most likely to be selected and preserved? Who has the power to decide? We discuss these issues at greater length in chapter 4, but here we want to say that the making of an archive is always a political act. Different groups of people will make different kinds of archives to support their own ideas of what the past was like, but usually it is the people who hold political power who decide what records will go into the ‘official’ archive. Thus, in South Africa, archives made by European colonisers were, with some important exceptions, mostly records that showed their own history in a favourable light, and that marginalised or ignored traces of the histories of African groups. Only in the 1960s and 1970s did some scholars in the country’s universities begin work to recover what they could of these traces.

Different groups of people, then, will often have very different ideas about what traces of evidence of the past are worth preserving. The point we want to emphasise is that if there is no archive, we cannot find out about the past in the first place. We illustrate this point with a simple story from our own experience.

In November 2018, the History Workshop at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (Wits University), hosted the launch of a book published that year by the University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. The book is titled History’s Schools: Past Struggles and Present Realities, edited by Aziz Choudry and Salim Vally. It discusses the struggles of progressive social movements in South Africa and other parts of the world against oppressive education systems. One of the speakers on this occasion was Professor Noor Nieftagodien, head of the History Workshop. He told how, a few years before, he had been engaged with a group of student activists in a project on youth politics and local history. He suggested to the students that they should build up an archive of the posters and other materials they were producing so that they would have a record of the work they were doing. The students were not particularly interested. They were busy with other activities. ‘Who needs archives?’ was their response.

Eighteen months later, Nieftagodien told us, the group wanted to hold an exhibition of the work they had done. But they found they had little to put in it. The record of their activities was mostly gone and, with it, a sense of how it fitted in with the history of earlier educational work done by youth activists, and with educational work being done in the present.

But there is more to say about our story of Nieftagodien’s story. We editors have chosen to write about it here in the introduction to our book. The relevant question is, where does our evidence about it come from? The answer is that it comes from notes made by one of the editors of this book, John Wright, who happened to be present at the launch. For his own interest, he made written notes on what the speakers had to say, and kept them in a file. Now we are using these notes to put our version of the story into writing for our readers. Without these notes, which were made by chance, we would not be able to do this unless we went back to Professor Nieftagodien and asked him to repeat his story to us. And perhaps he would have forgotten it, or would remember it slightly differently. Perhaps we would find that he still had notes on the subject that he had made himself. In using Wright’s notes, we need to think about several other issues. On which parts of Nieftagodien’s talk did Wright choose to make notes? What did he leave out? Would another listener perhaps have made a slightly different set of notes?

For researchers into the past, then, the questions of where archives come from, how they were made, and by whom, when, where and why are clearly of basic importance in understanding how we think about the past. We will discuss these ideas in more detail in chapter 4. Readers of this chapter can probably see already that the questions of how materials get into the archives, what happens to them once they are there, and how people read and interpret them are quite tricky. In this book our main interest is in exploring the archive – or, rather, a small part of it – of southern Africa’s past in the centuries before the colonial era. We are concerned not only with the question of what happened in the past. We are also interested in this question: how do we know, or think we know, what happened in the past?

Also important is the question of why people often disagree about how to interpret the materials in an archive. In many countries, including South Africa, such disagreements often turn into angry political arguments. (We discuss this further in chapter 3.) The question of why this is so, and how to respond to these arguments as scholars, is important for us to think about. In the first place, we need to understand the contexts in which the arguments take place. Who are the participants, and why does the past matter so much to them? Then we have to evaluate the historical source materials that they draw on to support their respective arguments. One of the most important points to establish is where the source materials come from. That is why we put so much emphasis on understanding the making of the particular archives that we discuss in this book.

When we think about the written materials that form a very important part of the archive of southern Africa’s past before colonial times, we find that most of these materials – whether in the form of books or unpublished documents – were written in the late 1800s and early 1900s; in other words, during the period of European colonialism. Some scholars in South Africa, as well as a number of political figures, have argued that many of these books and documents are too tainted by colonialism to be usable as sources of historical evidence. They think that these materials should be rejected, and that scholars of the times before colonialism should use only ‘authentic’ African sources. By this they usually mean books written by black authors and oral accounts related by knowledgeable black individuals.

We discuss the importance of the archive of black historical writings later in this chapter, as well as in chapters 3 and 4. And we fully agree that oral accounts can be very valuable sources of evidence on the past before colonial times. But we would argue that no histories written or spoken in southern Africa since the early 1800s can be free of the influences of European colonialism. Colonialism is an inescapable part of southern Africa’s history. The question of how to engage critically with source materials influenced by colonial ways of thinking lies at the heart of all the chapters in this book.

Towards thinking critically about the archive

The book is an edited collection of essays written by a number of different authors. Almost all the contributors are well-known researchers in the disciplines of history, art history and archaeology. Two are scholars of literature. Most of them are based in Gauteng, others in KwaZulu-Natal and in Cape Town, and one in Botswana and one in Britain. Nearly all of them are scholars who have focused their research on aspects of the history of the Limpopo−Gauteng−Lesotho−KwaZulu-Natal region. That is why the book deals with issues relevant in the first instance to archives of evidence on the history of this region. In a book like this, there is unfortunately not enough space to discuss the relevant scholarship on all the geographical regions of southern Africa. Much fruitful research into history before the colonial period has been done in other parts of southern Africa. In Eswatini (formerly Swaziland), for example, researchers in the Swaziland Oral History Project (SwOHP) have done detailed work on the country’s rich oral history.¹ In the Eastern Cape a new generation of scholars is starting to make critical studies of the archive of this period that in some ways are similar to what the authors in this book are doing. The discussions in this book will, we feel, be significant for critical thinking about the archive of history before colonial times in southern Africa more widely; it remains for scholars in other areas to take them up.

The book is intended for a readership of senior undergraduates; educationists; teachers; museum and heritage practitioners; archivists; lecturers in history, archaeology and the social sciences; and interested members of the general public. It has three broad aims:

• to encourage readers to think critically about where ideas concerning the past come from;
• to encourage readers to make their own explorations of the archive of the past before colonial times; and
• to encourage readers to think about why people in South Africa have often used, and continue to use, references to the past in the times before colonialism to argue about public affairs in the present.

In this book, readers will come across terms that are widely used, both in common speech and in academic discussions, to identify particular groups of people who, historically, have lived in southern Africa. We think here of the terms ‘Africans’, ‘Europeans’, ‘black people’, ‘white people’. The contributors to the book use these terms in different ways, depending on the historical context that they are writing about. These terms have never had closely fixed meanings, and in fact their meanings have at times been strongly contested. In some cases, they continue to be contested in the present.

Like many words in every language, these terms have changed their meanings over time. To put it another way, they belong to an archive of language that has been made and remade under particular historical circumstances. Like the other archives that we write about in this book, it needs to be further explored. Scholars of the history of languages in southern Africa have done some work on this subject, mostly on English and Afrikaans. Much more work on the history of the other languages of southern Africa remains to be done.

Reclaiming lost pasts

The book has been written at a time when public discussions about the history of southern Africa before the colonial era are taking place more openly than at any time in the last 100 years. Many people have turned to social media to investigate and discuss their personal identities in terms of family histories that reach back into times before colonialism. Among them are members of families whose names feature in different ways in this book: Kekana, Mamabolo, Mkhize, Ndlovu. Many, many others could be listed. Individuals who identify with specific groups such as the Bafokeng, the Bakwena, the Baphuthi, the Dlamini, the Hlubi, the Ndwandwe, the Qwabe and others have set up websites devoted to discussions of their histories. Others have written books and even set up private museums in this field. Education authorities are encouraging recognition of, and research into, ‘indigenous knowledge systems’ and ‘traditional’ cultures.

Inside and outside universities, intellectuals are taking new initiatives to research the past before colonial times. And, especially since the emergence of the #FeesMustFall movement in 2015, student leaders who press for the decolonising of the country’s universities have called for the teaching of what some of them called ‘precolonial history’. In much of this, there is a sense of wanting to reclaim lost pasts, of wanting to rediscover histories that have been withheld or distorted or even wiped out by people in authority.

In addition, politicians are increasingly appealing to people’s ideas about their traditions to win legitimacy and public support. Traditional leaders, as they are officially called, constantly use references to history before the colonial period in attempts to strengthen their claims to positions of authority. Their rivals for office do the same. Groups making claims to have past land rights restored to them spend time and money in searching out supporting evidence from sources on the history of the last 200 years and more.

For its part, the government of South Africa has taken steps to promote projects in the sphere of heritage. Heritage is commonly understood as having to do with cultural practices and beliefs that are valued because they have been inherited from the past. In 1999, five years after South Africa became a constitutional democracy, parliament passed the National Heritage Resources Act. The Act encouraged communities to become involved in identifying forms of heritage that recognised the achievements of people who had been seen as of no importance under the regimes of the colonial and apartheid periods. Most official initiatives have focused on commemorating struggles against ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• EDITORIAL NOTE
• MAP
• PART I FIRST THOUGHTS ABOUT THE ARCHIVE
• PART II COMMENTARIES AND CONVERSATIONS
• PART III BECOMING EXPLORERS
• PART IV ENGAGING WITH ARCHAEOLOGY AND ROCK ART
• PART V CONFLICTING OPINIONS
• PART VI FURTHER THOUGHTS
• GLOSSARY
• CONTRIBUTORS
• INDEX