RETHINKING AFRICA SERIES Published by the Centre for African Studies Cape Town, 2014 www.africanstudies.uct.ac.za ISBN 978-0-7992-2512-9 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior consent of the author. Printed by Source Corporation www.sourcecorp.co.za i As part of the new Humanities Initiative of the Department of Higher Education and Training, the University of Cape Town (UCT)’s Centre for African Studies (CAS) was given a grant in 2012 ‘to coordinate a network of researchers from at least three institutions (other than UCT) located in different provinces in order to construct a history of broader South Africa from the 11th – 16th centuries’. The Director of CAS, Professor Lungisile Ntsebeza, communicated with a range of scholars from various universities and research institutions in South Africa to elicit their interest in this project. Academics from the Universities of Cape Town, KwaZulu-Natal, Witwatersrand and Fort Hare, as well as the Director of the South African Democracy Education Trust (SADET), based in Pretoria, confirmed their interest. A working group, which included historians, anthropologists, archaeologists and historical sociologists, met at CAS on 2 March 2013. The Director of SADET attended the meeting from Tshwane and others from outside Cape Town shared their thoughts through email communications before the meeting. After discussion, the working-group agreed to recommend that: while the importance of the 11th-16th centuries period and the spirit behind ‘pre-1652’ was recognised, to give attention to the relatively under-researched pre-colonial eras of the southern African past, the title and scope of the project should be broadened to embrace all the pre-colonial eras in southern Africa, which end at different times in different parts of the region. The project should also include the impact of the pre-colonial on the colonial and the present. Limiting it to the 11th-16th centuries would place too much of a burden on archaeologists and archaeological work. The project should be trans-disciplinary and should aim to open up new methodologies based on trans-disciplinary perspectives for the pre-colonial in general. the envisaged project would build on relevant work already done, especially the 500 Years project based at Wits, which had led to the publication of the important book entitled Five Hundred Years Rediscovered (Wits University Press, 2008), and would draw upon i relevant work done on the pre-colonial in other parts of Africa and elsewhere in the global South. the initial proposal should be for a two-year project, but that is envisaged as the first phase of what should be a longer and larger project, one that will extend over decades and for which further funds will be solicited from various sources, such as the National Research Foundation (NRF) and elsewhere. The overarching aim of the initial two-year project was thus seen as the creation of a platform that would support and nurture research in these areas over the long term and would promote the development of methodologies that will take forward the study of the pre-colonial eras in southern Africa. This would be done by drawing upon existing work, by bringing work being done in different disciplines together, and by subjecting such work to critical trans-disciplinary analysis. One of the outcomes would be a conference. This was duly held at CAS on 28 and 29 March 2014, and the present volume includes most of the papers presented there, together with two papers that came in after the conference. The working group hoped to create a network of researchers, located in different provinces, that would include historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, historical linguists and natural scientists involved in relevant work relating to environmental and climate change, geomorphology, etc., and that we would draw in universities in neighbouring countries (e.g. Namibia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland and Mozambique). It was hoped that the regions would report on their activities at the conference and that an attempt would be made to compare the pre-colonial eras in southern Africa with those in other parts of the continent. A number of meetings and workshops were held in the various regions of the country. They involved people from, inter alia, the universities of Fort Hare, KwaZulu Natal, the Witwatersrand (Wits) and Walter Sisulu, as well as from the Mapubungwe Institute (MISTRA), the Mthatha archives and the Nelson Mandela Museum in Mthatha. Participants included not only academics but also poets, artists, and organic intellectuals researching and writing clan and/or family histories. The March 2014 conference, in part because of where it was held, drew mainly papers by academics, most of whom were connected in one or ii other way with UCT. One visitor came from Barcelona, Spain. Those at the conference agreed that CAS should, under Professor Ntsebeza’s leadership, continue to play a leading and facilitating role in both consolidating gains made and expanding the network of researchers, particularly in historically disadvantaged institutions. The target will be to produce a new generation of young scholars at these institutions, particularly women. Those leading projects should form a committee, whose main tasks would be to pursue the task of establishing and consolidating research networks particularly in the Eastern Cape, Limpopo and in neighbouring countries, especially those sharing common borders with South Africa, and to allocate resources with a bias for historically disadvantaged institutions and initiatives like in the Eastern Cape where academics should work with ‘organic intellectuals’ bent on writing their own history. Those who prepared papers for the conference were asked to produce a survey of their own particular fields, showing what had been done to date, what needed to be done, and how this could be done. In the event, the contributors did not always follow this brief, but their work, as reflected in the papers in this volume, should point to where the study of the pre-colonial should go in the future and suggest ways of getting there. It was recognised at the conference that there was a need for a more popular engagement with these issues. In the final session, John Wright, a historian who now works with archaeologists at the University of the Witwatersrand, spoke of the need for a book aimed at a general readership that would ‘discuss historiographies, concepts, methods and ideas about evidence with the aim of producing a critical understanding of the range of ways in which the preindustrial past has been taken up historically by different groups in South Africa, and how and why they continue to do so in the post-colonial presence’. He suggested that such a volume should begin with a discussion of stereotypical ways of thinking about the preindustrial past, such as the notion of ‘tribe’, that exists in the present and how and why such ways of thinking developed historically.1 A general paper by Wright begins this volume, after which we move to the archaeology of the Western and Northern Cape, with papers by 1 Transcript of proceedings of the March 2014 conference, available at the Centre for African Studies, UCT iii Janette Deacon and Andy Smith, leading scholars on the early history of the peoples of that region. Jeff Peires then takes us to the Eastern Cape, where he points to ways in which archaeologists can do work that ties in with the interests of historians. Sekibakiba Lekgoathi, another historian, tackles the theme of gender, relating it to ethnicity in Ndebele societies in what became South Africa. The social anthropologist/historian Carolyn Hamilton then reports on the 500-year archival online project she directs, before the linguist Matthias Brenzinger presents his findings on non-Bantu click languages. Jose de Prada-Samper, a specialist in folklore and story-telling from Barcelona, considers some of the oral traditions he has been told by people of the Karoo, and gives us an example of one of the stories he has collected. The historian Candy Malherbe then analyses early interactions between the Khoisan in the Western Cape with European colonists and slaves, showing that any idea of a break between the pre-colonial and the colonial is ahistorical. The pre-colonial continued, of course, to have an impact long after the end of pre-colonial period. June Bam, who is herself of partial Khoisan descent, investigates Khoisan heritage issues in the present, and the volume ends with two papers that take us back to Kwa-Zulu Natal: the historian Vukile Khumalo writes on the way in which those who wrote and read late nineteenth century newspapers constituted a new form of ibandla or council, and the anthropologist Grant McNulty describes an online project to collect and share indigenous knowledge, a project that links the pre-colonial with present-day identities. These papers, then, range widely over what is now South Africa – no such notion existed in the pre-colonial eras, as John Wright reminded us at the conference - and take us from the very early past to the present. They all represent work in progress and publication here does not preclude their being published elsewhere subsequently. It will be noted that the authors do not all agree on key issues and no attempt has been made to reconcile different approaches. It is hoped that these varied papers will stimulate new work on the pre-colonial, and that this volume will serve as a useful indication of aspects of the state of the field in early 2014. As this catalytic project proceeds, further volumes will follow.