Southern Africa to c. 1850 (African Studies)

Introduction
This article focuses on the history of the region that now comprises South Africa, Lesotho, Swaziland, and adjacent areas of Botswana and Mozambique. The era covered dates from the first establishment of pastoralist and farming societies in this region about two thousand years ago to the beginnings of the period that saw the shaping of its modern-day societies. This era straddles the conventional divide between “history,” as understood through written sources, and what is still too often called “prehistory,” as served predominantly through archaeological and ethnographic sources. The authors of this bibliography seek to work across this divide and also across the conventional divide between the “precolonial” and “colonial” periods, and, in doing so, to unpack deep-seated stereotypes about both. Since the collapse of apartheid in the early 1990s, long-established “colonial” views of South Africa’s history have become largely discredited, but they have left a residue of ideas and assumptions about the centrality of “tribes” and “tribal histories”that remains deeply sedimented in both public and academic discourses. Critical examination of the era before the mid-19th century has in effect come to be the preserve of three groups of scholars. One consists of the country’s several dozen archaeologists; a second comprises the small handful of academic historians who have studied the history of African societies in the late 18th and the 19th centuries; a third is made up of historians who have researched the history of the Cape Colony in its preindustrial age; that is, from the 1650s to the 1860s. For the most part, these scholars worked in separate enclaves and produced ideas about the past that scarcely overlapped. Beginning in the mid-1990s, however, their concerns and perspectives began to converge slightly, to the accompaniment of often vigorous debates about concepts, sources, and methods. The two prime concerns of this article are to point readers toward the current state of knowledge in these three fields and to highlight the nature of the debates that scholars of the preindustrial past continue to engage in. At a time when racial profiling remains important in much of South African political, social, and intellectual life, the historical point needs to be made that the great majority of these scholars are still white. Only very recently have black students in South Africa begun studying archaeology in any numbers, and most of the country’s black historians still focus their research on the period of colonialism and resistance to it. The authors’ thanks go to the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative at the University of Cape Town, and to the Rock Art Research Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand.
General Overviews
Many general histories of South Africa have been written over the years, and new ones appear with some frequency. Until the very late 20th century, most of them devoted no more than a single cursory chapter to the period before the coming of European colonists in the 1650s. As popular writings on the archaeology of South Africa make the earlier history of African societies more accessible, so general histories are beginning to pay more attention to it. Giliomee and Mbenga 2007 is a recent and readable, if not particularly probing, example. Hall 1987 is an older work that manages to make archaeological evidence understandable to a general readership, as does Mitchell 2006, a brief and more recent survey. Hamilton, et al. 2010, an academic overview, breaks new ground in giving detailed attention to the precolonial as well as the colonial past. Mitchell 2002 is a more specialized survey that delineates recent lines of academic thinking in archaeology. For coverage of colonial times to the mid-19th century, Elphick and Giliomee 1989 still serves as an authoritative introduction. Etherington 2001 takes up critiques of the mfecane and Zulu-centric history to present a lively reexamination of the history of the interior and eastern regions of South Africa in the first half of the 19th century.
Elphick, Richard, and Hermann Giliomee, eds. The Shaping of South African Society, 1652–1840. Cape Town: Maskew Miller Longman, 1989.
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Series of closely linked narrative essays that focus on the history of the Cape Colony and its expansion. An older work, but still an authoritative introduction. First published in 1979.
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Etherington, Norman. The Great Treks: The Transformation of Southern Africa, 1815–1854. Harlow, UK: Longman, 2001.
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A novel account of a key period in the shaping of modern South African society. Engages critically with orthodoxies about the so-called mfecane and the “great trek.”
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Giliomee, Hermann, and Bernard Mbenga, eds. New History of South Africa. Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2007.
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An illustrated history whose first four chapters (of a total of fifteen) cover the era to the mid-19th century. Written mainly by historians, they summarize evidence from archaeology and from documentary sources to provide an accessible if not always entirely up-to-date introduction to the period.
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Hall, Martin. The Changing Past: Farmers, Kings, and Traders in Southern Africa, 200–1860. Cape Town: David Philip, 1987.
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The first of its kind: a highly readable narrative history based mainly on archaeological evidence. An older work, but an often stimulating introduction to the period covered.
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Hamilton, Carolyn, Bernard Mbenga, and Robert Ross, eds. The Cambridge History of South Africa. Vol. 1, From Early Times to 1885. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
DOI: 10.1017/CHOL9780521517942Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Seeks to present an authoritative reassessment of South African history, aimed in the first instance at an academic readership. Chapters 2 to 6, written by two archaeologists and three historians, cover the period from the beginnings of food production early in the first millennium CE to the mid-19th century.
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Mitchell, Peter. The Archaeology of Southern Africa. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
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A comprehensive and authoritative synthesis. Chapters 8 to 13 (of a total of fourteen) provide a very useful, if densely written, guide to the archaeological literature on the history of southern Africa over the last two millennia.
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Mitchell, Peter. “Rediscovering Africa.” In Origins: The Story of the Emergence of Humanity in Africa. Edited by Geoffrey Blundell, 118–165. Cape Town: Double Storey, 2006.
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An outline of southern Africa’s history before the industrial era, written for a popular readership. Draws strongly on archaeological evidence.
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Historiographical Essays
The study of South African historiography has been a growing field since the deepening of contestations over the past during the entrenchment of the apartheid state in the 1960s and 1970s. The literature has focused mainly on the period since the later 19th century: comparatively little work has been done on histories of the earlier era. There are no full-length books on this latter subject: this section includes a selection of relatively recent essays in a range of broad topics. Deacon 1990 and Hall 1990 give overviews respectively of the development of what used to be called “Stone Age” and “Iron Age” archaeology in South Africa to the later 1980s. Deacon’s work is mainly descriptive, while Hall’s is more concerned with the politics of knowledge-making: their chapters give insights into two quite different approaches to the study of archaeology in South Africa. Mitchell and Whitelaw 2005surveys more recent archaeological work. Blundell 2004 is a commentary on different approaches—historical and ahistorical—to interpreting the rock art of southern Africa: critical surveys in this field are regrettably few in number. Barnard 2007 contains a succinct overview of the “Kalahari debates” or “Bushman debates” which, from the 1980s onward, transformed the study of Bushman history. Hamilton, et al. 2010 is in part a pioneering essay in a new field in South African historiography: the study of history-making in precolonial African societies. It also links this field with the written historiography of the colonial period. Penn 2001 and Worden 2010 are written by two leading researchers of the history of the Cape Colony. They discuss a number of important changes that are taking place in this field. See also the section on Bibliographies and Lists of References.
Barnard, Alan. Anthropology and the Bushman. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2007.
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A history of images of “the Bushman” in anthropological consciousness. Chapter 8 examines the “Kalahari debate” of the last two decades of the 20th century and its impact on ways of seeing “Bushman” history.
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Blundell, Geoffrey. Nqabayo’s Nomansland: San Rock Art and the Somatic Past. Uppsala, Sweden: Department of Archaeology and Ancient History, Uppsala University, 2004.
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Copublished with Rock Art Research Institute, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Chapter 2 provides an informed and critical commentary on studies of southern African rock art, particularly the paintings of the uKhahlamba (Drakensberg) and Maloti mountains, since the 1970s.
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Deacon, Janette. “Weaving the Fabric of Stone Age Research in Southern Africa.” In A History of African Archaeology. Edited by Peter Robertshaw, 39–58. Oxford: James Currey, 1990.
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A descriptive account of research into the archaeology of hunter-gatherer societies from the 1860s.
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Hall, Martin. “‘Hidden History’: Iron Age Archaeology in Southern Africa.” In A History of African Archaeology. Edited by Peter Robertshaw, 59–77. Oxford: James Currey, 1990.
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A political economy of research into the archaeology of farming societies in (then) Rhodesia and South Africa from the early 20th century. Critical of professional archaeologists’ relative isolation from politics in South Africa.
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Hamilton, Carolyn, Bernard Mbenga, and Robert Ross. “The Production of Preindustrial South African History.” In From Early Times to 1885. Vol. 1 of The Cambridge History of South Africa. Edited by Carolyn Hamilton, Bernard Mbenga, and Robert Ross, 1–62. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
DOI: 10.1017/CHOL9780521517942.002Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A thought-provoking synthesis of original comments on the making of oral histories in precolonial societies, with succinct examinations of the written history of the pre-1880s era.
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Mitchell, Peter, and Gavin Whitelaw. “The Archaeology of Southernmost Africa from c. 2000 BP to the Early 1800s: A Review of Recent Research.” Journal of African History 46.2 (2005): 209–241.
DOI: 10.1017/S0021853705000770Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A survey of research done since the early 1990s toward establishing conceptually more informed views of the archaeology of hunter-gatherer, pastoralist, and farming communities, and of historical relations between them. Available online by subscription.
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Penn, Nigel. “The Northern Cape Frontier Zone in South African Frontier Historiography.” In Colonial Frontiers: Indigenous–European Encounters in Settler Societies. Edited by Lynette Russell, 19–46. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2001.
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Traces the history of the concept of the “frontier” as used by historians of South Africa since the early 20th century, and explains their relative neglect of the Northern Cape frontier.
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Worden, Nigel. “After Race and Class: Recent Trends in the Historiography of Early Colonial Cape Society.” South African Historical Journal 62.3 (2010): 589–602.
DOI: 10.1080/02582473.2010.519904Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Discusses the revival of interest in the history of the Cape from the mid-17th to the mid-19th century, which has seen a shift from research on race and class to research on social and cultural issues. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
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Bibliographies and Lists of References
South African historical scholarship has been comparatively well served since the late 19th century by the compilers of bibliographies. Relatively few of their works, though, deal with subjects in the region’s history before 1850. Of these, fewer still are annotated; most consist of lists of references of varying degrees of comprehensiveness. The selection here aims for the general rather than the particular. Mitchell 2002 is a general survey of the archaeology of southern Africa. Huffman 2007 covers the archaeology of farming societies. Lewis-Williams and Challis 2011 includes a guide to further reading on rock art and Bushman studies. Elphick and Giliomee 1989 contains a wide-ranging if now somewhat dated list of references on colonial history to the mid-19th century. The bibliography in Hamilton 1995 is a comprehensive guide to sources on later precolonial history. Westley 1999 is an annotated bibliography on what used to be unproblematically known as the mfecane. Van Warmelo 1977 is a goldmine of references to journal articles on ethnography. See also Historiographical Essays.
Elphick, Richard, and Hermann Giliomee, eds. The Shaping of South African Society, 1652–1840. Cape Town: Maskew Miller Longman, 1989.
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An older source on the history of the Cape Colony and its frontier regions. Contains a useful list of references.
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Hamilton, Carolyn, ed. The Mfecane Aftermath: Reconstructive Debates in Southern African History. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1995.
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Copublished with University of Natal Press, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. Includes a comprehensive bibliography, the first of its kind to be published, on the precolonial history of southern Africa. A basic research tool for historians of the subject.
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Huffman, Thomas. Handbook to the Iron Age: The Archaeology of Pre-Colonial Farming Societies in Southern Africa. Scottsville, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2007.
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Contains a comprehensive list of sources on the archaeology of farming societies from the early first millennium to the early 19th century.
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Lewis-Williams, David, and Sam Challis. Deciphering Ancient Minds: The Mystery of San Bushman Rock Art. London: Thames and Hudson, 2011.
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Contains an up-to-date list of further readings on the rock art of southern Africa and on Bushman ethnography.
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Mitchell, Peter. The Archaeology of Southern Africa. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
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This comprehensive overview contains a long list of references to works both general and specific on its subject.
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Van Warmelo, N. J. Anthropology of Southern Africa in Periodicals to 1950. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1977.
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A massive compendium, nearly forty years in the making. Has very useful, if complex, crossindexes. On pp. 33–101 it lists ethnographic articles published in the period 1802 to 1850. These constitute a rich—though so far largely neglected—source of historical information.
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Westley, David. The Mfecane: An Annotated Bibliography. Madison: African Studies Program, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1999.
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Sees the mfecane writ large as the history of African societies in southern Africa from the late 18th to the mid-19th century. Detailed annotations on 246 items.
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Reference Works
The number of reference works that cover South African archaeology and history before 1850 is relatively small. Middleton and Miller 2008, Shillington 2005, and Vogel 1997 are all large encyclopedias that give varying degrees of coverage to southern Africa before the mid-19th century. The series Woronoff 1974–, put out by Scarecrow Press, is useful, but has relatively little on the pre-1850 period. Etherington 2007 is not a reference work in the usual sense, but contains stimulating discussions of colonial conventions of mapping precolonial “tribes” and tribal migrations. By the same token, Mesthrie 2002 is a collection of essays that gives some pointers to the regrettably small number of publications on the history of languages in southern Africa. The volumes of de Kock 1968–1987 contain brief entries on a number of individuals who featured in the history of South Africa before 1850. Jones 1993 is an excellent source of reference on the history of Swaziland in the late 18th and the 19th centuries. Up-to-date historical atlases of southern Africa are nonexistent; for historical maps, readers should refer to works on specific periods and regions.
de Kock, W. J., ed. Dictionary of South African Biography. 5 vols. Pretoria, South Africa: Human Sciences Research Council, 1968–1987.
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Five volumes of the DSAB were published in English and Afrikaans from 1968 by the Human Sciences Research Council. They contain numerous references to European colonists and scattered references to Africans who lived in South Africa before the mid-19th century. The two volumes of the New Dictionary of South African Biography (1995, 1999) give more coverage to Africans.
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Etherington, Norman, ed. Mapping Colonial Conquest: Australia and Southern Africa. Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2007.
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Includes illuminating essays by the editor on European imaginings of precolonial “tribes” and tribal migrations in southern Africa as expressed in maps.
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Jones, Huw. A Biographical Register of Swaziland to 1902. Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: University of Natal Press, 1993.
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A comprehensive and detailed compilation of individual biographies, ranging in length from a few lines to a dozen pages. Covers the period from the mid-18th century to the end of the South African War of 1899–1902.
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Mesthrie, Rajend, ed. Language in South Africa. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511486692Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Includes informative essays on the Khoesan and Bantu languages, on the origins of clicks in Southern Bantu, and on the origins of Afrikaans.
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Middleton, John, and Joseph Miller, eds. New Encyclopedia of Africa. 5 vols. Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2008.
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Expanded edition of Encyclopedia of Africa South of the Sahara (1997). Useful coverage of major themes in the history of southern Africa before 1850.
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Shillington, Kevin, ed. Encyclopedia of African History. 3 vols. New York: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2005.
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Contains numerous articles on southern Africa from the origins of humankind to postcolonial times, written by authorities in the field. Aimed at students and academics. Vol. 1 contains a useful list of entries ordered by historical period.
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Vogel, Joseph, ed. Encyclopedia of Precolonial Africa. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 1997.
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Consists of short essays, written by authorities in the field, and divided into five sections: environments, histories of research, technology, people and agriculture, and prehistory. A useful guide for students and academics.
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Woronoff, Jon, ed. Historical Dictionaries of Africa. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1974–.
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Since 1974, Scarecrow Press has been putting out a series of historical dictionaries, periodically revised, on individual African countries. The dictionaries for Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique, Swaziland, and South Africa cover the pre-1850 period with varying degrees of detail and expertise.
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Journals
The archaeology and history of South Africa are well served both by international and by locally published academic journals. Listed here are ones that circulate internationally and nationally and that give frequent or reasonably frequent coverage to the period before 1850. Among those omitted are several smaller, more regionally focused journals published in South Africa. A wealth of material, old and new, can be found in three longstanding journals: African Studies, the South African Archaeological Bulletin, and the Journal of African History. Southern African Humanities is a lively successor to the venerable Annals of the Natal Museum; it publishes mainly in archaeology, with individual articles on ethnography and history appearing in most issues. History in Africa and the Journal of Southern African Studies are important for critical commentary on method, source material, and historiography. The South African Historical Journal has reflected the varied and shifting concerns of professional historians in South Africa from the heyday of apartheid to the present.
African Studies. 1942–.
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Successor to Bantu Studies (1921–1941). Publishes mainly in the field of anthropology, with occasional articles on archaeological and historical topics.
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History in Africa. 1974–.
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The leading journal of method in the writing of African history. Publishes critical studies of documentary sources, archaeology, ethnography, linguistics, and oral history.
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Journal of African History. 1960–.
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The longest-established journal in the field. Gives coverage to the whole era of human history in Africa.
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Journal of Southern African Studies. 1974–.
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Focuses mainly on current issues and recent history, but frequently publishes articles on earlier times.
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South African Archaeological Bulletin. 1945–.
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The leading professional journal in the field of southern African archaeology. Technical but indispensable source of reference for the history of the pre-1850 era. A recently established practice is for editorial articles to track current themes and issues in archaeology.
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South African Historical Journal. 1969–.
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The leading professional journal in the field of South African history. In more recent years has published mostly articles on the period from the late 19th century onward, with occasional coverage of the earlier colonial period. Very little on the history of precolonial societies.
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Southern African Humanities. 2001–.
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Successor to Annals of the Natal Museum (1906–1988) and Natal Museum Journal of Humanities (1989–2000). Publishes articles mainly in the field of archaeology and ethnography, with occasional historical articles.
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Published Compilations of Primary Documents
The colonial era in South Africa saw the generation of large numbers of compilations of documents, many of them published, others not. They fell into two main categories. The bigger category was aimed essentially at establishing charters for European colonial rule and settlement. The smaller one, which overlapped with the first, was aimed at “knowing the natives,” the better to govern them or to evangelize them. Records in this category often captured in print narrations of history and descriptions of customs provided by African interlocutors. Today they are prime sources for research into the history of African societies. With some notable exceptions, they tend to be less widely known than those in the first category. This section consists of a selection of compilations in the second category pertinent to the history of southern Africa before 1850. In the hundred years after it was first published, Bleek and Lloyd 1968 remained a very widely used source on what used to be called Bushman “folktales”; today these narratives are increasingly being interpreted as sources on Bushman history. Cape of Good Hope 1968 was originally published in the period when the Cape Colony government was busy setting up an administrative framework for the recently annexed Transkeian Native Territories. The testimonies in Cory 1989 relate mainly to the Eastern Cape in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but some are useful sources on the period before 1850. The volumes of Ethnological Publications 1930–, published by the Department of Native Affairs, vary greatly in their usefulness as historical sources. Webb and Wright 1976–2001 is a primary source on the history of African groups in the KwaZulu-Natal region before 1900. Since 2000, the South African Rock Art Digital Archive has become an indispensable online source for researchers on the rock art of southern Africa. The CD in Skotnes 2007 makes available the entire corpus of testimonies recorded by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd in Cape Town in the 1870s and early 1880s from Bushman interlocutors.
Bleek, Wilhelm H. I., and Lucy C. Lloyd, comps. and trans. Specimens of Bushman Folklore. Cape Town: Struik, 1968.
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A selection from the mass of testimonies collected in Cape Town from ǀXam and !Kun informants in the 1870s and early 1880s by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd, and edited for publication by Lloyd. Texts in original language, with facing English translations. Gives unique insights into ǀXam culture and history in the mid-19th century. First published in 1911. See also McGranaghan 2012 in The Cape Colony, 1750–1850.
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Cape of Good Hope Commission on Native Laws and Customs. Report and Proceedings of the Government Commission on Native Laws and Customs. 2 vols. Cape Town: C. Struik, 1968.
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Contains a wealth of information on the history and ethnography of the African societies of the Eastern Cape. Part 2 (pp. 403–426) reprints several important documents that record aspects of the pre-1850 history of the Eastern Cape and of Natal as seen by African informants. First published in 1883.
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Cory, George, comp. The Historical “Conversations” of Sir George Cory. Edited by Michael Berning. Cape Town: Maskew Miller Longman, 1989.
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Publishes the oral testimonies collected from African, colored, and European informants in the Eastern Cape in the period 1900–1920 by Cory, who, for most of this time, was professor of chemistry at Rhodes University College. Some of these are pertinent to the history of the pre-1850 period.
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Ethnological Publications. Pretoria, South Africa: Department of Native Affairs, 1930–.
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The Ethnological Survey was established as a section of the department in 1925. Between 1930 and the late 1950s it published forty-four volumes on the traditions, customs, and current state of affairs of the “tribes” of specific magisterial districts, mostly in the Transvaal and Eastern Cape.
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Skotnes, Pippa, ed. Claim to the Country: The Archive of Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd. Johannesburg and Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2007.
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Copublished with Jacana Press, Cape Town. A collection of essays, published together with a CD in which nearly 13,000 notebook pages of original ǀXam and !Kun testimonies have been digitally reproduced and comprehensively indexed. The reproductions are accessible online through the website of the Centre for Curating the Archive, Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town. See also McGranaghan 2012 in The Cape Colony, 1750–1850.
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South African Rock Art Digital Archive (SARADA).
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The largest rock art digital archive in the world, maintained and updated by the Rock Art Research Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand. Gives online access to more than 200,000 images of photographs, tracings, and redrawings of rock paintings and engravings in southern Africa, together with pertinent documents.
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Webb, C. de B. and J. B. Wright, eds. The James Stuart Archive of Recorded Oral Evidence Relating to the History of the Zulu and Neighbouring Peoples. 5 vols. Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: University of Natal Press, 1976–2001.
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Publishes the testimonies collected from nearly two hundred interlocutors, mostly Africans, by the Natal colonial official James Stuart in the period 1897–1922. A primary source of information on the history of African groups in the KwaZulu-Natal region from the mid-18th to the early 20th century, with copious annotations and indexes whose coverage has expanded from one volume to the next. See also Hamilton 2011 in Thinking Critically about Concepts, Methods, and Sources.
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Major Shifts in Thinking about the Preindustrial Past
The readings in this section have been chosen as important and accessible statements on the shifts which have been taking place since the 1960s, and more especially since the 1980s, in the ways in which scholars think about South Africa’s pre-1850 past. In essence, scholars have been exploring the implications of a move away from the ethnographically rooted idea that Africans lived in bounded, culturally static “tribes” toward the notion that they lived in polities which, for historically explicable reasons, were constantly remaking themselves, their cultures, and their histories. The readings here overlap with those in the sections on Historiographical Essays and Thinking Critically about Concepts, Methods, and Sources. The well-known “mfecane debates” of the late 1980s and 1990s saw the questioning of long-established ideas about the historical significance of Shaka’s Zulu kingdom: Hamilton 1995 brings together a number of probing essays in this field. Hamilton 1998 puts forward original conceptions of how images of Shaka as a mighty ruler came into existence in the mid-19th century, and why they have survived to the present. Hamilton’s historicized argument serves to reinforce questionings of his actual place in history. Etherington 2011 uses a comparative historiographical approach to delineate some of the wider intellectual roots of the long-influential but problematic notion of “the wars of Shaka.” In the 1980s and 1990s, the so-called Kalahari debates were breaking down the long-established conceptual boundaries between “Bushmen,” “Hottentots,” and “Bantu,” and drawing numbers of scholars to recognize that Bushman communities were not mere ethnographic curiosities but had long been actors on the historical stage. Barnard 2007 puts the debates into anthropological context. Swanepoel, et al. 2008 and Delius and Marks 2012 bring together essays in archaeology and history which critique older perspectives in their fields and highlight directions taken in more recent research. For their part, historians are beginning to turn their attentions to the histories of marginal and interstitial groups as distinct from the bigger, more established “chiefdoms” and “states” that they have mostly focused on since the 1970s. In this context, Landau 2010 puts forward original and stimulating arguments about issues of collective identity-making among the societies of the highveld. In the colonial era, it is clear, however different the ideas of European colonizers and African colonized about southern Africa’s history might have been, they were becoming increasingly intertwined. Hamilton, et al. 2010 brings these “entanglements” into sharp focus, and in doing so, further blurs the common conceptual boundary between the “precolonial” and “colonial” pasts.
Barnard, Alan. Anthropology and the Bushman. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2007.
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A succinct survey of how Bushmen have been treated in ethnographic and anthropological literature since their first encounters with Europeans in the 1490s. Chapter 8 puts the Kalahari debates into context.
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Delius, Peter, and Shula Marks, eds. Special Issue: Rethinking South Africa’s Past. Journal of Southern African Studies 38.2, (2012).
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Contains twelve essays on recently developed perspectives on the archaeology, history, and historiography of South Africa since 1600. Several of the essays foreground questions of identity-making.
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Etherington, Norman. “Barbarians Ancient and Modern.” American Historical Review 116.1 (2011): 31–57.
DOI: 10.1086/ahr.116.1.31Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Stimulating analysis of the ways in which scholars’ concepts of the “barbarian invasions” of Europe influenced the development of ideas about the “wars of Shaka” in southern Africa.
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Hamilton, Carolyn, ed. The Mfecane Aftermath: Reconstructive Debates in Southern African History. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1995.
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Copublished with University of Natal Press, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. A set of essays that debate the long-established notion that the political and social upheavals which took place in the interior and east of southern Africa in 1820s and 1830s were caused by the expansion of the Zulu kingdom under Shaka.
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Hamilton, Carolyn. Terrific Majesty: The Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical Invention. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.
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Copublished with David Philip, Cape Town. Critically explores why images of Shaka have carried great power over a long period. Demonstrates that these images are the product of historical interactions between white colonizers and black colonized.
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Hamilton, Carolyn, Bernard Mbenga, and Robert Ross. “The Production of Preindustrial South African History.” In From Early Times to 1885. Vol. 1 of The Cambridge History of South Africa. Edited by Carolyn Hamilton, Bernard Mbenga, and Robert Ross, 1–62. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
DOI: 10.1017/CHOL9780521517942.002Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Probing examination of the ways in which different groups have thought about what can be called southern Africa’s preindustrial past. Gives sustained attention to the production of history outside the academy.
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Landau, Paul. Popular Politics in the History of South Africa, 1400–1948. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511750984Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The first 130 pages put forward an original and stimulating argument about the politics of group formation and identity-making on the highveld before the impact of colonial expansion began to be felt in the 1830s and 1840s.
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Swanepoel, Natalie, Philip Bonner, and Amanda Esterhuysen, eds. Five Hundred Years Rediscovered: Southern African Precedents and Prospects; 500 Year Initiative 2007 Conference Proceedings. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2008.
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A set of essays written by archaeologists and historians. Challenges notions of African societies as having been fixed, homogeneous entities, and seeks to integrate archaeological and historical approaches to the study of the past.
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Thinking Critically about Concepts, Methods, and Sources
Modern debates about the history of South Africa before 1850, as featured in the section on Major Shifts in Thinking about the Preindustrial Past, have been accompanied by the development of critiques of an earlier generation of concepts, methods, and approaches to sources. To appreciate how concepts used in intellectual discourses in the humanities and social sciences in South Africa have shifted since the collapse of apartheid, it is useful to compare the issues raised by the essays in Boonzaier and Sharp 1988 with those raised in Shepherd and Robins 2008. Particularly noteworthy is the maturing of a move, already visible in the earlier volume, away from colonial-era analyses of South African society conceived of in terms of ethnographers’ homogeneous races and “tribes” toward notions of groups and identities conceived of in fluid, historical terms. Nevertheless, the influence of “present-oriented” ethnographic perspectives in certain kinds of archaeology in South Africa remains strong. This is particularly the case in studies of rock art, as is indicated in Blundell 2004, which makes an explicit critique of interpretations that see the art primarily in ethnographic terms. From another angle, archaeologists in South Africa are sometimes accused of being committed to an empirical method that discourages them from reflecting critically on the wider social and political implications of what it is that they do. Shepherd 2003 mounts a trenchant critique of South African archaeology as social practice. For his part, the author of Boeyens 2012 comments from an archaeologist’s perspective on what is becoming a well-established practice in the discipline: the combining—though perhaps not always critically enough—of archaeological and documentary research. No less vigorous than the debates about the relationship between archaeology and history in South Africa have been debates about the ways in which oral histories are made and recorded, and the implications for their use as sources of evidence on the past. Hamilton 2002 outlines the main issues at stake. In an examination of a particular body of recorded oral histories, Hamilton 2011 goes on to underscore the importance of researching in depth the circumstances in which an archived source, whether written or oral, comes into being in order to understand the meanings that it carries. In a different vein, Etherington 2010 gives a timely reminder to historians that in studying the emergence of relatively centralized African polities in South Africa they need to think in terms of a longer time span than they have commonly done.
Blundell, Geoffrey. Nqabayo’s Nomansland: San Rock Art and the Somatic Past. Uppsala, Sweden: Department of Archaeology and Ancient History, Uppsala University, 2004.
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Copublished with Rock Art Research Institute, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. The first full-length work to examine Bushman rock art in historical rather than ethnographic terms. Uses rock paintings as a source of evidence on relations between Bushmen and other peoples in the Northeastern Cape in the mid-19th century.
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Boeyens, Jan. “The Intersection of Archaeology, Oral Tradition and History in the South African Interior.” New Contree 64 (2012): 1–30.
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Uses case studies to illustrate the explanatory potential of an interdisciplinary approach to the study of southern Africa’s past in the period 1700–1880.
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Boonzaier, Emile, and John Sharp, eds. South African Keywords: The Uses and Abuses of Political Concepts. Cape Town: David Philip, 1988.
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See particularly the chapters on culture, tradition, race, tribe, and ethnic group and nation.
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Etherington, Norman. “Historians, Archaeologists, and the Legacy of the Discredited Short Iron-Age Chronology.” African Studies 69.2 (2010): 361–375.
DOI: 10.1080/00020184.2010.499206Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Argues that historians need to rediscover an interest in the era before the period of African state-formation in the late 18th century. Archaeologists need to engage with historians in interpreting archaeological evidence from this earlier period. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
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Hamilton, Carolyn. “‘Living by Fluidity’: Oral Histories, Material Custodies, and the Politics of Archiving.” In Refiguring the Archive. Edited by Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, Michele Pickover, Graeme Reid, and Razia Saleh, 209–227. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer, 2002.
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Copublished with David Philip, Cape Town. Assesses modern debates over the status of oral histories as sources on the African past. Argues for recognition of both the fixed and the flexible elements in these histories, and of the fluidity of the contexts in which they are made and remade.
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Hamilton, Carolyn. “Backstory, Biography, and the Life of the James Stuart Archive.” History in Africa 38.1 (2011): 319–341.
DOI: 10.1353/hia.2011.0015Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Argues for the importance of researching in depth the backstories and the biographies of historical sources. The focus is on the life of the James Stuart Archive (see Webb and Wright 1976–2001 in the section on Published Compilations of Primary Documents); the implications go far beyond it. Available online by subscription.
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Shepherd, Nick. “State of the Discipline: Science, Culture, and Identity in South African Archaeology, 1870–2003.” Journal of Southern African Studies 29.4 (2003): 823–844.
DOI: 10.1080/0305707032000135842Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A pointed critique of South African archaeology as social practice. Has struck a chord with some archaeologists, while being strongly rejected by others.
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Shepherd, Nick, and Steven Robins, eds. New South African Keywords. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2008.
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Copublished with Jacana, Johannesburg. See especially the chapters on culture, ethnicity, heritage, indigenous knowledge, race, and tradition.
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Intellectual History before the Mid-19th Century
Since early colonial times, many commentators have written in varying degrees of detail, and with varying degrees of comprehension, about the nature and role of ideas in preindustrial African societies, but the overwhelming tendency has been, and continues to be, to place these ideas in the context of ahistorical tribal “cultures” and “beliefs.” The notion that African societies in southern Africa had intellectual histories has only recently begun to be entertained. Many scholars have also written about European imagings of Africans and the development of racial thinking in South Africa. Comparatively few have written on other themes as they relate specifically to the preindustrial era. Here we list a selection of the not very numerous studies which reflect on the production and circulation of ideas in southern Africa before the later 19th century. Comaroff and Comaroff 1991–1997stands out as pioneering a historical approach to understanding the place of ideas about religion and politics in autonomous African communities. More recently, Landau 2010 has written about the history of “consciousness” in both African and settler societies of the 19th century. Hamilton, et al. 2010and Wright 2010 examine the making of historical knowledge in colonial times and before. Bank 1997 places the origins of South African history-writing in the politics of the Cape Colony in the 1820s and 1830s. Attwell and Attridge 2012 is a major compendium that highlights the diversity of the literary cultures that have emerged in South Africa, including the Cape since the 16th century. Johnson 2012 analyzes primary texts on the Cape from the early 16th to the mid-19th century, together with more recent works on the region’s history and literature. Dubow 2006 investigates the place of intellectual work in the making of a new settler elite in the Cape in the 19th century.
Attwell, David, and Derek Attridge, ed. The Cambridge History of South African Literature. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
DOI: 10.1017/CHOL9780521199285Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Focuses primarily on the period since the late 19th century, but contains four essays (of a total of thirty-nine) on cultures of writing in the Cape before 1850.
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Bank, Andrew. “The Great Debate and the Origins of South African Historiography.” Journal of African History 38 (1997): 261–281.
DOI: 10.1017/S0021853797006993Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The conventional view is that the origins of South African historiography date to the late 19th century. The author shows that conscious construction of written pasts began in the Cape Colony in the 1820s and 1830s.
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Comaroff, Jean, and John Comaroff. Of Revelation and Revolution. 2 vols. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1991–1997.
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226114675.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The two volumes examine in detail the encounter between British missionaries and southern Tswana-speaking peoples from the early 19th century onwards. Their focus is on the relationships between political power, culture, and consciousness.
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Dubow, Saul. A Commonwealth of Knowledge: Science, Sensibility and White South Africa 1820–2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
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Chapter 1 deals with the early stages in the growth of an intellectual elite among European colonists in the Cape.
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Hamilton, Carolyn, Bernard Mbenga, and Robert Ross. “The Production of Preindustrial South African History.” In From Early Times to 1885. Vol. 1 of The Cambridge History of South Africa. Edited by Carolyn Hamilton, Bernard Mbenga, and Robert Ross, 1–62. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
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A thought-provoking synthesis of original comments on the making of oral histories in precolonial societies, with succinct examinations of the written history of the pre-1880s era.
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Johnson, David. Imagining the Cape Colony: History, Literature, and the South African Nation. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012.
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An innovative study that examines the range of ways in which commentators since the early 16th century have imagined the Cape as the location of a distinct political community.
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Landau, Paul. “Transformations in Consciousness.” In From Early Times to 1885. Vol. 1 of The Cambridge History of South Africa. Edited by Carolyn Hamilton, Berbard Mbenga, and Robert Ross, 392–448. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
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Penetrating if sometimes abstruse examination of the changing ways in which people in South Africa thought about themselves and their worlds in the 19th century.
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Wright, John. “Thinking beyond ‘Tribal Traditions’: Reflections on the Precolonial Archive.” South African Historical Journal 62.2 (2010): 268–286.
DOI: 10.1080/02582473.2010.493003Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Discusses a body of documentary sources, published and unpublished, which provides insights into how histories were made in autonomous African societies before they fell under colonial rule. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
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Hunter-Gatherers, Pastoralists, and Farmers in the First Millennium CE
The advent of mixed farming and pastoralism in southern Africa around two thousand years ago did not mean that the way of life of the region’s Khoesan-speaking hunter-gatherer societies came to an end. Hunter-gatherers shared the landscape with foodproducers, and identities were reconfigured around economic, social, and ritual interactions. Mitchell 2002 and Parkington and Hall 2010 survey the archaeological evidence on the advent of pastoralism and of mixed farming, and on relations between hunter-gatherers, pastoralists, and farmers. A more specialist review of the establishment of farming societies is given by Huffman 2007. Regional studies are to be found in Mazel 1989 on KwaZulu-Natal and Wadley 1987 on the southern “Transvaal.” The origins of pastoralism, especially in the Cape, are the subject of ongoing debates among archaeologists (Sadr and Fauvelle-Aymar 2008). Some argue that the initial appearance in southern Africa of sheep, cattle, and pottery was the result of the migration of Khoesan-speaking pastoralists from further north, others that pastoralism spread by cultural diffusion among resident hunter-gatherers. As far as the origins of mixed farming are concerned, the majority view is that a cultural “package” of farming was carried into the summer rainfall areas of South Africa by people speaking Bantu languages. More controversial is the use of ethnographic evidence from the 19th and 20th centuries in Huffman 2007 to argue for the existence of a particular and basically unchanging cultural “worldview” among African farmers, as reflected particularly in their settlement patterns. Lane 1994–1995 is skeptical about uncritical analogical argument of this kind, and of the ahistorical, long-term continuity this method implies.
Huffman, Thomas. Handbook of the Iron Age: The Archaeology of Pre-Colonial Farming Societies in Southern Africa. Scottsville, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2007.
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A comprehensive review of the archaeology of farming societies. Makes succinct summaries of debates around interpretation and the methodologies used, particularly over ethnographic analogies used for the interpretation of the settlement organization of early farmers.
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Lane, Paul. “The Use and Abuse of Ethnography in Iron Age Studies of Southern Africa.” Azania 29–30 (1994–1995): 51–64.
DOI: 10.1080/00672709409511661Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A pointed critique of the assumptions underlying the use of ethnographic models for interpreting the archaeological remains left by early farming societies, focusing on the making of models of spatial organization and their use to infer past “worldviews.”
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Mazel, Aron. “People Making History: The Last Ten Thousand Years of Hunter-Gatherer Communities in the Thukela Basin.” Natal Museum Journal of Humanities 1 (1989): 1–168.
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Chapter 7 (pp. 132–152) discusses the archaeological evidence on interactions between hunter-gatherers and farmers in the Thukela basin of KwaZulu-Natal from early in the first millennium.
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Mitchell, Peter. The Archaeology of Southern Africa. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
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Chapters 7–10 cover the hunter-gatherer cultures of what archaeologists call the Later Stone Age and the appearance of pastoralism and mixed farming in southern Africa. A highly informative if sometimes overly dense overview of data, debates, and issues, with a comprehensive bibliography.
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Parkington, John, and Simon Hall. “The Appearance of Food Production in Southern Africa 1000 to 2000 Years Ago.” In From Early Times to 1885. Vol. 1 of The Cambridge History of South Africa. Edited by Carolyn Hamilton, Bernard Mbenga, and Robert Ross, 63–111. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
DOI: 10.1017/CHOL9780521517942Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An up-to-date review of a critical conjuncture in the history of hunter-gatherers, pastoralists, and farmers.
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Sadr, Karim, and Francois-Xavier Fauvelle-Aymar, eds. Special Issue: Khoekhoe and the Origins of Herding in Southern Africa. Southern African Humanities 20.1 (2008).
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Contains thirteen specialized essays dealing with evidence from archaeology, linguistics, physical anthropology, genetics, and ethnography.
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Wadley, Lyn. Later Stone Age Hunters and Gatherers of the Southern Transvaal: Social and Ecological Interpretations. Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, 1987.
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Uses an ethnographic model of aggregation and dispersal, informed by materialist theory, to interpret the evidence on the social structures and ecologies of hunter-gatherers. Gives an interpretation of how processes of aggregation and dispersal among hunter-gatherers broke down after the arrival of farmers from about 400 CE.
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Southern Africa and Indian Ocean Trade, 900–1300
From about 900 the Limpopo-Shashe region became bound into networks of long-distance trade that linked it to the coasts of East Africa and the wider Indian Ocean. Ivory and gold were exported in exchange for exotic goods like cloth and beads. Political elites increasingly came into competition with one another for control of trade goods and trade routes, with consequent transformations in political organization, economy, religion, and settlement patterns. Wood 2011 uses evidence from numerous archaeological sites to argue that from at least the 7th century CE southern Africa was closely integrated into the Indian Ocean trading system. After 900 the dominant polity in the Limpopo-Shashe region was centered on the region now known as Mapungubwe. Archaeological evidence suggests that this was the first centralized state in southern Africa, with sacred leadership and a class-based social system. Mitchell 2005 places its history in the context of the expansion of trade in the Indian Ocean. The essays in Leslie and Maggs 2000 provide detailed examinations of the evidence on Mapungubwe’s rise and fall in the period 900–1300. Denbow 1999 examines the evidence for contemporary developments to the west in the region that is present-day Botswana. Huffman 2009 discusses the relationship between Mapungubwe and the kingdom of Great Zimbabwe that consolidated on the Zimbabwe plateau to the northeast after 1300. Huffman’s account has been critiqued by several commentators (see Sealy 1997) for its ahistorical use of argument by ethnographic analogy. Huffman 2009 supports the view that the decline of Mapungubwe was due to the impact of drought on large-scale agricultural production. Smith 2005 suggests, however, that climatic conditions at this time were favorable for agriculture and that the explanation must be sought in political factors. Since the collapse of apartheid in the early 1990s, the site of Mapungubwe has become an important icon in South Africa’s reimagined heritage. Tiley-Nel 2011 is the largest and latest work to celebrate this development.
Denbow, James. “Material Culture and the Dialectics of Identity in the Kalahari: AD 700–1700.” In Beyond Chiefdoms: Pathways to Complexity in Africa. Edited by Susan McIntosh, 110–123. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
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A discussion of trade across the Kalahari and how environment and commodity exchange interacted in the making of identities among hunter-gatherers, pastoralists, and farmers.
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Huffman, Thomas. “Mapungubwe and Great Zimbabwe: The Origin and Spread of Social Complexity in Southern Africa.” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 28 (2009): 37–54.
DOI: 10.1016/j.jaa.2008.10.004Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Argues that Mapungubwe was the forerunner to Great Zimbabwe. Outlines the factors that contributed to the rise of the Mapungubwe state and the transfer of its institutions to Great Zimbabwe after its collapse in about 1300. Available online by subscription.
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Leslie, Mary, and Tim Maggs, eds. African Naissance: The Limpopo Valley 1000 Years Ago. South African Archaeological Society: Goodwin Series 8. Cape Town: South African Archaeological Society, 2000.
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A set of essays that provides informed and up-to-date statements on the evidence for the rise and collapse of political and social complexity in the Shashe-Limpopo Valley from early in the second millennium.
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Mitchell, Peter. African Connections: Archaeological Perspectives on Africa and the Wider World. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira, 2005.
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Chapter 4 outlines the evidence on the place of the East African coast and its hinterlands in the Indian Ocean trading system to 1500.
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Sealy, Judith, ed. “Review Feature: Snakes and Crocodiles: Power and Symbolism in Ancient Zimbabwe, by Thomas N. Huffman.” South African Archaeological Bulletin 52.166 (1997): 125–143.
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A set of critical responses to Huffman’s book. For the most part the material covers the post-Mapungubwe period, but its importance lies in the critiques that the authors make of Huffman’s methodology and assumptions and, consequently, the plausibility of his interpretations. Available online by subscription.
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Smith, Jeanette. “Climatic Change and Agropastoral Sustainability in the Shashe/Limpopo River Basin from AD 900.” PhD diss., University of the Witwatersrand, 2005.
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Engages with the archaeological evidence on the region’s paleaoclimatic sequence. Discusses the nature of the agricultural base that underpinned the rise and continued existence of the Mapungubwe state. Points to the weakness of certain assumptions about the correlations between climatic change and shifts in the viability of complex political and social systems.
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Tiley-Nel, Sian, ed. Mapungubwe Remembered: Contributions to Mapungubwe by the University of Pretoria. Johannesburg: Chris Van Rensburg, 2011.
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A richly illustrated book on the history of archaeological research at Mapungubwe, aimed at both popular and academic readerships. Tends toward a triumphalist celebration of Mapungubwe as the first Great State in southern Africa.
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Wood, Marilee. Interconnections: Glass Beads and Trade in Southern and Eastern Africa and the Indian Ocean—7th to 16th Centuries. Uppsala: Uppsala University, 2011.
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The published version of a PhD thesis written by a leading authority in the field. Reproduces seven articles previously published by the author and colleagues.
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The Limpopo-Gariep Region, 1300–1800
Archaeological evidence indicates that the period after 1300 saw the appearance in the north and east of new communities of farmers. Their advent is visible in widespread shifts to new pottery styles and new patterns of settlement layout (Hall 2010). People who probably spoke languages today labeled as Nguni were establishing themselves east of the Drakensberg escarpment by 1200, while people who probably spoke Sotho-Tswana languages were settling in the northern part of what is now Limpopo Province by 1300. On archaeological, cultural, and linguistic grounds, Huffman 2007 argues that these peoples migrated into the region from East and Central Africa. The view that Nguni-speakers remained confined primarily to the territories east of the escarpment while Sotho-Tswana-speakers inhabited the inland regions remains widespread. However, the archaeological evidence suggests that the boundary between the two language groups was fluid and that significant movement across the escarpment took place, particularly from east to west. In the north, the collapse of the Mapungubwe kingdom left a political space which by the 1500s had been filled by what came to be called the Venda state. This was a product of interaction between groups of Shona-speakers and Sotho-Tswana-speakers. The archaeology of this process is outlined in Loubser 1989, which uses oral records to show how the Singo, a Shona-speaking group who established domination in the Soutpansberg region in the late 17th century, used their position of power to backdate their claims to be the first Venda. Maggs 1976 describes the movement of farmers onto the southern highveld from about 1500. The southward expansion of sorghum and millet agriculture came to an end as farmers reached the limits of the regions where summer rainfall was high enough for these crops to grow. Delius and Schoeman 2008 reviews social and economic developments in the 17th and 18th centuries on the Mpumalanga escarpment, a region that is currently attracting increasing attention from archaeologists. Whitelaw 2008summarizes what is known of the archaeology of Nguni-speaking farmers in KwaZulu-Natal. Comparatively little archaeological research has been done in Mozambique: Newitt 1995 outlines the history of the region in the period under discussion as known from documentary evidence.
Delius, Peter, and Maria Schoeman. “Revisiting Bokoni: Populating the Stone Ruins of the Mpumalanga Escarpment.” In Five Hundred Years Rediscovered: Southern African Precedents and Prospects; 500 Year Initiative 2007 Conference Proceedings. Edited by Natalie Swanepoel, Amanda Esterhuysen, and Philip Bonner, 135–168. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2008.
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A review of oral, archaeological, and written evidence on the history in the 17th and 18th centuries of a large complex of settlements geared toward intensive agricultural production on the Mpumalanga escarpment. Queries the notion that the “Bokoni” inhabitants constituted a homogeneous “tribe.”
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Hall, Simon. “Farming Communities of the Second Millennium: Internal Frontiers, Identity, Continuity, and Change.” In From Early Times to 1885. Vol. 1 of The Cambridge History of South Africa. Edited by Carolyn Hamilton, Bernard Mbenga, and Robert Ross, 112–167. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
DOI: 10.1017/CHOL9780521517942Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An up-to-date review of the history of farming societies, based on evidence from archaeology and oral records, with emphasis on the making of new identities. Gives attention to the archaeology and history of hunter-gatherers and their ongoing relationships with farmers, processes that are powerfully captured in rock art made by hunter-gatherers.
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Huffman, Thomas. Handbook of the Iron Age: The Archaeology of Pre-Colonial Farming Societies in Southern Africa. Scottsville, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2007.
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Chapter 21 provides a succinct and well-referenced summary of the archaeological evidence, as interpreted from a structuralist perspective, on the history of farming societies after 1200.
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Loubser, Johannes. “Archaeology and Early Venda History.” South African Archaeological Society Goodwin Series 6 (1989): 54–61.
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Summarizes a larger doctoral thesis that outlines the emergence of Venda identity in northern Limpopo Province around 1500. Uses archaeological and oral evidence to suggest how newcomer groups established political domination and made identities in regions already occupied by other farmers. Available online by subscription.
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Maggs, Tim. Iron Age Communities of the Southern Highveld. Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: Natal Museum, 1976.
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An older work that remains a seminal study of the expansion of farmers onto the southern highveld after about 1500. Based on sensitive use of archaeological evidence and recorded oral histories.
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Newitt, Malyn. A History of Mozambique. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.
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A useful outline, with its focus mainly on interactions between Portuguese colonizers and resident African farmers.
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Whitelaw, Gavin. “A Brief Archaeology of Precolonial Farming in KwaZulu-Natal.” In Zulu Identities: Being Zulu, Past and Present. Edited by Benedict Carton, John Laband, and Jabulani Sithole, 47–61. Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2008.
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A brief and up-to-date summary of the archaeology of farming societies in KwaZulu-Natal, with a comprehensive bibliography.
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The Karoo and Northern Cape, 1500–1800
We visualize the region as constituting the arid southern and southwestern periphery of the grasslands of the high interior plains that were colonized by African farmers after about 1500 (see Maggs 1976 and Hall 2010 in the section on The Limpopo-Gariep Region, 1300–1800). It had its own particular dynamics of interactions between hunter-gatherers, herders, and farmers. This perspective differs from that in more conventional accounts, which tends to position the region primarily as the northern “frontier” of the expanding Cape Colony. New dynamics, involving often violent processes of dispossession, displacement, and enserfment, began to unfold after 1700, as European graziers from the Cape Colony began expanding northwards and eastwards. Smith 1995 focuses on the groups of Khoesan-speaking hunter-gatherer-herders that lived along the Gariep River. Van der Merwe 1937, Penn 2005, and Legassick 2010 deal in different ways with the history of relations between hunter-gatherers, herders, and European colonists in the 18th century. Penn 1999 sketches the lives of particular individuals who had been extruded for one reason or another from the Cape Colony. Saunders 1966 discusses the earliest known documentary references to Tswana-speaking peoples. Penn 2001 is an incisive review of the “frontier” historiography of the Cape Colony.
Legassick, Martin Chatfield. The Politics of a South African Frontier: The Griqua, the Sotho-Tswana, and the Missionaries, 1780–1840. Basel, Switzerland: Basler Afrika Bibliographien, 2010.
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This work publishes the author’s well-known doctoral thesis, researched and presented in the 1960s. The first three chapters examine the nature of interactions between African farmers and herders and European colonists north and south of the Gariep River in the 18th century.
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Penn, Nigel. Rogues, Rebels and Runaways: Eighteenth-Century Cape Characters. Cape Town: David Philip, 1999.
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Four of the five chapters deal with fugitives and bandits in the northern frontier zone of the Cape Colony.
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Penn, Nigel. “The Northern Cape Frontier Zone in South African Frontier Historiography.” In Colonial Frontiers: Indigenous–European Encounters in Settler Societies. Edited by Lynette Russell, 19–46. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2001.
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Traces the history of the concept of the “frontier” as used by historians of South Africa since the early 20th century, and explains their relative neglect of the Northern Cape frontier.
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Penn, Nigel. The Forgotten Frontier: Colonist and Khoisan on the Cape’s Northern Frontier. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2005.
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Outlines a history of interaction between Dutch colonizers and indigenous Khoesan-speaking societies, focusing on the destruction of the latter, the killing off of large numbers of their members, and the incorporation of most of the rest into the Cape Colony’s laboring underclasses.
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Saunders, C. C. “Early Knowledge of the Sotho: Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Accounts of the Tswana.” Quarterly Bulletin of the South African Library 20 (1966): 60–70.
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An often-cited article that sketches the development of hearsay knowledge of Tswana-speaking peoples among European colonists at the Cape.
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Smith, Andrew, ed. Einiqualand: Studies of the Orange River Frontier. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 1995.
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A collection of essays on the archaeology, ethnography, and physical anthropology of Khoesan-speaking societies of the Northern Cape–Gariep region. The historical review by Nigel Penn (Chapter 2) summarizes his longer work (Penn 2005).
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Van der Merwe, P. J. Die Noorwaartse Beweging van die Boere voor die Groot Trek (1770–1842). The Hague: W. P. Stockum, 1937.
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A classic study. The first three chapters give a detailed, if now old-fashioned, account of relationships between Bushmen and Boer colonists in the Karoo before 1800.
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The Southern and Western Cape 1500–1800
From 1500 onward the lives of Khoesan-speaking pastoralists and hunter-gatherers in the Southern and Western Cape were increasingly affected by the advent of Europeans. First were Portuguese maritime callers; from the late 16th century onward they were joined by increasing numbers of Dutch, English, and French. In 1652 the Dutch East India Company established a refreshment station at the Cape; after 1700, though still ruled by the Company, it grew rapidly into a Dutch colony. Elphick 1977 describes the societies of the hunter-gatherers and pastoralists, and gives an overview, based primarily on documentary evidence, of their experiences at the hands of Dutch officials and settlers. Ross 2010 gives a more up-to-date account of the settlement of the Dutch and their inherently violent expansion northward and eastward into the interior. Mitchell 2009 is a case study of relations between Khoekhoen and Dutch in a particular region. Schrire 1995 looks at the archaeological evidence for interactions in the Southwest Cape. A number of the essays in Bank 1998 deal with aspects of the history and culture of Khoesan-speaking groups. In contrast, Shell 2005 and Worden 2007 point to the importance of “global” forces in the history of the Cape Colony. Hall 2000 usefully brings the eye of a historical archaeologist to bear in his comparative study of Dutch settlement at the Cape and on the Chesapeake.
Bank, Andrew, ed. The Proceedings of the Khoisan Identities and Cultural Heritage Conference: Organised by the Institute for Historical Research, University of the Western Cape; Held at the South African Museum, Cape Town; 12–16 July 1997. Cape Town: Institute for Historical Research, University of the Western Cape, 1998.
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Publishes forty-five unrevised papers originally presented at a conference held in Cape Town in 1997. Several of them deal with issues of identity, social organization, and the significance of rock art among Khoesan groups in the Cape Colony, and with their relations with European colonists.
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Elphick, Richard. Kraal and Castle: Khoikhoi and the Founding of White South Africa. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1977.
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A pioneering and still very useful study that focuses in detail on the history of individual communities of Khoekhoe pastoralists and on their interactions with Europeans at the Cape to 1701. Argues that there were no sharp divisions between communities of pastoralists and of hunter-gatherers.
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Hall, Martin. An Archaeology of the Modern World: Colonial Transcripts in South Africa and the Chesapeake. London: Routledge, 2000.
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A poststructuralist and theoretically adept comparative study of the relationships between material culture, symbolic meaning, and the exercise of power in colonial society.
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Mitchell, Laura. Belongings: Property and Identity in Colonial South Africa: An Exploration of Frontiers, 1725–c. 1830. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.
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Deals with relations between Dutch colonists and Khoesan-speaking groups in the Olifants River Valley in the Western Cape. Focuses on processes of colonial conquest and dispossession.
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Ross, Robert. “Khoesan and Immigrants: The Emergence of Colonial Society in the Cape, 1500–1800.” In From Early Times to 1885. Vol. 1 of The Cambridge History of South Africa. Edited by Carolyn Hamilton, Bernard Mbenga, and Robert Ross, 168–210. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
DOI: 10.1017/CHOL9780521517942Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An up-to-date review that focuses mainly on the colonization of the Cape by the Dutch from the 1650s and on their interactions with Khoesan-speaking pastoralists and hunter-gatherers.
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Schrire, Carmel. Digging through Darkness: Chronicles of an Archaeologist. Richmond: University of Virginia Press, 1995.
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An account of interactions between Dutch colonizers and Khoesan-speaking pastoralists and hunter-gatherers at the Cape from the perspective of an archaeologist. A powerful statement, colored by autobiographical passages, about the ways in which archaeology can give a “voice” to people silenced by colonial domination.
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Shell, Robert. “Immigration: The Forgotten Factor in Cape Colonial Frontier Expansion.” Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Comparative Studies 18 (2005): 1–38.
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Argues that frontier settlement and expansion in the Cape Colony was as much a function of economic conditions in Europe as it was of settler demography.
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Worden, Nigel, ed. “New Approaches to VOC History in South Africa.” South African Historical Journal 59 (2007): 3–18.
DOI: 10.1080/02582470709464770Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A collection of eight revisionist papers that range over a wide variety of topics. Of particular value for placing the 17th- and 18th-century Cape within the wider world of the operations of the Dutch East India Company in the Netherlands and the Indian Ocean.
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Colonial Expansion and Its Impact, 1750–1850: Direction-Setting Studies
From the mid-18th century onward, the effects of increasingly violent colonial expansion began to be felt among the communities which inhabited the interior and eastern regions of the subcontinent. At much the same time, long-distance trade was expanding inland from points on the coasts of southern Mozambique, and leading to intensified political and social conflict as different groups competed for new sources of wealth. For many people, these developments brought increasing political and social instability; for others, especially members of particular ruling houses, they brought new opportunities for increasing their wealth and expanding the bases of their power. The pace of colonial commercial and territorial expansion increased markedly after British rule was established in the Cape Colony in 1806. From the 1810s, waves of disruption emanating from the south and the northeast began to overlap in the interior, leading to the break-up of numbers of established chiefdoms, the displacement of many communities, and the re-amalgamation of groups across the region into perhaps a dozen enlarged kingdoms and paramountcies. Until recently, these events, misleadingly labeled by historians as the mfecane or difaqane, were very widely ascribed to the expansion of the Zulu kingdom under Shaka. The emerging new polities were still in the process of consolidating themselves when, in the later 1830s, the interior was once again thrown into turmoil by the irruption into it of parties of Boer settlers from the Cape. The items selected here are broad overviews of key developments in these times of upheaval. Keegan 1996 and Legassick and Ross 2010 describe how shifts in the Cape Colony’s political economy translated into more active commercial expansion and more aggressive land appropriation beyond its borders. Eldredge and Morton 1994 focuses on the expansion of colonial slaving frontiers. Legassick 2010a and Legassick 2010b examine the impact of settler expansionism in the colony’s northern and eastern frontier zones, respectively. Hedges 1978 focuses on the impact of commercial expansion in the hinterland of Delagoa Bay. Wright 2010 gives a “post-Zulu” explanation of the political upheavals that took place in the 1820s and 1830s among African societies in the interior and eastern regions of the subcontinent. Etherington 2001 provides a novel and often provocative survey of a key period in the shaping of the societies of the interior.
Eldredge, Elizabeth, and Fred Morton, eds. Slavery in South Africa: Captive Labor on the Dutch Frontier. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1994.
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Copublished with University of Natal Press, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. Gives insights into the enslavement of Africans as colonial frontiers of trade and settlement expanded into the interior of southern Africa. Describes the complicity of African elites in slave trading.
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Etherington, Norman. The Great Treks: The Transformation of Southern Africa, 1815–1854. Harlow, UK: Longman, 2001.
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A stimulating, if often idiosyncratic, discussion that focuses on the ways in which the political dynamics of African societies in the interior and east of the subcontinent were affected by European colonial expansion. Engages critically with orthodoxies about the so-called mfecane and the “great trek.”
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Hedges, David. “Trade and Politics in Southern Mozambique and Zululand in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries.” PhD diss., University of London, 1978.
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An older but still influential study, unfortunately never published. Sees the expansion of trade through Delagoa Bay as a key factor in the rise of African states in the hinterland.
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Keegan, Timothy. Colonial South Africa and the Origins of the Racial Order. Cape Town: David Philip, 1996.
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Argues that the establishment of British rule at the Cape in 1806 inaugurated a period of much more aggressive capitalist expansion in the colony and in the wider subcontinent.
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Legassick, Martin Chatfield. The Politics of a South African Frontier: The Griqua, the Sotho-Tswana, and the Missionaries, 1780–1840. Basel, Switzerland: Basler Afrika Bibliographien, 2010a.
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This work publishes the author’s well-known doctoral thesis, researched and presented in the 1960s. Remains the leading study of the region about the middle Gariep in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
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Legassick, Martin. The Struggle for the Eastern Cape 1800–1854: Subjugation and the Roots of South African Democracy. Sandton, South Africa: KMM Review, 2010b.
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A brief and cogent survey of capitalist-driven colonial expansion in the Eastern Cape under British rule, the displacement of Xhosa-speaking societies, and the ensuing frontier wars.
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Legassick, Martin, and Robert Ross. “From Slave Economy to Settler Capitalism: The Cape Colony and Its Extensions, 1800–1854.” In From Early Times to 1885. Vol. 1 of The Cambridge History of South Africa. Edited by Carolyn Hamilton, Bernard Mbenga, and Robert Ross, 253–318. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
DOI: 10.1017/CHOL9780521517942Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Focuses on the consolidation of a colonial bourgeoisie in the Cape under British rule, and on aggressive settler expansion in the Eastern Cape and in the interior of the subcontinent.
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Wright, John. “Turbulent Times: Political Transformations in the North and East, 1760s–1830s.” In From Early Times to 1885. Vol. 1 of The Cambridge History of South Africa. Edited by Carolyn Hamilton, Bernard Mbenga, and Robert Ross, 211–252. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
DOI: 10.1017/CHOL9780521517942Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Moves on from the long-established notion that the upheavals which took place among African societies in the 1820s and 1830s were caused primarily by the expansion of the Zulu under Shaka.
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The Cape Colony, 1750–1850
The period covered in this section saw the Cape pass from the rule of the moribund Dutch East India Company to that of Britain, which was then in the process of making itself the world’s leading commercial and industrial power. After the British takeover in 1806, the Cape became the springboard for an increasingly rapid expansion of the frontiers of European trade and settlement into the interior of the subcontinent. Another major consequence was a shift in the Cape itself from an economy based on slave labor to one based on coerced wage-labor. The Cape Colony has a substantial historiography, much of it with a local and parochial focus on the activities of European colonists. With some notable exceptions, historians of the Cape still tend to work in isolation from archaeologists, and also from historians working on other parts of the subcontinent. The items listed here are either well-established works, or recent studies which break new ground. Legassick and Ross 2010 examines the emergence of a new capitalist dynamic in the Cape, and the consequent stimulus to commercial and territorial expansion. Elbourne 2002 takes up a specific theme in this process. Using novel insights into the Bleek and Lloyd Archive, McGranaghan 2012 sheds fresh light on the history of ǀXam groups in the Northern Cape. Ross 1999 focuses on aspects of the conflicted social history of the Cape Colony. Crais and Scully 2009 takes up a subject that has in recent years attracted a good deal of attention from politicians and popularizers. While their probing analysis focuses on the life story of a single individual, it also sheds light on the nature of Cape society in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Worden and Crais 1994 and Watson 2012 examine the nature of Cape slavery and the effects of emancipation in the first half of the 19th century.
Crais, Clifton, and Pamela Scully. Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009.
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Copublished by Wits University Press. A pointed academic contribution to the literature on the controversial subject of Sara Baartman as the “Hottentot Venus,” and her different lives in the Cape Colony, London, and Paris.
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Elbourne, Elizabeth. Blood Ground: Colonialism, Missions, and the Contest for Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799–1853. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002.
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Focuses on the relationship between the Khoekhoe and the London Missionary Society, in the context of the expansion of British colonial rule and settlement. A detailed and powerful academic study.
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Legassick, Martin, and Robert Ross. “From Slave Economy to Settler Capitalism: The Cape Colony and Its Extensions, 1800–1854.” In From Early Times to 1885. Vol. 1 of The Cambridge History of South Africa. Edited by Carolyn Hamilton, Bernard Mbenga, and Robert Ross, 253–318. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
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The informed discussion of the consolidation of a colonial bourgeoisie in the Cape under British rule opens new avenues of thinking on the history of the colony in the preindustrial period.
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McGranaghan, Mark. “Foragers on the Frontiers: the ǀXam Bushmen of the Northern Cape, South Africa, in the Nineteenth Century.” PhD diss., University of Oxford, 2012.
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A historical ethnography of ǀXam groups, based on extensive research in the Bleek-Lloyd Archive (see also Bleek and Lloyd 1968 and Skotnes 2007 in Published Compilations of Primary Documents). Emphasizes the importance of focusing on the history of interactions between ǀXam and non-ǀXam groups.
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Ross, Robert. Status and Respectability in the Cape Colony, 1750–1870: A Tragedy of Manners. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511497292Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A collection of incisive essays relating to antagonisms of class, race, and gender in colonial society.
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Watson, R. L. Slave Emancipation and Racial Attitudes in Nineteenth-Century South Africa. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781139135146Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Argues that after the emancipation of slaves in the Cape Colony in the 1830s, European colonists’ new needs for a disciplined labor force served to intensify settler racism.
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Worden, Nigel, and Clifton Crais, eds. Breaking the Chains: Slavery and Its Legacy in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1994.
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A collection of essays on the last years of slavery, the growth of the antislavery movement, emancipation, and post-emancipation social relations.
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The Interior, 1750–1850
From the mid-18th century the region between the Gariep and Limpopo Rivers was increasingly drawn into the economic and political orbit of the Cape Colony, first through the expansion of the frontier of hunting, trading, and raiding for livestock and slaves, and later through the extension of areas of colonial settlement. From very different perspectives, Hall, et al. 2008 and Landau 2010 examine the political and social dynamics of societies of Tswana-speakers on the highveld. Ross 1976 describes relations between the various groups of Griqua and between Griqua and colonial officials and missionaries. Rasmussen 1978 and Sanders 1975 are two older works on the emergence respectively of the Ndebele and Basotho kingdoms in the troubled times of the 1820s; they remain useful sources of reference. The origins of certain stereotypes about the so-called mfecane on the southern highveld are discussed in Etherington’s stimulating revisionist analysis (Etherington 2004). Esterhuysen 2008 focuses on the largely unstudied history of one of the smaller chiefdoms of what is now Limpopo Province.
Esterhuysen, A. B. “Ceramic Alliances: Pottery and the History of the Kekana Ndebele in the Old Transvaal.” In Five Hundred Years Rediscovered: Southern African Precedents and Prospects; 500 Year Initiative 2007 Conference Proceedings. Edited by Natalie Swanepoel, Amanda Esterhuysen, and Philip Bonner, 197–214. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2008.
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Demonstrates how evidence from archaeology, colonial documents, ethnography, and oral histories can be combined to produce new insights into the history of a specific African community.
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Etherington, Norman. “A Tempest in a Teapot? Nineteenth-Century Contests for Land in South Africa’s Caledon Valley and the Invention of the Mfecane.” Journal of African History 45 (2004): 203–219.
DOI: 10.1017/S0021853703008624Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Argues that the extent of the violence that took place on the southern highveld in the 1820s was deliberately exaggerated by African chiefs and their missionary clients the more effectively to press the chiefs’ claims to land and political legitimacy. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
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Hall, Simon, Mark Anderson, Jan Boeyens, and François Coetzee. “Towards an Outline of the Oral Geography, Historical Identity, and Political Economy of the Late Precolonial Tswana in the Rustenburg Region.” In Five Hundred Years Rediscovered: Southern African Precedents and Prospects; 500 Year Initiative 2007 Conference Proceedings. Edited by Natalie Swanepoel, Amanda Esterhuysen, and Philip Bonner, 135–168. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2008.
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Based on evidence from archaeology and from recorded oral histories. Deals with the establishment of large Tswana towns in the late 18th century and discusses the making of new identities in this period.
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Landau, Paul. Popular Politics in the History of South Africa, 1400–1948. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511750984Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The first three chapters present a novel discussion of the political and social structures of precolonial African societies of the highveld and of the making of identities in these societies. The author thoroughly dismantles the common notion that Africans lived in bounded tribes.
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Rasmussen, R. Kent. Migrant Kingdom: Mzilikazi’s Ndebele in South Africa. London: Rex Collings, 1978.
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Copublished with David Philip, Cape Town. An older but still useful analysis of the scraps of documentary evidence and recorded oral histories that bear on the emergence and consolidation of the Ndebele kingdom under Mzilikazi Khumalo in the 1820s and 1830s.
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Ross, Robert. Adam Kok’s Griquas: A Study in the Development of Stratification in South Africa. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1976.
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A standard work of reference on the history of Griqua communities in the 19th century.
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Sanders, Peter. Moshoeshoe: Chief of the Sotho. London: Heinemann, 1975.
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An older work in a tradition that tends to hail Moshoeshoe as an example of an “African Good Leader,” but still useful for its discussion of the internal dynamics of the Basotho kingdom and of its relations with its African and Boer neighbors.
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The Eastern Cape, 1750–1850
The most vigorous resistance to colonial expansion in southern Africa before the mid-19th century took place in the eastern borderlands of the Cape Colony. The region also saw the emergence of the first groups of African “modernizers” in the subcontinent. Mostert 1992 is a bulky but eminently readable popular account of colonial expansion and Xhosa resistance. The major source on the internal dynamics of Xhosa societies in this period is Peires 1981. Newton-King 1999 examines the dynamics of conflict in the early stages of the development of a “frontier” zone in the Eastern Cape. Legassick 2010 analyzes the changing economic and political dynamics of the Cape Colony in the first half of the 19th century, and the effects that these changes had on colonial expansion in the east. From a perspective that sees cultural dynamics as important, Crais 1992 examines Xhosa resistance to colonial dispossession. Peires 1989 is the standard source on the well-known Xhosa cattle-killing of 1856–1857. In a different vein, Fry 2010 provides a stimulating new perspective on the emergence of a stratum of “Mfengu” or “Fingo” entrepreneurs in the eastern borderlands of the Cape from the early 19th century. Also moving on from the well-worn field of resistance history, Challis 2012 looks at the emergence of a culturally heterogeneous group of raiders in the mountains of the northeast.
Challis, Sam. “Creolization on the Nineteenth-Century Frontiers of South Africa: A Case-Study of the AmaTola ‘Bushmen’ in the Maloti-Drakensberg.” Journal of Southern African Studies 38.2 (2012): 265–280.
DOI: 10.1080/03057070.2012.666905Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Examines the formation of mounted raiding groups of diverse origins in the mountains on the north-eastern borders of the Cape Colony. Argues that similar processes of “creolization” were common in colonial frontier regions in southern Africa.
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Crais, Clifton. The Making of the Colonial Order: White Supremacy and Black Resistance in Pre-Industrial South Africa: the Eastern Cape, 1770–1865. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
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Integrates historical narrative with anthropological perspectives that capture the cultural rationale of Xhosa resistance and response to British colonization.
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Fry, Poppy. “Siyamfenguza: The Creation of Fingo-ness in South Africa’s Eastern Cape, 1800–1835.” Journal of Southern African Studies 36.1 (2010): 25–40.
DOI: 10.1080/03057071003607303Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An original contribution to the debate on the making of a discrete mfengu identity. Argues that many amaMfengu were characterized by an increasing orientation toward the colonial world of trade and commercializing agriculture. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
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Legassick, Martin. The Struggle for the Eastern Cape 1800–1854: Subjugation and the Roots of South African Democracy. Sandton, South Africa: KMM, 2010.
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A brief survey of capitalist-driven colonial expansion in the Eastern Cape under British rule, the displacement of Xhosa-speaking societies, the ensuing frontier wars, and the establishment of representative government in the Cape Colony.
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Mostert, Noel. Frontiers: The Epic of South Africa’s Creation and the Tragedy of the Xhosa People. London: Cape, 1992.
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An exhaustive account of Eastern Cape history aimed at a popular readership. The main themes covered are the expansion of the Cape in the 18th and 19th centuries, occupation of land by Dutch and British settlers, and Xhosa resistance.
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Newton-King, Susan. Masters and Servants on the Cape Eastern Frontier, 1760–1803. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
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A frontier study stimulated by Legassick’s work. Argues that relations between Dutch colonists and Khoesan-speaking groups in the Eastern Cape were less fluid and more antagonistic than he suggests.
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Peires, Jeffrey. The House of Phalo: A History of the Xhosa People in the Days of Their Independence. Johannesburg: Ravan, 1981.
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A standard work of reference on the history of the southern Xhosa-speaking peoples. Based on oral sources as well as colonial documents. Its analysis of British expansion and Xhosa resistance in the Eastern Cape addresses the tensions between Xhosa elites and commoners, and the entanglement of colonial and indigenous economies and worldviews.
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Peires, Jeffrey. The Dead Will Arise: Nonqgawuse and the Great Xhosa Cattle-Killing Movement of 1856–57. Johannesburg: Ravan, 1989.
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The Xhosa cattle-killing is widely recognized today as a desperate response to British colonial expansion in the Eastern Cape. This seminal text sets itself against lingering “settlerist” interpretations of the episode as a product of tribal superstition, and provides new insights into Xhosa history in the mid-19th century.
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The KwaZulu-Natal Region, 1750–1850
The historiography of KwaZulu-Natal in this period was long dominated by accounts of the rise and consolidation of the Zulu state under Shaka. While accepting the historical importance of the Zulu kingdom, since the 1980s scholars have developed new lines of critical thinking about its history, and have also sought to open up new areas of research. Wright and Hamilton 1989 summarizes a decade of academic work done by the authors and others, and for the first time puts the study of the making of identities in precolonial societies up front as a field of research. Some of the essays in Hamilton 1995 seek to move beyond Zulu-centric and Shaka-centric history, as does Hamilton 1998, paradoxically through a thoroughly historicized examination of the making of ideas about Shaka in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Another “decentering” work is that of Wylie 2000, which reveals the thinness of the historical evidence on which “colonial” ideas about Shaka are based. Wright 2006–2007 takes revisionist rethinkings a step further through a critique of stereotyped notions of “the wars of Shaka.” Etherington 2004 insists that historians need to look back much further than the mid-18th century as the starting-point of “state formation” in the region. On another tack altogether, but in a field where much historical research remains to be done, Vinnicombe 2009 uses evidence from rock paintings, ethnography, and colonial documents to place the history of the Bushmen of the Drakensberg on the intellectual map.
Etherington, Norman. “Were There Large States in the Coastal Regions of Southeast Africa before the Rise of the Zulu Kingdom?” History in Africa 31 (2004): 157–183.
DOI: 10.1017/S0361541300003442Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Explores the possibilities that centralized chiefdoms may have existed before the mid-18th century, which historians today commonly take as the starting-point of state-formation in the KwaZulu-Natal region. Available online by subscription.
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Hamilton, Carolyn, ed. The Mfecane Aftermath: Reconstructive Debates in Southern African History. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1995.
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Copublished with University of Natal Press, Pietermaritzburg. A collection of essays that seek to move beyond stereotyped notions about the expansion of the Zulu state under Shaka as the prime cause of the political and social upheavals which took place among African societies in the interior and east in the 1820s and 1830s.
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Hamilton, Carolyn. Terrific Majesty: The Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical Invention. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.
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Argues that the images of Shaka as a mighty ruler which became common in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were a product of the “entanglement” of ideas produced by European colonizers and African colonized alike. Rejects the notion that white and black lineages of writing on Shaka have essentially developed separately.
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Vinnicombe, Patricia. People of the Eland: Rock Paintings of the Drakensberg Bushmen as a Reflection of Their Life and Thought. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2009.
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This book pioneered the use of ethnographic evidence from the 19th and 20th centuries to interpret the meanings carried in the rock art of southern Africa. It has become a major point of reference for students of Bushman rock art and history. First published in 1976.
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Wright, John. “Beyond the ‘Zulu Aftermath’: Migrations, Identities, Histories.” Journal of Natal and Zulu History 24–25 (2006–2007): 1–36.
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A critical examination of the origins of widespread stereotypes about the “wars of Shaka.” Argues that they have little basis in historical evidence. Available online by subscription.
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Wright, John, and Carolyn Hamilton. “Traditions and Transformations: The Phongolo-Mzimkhulu Region in the Late 18th and Early 19th Centuries.” In Natal and Zululand from Earliest Times to 1910: A New History. Edited by Andrew Duminy and Bill Guest, 48–82. Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: University of Natal Press, 1989.
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Copublished with Shuter & Shooter, Pietermaritzburg. An older essay but still widely used as a source of reference. Summarizes two decades of revisionist scholarship on the history of the KwaZulu-Natal region before the establishment of colonial rule.
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Wylie, Dan. Savage Delight: White Myths of Shaka. Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: University of Natal Press, 2000.
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A collection of critical essays on the documentary sources commonly used by writers on Shaka. Reveals the overall thinness of these sources.
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The Northeast, 1750–1850
The region under study—roughly, Swaziland, southern Mozambique, and the Mpumalanga and Limpopo Provinces of South Africa—is traversed by international borders established in colonial times. As a consequence, its historiography has been, and remains, deeply fragmented. Much more has been written on the South African part of the region than on Swaziland and Mozambique. By way of archaeological background, Masson 2011 tries to make the most of a very limited body of sources on Swaziland. A number of essays in Delius and Schoeman 2010 focus on the archaeology and ecology of the little-studied area of extensive agricultural terracing and stone-walling in southern Mpumalanga. An important factor in shaping economic and political trajectories in the region after the mid-18th century was the rapid rise of foreign trade at Delagoa Bay. African producers over a wide area traded ivory and, later, cattle and captives through intermediary communities in exchange for luxury goods such as cloth, beads, and brass. Hedges 1978 is a pioneering work in this field. Bonner 1983 and Delius 1983 are well-known studies that cover the rise and consolidation of the Swazi and Pedi kingdoms, respectively, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. They also deal with the early stages of interaction between these kingdoms and the Boer communities from the Cape that had established themselves in the 1840s in what became the Transvaal. Using primarily archaeological evidence, Schoeman 1998 examines the history of a particular African community in the early 19th century. Delius 2010 focuses specifically on a trade in captives. Swanepoel, et al. 2008 contains several essays that break new ground in the archaeology and history of the region under discussion.
Bonner, Philip. Kings, Commoners, and Concessionaires: The Evolution and Dissolution of the Nineteenth-Century Swazi State. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511563027Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Uses oral evidence and colonial documents to give an account of the rise and consolidation of the Swazi kingdom in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Good on the extent to which internal politics were shaped by pressures from the neighboring Zulu state and from Boer communities in the Transvaal.
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Delius, Peter. The Land Belongs to Us: The Pedi Polity, the Boers, and the British in the Nineteenth Century Transvaal. Johannesburg: Ravan, 1983.
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Makes a close reading of scraps of evidence from oral histories, missionary records, and colonial documents to give an account of the rise, collapse, and reconsolidation of the Pedi kingdom in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
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Delius, Peter. “Recapturing Captives and Conversations with ‘Cannibals’: In Pursuit of a Neglected Stratum in South African History.” Journal of Southern African Studies 36.1 (2010): 7–23.
DOI: 10.1080/03057071003607295Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Raises a subject generally skirted round by historians of southern Africa: the trading of captives within and between African and Boer communities.
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Delius, Peter, and Maria Schoeman, eds. Special Issue: History and Archaeology in Conversation—South Africa Meets East Africa Workshop. African Studies 69.2 (2010): 207–378.
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A collection of papers that seeks to bridge methodological divides between historians and archaeologists. Emphasizes historical ecology, with case studies of intensive precolonial agricultural systems in Mpumalanga and East Africa. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
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Hedges, David. “Trade and Politics in Southern Mozambique and Zululand in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries.” PhD diss., University of London, 1978.
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An older and unpublished work, but still indispensable for studying the political and economic dynamics of the Delagoa Bay region and its hinterland.
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Masson, John. The Archaeology of Swaziland: An Introduction. Johannesburg: Freethinkers, 2011.
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An overview written by a well-informed former official in the Swaziland colonial service. Contains a chapter on the relatively meager amount of research that has been done on the archaeology of farming societies in Swaziland.
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Schoeman, Maria. “Material Culture ‘under the Animal Skin’: Excavations at Esikhunjini, a Mfecane-Period Ndzundza Ndebele Site.” Southern African Field Archaeology 7.2 (1998): 72–81.
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Discusses the archaeology of an early-19th-century Ndzundza settlement. Focuses on changes in identity-making as an aspect of the politics of affiliation and resistance during the political and social upheavals of the time.
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Swanepoel, Natalie, Amanda Esterhuysen, and Philip Bonner, eds. Five Hundred Years Rediscovered: Southern African Precedents and Prospects; 500 Year Initiative 2007 Conference Proceedings. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2008.
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A collection of essays written by archaeologists and historians seeking to reopen conversations between their disciplines. Includes studies of topics in the history of Limpopo, Mpumalanga, Swaziland, and northern KwaZulu-Natal in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
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