Major mission archives are those of the London Missionary Society in the SOAS Library, University of London; the Methodist Missionary Society, also in the SOAS Library; the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society in the Maison des Missions in Paris and in the Morija Museum and Archives, Lesotho; the Berlin Mission Society in the Kirchliches Archivzentrum in Berlin; the Swiss Mission in Lausanne; and the Norwegian Missionary Society in Stavanger. These early hunters are classified as archaic humans. This has been demonstrated most clearly in the case of ideas about the iconic Zulu king Shaka kaSenzangakhona, where Carolyn Hamilton has shown in detail that the archive of what it is possible to think and say and write about him with any credibility is the product of interactions over nearly two centuries between both black and white brokers of the past.11. 1919 - South West Africa (Namibia) comes under South African administration. At present, it is unclear which hominids made Oldowan tools. Until the 1860s numbers of African polities in the interior regions were well able to retain their political autonomy and fend off efforts of white colonists to seize their lands. 20. Many of them had undoubtedly been displaced by political upheavals in that region in the 1820s and early 1830s, but recent research suggests that others were individuals from Xhosa-speaking groups who had lost land and cattle and were searching for opportunities to regain both.49. Perspectives on southern Africa’s past in the eras before the establishment of European colonial rule have been heavily shaped by political conflicts rooted in South Africa’s history as a society of colonial settlement. 23. These differences of perspective provide a graphic example of how deeply divided people in South Africa are over the region’s history, even the history of several hundred thousand years ago, and of how sensitive they can be to slights perceived to be rooted in the politics of the past. The new statelets set up by Boer leaders in the interior in the 1840s and 1850s were too weak to establish effective domination over the African-ruled polities round them. The new arrivals are now generally seen as having carried ancestral forms of the languages known as Nguni and Sotho-Tswana into eastern and central southern Africa, respectively.32, These new farming groups are sometimes described as the “ancestors” of the majority of the population living in these regions today. Their writings have in turn fed into the writings of black authors, to the point where it is has long since become impossible—assuming it was ever possible—to disentangle the roots of their ideas along “racial” or “ethnic” lines. Many works begin with a chapter that gives a passing nod to the presence of “Bushmen” and “Hottentots” in “early” times and then to the supposedly recent migration into the subcontinent from farther north of “Bantu tribes.” They then pick up a narrative of history from the coming of Portuguese navigators in the 1480s and, in more detail, the establishment of Dutch settlement at the Cape in the 1650s.12. Museum displays on human evolution are open to the public at Maropeng, on the edge of the World Heritage Site, and at Sterkfontein. This, unlike the Dutch settlement in 1652, was not permanent. Others use these names as a form of terminological shorthand, though the distinctions between these usages are not always clear. Many scientists believe Homo habilis produced them. Archaeologists and historians have long debated the origin of pastoralism in western southern Africa.21 Until the 1960s it was usually linked to the immigration from farther north in Africa, at a time unknown, of people labeled in the literature as “Hottentots.” In the 1970s the idea began to gain ground that the historically known pastoralists, or Khoi or Khoekhoe as they were beginning to be labeled, were the descendants of “Bushman” or “San” hunter-gatherers in the mid-Zambezi region who, about 2,000 years ago, acquired cattle and sheep from neighboring groups of farmers speaking siNtu (Bantu) languages, gradually took to a stock-keeping and stock-raising way of life, and spread across the western and southern regions of the subcontinent and along the southern coast. Various cave sites are also open to the public in the Cape. This is why small artefacts are so important. More recently, evidence from genetics and linguistics has begun to point once again to the older idea that the first owners of livestock, in the form of sheep, were small migrant groups from East Africa.22 From them, some archaeologists argue, the practice of keeping and raising sheep diffused to communities of hunter-gatherers as far as the southern coastlands. Quotations from Sarah Wild, “Race, Space and Sexual Diversity,” Mail and Guardian, December 23, 2015, 34. “I am no grandchild of any ape, monkey or baboon,” stated Zwelinzima Vavi, former general secretary of the trade union federation Cosatu. Today, we know that australopithecines represent the first human ancestors to walk upright, and they are only found in Africa. Before colonialism, there were only bush back roads through which men trekked with goods on their backs. See also Judith Sealy, “Isotopic Evidence for the Antiquity of Cattle-Based Pastoralism in Southernmost Africa,” Journal of African Archaeology 8.1 (2010): 65–81 (the author’s thanks to Gavin Whitelaw for this and the next reference). Under colonial rule, many chiefs found advantage for themselves and their immediate followings in adapting to systems of tribal administration that in certain ways mapped onto African political practices, and that confirmed favored chiefs’ positions of authority and strengthened their rights to control specific territories. 35. B. Peires, The Dead Will Arise: Nongqawuse and the Great Xhosa Cattle-Killing Movement of 1856–7 (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1989); Neil Mostert, Frontiers: The Epic of South Africa’s Creation and the Tragedy of the Xhosa People (London: Pimlico, 1993); and Martin Legassick, The Struggle for the Eastern Cape 1800–1854: Subjugation and the Roots of South African Democracy (Johannesburg: KMM, 2010). In this interpretation, Shaka of the Zulu was one of the prime causes. Important archaeological and ethnographic collections are held in the following South African institutions: Albany Museum, Grahamstown; Ditsong National Museum of Cultural History and Ditsong National Museum of Natural History, both in Pretoria; Iziko South African Museum, Cape Town; KwaZulu-Natal Museum, Pietermaritzburg; McGregor Museum, Kimberley; National Museum, Bloemfontein; the University of Cape Town; the University of Pretoria; the University of South Africa in Pretoria; and the University of the Witwatersrand. Important displays of MSA artefacts are open to the public at the Iziko Museum in Cape Town and the Origins Centre in Johannesburg. March 26, 2015. Although the British relinquished the colony to the Dutch in the Treaty of Amiens (1802), they reannexed it in 1806 after the start of the Napoleonic Wars. 1934 - The Union of South Africa parliament enacts the Status of the Union Act, which declares the country to … Most archaeologists working in this field accept the argument that the break occurred when new groups of immigrant farmers from East Africa extended their political and cultural domination over the established inhabitants. 21. A widespread European settlerist view, based on deep-seated stereotypes of warring races and “tribes,” is that they were permanently in conflict: historical evidence shows that in fact they interacted and intermingled in a range of different ways. Major collections of ethnographic objects from southern Africa are held in the British Museum in London and the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford. The author’s thanks to Gavin Whitelaw for discussion about this issue. Africa’s True Name. The British took over the colony in 1795, returned it during the Peace of Amiens in 1802, and then re-occupied it in 1809. Chiefdoms varied widely in their social composition; this is an issue to which historians have generally not given much attention. In the 1960s, in the era of decolonization in Africa, archaeologists began paying attention to excavating “Iron Age” sites associated with “Bantu” farming peoples. Printed from Oxford Research Encyclopedias, African History. 10. The arrival of the British in the eighteenth century accelerated the process. 1: From Early Times to 1885, eds. Peter Delius, The Land Belongs to Us: The Pedi Polity, the Boers and the British in the Nineteenth-Century Transvaal (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1983), 62–79. Nevertheless, since the 1980s, archaeologists have become increasingly concerned with what the material evidence, including the subcontinent’s rich heritage of rock art, can tell them about social relations in the past and about what some researchers call “worldviews.” Historians have plenty of scope to incorporate the results of archaeological research in this field into narratives extended back in time. Lee Berger and his team found the extraordinarily well-preserved remains of a juvenile male and adult female of a new species, Australopithecus sediba. Over the next forty years, the handful of trained archaeologists in the country focused mainly on excavation of hunter-gatherer sites of what they called the “Stone Age.” Their prime concerns were with the classification of stone artifacts and identification and description of variant regional and temporal Stone Age cultures. In this article, phrases such as “history before colonial times” and “history before the colonial era” are used as generalized terms in place of the singular term “precolonial.”. Thus, Mzilikazi only stayed in the Pretoria area for four or five years. Only since the establishment of constitutional democracy in 1994 have black students in this country begun to study archaeology in any numbers, and only in recent years have black archaeologists begun to establish themselves as senior scholars. Ultimately, the Voortrekkers chased Mzilikazi out of South Africa, making it possible for Boers to settle permanently north of the Vaal. Evidence from archaeology and from recorded oral materials indicates that in fact frequent movements of ideas and social practices, as well as of groups of people, took place across this line, and that identities of “Nguni” and “Sotho-Tswana” were less clearly defined than these ethnographic categorizations suggest.33. Thus, its traders forged new trading links, providing goods from Europe and the East, which Africans exchanged for their exports, including slaves. It is likely that in the later 18th century attempts to control trade routes and the distribution of trade goods were becoming a frequent cause of conflict within and between chiefdoms. 37. Acheulian artefacts seldom occurred in cave sites until the end of the Earlier Stone Age (from about 400,000 to 250,000 years ago), but some have been found at Sterkfontein and Swartkrans. Throughout the Iron Age, climatic fluctuations played a significant role in structuring human geography. This section draws heavily on Mitchell, The Archaeology of Southern Africa, chs. Although many specimens have been found in breccias, australopithecines did not normally live in caves. 25. Trance images figure prominently, along with animals of power, such as eland, elephant and rhino. 1830: An Archaeological Perspective,” Journal of Southern African Studies 38.2 (2012): 305–309. Several smaller ones were established among Tswana-speaking polities on the fringes of the Kalahari Desert.45, The seizing of the Cape in 1806 by Britain, the world’s most dynamic industrializing power, inaugurated a new era of colonial expansion in southern Africa. The degree to which their behaviour was equally modern, however, is still under investigation. In addition to bow hunting and shellfish collection, human behaviour was recognisably modern in other ways. Mitchell, The Archaeology of Southern Africa, 28–32. Academic research in South Africa in the 1980s took place against the background of intensifying political conflict, which led many people inside and outside academia to see the history of the period before colonialism as increasingly irrelevant. Evidence for these cognitive advancements comes from Sibudu Cave near Durban and Blombos Cave in the Cape both dating to about 70 000 years ago. New polities rose and fell, many older polities were broken up and disappeared, and groups of displaced people shifted back and forth across the landscape, often ending up in places far from their original homes. Other Europeans—traders and missionaries in particular—worked with Africans to make profits and save souls. The Cape became a vital base for Britain prior to the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, and the Cape’s economy was meshed with that of Britain. South Africa : Transvaal Colony; Cape Colony; Colony of Natal; Orange River Colony; South-West Africa (from 1915, now Namibia) British West Africa. Many scholars hold to the notion that the archives of oral materials, recorded and unrecorded, are made up of “oral traditions,” that is, largely formal accounts of the past made by knowledgeable individuals and passed down, also largely formally, from one generation to the next with little change to their “core” meanings. In northern KwaZulu-Natal, the dominant chiefdom by the late 18th century was that ruled by Zwide of the Ndwandwe people. 9 and 10; and John Parkington and Simon Hall, “The Appearance of Food Production in Southern Africa 1,000 to 2,000 Years Ago,” in Cambridge History of South Africa, vol. Another facility in Pretoria, the National Culture History Museum, displays a large number of clay figurines from an early initiation site near Mapungubwe. University of the Witwatersrand. Paul Landau, Popular Politics in the History of South Africa, 1400–1948 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); and Carolyn Hamilton and John Wright, “Moving beyond Ethnic Framing: Political Differentiation in the Chiefdoms of the KwaZulu-Natal Region before 1830,” Journal of Southern African Studies, 43.4 (2017). 13. This argument is used to legitimate the continued presence of whites in South Africa in the face of colonial withdrawals elsewhere in Africa. Before colonialism, sub-Saharan Africa was a subsistence economy; because of colonialism it became a monetized economy. Historians were opening up a relatively unexamined field in the form of critical historical analyses of their main sources of evidence. Across the eastern half of southern Africa, farmers developed a variety of settlement patterns.34 Their movement to the west and south came to an end as they reached the margins of the drier regions of the subcontinent. 55. A second is the body of records of oral materials pertinent to the past before the colonial period made by officials, missionaries, and other researchers, black and white, in discussion with African interlocutors in the period from the early 19th to the mid-20th century. These helmet sculptures each had eyes, a mouth and other human-like features. Peter Delius (Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2007), 146–151. The front-back orientation of these settlements conforms to the shape of the terrain. This is something of the conflicted background to the study of South Africa’s past, including the period before European colonial domination. At this time, then, our ancestors were most likely specialized scavengers. The relationship between San hunter-gatherers and Khoekhoe pastoralists is the subject of current research. By 25,000 years ago and the beginning of the Later Stone Age (LSA), archaeological deposits contain a diagnostic tool kit that includes small scrapers and segments manufactured from fine-grained materials. Somewhat later, Sotho-Tswana people moved south into a large part of Gauteng and the Northwest Province. Besides doing research into the history of settlement patterns and economy in the region, archaeologists have investigated the history of social and political relations between different “layers” of population, between the capital and peripheral areas, and between farming and hunting-gathering groups. At one level it simply underscores the methodological point that the main sources of evidence used for constructing narratives of the aliterate past differ from those used to construct narratives of the literate past. In other societies and other circumstances, as numbers of researchers have described, stories about the past were not made and transmitted in formal settings but were developed, argued about, and passed on by ordinary people in everyday discourses in informal surroundings.7 Written records made of oral materials were shaped on the one hand by the particular agendas of the recorders and, on the other, by the agendas of their interlocutors. In the 1890s the Portuguese defeated the Gaza kingdom and established control over southern Mozambique. Among the themes that historians might engage with are the following: the emergence of anatomically modern humans, Homo sapiens sapiens, from hominid ancestors sometime after 200,000 years ago; social and cultural developments through the period that archaeologists label as the Middle Stone Age, dating from before 300,000 to about 25,000 years ago; the emergence in this period of people who can possibly be seen as remote ancestors to historical populations of hunter-gatherers, and who possibly spoke languages ancestral to some of the languages spoken by hunter-gatherers in recent times; the meaning, in social and cultural terms, of the shift from Middle Stone Age to Later Stone Age technologies after about 25,000 years ago; the nature of the analogue between Later Stone Age cultures and cultures of historically known hunter-gatherer groups, especially in the light of studies that highlight the variability in space and time of Later Stone Age cultures;19 and the nature of hunter-gatherer societies and cultures at the beginning of the era of pastoralism and agriculture a little before 2,000 years ago, and of their interactions with pastoralists and farmers in the ensuing centuries. South African Rock Art Digital Archive. 17. By about 1200 the rulers of a chiefdom based at the hill now known as Mapungubwe had established domination over a territory that extended over the northern part of what is now Limpopo province, and into eastern Botswana and southern Zimbabwe. Recently, a new find from the Cradle has made world headlines. 5. Colonial-made ideas about tribe and tradition also deeply inflected the making of the major source materials that historians use for evidence on the history of the period before colonialism. Etherington, Harries, and Mbenga, “From Colonial Hegemonies to Imperial Conquest”, 376–391; and Trapido, “Imperialism, Settler Identities, and Colonial Capitalism,” 73–101. But it is becoming clear that people whose societies were geared toward receiving outsiders, and making and remaking alliances with “others,” did not think of themselves primarily as closed “tribes.” Rather, they saw themselves as the descendants of individual ancestors who, within culturally set limits, which themselves were liable to change over time, could be promoted or demoted in importance according to political circumstances. Hamilton, Terrific Majesty; Carolyn Hamilton, “Backstory, Biography, and the Life of the James Stuart Archive,” History in Africa 38 (2011): 319–341; and Hamilton, “Archives, Ancestors.”. Fully fledged pastoralism, they argue, may have begun only at a much later stage, when communities of hunter-gatherers with sheep, probably living in what is now northern Botswana, acquired cattle from siNtu-speaking farmers who had established themselves in the region during the 1st millennium ce. When Europeans arrived in Africa they found it upon themselves to bring us commerce and civilization. These interlocutors were drawing from, and often reshaping, historical knowledge learned from their own interlocutors, who in turn had their own agendas. One is the body of reports on, and descriptions of, autonomous African societies written by European travelers, officials, and missionaries from the late 15th century onward. Mzilikazi’s entry into Gauteng marks the beginning of the Historic Period. Located at the junction of Botswana, Zimbabwe and South Africa, the Shashe and Limpopo rivers became the ‘Nile of South Africa’ during the Middle Iron Age. East of the uKhahlamba-Drakensberg, in 1838–1840, the Zulu kingdom tried to fight off parties of Boers, then split, with a faction under Mpande allying with the Boers to overthrow the Zulu king Dingane, who, a dozen years before, had himself been party to the assassination of Shaka. The famous gold rhinoceros from Mapungubwe is a national icon and the inspiration for South Africa’s highest civilian award. This left the way open for the penetration into the Indian Ocean after 1500 of officially backed traders and freebooters from Portugal, a small, poor country at the opposite end of the Eurasian land mass from China. By the mid-18th century, mixed groups in the Cape frontier zone were trading firearms, horses, beads, and alcohol northward to Tswana-speaking groups, and cattle and ivory southward to colonial markets. Many scholars still conceive of the societies of the period at a broader level as discrete ethnic and cultural groups, and continue to talk of the history and culture of “the San,” “the Nguni,” the “Tswana,” “the Xhosa,” and other such groups. Writers and editors of general histories of South Africa have generally paid very little attention to the long era before the coming of European settlers in the mid-17th century. Historians picking their way through the literature have to rely heavily on syntheses of research made by archaeologists themselves,15 and by popular works in a few arenas that attract a public readership, such as the search for human origins,16 and the interpretation of rock art.17 The professional syntheses remain strongly focused on the provenance of the material evidence they deal in, and on outlining the nature of the material cultures that they recognize and give names to. Memories of ancestors and other ideas about the past were constantly contested and reworked in public discourses.37. Its new interpretive centre won an international prize. Southern Nguni built the first stonewalling in about AD 1300 in the Midlands of KwaZulu-Natal. Mitchell, The Archaeology of Southern Africa, 344–379; Huffman, Handbook to the Iron Age, 428–453; and Simon Hall, “Farming Communities of the Second Millennium: Internal Frontiers, Identity, Continuity and Change,” in Hamilton, Mbenga and Ross, eds., Cambridge History of South Africa 1, 112–148. The quotation is from Hamilton, Mbenga and Ross, “The Production of Preindustrial South African History,” 6. The Drakensberg Mountains were once regarded as having marked a clear dividing line between Nguni speakers to the east and Sotho-Tswana speakers to the west. Methodist Missionary Society Collection, School of Oriental and African Studies. Archaeologists have recorded the earliest Sotho-Tswana sites, characterized by a ceramic style called Moloko, in the Limpopo Province. The distinctions between chiefs and kings is not clear; “state” implies a relatively high degree of political centralization, when the powers exercised by African leaders in these polities varied widely; and “nation” implies a degree of political unity and “national” sentiment that did not necessarily exist. 32. Imperialism Research Project By Danial Sheikh and Gavin Wong with special thanks to Vickypoo [Victor Liang] motives for the Europeans South Africa’s position on the continent of Africa was a strategic port location, allowing cargo ships to make stops before heading to/from Asia 56. 1, ed. Although the Afrikaners were the minority ethnic group in the country, the Afrikaner National Party gained control of the government in … The hominids that made Acheulian tools can confidently be identified as Homo ergaster (formerly called Homo erectus). Shula Marks, “War and Union, 1899–1910,” in Cambridge History of South Africa, vol. They focused on political narrative and on changes in political and economic institutions, and to some extent on changes in social institutions. Gambia Colony and Protectorate; Sierra Leone; Nigeria; British Togoland (1916–56, today part of Ghana) Cameroons (1922–61, now part of Cameroon and Nigeria) Gold Coast (British colony) (now Ghana) Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 75–90; and Dan Wylie, Savage Delight: White Myths of Shaka (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 2000). These sculptures were most likely used in initiation ceremonies of some sort. Andrew Smith, “Pastoral Origins at the Cape: Influences and Arguments,” Southern African Humanities 20.1 (2008): 49–60. 47. The ancient city of Mapungubwe is an Iron Age archaeological site in the Limpopo Province on the border between South Africa, Zimbabwe and Botswana, and was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in July 2003. In the 1810s and 1820s, the expanding zones of political instability in the interior regions and in the northeast were starting to overlap. In aiming to provide a critical perspective on southern Africa’s history in the long era before the establishment of colonial rule, this article seeks to interweave a basic narrative with discussion of the nature and provenance of the main sources of evidence available and of the concepts which historians use to make sense of it. 7. Items like copper, ostrich eggshell, and marine shell, which were available only in certain localities, were traded, very probably through intermediary groups, over longer distances. A few centuries later, other groups living in the better-watered eastern regions had to begin coping with the settlement among them of communities of farmers living in villages, cultivating sorghums and millets, raising cattle and sheep, and producing and using iron implements.20. For their part, groups of hunter-gatherers based in mountainous regions were often better able to resist the advance of the farmers, sometimes for years at a time. Maggs, Iron Age Communities of the Southern Highveld (Pietermaritzburg: Natal Museum); and Peter Delius, Tim Maggs, and Alex Schoeman, Forgotten World: The Stone-Walled Settlements of the Mpumalanga Escarpment (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2014). This rare occurrence further increases the importance of the World Heritage Site. Simon Hall, “Identity and Political Centralisation in the Western Regions of Highveld, c. 1770–c. Only recently have black historians in South African universities begun to research and write the country’s history before the colonial period. The link was not copied. In 1884, a group of European leaders and diplomats met in Berlin to carve up Africa in service of their imperial interests. Evidently, some people had to burn their grain bins down and build new ones on top. From the 1770s, in the region around the Fish River in the eastern Cape, groups of Xhosa-speaking farmers, Khoekhoe pastoralists, and Boer graziers jostled for supremacy. See the essays in Belinda Bozzoli and Peter Delius, eds., “History from South Africa,” thematic issue of Radical History Review 46.7 (1990); and Hans Stolten, ed., History Making and Present Day Politics: The Making of Collective Memory in South Africa (Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2007). With minimal impact on the local peoples (Bantu speaking groups and Bushmen) the Dutch started to move inland and colonize. 26. Hamilton, Mfecane Aftermath; Dan Wylie, Savage Delight: White Myths of Shaka (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 2000). 41. Many of the great African kingdoms fell hundreds of years ago and so much time has passed that we may never fully understand what life was like in … The new order was given constitutional status with the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910. Most Acheulian material is found outside caves because our ancestors had not yet mastered fire. Shortly after the abandonment of Mapungubwe (about AD 1300), the ancestors of the present day Sotho-Tswana moved south from East Africa. 36. 15. “I [have] also been called a baboon all my life; so [were] my father and his fathers.” In similar vein, Dr. Mathole Motshekga, lecturer in law at the University of South Africa, director of the Kara Heritage Institute, and senior African National Congress member, saw the discovery as perpetuating a Western materialist theory that Africans are subhuman.

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