Tuning up for OBO

By John Wright and Simon Hall

No, this is not a piece about playing a difficult musical instrument; it is about the seemingly more mundane but perhaps equally constructive business of producing an article for Oxford Bibliographies Online.

'A view in the Town of Litakun' (Dithakong), a southern Tswana town near present-day Kuruman. An engraved and coloured reproduction of an original drawing made by William Burchell in July 1812 (From Burchell, W.J., 1824, Travels in the Interior of Southern Africa. V II, London: Longman, Hurst, Orme, Brown and Green)

In November 2012, Oxford University Press OUP) put online a number of bibliographies in its African Studies series, including one which the Editor-in-Chief of the series, Professor Tom Spear of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, had asked us to write on precolonial southern Africa. After several changes of title, it finally appeared - baldly but succinctly - as 'Southern Africa to c.1850' (accessible through registration at: www.oxfordbibliographies.com).

Here, we briefly outline some of the major issues which, as a historian (JW) and archaeologist (SH) working together, we faced in giving shape to our own contribution. For us, it was not just a matter of pulling together a list of references: it was a matter of making what we hope will become a useful intellectual tool in its field.

Partnerships between historians and archaeologists in South Africa have been uncommon until very recently. The two of us had both been active in the Five Hundred Year Initiative which, since its formation in 2006, has sought to work across the divide between the two disciplines. We had also engaged closely with each other's ideas in the reading group on precolonial history held since 2010 under the auspices of the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative.

An oblique aerial view of the remains of the early 19th century Tlokwa (Tswana) town of Marothodi near the Pilanesberg in North West Province

We knew that we wanted the article to work towards unpacking deep-seated stereotypes, both popular and academic, about the precolonial past that had developed during the colonial era in the 19th century and the struggle against colonialism in the 20th century, and which are still current.

We knew that we wanted to work across the conventional divide between 'prehistory', as served predominantly through archaeological sources, and 'history', as understood mainly through written sources, as well as across the conventional divide between the 'precolonial' and 'colonial' periods. But developing coherent threads of ideas on these issues, threads that could be led from the overall Introduction through the article as a whole, was a more complex business than we had anticipated.

OUP sets clear parameters for its online bibliographies. They are envisaged not as comprehensive listings but as scholarly guides through the more recent literature for researchers who are unfamiliar with a particular field, or who are looking for up-do-date references. They are intended to be 'high-level encyclopedias' which help users quickly identify the main pathways of current research. The idea is that the authors will regularly update them - for us one of the more exciting features of developing an online publication.

Authors are limited to a maximum of 150 citations, subdivided into categories of no more than eight items each. The initial categories must be drawn from a list established by OUP to ensure some degree of conformity between bibliographies: General Overviews, Reference Works, Textbooks, Anthologies, Bibliographies, and Journals. Further categories are worked up by the authors themselves.

Each bibliography must have an overall Introduction of no more than 400 words which sets out the lines along which the bibliography is structured. Each category must have a Commentary of no more than 400 words which explains why each particular item has been selected. Each item must also have an Annotation which describes in no more than 50 words what it is about.

A watercolour with notes of the 'rainmaker's wife' from John Campbell's diary, made on 5 May, 1820 at Kaditshwene, the Hurutshe capital (Tswana) near present-day Zeerust (NLSA, J Campbell 7272)

OUP encourages authors to include online items where possible; unpublished items may also be included. Each category must be more or less self-contained, but cross-referencing to items in other categories and duplication of items between categories are acceptable. To keep a limit on self-advertising, authors are discouraged from including more than three items of their own work.

We are aware that some authors of other bibliographies in the series have chafed against the constraints that they have to work under. For our own part we were not unhappy with them; we found that they helped us to navigate through what is a very large and loosely defined field. But it still took us a good while to find what we saw as a direction-setting title to work to. OUP's initial label for the bibliography was 'States of Southern Africa', which it explicitly saw as meaning the formation of states among ethnically defined categories of people, such as 'Nguni' and 'Sotho'.

Our own perspective was directly opposed to construction of the past in terms of bounded groupings, or 'tribes',  hence we preferred the title 'Precolonial Societies of Southern Africa', with a focus on regional rather than ethnic groupings. But this too we soon abandoned, after deciding, in alignment with a growing practice in the field, that it was high time to move on from using the term 'precolonial' in anything but the loosest sense.

In its place we decided on 'African Societies in Southern Africa from [date] to [date]', with the precise period covered to be decided at a later stage, and subdivisions organised in the first instance by historical period and in the second by region.

After we had begun to think in detail about the structure of the bibliography, we accepted the fact, though initially with some reluctance, that the history of 'African' societies, which was where our own professional interests lay, could not be studied without a detailed knowledge of the history of neighbouring colonial societies, and that the bibliography would have to cover the history of the Cape Colony. The further we worked into the article, the more the inclusion of the Cape made sense.

The working title became the somewhat clunky 'Southern Africa from the first millennium CE to the mid-19th century'. Later, after the article had been submitted to OUP, anonymous editors made a fourth change of title to the final one, 'Southern Africa to c.1850'.

James Stuart's plan of Mgungundlovu (Dingane's capital between 1829 and 1838). (From Webb, C. & Wright, J. 1977. The Stuart Archives, Vol. I. Pietermaritzburg: Natal University Press)

Deciding on the boundaries of the period and of the region that the bibliography would cover was the product of a series of contingent, and in some cases somewhat arbitrary, decisions. (Is the conceptual slicing up of time and space ever anything else?) Given Hall's interests as an archaeologist and his knowledge of the relevant literature, it seemed to us to make sense to start with the 'interactions' that had taken place between established hunter-gatherers and expanding herders and farmers from early in the first millennium onward.

We decided on the mid-19th century as our endpoint for two main reasons. In the first place, it marked roughly the beginning of a period of more aggressive settler expansion in the subcontinent, and hence of more intensive engagements between settler and indigenous communities. In the second place, it marked more or less the beginning of a new and much more vigorous phase of political and economic 'modernisation' in the subcontinent. A direct consequence of both developments was a 'thickening-up' of the available source material in the form of original documents and of recorded oral histories.

As for defining our region of focus: neither of us felt qualified to work on Namibia, which lay on the outer margins of our archaeological and historical consciousness. By the same token, we felt unable to say much about the history of Mozambique beyond what we had come across in the relatively sparse literature in English. We learnt from OUP that the archaeology and history of Zimbabwe, which we had initially planned to include, were being covered by another OBO author, Innocent Pikirayi. So for our purposes 'Southern Africa' came to mean the region today covered by South Africa, Lesotho, Swaziland, and neighbouring regions of Botswana and Mozambique.

When it came to thinking about the categories into which the bibliography would be divided, both of us were clear that we wanted to put up front the perspective that the past that we were writing about was a field of contention and debate. So we began with two closely related topics - 'Recent Shifts in Thinking about the Pre-Industrial Past' and 'Thinking Critically about Concepts and Methods'.

For the rest, we determined at an early stage that we would hold to a chronological rather than thematic ordering, and make subdivisions (themselves perhaps needing to be problematised) by region for the more recent periods as the volume of published literature allowed. We ended up with a total of 17 categories. Already we see the need to modify one or two of them, and to add one or two more, in particular one on 'Intellectual History', for which there is a lot more material available in the pre-1850 period than at first meets the eye.

Excavated 'hut' floors from the warrior area at Mgungundlovu (July 1977)

In making selections of items within each category from a large and expanding literature, we tended to favour those that spoke to particular debates and issues over bare reports and narratives, and more recent works over older works, though we included several  canonical publications where we felt  they deserved it. In the business of annotating, we drew mainly on personal knowledge of the items included, though in some instances had to rely on information obtained from the Internet.

In thinking about the next edition of the bibliography, we will take note of useful comments made by participants in a workshop of the APC to which we presented our completed article in April 2012.

Among the points made were the following: the need for us to develop and publish a parallel article on the processes in which we had produced the bibliography (one commentator saw this as more important than the bibliography itself); the need to find a way of referring to the large number of texts which we did not include in our article; the need to explain, not efface, the question of why the bibliography contains very few items written by black authors; the need to include more references to online material; the need to include more on southern Africa in the world of the Indian Ocean; the need to include more on the period of Dutch rule at the Cape.

We plan to take the bibliography to further seminars at the University of Cape Town and the University of the Witwatersrand: work on it is ongoing.

• John Wright is based at the Rock Art Research Institute, University of the Witwatersrand and Simon Hall at the Department of Archaeology, University of Cape Town.