APC Researchers at the 25th Biennial Conference of the Southern African Historical Society

A 1990 paper by Carolyn Hamilton and John Wright ("The Making of the Amalala: Ethnicity, Ideology and Relations of Subordination in a Precolonial Context," South African Historical Journal 22, no. 1) was the prompt for a panel on “Sources and Social Identities: the Establishment and Uses of the amaLala Category”. 

In a paper on retellings of the story of the Nyavu chief Nomsimekwane, who survived the vicissitudes of Shaka, Dingane and the Boers to become a long ruling chief in the British colony of Natal, Jill Kelly (whom we welcome as a new APC research fellow) argued that Lala identity, analysed in 1990 by Hamilton and Wright as a category of inferior status manipulated by Shaka, as expressed in this tale, was mobilised by the Nyavu Chiefly house as late as 1939.  By 2013, however, in a different political era, the Nyavu had abandoned this kind of claim in favour of a squarely Zulu identity. 

Jochen Arndt, whom we also welcome as a new APC research fellow, used the 1990 Hamilton and Wright argument about social differentiation in the early Zulu kingdom to make a contribution about the timing of language becoming a distinctive marker of identity in the region. He argued that before the rise of the Zulu conquest state, political differentiation was based on the giving of allegiance and claims of shared descent. With the rise of the Zulu state, the idiom of descent was abandoned in favour of using language as a marker of dominant and subordinate political categories. 

In their contribution to the panel, Hamilton and Wright developed in new directions some of their earlier lines of argument. Adhering to their original argument about new social categories as expressing similarity and difference cast in terms of origins and as conferring status and rights and as justifying exploitation, they revisited the question of whether these should be described as emergent ethnicities, as in their original argument. Their hesitancy about applying a familiar twentieth-century concept like ethnicity to a late eighteenth/early nineteenth century situation was informed by growing understandings of the way in which the concept is rooted in a particular history of thought that developed in the intervening period. They also offered a critical discussion of the available evidence pertinent to use of the identification amalala prior to the rise of the Zulu kingdom.

APC Masters student Rehana Odendaal presented the paper "'You Never Hear People Speak About it You Know': Remembering and Forgetting the Trojan Horse Shootings 1985-2014 in a session on 'Memory Wars'". Drawing on her Honours research, Odendaal argued that through the process of public memorialisation which has taken place around the Trojan Horse Shootings, a number of political and personal narratives linked to the event have become obscured and essentially forgotten. The paper used the memorial split which exists between the memorialisation of the Athlone Trojan Horse Shootings on 15 October 1985 and the Crossroads Trojan Horse on 16 October 1985 to problematise how historical events are constructed and related. This stimulated an interesting discussion around how memorial spaces are used to claim specific social and political identities and questioned how such claims have an impact on our remembering of those “bystanders” who are affected by acts of politically-motivated violence but fall out of the oppressor-resistor binary. 

The conference also saw the launch of volume 6 of The James Stuart Archive of Recorded Oral Evidence Relating to the History of the Zulu and Neighbouring Peoples  (JSA) (University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2014). Since the publication of volume 1 in 1976, the JSA (volumes 1 to 4 edited by Colin Webb and John Wright; volumes 5 and 6 edited by John Wright) has established itself as the main source on the history of the KwaZulu-Natal region in the two centuries before the establishment of European colonial rule. 

In his address at the launch, John Wright, who is an Honorary Research Associate in the APC, highlighted the point that there is much more work to be done in the Stuart publication project. He and Mbongiseni Buthelezi, Senior Researcher at the APC, are currently editing volume 7 of the JSA, which will contain the izibongo, or praises, omitted from volumes 1 to 6. 

John Wright also drew attention to the central role of the APC in promoting research into the biographies of the interlocutors with whom Natal colonial official James Stuart conversed in the early years of the 20th century. He discussed the historiographical significance of the term izithunguthu, a word applied by one of Stuart’s oldest interlocutors to oral historians like himself who, at this time, were experiencing the partial erasure of the histories which they remembered and their replacement by written histories. The term was taken up into the title of the colloquium on southern African pasts before the colonial era which the APC held from 16 to 18 July.

Read the text of John Wright's address HERE.

The Archival Platform, a joint APC-Nelson Mandela Foundation initiative based in the APC, also had a strong presence at the conference. A special event: “Memo for Mthethwa: the SAHS calls on the Minister of Arts and Culture to address challenges in the archives” brought Jo-Anne Duggan, director of the Archival Platform into conversation with Julie Parle, former acting –chair of the National Archives Advisory Council (NAAC). The conversation focused on Duggan’s summary of the findings detailed in the Archival Platform’s State of the Archives analysis and Parle’s questions about what historians could expect from the national archival system and how they could “make their voices heard”. The session attracted a much larger than expected audience – evidence of SAHS long-standing interest in and concern for archives. 

Duggan, Parle and speakers from the floor raised a number of issues, expressing their anxieties about vulnerable records, insufficient funding and human resources, the problem of tracing records in the face of inadequate, or non-existant inventories or finding aids, the failure to address the challenges of digitisation and the precarious status of archives in institutions such as universities.   Several speakers indicated that they were impatient with, or losing hope for any action from government, suggesting that there was no political will or appreciation for the value of records as  resources for the study of history or in support of an accountable government. Parle, whose term of office on the NAAC appears to have been deeply frustrating, noted that one of the consequences of poor record keeping is the potential for miscarriages of justice. Another more militant speaker from the floor called on the audience to support a call for a class action against public archives, arguing that national and provincial government’s neglect of archives put them in breach of archival legislation and of the Constitution.
 
On a positive note, and in response to a speaker’s comments on the lack of media interest in and attention to archives, reference was made to a new initiative, The Conversation, which is intended to provide a platform through which researchers attached to academic institutions, can share information and ideas with the public through various social media platforms, including a website. It was agreed hat this might provide a channel for historians to draw attention to the significance of archives as a critical resource for research.  The Archival Platform is currently pursuing this option.