Into the Archive of South Africa’s Deep Past: Journeys and Arguments

22 Dec 2021
Book Cover courtesy of Cynthia Kros.
22 Dec 2021

Cynthia Kros and John Wright

Discussion of South Africa’s past before colonial times has often become the subject of fierce argument, both in public media and in the academic world. Lively exchanges on what many people call ‘oral traditions’ took place during a seminar given by Cynthia Kros and John Wright at the University of Johannesburg on 12 October. Their paper, with the title ‘Journeys into the archive of South Africa’s deep past: Introducing a book’, was given in the programme of seminars run by the university’s Department of Historical Studies. Kros and Wright are both honorary research associates in the APC. Here they give a report on the meeting, which was held online. A video recording of the seminar is available on the UJ Department of History's YouTube channel.

Introducing a book

Our main purpose in the seminar was to introduce a book titled Archives of Times Past: Conversations about South Africa’s Deep History. It has been edited by the two of us, together with our colleagues Mbongiseni Buthelezi and Helen Ludlow, and is due to be published by Wits University Press in February 2022. It is concerned with the times before the establishment of European colonial rule in southern Africa, and explores a range of materials that historians and others have used as sources for finding out about these times. Very little of this kind of research work has so far been done in South Africa. In our book, eighteen authors have contributed a total of 21 chapters, ranging in length from 2000 to 8000 words.

The editors encouraged the contributors to write in personal terms about how they had come to be explorers of the past before colonial times, and to describe how they had discovered a particular archive and the intellectual journeys they had made in working with it. Our idea was for the essays to give readers a sense of how challenging it is to do one’s own archival research, and how rewarding it can be. We hoped that the essays would stimulate readers’ critical thinking about how to interpret texts and other sources of evidence on times past. Our approach was strongly influenced by our own intellectual journeys over a dozen years as research associates in the APC.

We wanted some kind of coherence in the book’s geographical focus, so it made sense to point it towards research areas we were more rather than less familiar with, which meant KZN and Gauteng in first instance, extending out to neighbouring regions. These factors shaped our approaches to possible contributors. Almost all of them are well-known researchers in the disciplines of history, art history, and archaeology. Two are scholars of literature. Most of them are based in Gauteng, others in KwaZulu-Natal and in Cape Town, with one in Botswana and one in Britain. Nearly all of them are scholars who have focussed their research on aspects of the history of the Limpopo-Gauteng-Lesotho-KwaZulu-Natal region. In a book like this there is unfortunately no space for discussion of the relevant scholarship on all the geographical regions of southern Africa. But the discussions in the book will, we feel, be significant for critical thinking about the archive of history before colonial times in southern Africa more widely: it remains for scholars in other areas to take them up.

From the start we wanted a book aimed at readers with an interest of one kind or another in the field of southern Africa’s history before colonial times but not necessarily with an academic foundation in it. We were early on encouraged to pursue this line of writing and editing by educationists we spoke to in Cape Town and Johannesburg. So the book is intended primarily for a readership of senior undergraduates, educationists, teachers, museum and heritage practitioners, archivists, lecturers in history, archaeology and the social sciences and interested members of the general public.

Thinking critically about the archive

The book has three broad aims. First, to encourage its readers to think critically about where ideas concerning the past before colonial times come from. Second, to discuss productive new approaches to using archives pertinent to this past as sources of historical evidence. And third, to encourage readers to think about why people in South Africa have often used, and continue to use, references to the deep past to argue about public affairs in the present.

The book seeks to bring out the wide variety of traces of the past that historians of the times before colonialism use as sources of evidence. It’s a very large field: the book does no more than make a start on this for the particular regions we point at. In discussing the nature of this archive, we aim to bring out at clearly as possible the point that the materials which we call sources of historical evidence are themselves historical products. They are of the particular times and places in which they were produced. This is perhaps an obvious point for historians, but it is not necessarily one that our readers will have thought much about. The deeming of certain materials, and not others, as archival, that is, as collections that form possible sources of historical evidence, is also a historical product. Imagining these materials in the present as sources of evidence, and making them into collections, happens at particular times and in particular places, and is an ongoing process, and a contested one. It is therefore in its essence a political act.

To understand what the sources might have to say to us in the present, and why they say this rather than that, a basic job for the researcher is to examine the provenance of the source materials in detail: how they came into existence, who made them, when, where, why, under what circumstances. A central point that emerges from research into the provenance of the sources as that all the source materials on southern Africa’s past before colonialism that are available to us today are, in one way or another, to a greater or less extent, marked by discourses, on the part of black people and white people, that took place in colonial times about the African past. This is a fundamental issue in researching the past before colonial times: how can we see beyond shapings made in the colonial period to arrive at different – decolonial – readings in the present? This issue lies at the heart of all the essays in the book.

Academic debates and the school curriculum

In her introduction to the book presented at the UJ seminar, Kros reflected on remarks made by students with whom she has been working recently at UCT, concerning the current history curriculum in schools. To her surprise, these students reported that their experience of the curriculum had been that it was still deeply ‘colonial’. They noted that the sections on southern Africa still appeared to occupy a subordinate position to those on European or North American history. Kros’s surprise was rooted in what she now realises was a certain degree of complacency on her part, a realisation that was reinforced by a comment made by one of the participants in the UJ seminar.

Kros had read the statement in the Grade 10 curriculum on ‘Transformations in southern Africa after 1750’ many times. She had always thought that the statement reflected progressive academic representations of the history of African political entities from the mid-eighteenth to the late nineteenth century. But after talking to students she learnt that the statement was deeply problematic. It emphasises often abstract processes of political consolidation, dissolution and re-alignment in response to novel contemporary economic and environmental conditions at the cost of a narrative that brings out the role of Shaka as a historical figure. In the written paper circulated for the seminar, Kros had described the curriculum’s version as ‘progressive’ history. This earned a sharp retort from one of the participants. Indeed, before the intervention in the seminar, Kros had been musing over what made the approach adopted by the curriculum more ‘progressive’ than those that explain the rise of certain kinds of African polities, including the Zulu state itself, as the product of Shaka’s expansionism. Even in the course of the paper itself, Kros had confessed, partly because of her conversations with the students, to being haunted by the arguments made by some of the historians who had defended the concept of the mfecane at the height of the debates in the 1980s and early 1990s. These historians took the line that the notion of the mfecane acknowledged the agency of Africans, whereas the anti-mfecane position appeared once again to rob Africans of an acknowledgment of their initiative and innovation.

Clearly, there are a lot of problems with the way the academic debates have been, or, more to the point, have not been translated for the school curriculum. Kros tried to make this point in the paper, a point based partly on her long experience of high school teaching, first as a history teacher herself and then as a university lecturer supervising teaching practice, and partly on remarks made by university student interlocutors. But she did not intend, as may have come across in the seminar, to pass judgment on the intellectual capacity of high school teachers. She fully realised that for the latter a section in the Grade 10 curriculum represents a paltry few hours in their working life, and that they have neither the time nor, often, the resources to spend reflecting on it and conducting further research. Now, consider the following excerpt from the current Grade 10 curriculum and how it might strike high school history teachers:

‘However, historians are moving away from the idea of mfecane/difaqane, which is linked to outdated, colonial-era ideas of the centrality of the ‘wars of Shaka’. Wars and disruptions took place, but most of them were not caused by Shaka and the Zulu. This unit investigates the recent research and explores the ways in which historical myths are constructed’ (Grade 10 History. National Curriculum Statement (NCS) Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement, 16). https://www.sahistory.org.za/sites/default/files/archive-files/caps_fet_history_gr_10-12_web_1.pdf

Unless they had been present at the often fierce mfecane debates of the 1980s-and early 1990s or had received a thorough education in the relevant historiography, it is very likely that teachers would be extremely puzzled. They might well ask: who are these historians who are moving like herds in an annual migration over the plains away from the idea of mfecane/difaqane? What sense does it make to describe ideas that prioritise an African leader as ‘outdated’ and ‘colonial’? What are ‘historical myths’ and, if they are myths, what are they doing in a history curriculum?

In the UJ seminar, we heard quite clear echoes of the mfecane debates. Below, Wright mentions how some aspects of them were revived. His focus on one of the central arguments concerning the existence of ‘oral tradition’ is in itself evidence of how important it is to historians to establish what the nature of their sources is, and how much they can be relied upon or, if not reliable in any straightforward way, what it is they do offer us. Archives of Times Past is intended to offer readers insights, not only into how sources are made and re-made, but also about why a thorough understanding of them, a consciousness of their origins and their life-stories, matters so much to the contributors of the chapters and, ultimately, to wider publics.

Arguments

In his spoken introduction, Wright made a point of bringing up the issue, highlighted above, faced by all researchers into southern Africa’s past before colonial times: that the available sources of evidence are all marked in one way or another by influences emanating from discourses of the colonial period about that past. This line of argument led to some lively exchanges between Wright and Professor Jeff Peires, well-known historian of the Eastern Cape. For his part, Peires resisted the idea that all oral accounts of the past before colonial times are marked by colonial-era influences. He made the argument that he has made many times over the years, that there are important differences between what he calls oral histories and oral traditions. The former can be attributed to specific narrators speaking under specific circumstances. The latter emerge, in any particular society, from the convergence of numerous separate stories into a single agreed account whose core features are passed on from one generation to the next as traditional knowledge in processes that have remained independent of outside influences.

To this line of argument Wright responded by remarking that Peires’s line of argument has nothing to say about the political and social processes in which such convergences take place. Wright insisted in effect that that no oral accounts of the past can be seen as standing outside history, and as unmediated by the politics of the period between the moment when they were first enunciated and the moment when they were recorded.

To take this point further: we see Peires’ line of argument as pointing to a politically unlikely scenario. The implications of his position are that in African societies before colonial times there were certain discourses about the past that were more or less sealed off from all the other discourses about the past that were taking place. They formed a separate strand of narrating the past that later researchers labelled as ‘oral traditions’. But we would argue that in African societies the past was always an integral part of discourses in the present, or, to turn the point around, political discourses were imbued with discourses about the past.

Like historians before us – Etherington, Landau, Hamilton – we see African societies in the times before colonialism as having been relatively fluid in their composition, with people – whether as individuals, as families, or as larger clusters – frequently moving from one grouping to another. Groupings were in their nature organized to receive outsiders, by no means necessarily on equal terms but certainly on terms that allowed for the incorporation of newcomers in diverse ways and to varying degrees. In these circumstances both established groups and incoming groups might well have needed to make certain adjustments to their respective notions of the past – particularly about origins and about who was genealogically related to whom – to facilitate processes of incorporation. Such tweakings of the past were a subject of ongoing negotiation in public discourses in the present. We find it difficult to envisage accountings of the past that stood outside these discourses to any significant degree.

Coda

To return to the book that we are publishing. It is not just about ‘times past’. It aims to engage with the curiosity that many people today feel about the past before the colonial era.

From the essays in it we get a picture of how wide the range is of different archives that can be investigated for evidence on the history of southern Africa before colonial times. We also get a picture of the different kinds of work that researchers do in engaging with these archives. From the life-histories told by some of the contributors we get a picture of the variety of backgrounds that scholars engaged today in this field of research come from. This variety contributes to the intellectual interest of working in this field. Scholars bring a range of different experiences to bear, and ask questions of different kinds. They show that there is always something more to find out about the past before colonial times. And they show that, in these ‘post-colonial’ times, new ways of interpreting source material on this past are being developed.

Traces of the past that have survived into the present do not speak for themselves. Historians are reading old written accounts in new ways. Archaeologists are coming up with new interpretations of the material objects that they find. Historians and anthropologists are developing new ways of reading recorded oral histories, and of understanding spoken histories. There can be no fixed, ‘authentic’ view of the past before colonial times. The business of exploring the archive and of thinking about where it comes from is never finished.


Acknowledgements

Our thanks to Carolyn Hamilton and colleagues at the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative for ongoing - and always productive - conversations. Thanks also to the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences for a grant towards the publication of Archives of Times Past.