Five Hundred Years Rediscovered

In the age of the African Renaissance, southern Africa has needed to reinterpret the past in fresh and more appropriate ways. The last 500 years represent a strikingly unexplored and misrepresented period which remains disfigured by colonial/apartheid assumptions, most notably in the way that African societies are depicted as fixed, passive, isolated, un-enterprising and unenlightened. This period is one the most formative in relation to southern Africa’s past while remaining, in many ways, the least known. Key cultural contours of the sub-continent took shape, while in a jagged and uneven fashion some of the features of modern identities emerged. Enormous internal economic innovation and political experimentation was taking place at the same time as expanding European mercantile forces started to press upon southern African shores and its hinterlands. This suggests that interaction, flux and mixing were a strong feature of the period, rather than the homogeneity and fixity proposed in standard historical and archaeological writings. Five Hundred Years Rediscovered represents the first step, taken by a group of archaeologists and historians, to collectively reframe, revitalise and re-examine the last 500 years. By integrating research and developing trans-frontier research networks, the group hopes to challenge thinking about the region’s expanding internal and colonial frontiers, and to broaden current perceptions about southern Africa’s colonial past.

Theory in Africa, Africa in Theory explores the place of Africa in archaeological theory, and the place of theory in African archaeology. The centrality of Africa to global archaeological thinking is highlighted, with a particular focus on materiality and agency in contemporary interpretation. As a means to explore the nature of theory itself, the volume also addresses differences between how African models are used in western theoretical discourse and the use of that theory within Africa. Providing a key contribution to theoretical discourse through a focus on the context of theory-building, this volume explores how African modes of thought have shaped our approaches to a meaningful past outside of Africa. A timely intervention into archaeological thought, Theory in Africa, Africa in Theory deconstructs the conventional ways we approach the past, positioning the continent within a global theoretical discourse and blending Western and African scholarship. This volume will be a valuable resource for those interested in the archaeology of Africa, as well as providing fresh perspectives to those interested in archaeological theory more generally.

This volume critically examines sources of evidence and material from the archive that historically have been used to tell southern Africa’s pre-colonial story.

History in a Post-Truth World: Theory and Praxis explores one of the most significant paradigm shifts in public discourse. A post-truth environment that appeals primarily to emotion, elevates personal belief, and devalues expert opinion has important implications far beyond Brexit or the election of Donald Trump, and has a profound impact on how history is produced and consumed. Post-truth history is not merely a synonym for lies. This book argues that indifference to historicity by both the purveyor and the recipient, contempt for expert opinion that contradicts it, and ideological motivation are its key characteristics. Taking a multidisciplinary approach, this work explores some of the following questions: What exactly is post-truth history? Does it represent a new phenomenon? Does the historian have a special role to play in preserving public memory from ‘alternative facts’? Do academics more generally have an obligation to combat fake news and fake history both in universities and on social media? How has a ‘post-truth culture’ impacted professional and popular historical discourse? Looking at theoretical dimensions and case studies from around the world, this book explores the violent potential of post-truth history and calls on readers to resist.

This volume contributes rich, new material to provide insights into indigenous responses to the colonial empires of Great Britain and Germany (Namibia) and explore the complex intellectual, cultural, literary, and political borders and identities that emerged across these spaces.

This scholarly account traces the emergence of the Zulu Kingdom in South Africa in the early nineteenth century, under the rule of the ambitious and iconic King Shaka. In contrast to recent literary analyses of myths of Shaka, this book uses the richness of Zulu oral traditions and a comprehensive body of written sources to provide a compelling narrative and analysis of the events and people of the era of Shaka's rule. The oral traditions portray Shaka as rewarding courage and loyalty and punishing failure; as ordering the targeted killing of his own subjects, both warriors and civilians, to ensure compliance to his rule; and as arrogant and shrewd, but kind to the poor and mentally disabled. The rich and diverse oral traditions, transmitted from generation to generation, reveal the important roles and fates of men and women, royal and subject, from the perspectives of those who experienced Shaka's rule and the dramatic emergence of the Zulu Kingdom.

This book captures community voices in matters relating to their relationship with specific archaeological heritage sites and landscapes in the Limpopo Province of South Africa. Focusing on the stonewalled archaeological heritage associated with Venda speakers and the reburial in 2008 of human remains excavated by the University of Pretoria from the cultural landscape of Mapungubwe, the book attempts to establish why archaeology and cultural heritage conservation struggle for relevance in South Africa today. In articulating the relevance of archaeology in South Africa in particular and southern Africa in general and in the context of public or community-based archaeology, the book explores how communities and the public interact, use and negotiate with their pasts. The research critiques the notion of archaeological heritage conservation and attempts to understand cultural heritage conservation from the perspectives of descendant communities. The book further exposes the conflict between cultural heritage protection efforts and modern development and questions the role of such efforts, given the challenges of unemployment, social inequality and poverty in democratic South Africa. The book is also about community engagement in archaeology, specifically in matters relating to access to cultural heritage resources. This study suggests that there is scope for community archaeology to take centre stage and drive future directions in archaeology if archaeologists change their approach in dealing with communities. Researchers are challenged in this study to rethink the notion of heritage, to debate the objectives behind cultural heritage conservation and to critically reexamine the relevance of archaeology today. This study suggests that the conflicting positions between heritage managers, archaeologists and descendant communities may be resolved through sharing of 'tradition' with the 'present'.

This book explores how objects, landscapes, and architecture were at the heart of how people imagined outlaws and disorder in colonial southern Africa. Drawing on evidence from several disciplines, it chronicles how cattle raiders were created, pursued, and controlled, and how modern scholarship strives to reconstruct pasts of disruption and deviance. Through a series of vignettes, Rachel King uses excavated material, rock art, archival texts, and object collections to explore different facets of how disorderly figures were shaped through impressions of places and material culture as much as actual transgression. Addressing themes from mobility to wilderness, historiography to violence, resistance to development, King details the world that raiders made over the last two centuries in southern Africa while also critiquing scholars’ tools for describing this world. Offering inter-disciplinary perspectives on the past in Africa’s southernmost mountains, this book grapples with concepts relevant to those interested in rule-breakers and rule-makers, both in Africa and the wider world.

This volume provides new insights into the distinctive contributions that community archaeology and heritage make to the decolonization of archaeological practice. Using innovative approaches, the contributors explore important initiatives which have protected and revitalized local heritage, initiatives that involved archaeologists as co-producers rather than leaders. These case studies underline the need completely reshape archaeological practice, engaging local and indigenous communities in regular dialogue and recognizing their distinctive needs, in order to break away from the top-down power relationships that have previously characterized archaeology in Africa. Community Archaeology and Heritage in Africa reflects a determined effort to change how archaeology is taught to future generations. Through community-based participatory approaches, archaeologists and heritage professionals can benefit from shared resources and local knowledge; and by sharing decision-making with members of local communities, archaeological inquiry can enhance their way of life, ameliorate their human rights concerns, and meet their daily needs to build better futures. Exchanging traditional power structures for research design and implementation, the examples outlined in this volume demonstrate the discipline’s exciting capacity to move forward to achieve its potential as a broader, more accessible, and more inclusive field.