Fount of Deep Culture: Legacies of theJames Stuart Archivein South African Historiography

2003 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 87-106
Author(s):  
Benedict Carton
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
South African ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
Southern Africa ◽  
African History ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Interpretation ◽  
The Past ◽  
Deep Culture ◽  
The University

The 2001 launch of the fifth volume of theJames Stuart Archivereinforces this publication's reputation as a mother lode of primary evidence. TheArchive'sexistence is largely due to the efforts of two editors, Colin De B. Webb and John Wright, who transformed a tangle of notes into lucid text. They deciphered the interviews that Natal colonist James Stuart conducted with a range of informants, many of them elderly isiZulu-speaking men. Transcribed by Stuart between the 1890s and 1920s, these discussions often explored in vivid detail the customs, lore, and lineages of southern Africa. Although references to theArchiveabound in revisionist histories of southern Africa, few scholars have assessed how testimonies recorded by Stuart have critically influenced such pioneering research. Fewer still have incorporated the compelling views of early twentieth-century cultural change that Stuart's informants bring to a post-apartheid understanding of South Africa's past.Well before the University of Natal Press published volume 5, the evidence presented in theArchivehad already led scholars of South African history into fertile, unmarked terrain. One example of groundbreaking data can be found in the statements of volume 4's master interpreter of Zulu power, Ndukwana kaMbengwana. His observations of the past anchor recent studies that debunk myths surrounding the early-nineteenth-century expansion of Shaka's kingdom. Ever timely, the endnotes in volume 5 discuss these reappraisals of historical interpretation and methodology. Editor John Wright elaborates in his preface: “By the time we picked up work on volume 5, we were starting to take note … that oral histories should be seen less as stories containing a more or less fixed ‘core’ of facts than as fluid narratives whose content could vary widely.”

Textual Incest: Nathaniel Isaacs and the Development of the Shaka Myth

1992 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 411-433 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan Wylie
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South African ◽  
Southern Africa ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Harold Bloom ◽  
The Past ◽  
Anxiety Of Influence ◽  
Storm Center ◽  
Verbal Construction ◽  
The University

Literary practitioners have long been, often uncomfortably, aware of the ambivalently fruitful and constraining rhetorical influences of the past. Writers successively utilize or rebel against traditional tropes, poetic conventions, and narrative norms, balancing cultural depth against individualist innovation, acceptability against rejection, public intelligibility against the opacity of private connotation. By such gestures towards the traditions, literature challenges, upholds, or leaves unquestioned the moral, political, and cultural pre-suppositions of its day.South African historiography is less aware than it might be of its textuality, in this sense, of its immersion in a similar “anxiety of influence,” as Harold Bloom has termed it. Little attention has been paid to its rhetorical lineaments and heritage or to the ways historians have read, used, and departed from one another. This is dramatically illustrated by the case of the historiography of Shaka Zulu (assassinated in 1828). Nowhere else has such poverty of evidence and research spawned such a massively unquestioned, long-lived, and monolithic “history.” Only in the last decade has the legendary, verbal construction of the Shaka figure been seriously questioned; only in 1991, at an important colloquium at the University of the Witwatersrand, was something approaching an academic consensus reached that themfecane—the notion of Shaka's Zulus as the “storm-center” of a sub-continental explosion of autophagous, black-on-black violence—was no longer a credible vehicle for understanding the early nineteenth century in southern Africa.

scholarly journals The public and private life of Sol Plaatje

Historia ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Sabata-mpo Mokae
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
South African ◽  
Private Life ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Black African ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The University ◽  
Excellent Resource

There has been an upswing in attention to South African biography in the past few decades, with a welcome trend towards remaking or revising the canon of important figures from the South African past. This has included edited collections of the works of prominent individuals, and notable among these have been early-twentieth century black African politicians and writers. Historical Publications Southern Africa (renamed from its previous moniker, the Van Riebeeck Society) has published four edited collections of the writings of such individuals since 2008, including Isaac Williams Wauchope, Richard Victor Solope Thema, and A.B. Xuma. A Life in Letters, a collection of Solomon T. Plaatje's correspondence, is the fourth such volume in just over a decade. There are 260 letters, written from 1896 to 1932, included in the book. Most are in English, but some are in Setswana, Dutch/Afrikaans, and a few are in German. Although a number of the letters are from the collections of the Cullen Library at the University of the Witwatersrand, the reviewer counted twenty-seven different collections across three continents. The book is thus an excellent resource not only for historians, but also for students and the general public who now have access to a wide range of Plaatje's thoughts, opinions, and emotions that are evident in his letters.

Oral Evidence in a Pseudo-Ethnicity: The Fingo Debate

1995 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 359-368 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy J. Stapleton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South African ◽  
Southern Africa ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
African History ◽  
Cover Story ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Illegal Activities ◽  
Oral Evidence

There is a disturbing trend emerging in South African history. Unquestioning acceptance of African oral tradition threatens to become a requirement of politically correct scholarship. The African voice knows all. Julian Cobbing has been sharply criticized for ignoring oral evidence in his revision of early nineteenth-century South African history. Cobbing claims that African migration and state formation in the 1820s was caused by the illegal activities of colonial slave raiders who covered up their operations by claiming that the Zulu kingdom under Shaka had laid waste to the interior of southern Africa. This cover story was incorporated into South African history as the mfecane (or crushing) and served to justify white supremacy by portraying blacks as inherently violent. Carolyn Hamilton attacks Cobbing for ignoring the African voice which allegedly supports the orthodox mfecane by placing Shaka at the center of events. In response, Cobbing claims that the largest record of Zulu oral evidence was distorted by James Stuart, the colonial official who collected it at the turn of the last century. Although Elizabeth Eldredge rejects the Zulucentric mfecane in favor of a broad compromise theory based on environmental and trade factors plus the activities of a few Griqua labor-raiders on the High veld, she accused Cobbing of developing a Eurocentric hypothesis which robs Africans of initiative within their own history. More critically, Jeffrey Peires, whose work on the Xhosa is deeply rooted in the conventional mfecane, describes Cobbing as “a reactionary wolf dressed up in the clothing of a progressive sheep” and implies that his ideas are nothing short of racist.

Learning Zulu

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Sanders
Keyword(s):  
Language Learning ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
South African ◽  
Press Coverage ◽  
African History ◽  
African Culture ◽  
The Past ◽  
Correct Form ◽  
Linguistic Purism

When this book's author began studying Zulu, he was often questioned why he was learning it. This book places the author's endeavors within a wider context to uncover how, in the past 150 years of South African history, Zulu became a battleground for issues of property, possession, and deprivation. The book combines elements of analysis and memoir to explore a complex cultural history. Perceiving that colonial learners of Zulu saw themselves as repairing harm done to Africans by Europeans, the book reveals deeper motives at work in the development of Zulu-language learning—from the emergence of the pidgin Fanagalo among missionaries and traders in the nineteenth century to widespread efforts, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, to teach a correct form of Zulu. The book looks at the white appropriation of Zulu language, music, and dance in South African culture, and at the association of Zulu with a martial masculinity. In exploring how Zulu has come to represent what is most properly and powerfully African, the book examines differences in English- and Zulu-language press coverage of an important trial, as well as the role of linguistic purism in xenophobic violence in South Africa. Through one person's efforts to learn the Zulu language, the book explores how a language's history and politics influence all individuals in a multilingual society.

The Politics of Chiefs and Commoners before the 1830s

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raevin Jimenez
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South African ◽  
State Level ◽  
Temporal Context ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
African History ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Level Analysis

The field of pre-1830 South African history has been subject to periodic interrogations into conventional narratives, sources, and methods. The so-called mfecane debates of the 1980s and 1990s marked a radical departure from characterizations of warfare in the interior, generally regarded in earlier decades as stemming solely or mostly from the Zulu king Shaka. Efforts to reframe violence led to more thorough considerations of political elites and statecraft from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century but also contributed to new approaches to ethnicity, dependency, and to some extent gender. A new wave of historiographical critique in the 2010s shows the work of revision to be ongoing. The article considers the debates around the wars of the late precolonial period, including unresolved strands of inquiry, and argues for a move away from state-level analysis toward social histories of women and non-elites. Though it focuses on the 1760s through the 1830s, the article also presents examples highlighting the importance of recovering deeper temporal context for the South African interior.

scholarly journals The Idea of Russian Symbolism about the Synthesis of Cultural Forms in the Context of Postmodern Culture

ICONI ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 126-136
Author(s):  
Nadezhda A. Tsareva ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
Information Technologies ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
The Past ◽  
Russian Symbolism ◽  
Postmodern Art ◽  
Cultural Forms ◽  
Synthetic Media ◽  
Integrity Of Life

The relevance of the topic is due to the attention to trends in the development of culture. The synthesis of cultural forms is one of the important factors in the dynamics of culture. The teaching of Russian symbolism about the synthesis of cultures was analyzed in the scientifi c literature of the entire twentieth century. The novelty of the research is to compare the idea of art synthesis in the early twentieth and twenty-fi rst centuries. Two aspects of the idea of synthesis are considered: 1) the relevance of the idea of art synthesis in the postmodern era; 2) music and the visual series as organizing centers of art synthesis in the era of information technology. The purpose of this article is to examine the teaching of Russian symbolism about the integration of various forms of art and the features of synthesis in the postmodern era. The idea of integrating cultural forms was one of the key elements in Russian symbolism at the beginning of the twentieth century and was interpreted as a real prospect for the development of culture. In a broad sense, synthesis in symbolism meant the integrity of life, the integration of all spheres of human activity, the “organic connection” of cultures of the past and present. The synthesis can be realized on the basis of the art of symbolism, which can create a new culture. The synthesis of arts was understood as the beginning of the formation of a new culture. The core of the synthesis of arts, the symbolists saw music. Postmodern art is characterized by synthetism. Computer and information technologies create new forms of synthetic media art. The video series becomes the center of integration construction of postmodern audiovisual culture forms. The symbolist idea of the synthesis of arts as the beginning of cultural change in the postmodern era remains a utopian project. But the creation of new art forms in postmodern culture i s based on integration. New technologies are becoming a factor that determines the specifi cs of the synthesis of arts and infl uences the dynamics of culture. Both in Russian symbolism and in modern art, the goal of art synthesis is to present an integral image of the world, to form a system of worldview attitudes.

scholarly journals History, memory and reconciliation: Njabulo Ndebele’s The cry of Winnie Mandela and Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela’s A human being died that night

Literator ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
R. Goodman
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Human Being ◽  
African History ◽  
African Society ◽  
South African Society ◽  
The Past ◽  
Public Figures ◽  
Ethical Complexity ◽  
Narrative Techniques

This article deals with two texts written during the process of transition in South Africa, using them to explore the cultural and ethical complexity of that process. Both Njabulo Ndebele’s “The cry of Winnie Mandela” and Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela’s “A human being died that night” deal with controversial public figures, Winnie Mandela and Eugene de Kock respectively, whose role in South African history has made them part of the national iconography. Ndebele and Gobodo-Madikizela employ narrative techniques that expose and exploit faultlines in the popular representations of these figures. The two texts offer radical ways of understanding the communal and individual suffering caused by apartheid, challenging readers to respond to the past in ways that will promote healing rather than perpetuate a spirit of revenge. The part played by official histories is implicitly questioned and the role of individual stories is shown to be crucial. Forgiveness and reconciliation are seen as dependent on an awareness of the complex circumstances and the humanity of those who are labelled as offenders. This requirement applies especially to the case of “A human being died that night”, a text that insists that the overt acknowledgement of the humanity of people like Eugene de Kock is an important way of healing South African society.

THE NORTHEASTERN FACTOR IN SOUTH AFRICAN HISTORY: REEVALUATING THE VOLUME OF THE SLAVE TRADE OUT OF DELAGOA BAY AND ITS IMPACT ON ITS HINTERLAND IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY

2020 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
LINELL CHEWINS ◽  
PETER DELIUS
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South African ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
African History ◽  
Trading System ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Trading Systems ◽  
Mascarene Islands

AbstractThis article, largely on the basis of in-depth research in archives in Lisbon, provides an account of the trading systems linking Delagoa Bay to its southern hinterland. Within this framework we argue that the role of the slave trade has been previously underestimated. There is evidence that the booming demand for slaves in Brazil and on the Mascarene Islands hit this region with force. The scale of that trade is difficult to establish because it was, by and large, illicit and so not systematically recorded. There are indications of a significant trade prior to 1823 and a substantial one after that date. There is also evidence that northern Nguni groups, including the Zulu kingdom, were deeply involved in this trading system. The main sources of captives, however, were militarily weak societies, like the Tembe, which lived closer to the Bay.

The Reconstruction of Memory at Constitution Hill

2008 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHURCHILL MADIKIDA ◽  
LAUREN SEGAL ◽  
CLIVE VAN DEN BERG
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Political Leader ◽  
Constitutional Court ◽  
African History ◽  
Constitutional Democracy ◽  
South Africans ◽  
The Past ◽  
Nelson Mandela ◽  
Former Prisoners ◽  
The Web

Abstract The Old Fort Prison was Johannesburg's main place of incarceration of prisoners for eight decades, including during the apartheid era. Virtually every important political leader in South African history, including Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Winnie Mandela, and Fatima Meer, as well as scores of ordinary South Africans caught in the web of colonial and apartheid repression, were imprisoned there. Today, this prison complex is home to South Africa's Constitutional Court. Constitution Hill has brought former prisoners to “map” their memories of the site. They also host public dialogues on the injustices of the past, as typified by the prisons at Number Four, as well as people's understanding of their constitutional needs and rights, and their experiences of the country's young constitutional democracy.

The Roots and Varieties of Political Conservatism in India

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-217 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christophe Jaffrelot
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
Land Reform ◽  
Caste System ◽  
Reform Movements ◽  
The Past ◽  
Congress Party ◽  
Political Conservatism

A country that has not gone through a revolution, India has been the crucible of several reform movements as early as the nineteenth century. But none of them intended to break with the past. They even sometimes prepared the ground for revivalism. In parallel, Hindu traditionalism developed in reaction to social and cultural change. In the twentieth century, these schools of thought found political expressions in the Congress party where they inhibited the fights against the caste system and land reform. These trends continued after 1947, in reaction to Nehruvian views, till conservative Congressmen created the Swatantra party and then the Congress (O).

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