Norman Etherington,’Barbarians Ancient and Modern’, American Historical Review 116, 1 (2011).
from the intro:
Two noteworthy historical controversies have proceeded in parallel fashion since the early 1980s without the protagonists in either debate being aware of the other. One concerns warfare and migration among early-nineteenth-century African societies and their contribution to the ethnic divisions that flowered under South Africa’s apartheid regime. The other concerns the role of external barbarians and their migrations in the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the founding of enduring European nations. Unquestionably these controversies differ substantially, both in the issues at stake and in their temporal and geographical scale. But they raise similar questions about concepts of tribes, barbarians, and mass migrations formulated by previous generations of historians. Nineteenth-century knowledge about the precolonial societies of Southern Africa was generated by methodologies and assumptions now known to be flawed, with many of them reflecting the legacy of classical studies in the West. Major errors stemmed from the application of inappropriate European models to African societies—models that owed much to the heritage of classical learning about Romans and barbarians. In a parallel development, encounters with exotic peoples on imperial frontiers since the sixteenth century had been reshaping classical scholars’ concepts of ancient barbarians. The result was a complicated process of intellectual interchange: modern conquerors viewed their newly acquired subjects and colonial neighbors through the distorting prism of Roman history, while historians of the classical world continually reinterpreted ancient sources in the light of present-day imperial experience. The critique of evidence developed during the debate on the so-called mfecane in South Africa applies with equal validity to the study of barbarian movements and identities in European late antiquity. It is perhaps not surprising that the two controversies developed along similar lines in the late twentieth century, when old certainties about colonial others and the nature of ethnicity were subjected to unprecedented scrutiny. The central points at issue transcend the disciplinary boundaries of both fields of study, bedeviling historical scholarship wherever national or ethnic movements claim connections to long-past migrations, vanished peoples, or defunct polities.
Filed under: Ancient History, Empire, Scholarship and insights, Southern Africa | Closed
Frauen in den deutschen Kolonien expands the breadth and depth of our understanding of women’s roles and positions in the colonial endeavor. This edited collection builds upon previous works that have dealt exclusively with German women active in the colonial field.[1] It goes beyond previous books, however, by bringing together the experiences of women, European and non-European, from across Germany’s overseas empire and the metropole into a single volume that covers not just the period of effective German colonialism but also the subsequent interwar period. The multifaceted comparative aspect of the collection offers the reader great potential to draw significant conclusions about the role of women in German colonialism.
Filed under: Empire, gender, Scholarship and insights | Closed
In The Deaths of Hintsa, Premesh Lalu argues that South African history remains trapped by colonial modes of thinking. As a necessary consequence, he claims that the field needs a post-colonial moment, suggesting that historians engage with a deconstructionist strand of subaltern studies so as to sever the field from colonial epistemologies. In this essay, I review the book and then locate Lalu within a broad overview of South African historiography in order to offer a critical response to his proposals. I highlight radical and social historians because I think that they have more to offer the field today than Lalu is willing to admit. In a final section, I briefly explore Jonathon Hyslop’s idea of an epistemological middle ground and Clifton Crais’s engagement with subaltern studies. Both scholars provide useful alternatives to Lalu’s work. I conclude that South African history does not need Lalu’s post-colonial moment because it would privilege creativity at the expense of coherence and promote dismantling at a time when we may want to seek some stability.
Filed under: postcolonialism, Scholarship and insights, Southern Africa | Closed
carel boshoff III
This is one of the more readable pieces I’ve read on the recent passing of Professor Carel Boshoff, the visionary Afrikaner nationalist.
Paradox trailed Carel Boshoff through his whole life. Before he devoted himself to building an all-white paradise, he worked for three years as a missionary in Soweto, the vast black labor reserve south of Johannesburg. Only some 2 or 3 percent of his neighborhood’s residents were Christians then, he told me when I interviewed him in Orania a year and a half ago. He longed to share with the rest the light of divinity.
But at the same time, through the 1980s, Boshoff — who married Verwoerd’s daughter Anna — was rising through the ranks of the conservative Afrikaner intelligentsia. This group worried about the preservation of the Afrikaner language and traditions after the anticipated end of white rule, as well as whites’ physical safety. Steeped in the writings of communitarian philosophers and early Zionists, Boshoff began to float the idea of a much tinier Afrikaner state, one which whites dominated not by forcibly subduing a black majority but by barring blacks altogether. In 1990, his dream became a reality when an old mining town in the country’s sparsely populated northwest went onto the auction block. Boshoff and a crew of supporters bought the whole thing, requiring the handful of blacks who lived there to leave. (Boshoff didn’t apologize for the relocations: “When you buy a used car,” he told a reporter, “you don’t buy the car’s occupants.”) He explained to the curious press that Orania was a “radical solution to a radical problem,” claimed 12,000 families had signed up to settle there, and predicted the number would expand exponentially.
From the pen of Eve Fairbanks, writing for Foreign Policy.
Filed under: media, Political developments, Southern Africa | Closed
The oral narratives and personal accounts given by the /Xam of the northern Cape, and recorded by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd, have played a key role in interpretations of rock art and of southern San culture, recent and ancient, generally. However, the validity of the account that relates the /Xam texts to supposed shamanic practices is an issue requiring attention. The texts are open to other readings that do not support the notion that ‘altered states’ are central in the thought of diverse San groups. Insofar as its methods and ‘neuropsychological’ foundations produce an account of a unified and largely uniform San cultural identity, the shamanistic reading sacrifices historicity and a more nuanced understanding of San pasts and lived experiences. As an alternative to positivist and structuralist accounts, phenomenology is an approach that is of relevance to under-explored issues regarding the writing of San (cultural) histories by archaeologists, anthropologists and other scholars.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights, Southern Africa | Closed
This article identifies a theoretical nexus between indigeneity and liberal democracy in three post-colonial contexts. Like democracy, the politics of indigeneity asks questions and makes assumptions about where power ought to lie and how it ought to be shared in relation to political inclusion and national sovereignty. The interaction of indigeneity with democracy highlights the limitations of liberal theory as well as the opportunities it provides to meet indigenous claims and conceptions of justice. Exploring the ideological tensions and commonalities between democracy and indigeneity allows a contrast, in comparative context, of the proposition that in Fiji, for example, democracy is “a foreign flower” unsuited to the local environment with the argument that liberal representative democracy can, in fact, mediate power in favour of an inclusive national polity.
Filed under: Australia, Pacific, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Saree Makdisi, ‘Riding the Whirlwind of Settler Colonialism’, Victorian Studies 53, 1 (Autumn 2010)
a bit of it:
The structural logic leading to such catastrophes is precisely what Belich aims to uncover and retrace, though his book is ultimately more interested in colonial triumph than in the human catastrophes that have always accompanied it (of which, to be fair, it is well aware). And Replenishing the Earth accomplishes its task very ably. Belich’s book, from which any scholar interested in British or Anglophone culture in the nineteenth century has much to learn, reminds us of the virtues of transcending the limits and scale of the nation-state and opening our interpretive horizons to read the world in as wide a frame as possible. It resituates Victorian Britain in its global context and also adds much needed socioeconomic contextualization for the recent interest in transatlantic studies. It is also a valuable addition to the growing body of work on settler-colonial societies, though it would have been more valuable still had it done more to engage with some of the current scholarship in the wider field, for example, the work of Patrick Wolfe, or the recent books of Lorenzo Veracini, Gershon Shafir, Nur Masalha, Gabriel Piterberg, and others, which explore the last surviving example of classic settler colonialism in the world, namely the ongoing Zionist project in Palestine (which, curiously, is the only major case of settler colonialism that the book does not discuss or even mention in passing, despite its contextual discussions of French Algeria, Russian Siberia,and Chinese Manchuria).
Filed under: Empire, Scholarship and insights | Closed
…he seems to be claiming that ‘Indigenous Title’ is somehow different from ‘Aboriginal Title’ with the difference being that Indigenous Title is both an individual right as well as a communal one.
turtletalk, on Louison v. Ochapowace Indian Band #71
Filed under: Canada, law, Scholarship and insights | Closed
griquas
griquas learn from voortrekkers:
Die Griekwavolk se droom om sy geskiedenis en erfenisterreine te bewaar, is lewendig en daarom het hulle heelpad per trein van die Noord-Kaap gekom om te kom kyk hoe dinge by die Voortrekkermonument gedoen word.
and long for zulu-esque memorialisation:
“Maar ons wil onder dieselfde wet as al die ander swart stamme val en dieselfde behandeling kry wat die Zoeloes byvoorbeeld kry.”
van Beeld.
Filed under: media, Southern Africa | Closed
