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This paper takes as its subject the fact that digital archival production – of existing materials and born-digital records – has collapsed in contemporary South Africa, and it offers some arguments about why it is important to reverse this process. The current situation can be explained by the fact that digitisation has been widely described as a form of intellectual imperialism, a characterisation that echoes influential strands of postcolonial theory and South African nationalism. The reasons for this unusual understanding lie in the difficult history of the last major digitisation effort, the Mellon-funded collaboration between Aluka and the Digital Imaging Project of South Africa (DISA). The paper reconstructs that project in some detail in an effort to understand what went wrong, arguing that in place of the geopolitical explanation that many participants adopted, most of what went wrong was much more narrowly technological. Yet, the same technological issues have already been great assets to South African researchers, holding out the promise of solutions to some pressing local difficulties of digital preservation and archival assembly. The last section of the paper takes up some of the reasons why scholars need to take digital record-keeping much more seriously than they have to date – chief amongst these being the fertile possibilities of forgery and impersonation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In a committed anti-apartheid publisher like Ravan Press in the 1970s and 1980s, the selection of authors was usually based on political or ideological grounds as well as the quality of their writing. As a result, Ravan was harassed and subjected to censorship. But to what extent did Ravan's social position and capital inform the author-publisher relationship? One relatively well-known case is that of Miriam Tlali, described as 'the first black woman to publish a novel in South Africa'. Tlali's account of her relationship with Ravan has been described in very negative terms. However, her account changed over time and is not supported by other evidence. Based on archival sources and interviews, this article will explore the relationship between Tlali and Ravan Press, raising questions of the politics and power dynamics of literary publishing in the apartheid period. The article also raises questions about the methods used to write literary history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The title of this essay is taken from the 1975 Penguin African Library revised edition of Antony Martin's 'Minding Their Own Business: Zambia's Struggle against Western Control'. This article exploits archival evidence to highlight Penguin's distinctive attitudes to and practices within the southern African market, particularly, but not exclusively, the major market of South Africa. The Penguin African Library itself contained not only many volumes on South Africa, but also pioneering works on Portuguese decolonisation, the Rhodesian question, and on South-West Africa. This article adopts the framework of a three-phase development in the motivation behind publishing for Africa: tutelage, radicalism and marketisation. The first of these phases is represented by the Penguin (Pelican) West African (later simply African) Series; while the later Penguin African Library illustrates the radicalism of what was then the editorial standpoint. These African Library mass-market paperbacks had a double intent: to inform western readers about a region which, from the early 1960s, dominated international headlines, and to reflect back to increasing numbers of self-aware and educated Africans aspects of the region hidden from them or about which they wished to know more. The degree of opposition to and compromise with colonial and apartheid regimes forms the subject of discussion, as do the reactions in the UK to continuing operations in the region, particularly after the expulsion of South Africa from the Commonwealth in 1961, the adoption of UN Resolution 1761 in 1962, and the growth of the Anti-Apartheid Movement during the 1960s and 1970s. Penguin faced not just the commercial challenge of possibly losing an important export market but also the ethical dilemma posed by a belief in the transformational power of knowledge through the availability of good books at reasonable prices. The article concludes with a discussion of the resolution of that challenge and dilemma subsequent to the takeover of Penguin by Longmans in 1970, and the onset of the final phase of marketisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1780s, French merchants developed a systemic trade in slaves to and around the Cape of Good Hope. But a decade later the trade passed into the hands of a cosmopolitan group of merchants at Mozambique. These men developed various strategies as a way of raising the funds needed to acquire, outfit and insure slave ships. They particularly built up trade links with agents and partners in several ports of the western Indian Ocean and the south Atlantic. This article concentrates on the organisation and operation of the slave trade at Mozambique Island in the decade around 1800. It is particularly concerned to examine the role in this trade on the part of merchants at the Cape, who serviced slave ships and bought their human merchandise, and who mounted their own expeditions in search of slaves. It ends by suggesting ways in which new directions in the trade, following its piecemeal abolition, and the growing dominance of Brazil, contributed to long-term developments in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article proposes two features without which social science research work in the Centro de Estudos Africanos (CEA – Centre for African Studies) at Eduardo Mondlane University during the period 1976–86 cannot be fully grasped. First, the conflicting, ambiguous and productive interactions between the Mozambican state's attempts to construct socialism, and the strategies of the South African ‘empire’ in trying to build a hegemonic bloc in the region, particularly in its radical form of maintaining an economic and military destabilisation policy in Mozambique. Second, the conflicting, ambiguous and productive interactions between the CEA the Mozambican state, and among CEA researchers, over their research interests, research priorities and primary political loyalties. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 1969, Portugal and South Africa signed an agreement that enabled the apartheid regime effectively to extend its tentacles of empire over the proposed dam at Cahora Bassa. Located in the heart of central Mozambique, far from the South African frontier, the dam became a security project masked as a development initiative. Cahora Bassa, including the massive lake behind the dam, rather than becoming the multi-purpose dam originally envisaged by Portuguese planners, was transformed into a strategic security project designed to blunt the advance into southern Mozambique of the liberation movement the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (Frelimo) and, by extension, its ally the African National Congress (ANC). In this way, the colonial regime and its apartheid ally hoped to prevent attacks against Mozambique's major colonial urban areas of Beira and Lourenço Marques. From Pretoria's perspective, it was preferable to fight the ANC in central Mozambique rather than along the Limpopo river – southern Mozambique's frontier with South Africa. The hydro-electric project at Cahora Bassa also ensured South Africa's energy security. The 1969 agreement guaranteed that 82 per cent of the electricity generated there would be exported to South Africa at well below the world price. This article examines the vital role played by South African interests in financing, constructing, and defending the dam site at Songo, which resulted in the dam's deterritorialisation and allowed South Africa to incorporate Cahora Bassa as an outpost of empire. It also explores the ways in which Pretoria held the dam hostage after Mozambique became independent, as part of a broader process of destabilising its socialist neighbour to the north. Even after the dismantling of the apartheid regime in 1994, the new ANC-led government resisted efforts to abrogate the colonial agreement, and Songo remained a foreign enclave. Although Mozambique regained sovereignty over the dam site in 2007, even today, most of the electricity generated by Cahora Bassa is exported to South Africa, at a price that remains a state secret. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

African Mirror, the South African-produced and world's longest running commercial newsreel, was a regular item in cinema programmes and on other exhibition circuits in South Africa from its inception in 1913. The importance of cinema newsreel has been recognised for its role as propaganda during wartime and its presence in everyday life, reaching wide audiences with representations of national and public events. The digitisation of Movietone, Pathé and other well-known newsreels has enabled scholars to access archive material and has generated detailed histories of newsreels' impact in the public realm. This article extends this analysis toAfrican Mirror. The archive of the South African newsreel constitutes a substantial body of film, produced weekly over 70 years. Its operations extended across southern and eastern Africa, as well as North Africa during the Second World War. It was screened on cinema circuits to mainly white, but also Indian and ‘coloured’ South African audiences, the latter a category which incorporated some African audiences, and its footage was supplied to newsreels such as Pathé. This article highlights the similarity ofAfrican Mirrorto other newsreels and argues that it played an important role in promoting ‘South Africanism’ in the first decades of Union. Providing an overview of its coverage of South African events, it details the conditions of production, distribution and exhibition ofAfrican Mirror, and describes how it became established as part of the cinema-going experience in South Africa between 1913 and 1948. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The archives of two German Lutheran mission societies hold rich data on, and interpretations of, Transvaal history. But this material cannot simply be mined for ‘facts’. It was assembled in a process of interaction in which the perceptions and values of both missionaries and converts were challenged, culturally translated and modified. The missionaries' views and perceptions became entangled with the thought patterns of colonial society and were challenged by African converts. This article argues that, in order to engage effectively with this archival material it is necessary to grasp the history of the missionaries, the dialogues they engaged in and the social transformations they experienced. It also suggests that the mission archives provide insights into the nineteenth-century history of marginal social strata in both Germany and South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Political centralisation in the area of present-day North West Province in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has conventionally been associated with a broad identity, homogenised as ‘Tswana’. This article reviews the archaeological and oral evidence of identity from about ad 1500 through to the 1820s and elaborates a discussion of identity that focuses upon the cumulative accretion of at least two layers of people whose cultural and historical affiliations are traced to ‘Nguni’-speakers east of the escarpment. In the early nineteenth century attributes of these prior identities were still materially expressed. Consequently, political centralisation did not take place within a singular homogenous ‘Tswana’ identity, but with reference to complex historical layering in the region. It is argued that the retention of elements of an earlier ‘Nguni-ness’ among the Tlokwa, for example, was due to their role as specialist metal producers in the regional economy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article considers the social hinterland of leading members of the ANC underground who, raised in the Transkei, came of age in the late 1970s. Earlier in the twentieth century, South Africa's Native Reserves were wellsprings of nationalist leadership. Prominent ANC leaders shared a similar regionally-focused set of familial, educational and professional connections that vaulted them to the centre of the nationalist movement. These regional networks remained important feeders for the ANC into the later apartheid era. Chris Hani recruited his leading cadres from a small pool of young men educated in Transkei's élite schools and earmarked for senior posts in the Bantustan bureaucracy. This social proximity of élite ANC cadres and leading Bantustan functionaries made the boundaries between opposition and collaboration permeable. While the ANC's attempted alliance with KwaZulu chief minister Buthelezi failed, hardening the distinction between militant nationalism and apartheid-corrupted ethnicity, its relationship with the Transkei's Bantu Holomisa is a counter-example of the blurring of these political identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

2007 was the 'Year of Luthuli' in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Throughout the year, events commemorating the 1967 death of the former President-General of the ANC celebrated his life and contribution to the liberation of South Africa. A year later, during the presidential succession battle various politicians paid tribute to Luthuli, positioning themselves as heirs to his political and moral legacy. Celebrated as a 'founding father' of South Africa's modern democratic state, who had led the ANC during some of the most dramatic events in its history and as Africa's first Nobel Peace Prize winner, Luthuli's name conjures awe and respect. Unsurprisingly, Luthuli has been assigned a prominent place in the process of nationalist myth making. This article is inspired by Michel Rolph Trouillot's, Silencing the Past: Power and Production of History (1995) and highlights the contrast between the present lionisation of Luthuli as a nationalist founding figure and the effective silencing of his stance on the shift to violence soon after the launch of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) in December 1961. I argue that a silence in the archives is not primarily a result of poor health or the banning orders imposed on Luthuli, but rather of his embarrassingly persistent espousal of non-violent methods that led to his marginalisation as a leader of the ANC in the early 1960s. An examination of Luthuli's columns in the Golden City Post reveals that he argued against a turn to violence before and after the ANC's decision to prepare for the armed struggle and MK's launch. Luthuli's continued public advocacy of only non-violent methods discomfited many of his contemporaries. Consequently, his ability to lead the liberation movement was compromised and diminished significantly from 1961 until his death six years later. Narratives by former MK operatives affirm Luthuli's prescience regarding the strategic ineffectiveness of violence. Finally, the article demonstrates the inaccuracy of the self-justifying portrayals of Luthuli as a supporter of the armed struggle by both nationalist historians and politicians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The social pension was introduced in South Africa in 1928, but eligibility was extended to African South Africans in 1944 and to African Namibians only in 1973. Botswana introduced its own social pension scheme in 1996, and Lesotho followed as recently as 2004. Initially conceived as a welfarist programme to provide social assistance to 'poor whites', South Africa's social pension was later exploited for a complex combination of political objectives, including the control of African urbanisation and maintenance of rural labour reserves (Bantustans) in South Africa, and 'winning hearts and minds' during South Africa's occupation of Namibia. Since the accession to power of the ANC and SWAPO governments in the early 1990s, equity concerns and antipoverty objectives have dominated. Racially discriminatory payment levels were declared unconstitutional and have been eradicated in both countries. While concerns have been raised about the fiscal sustainability of the social pension, its future as a social welfare programme in southern Africa and elsewhere depends mainly on political commitment from governments and taxpayers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on recent re-interpretations of literacy that see it as a socially-embedded process rather than a neutral skill, this article examines how a group of Swiss missionaries spread a set of Protestant reading practices and texts in late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury south-east Africa. I argue that their experience at home led them to view literacy as a revolutionary tool for the transformation of society. I then look at the different contexts in which Africans adopted the skills of literacy, and the different meanings with which they imbued the practice. The fourth section ties these ways of reading to the interpretation of texts and local networks of power. The final part examines literacy as a sign and source of power employed by a new class of national politicians. Here, I draw parallels between the missionaries' objectives in pursuing literacy and those of the mass literacy campaigns organised by Frelimo in Mozambique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]