Search

Copyright of Comparativ: Leipziger Beiträge zur Universalgeschichte und Vergleichenden Gesellschaftsforschung is the property of Leipziger Universitaetsverlag GmbH and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article offers information on historical ecology and state formation in southern Africa topics discussed include human interaction with the environment; climate change affecting ecology; and civilization in terms of Crafts and technologies.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, southern Africa’s white colonists used the word ‘Caffre’ to characterise the region’s black majority as an inferior race of African origins. While this historical context explains why the term ‘Caffre’ is considered hate speech in post-apartheid South Africa, the word’s history dates back to the beginning of Europe’s engagement with the region in c. 1500. Based on primary sources in multiple languages, this article explores this deeper history and shows that Europeans imbued the word ‘Caffre’ with racialising ideas from the start. The Portuguese first racialised the term by linking it explicitly to black skin colour in the 16th century. In the 17th century, Cape Colony officials reinforced its racialisation by creating a ‘Hottentot–Caffre’ race dichotomy, a racial divide of long-term significance in southern African history. By the end of the 18th century, most European naturalists argued that ‘Caffre’ identified a people racially distinct from ‘Hottentots’ and ‘true Negroes’, an idea that shaped missionary approaches to Bible translation in the region until the mid 19th century. Moreover, naturalists rationalised these alleged racial differences by placing the origins of the ‘Caffres’ outside the African continent, thereby effectively defining them as a superior race of non-African provenance. The word’s deeper history, therefore, exposes a major transformation in meaning over the course of the 19th century: whereas the word ‘Caffre’ represented a superior race of non-African origin in 1800, it described an inferior race of African origin in 1900. Because the radical change in meaning parallels the process of black political and economic disempowerment in southern Africa, the article suggests that the term became directly implicated in and transformed by this process and, for this reason, should be viewed as a valuable historical record of the establishment of white supremacist rule in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Southern Africa has experienced highs and lows in its efforts towards democratisation. Following political independence of Southern Africa states, the germination of democratisation was a rather slow process. A brief period of multi-party democracy introduced through pre-independence elections quickly dissipated and was replaced by one-party, one-person and, in some instances, military regimes. This era also coincided with the height of the Cold War globally and the heyday of apartheid in which inter-state conflicts had intensified. Since the late 1980s and early 1990s, a new dispensation has emerged wherein multi-party democracy has re-emerged in the context of the post-Cold War and post-apartheid dispensation, marked by relative peace dividend. However, democratisation in Southern Africa remains a mixed bag today. Some countries have not yet experienced the democratic transition. Others have managed to transition from one-party, one-person and military regimes to multi-party democracies. In various others, there are signs of reversal of democratic gains. This paper reviews the state of democratisation in Southern Africa with a view to understand why the regional record is so uneven across countries that form the Southern African Development Community (SADC). While the article presents a regional snapshot, it also presents comparative insights from Botswana and Lesotho. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There is a growing corpus of social-ecological thinking in the field of resilience studies.One example is the pioneering work of Gunderson and Holling (2002) on panarchy. The work has had a significant impact on disciplinary collaboration between the natural and human sciences. It appears that the discipline of History can benefit particularly from these interactions - particularly witthin the framework of panarchy theory. In the front loop of panarchy, Gunderson and Holling have safely ensconced a "memory" feeder, a progressive trend leading towards the conservation and responsible exploitation of natural resources. In the panarchy model this phase is especially evident before the onset of almost inevitable creative destruction/collapse that paves the way for renewal to the back loop. The understanding of "memory" to the panarchy cycle focuses on institutional memory, traditional knowledge and memorialised experience of resource management. Special attention is given to "memory" to that it creates opportunities for historical thinking. By introducing a discourse on historical consciousness, the concept of memory moves more in line with formal historical thinking. The meaning of "creative destruction"/collapse is therefore categorised to terms of Rüsen's (2013) conception of sense-making of the crisis phenomenon. Interpretive historical thought can then find space in panarchy theory. At toe same time the use of memory, from an ecological Md social perspective could create a better understanding of indigenous and/or local knowledge systems related to the past. to the final section there is a brief discussion on toe Iron Age to southern Africa (from about 200 to 1850CE), focusing specifically on the proto-urban development of Mapungubwe and Great Zimbabwe.The exposition is consciously opaque. The objective is to encourage the reader to think about the interpretation of water history in precolonial southern Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ethnographic data of the Bleek-Lloyd archive pertaining to the ǀXam Bushmen (San) of the Karoo have been marshalled to great effect in developing understandings of Bushman rock art throughout southern Africa, with implications for archaeological interpretations of hunter-gatherer rock arts worldwide. Rock art from their homelands, however, has received comparatively little attention, and obvious historical content—which would tie the art to the socio-cultural milieu of the Bleek-Lloyd informants—has occasioned relatively little comment. This paper returns to one site (the Strandberg) known to have been a prominent feature in the cultural landscape of the ǀXam to explore the historical imagery present there, examining the ways in which this art demonstrates the ongoing vitality of certain aspects of ǀXam life in the face of the dramatic socio-cultural changes experienced by these groups from the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. The paper investigates the range of potential authors for the art, and looks at the context of its production within the expansion of global markets, violent interactions and shifting subsistence options that characterized the late nineteenth-century Northern Cape. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented to the issue of the journal that discusses topics such as the murder of nun Sister Aidan Quinlan, electoral reform in Southern Rhodesia, and civic participation in the Vaal Triangle, South Africa.

An introduction is presented to articles within the issue on the theme of the British Empire and South African imperialism in Southern Africa during the 20th century with topics including rural landscapes, the geography of power and social and intellectual networks.

This article argues that empire should be understood not only as geography or network, but also as extractive, hierarchical and stratified relations of knowledge, where the modern museum emerged as one of its key institutions and primary sites. The focus of this examination of empire as epistemology is the process of the return of the remains of Klaas and Trooi Pienaar to South Africa for reburial in 2012, seen in relation to other return processes under way from South African museums to the Northern Cape and Namibia. These are analysed through a wider understanding of South Africa's multiple colonialisms, as colonised and coloniser, and in relation to the history of the Trans-/Garieb transfrontier region, which, by the early 20th century, had been marked by colonial violence and the dispersal of its people across colonial borders. The plunder of graves in this region conducted in the name of scientific collecting formed the basis of the South Africanisation of science, through which the flows of human remains and artefacts began to be directed to South African museums in the service of a special South African concentration on ‘living fossils’, as they competed with their European counterparts. Through an insatiable and competitive collecting history at this time, the remains of so-called primitive people and their artefacts and records ended up in museums and archives in Vienna. They also became the founding collections of at least two museums in South Africa, the newly formed McGregor Museum in Kimberley and the modernising South African Museum in Cape Town. This article tracks the experience, debates and challenges of the repatriation of the remains of the Pienaars as a process of ‘rehumanisation’, disinterred, transported and stored as artefacts, and returned as the remains of citizens and subjects of history. It asks what implications this repatriation holds for the future for the modern museum itself, marked as it has been by a ‘denial of coevalness’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Godfrey Nangonya hardly figures in any liberation narrative in southern Africa. Born and educated in the border region of Namibia/Angola, he gravitated to Cape Town and the ferment of radical, nationalist and pan-African politics in the late 1940s. Departing for Angola, he joined militants who founded the MPLA. He was imprisoned twice under the Portuguese and, because of the complications of plural political affiliations, twice after Angolan independence. This article explores Nangonya's transnational political, nationalist and carceral journeys, and especially the years 1974–75 when, as SWAPO's liaison officer with UNITA in southern Angola, he was ‘sacrificed’ by the Namibian liberation movement. It examines the open and volatile southern Angolan frontier region in a time of expanding historical possibilities for national liberation, a space that had to be forcibly stabilised, whether as a buffer zone for the South African military, a zone of passage for SWAPO guerrillas, or sovereign territory for the MPLA. The new Cold War dynamics soon resulted in a hardening of political boundaries and the narrowing of nationalist alignments and internal debates. Nangonya was exiled by a Namibian nationalism and its history that was purged of its plural alternative narratives, and which is only now slowly opening up to debate. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented in which the authors discuss various reports within the issue on the topic of national liberation in southern Africa.

Copyright of Historia is the property of Historical Association of South Africa and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper investigates the reluctance of the nineteenth-century Zulu people of southern Africa fully to embrace firearms in their war-making, and posits that this was an expression of their military culture. Not that the Zulu could not appreciate the battle-winning potential of the new military technology, or were dissuaded from increasingly determined efforts to obtain large quantities of firearms from traders. Yet, because firearms were prestigious weapons, monopolized by the elite, or professional hunters, Zulu commoners had little opportunity to master them and continued to rely instead on their traditional weapons, particularly the stabbing-spear. Even so, cultural rather than practical reasons were behind the rank and file's reluctance to upgrade firearms to their prime weapon. Employing recorded contemporary Zulu oral evidence, praise songs, and statements of prisoners-of-war, to unpack the Zulus' own perception of their heroic military culture, it is argued that, because of the engrained Zulu cultural consensus that only hand-to-hand combat was appropriate conduct for a true fighting-man, killing at a distance with a firearm was of inferior significance, and did not even entail the ritual pollution that followed homicide and the shedding of human blood. Only close combat was worthy of praise and commemoration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, tourism has attracted the attention of many scholars in development literature. In Botswana, as elsewhere, the dominant theme in the literature has, invariably, been the emphasis on the argument that the tourism industry is a conduit of development of the rural economies and also enables developing countries to participate in the global economy. While this is not in dispute, the literature is silent on the history of the development of the tourism industry in Botswana with specific reference to the impact on the nascent industry of the southern African liberation wars in the Chobe area. The article argues that the political violence resulting from the liberation wars between 1966 and 1980 delayed the development of the Botswana tourist industry as the Chobe tourist destination was turned into a theatre of war. In having to pay more attention to the security threat, the Botswana government gave less attention to tourism development. Meanwhile, the local and international media made headlines about the war incidents in the Chobe District, painting a gloomy picture on the potential of the industry and deterring tourists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Forced immigration from the Southwest Indian Ocean marked life at the Cape of Good Hope for over a century. Winds, currents, and shipping linked the two regions, as did a common international currency, and complementary seasons and crops. The Cape's role as a refreshment station for French, Portuguese, American, and Spanish slave ships proved particularly important in the development of a commerce linking East Africa, Madagascar, and the Mascarenes with the Americas. This slave trade resulted in the landing at the Cape of perhaps as many as 40,000 forced immigrants from tropical Africa and Madagascar. Brought to the Cape as slaves, or freed slaves subjected to strict periods of apprenticeship, these individuals were marked by the experience of a brutal transhipment that bears comparison with the trans-Atlantic Middle Passage. The history of the Middle Passage occupies a central place in the study of slavery in the Americas and plays a vital role in the way many people today situate themselves socially and politically. Yet, for various reasons, this emotive subject is absent from historical discussions of life at the Cape. This article brings it into the history of slavery in the region. By focusing on the long history of this forced immigration, the article also serves to underline the importance of the Cape to the political and economic life of the Southwest Indian Ocean. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The first Southern African Historical Society meeting outside the Union or Republic of South Africa is an opportunity to look wider than national histories, and forward as well as back. This paper raises nine points for the production of public as well as scholarly history. The need for historical studies to burst out of national barriers. What is or has been Southern Africa as a region? The need for caution in using overly-fixed categories of identity such as ethnicity. The need to embrace and historicise the remote past of ‘prehistory’. The importance of Eastern African and Indian Ocean connections. The continuing salience of imperial as well as colonial history. The importance of ‘native agency’ in brokering mass Christianity and modern society. Seeing history as multiple-biography and even daring to write semi-fictionalised biography. The need for responsible use of entertainment media in publicising scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article offers information on the June 27-29, 2013 24th Biennial Conference of the organization Southern African Historical Society (SAHS) at the University of Botswana (UB) in Gaborone, Botswana. The conference theme was "All for One, One for All? Leveraging National Interests with Regional Visions in Southern Africa." Speakers noted include scholars Jane Carruthers, Neil Parsons, and Saul Dubow.

Historian Jane Carruthers's June 28, 2013 keynote address at the Southern African Historical Society (SAHS) 24th Biennial Congress at the University of Botswana in Gaborone, Botswana is presented. She discusses the relation of history to nationalism, regional identity in southern Africa, and the development of transnational historiography.

Much is known about the economy and spatial organization of Zimbabwe culture entities of Mapungubwe, Great Zimbabwe and Khami but less in terms of their origins and relationship with each other. Based on little tangible evidence, it is believed and widely accepted that the societies based at Mapungubwe ( ad 1220-1290), Great Zimbabwe ( ad 1300-1450) and Khami ( ad 1450-1820) rose, developed and eclipsed in tandem. A recent reexamination of the relationship between these settlements and related ones using local ceramics, imported artefacts, stone architecture and Bayesian modelling suggests this may not have been the case. The synthesis proffered revelations which temper the widely accepted assumption that sociopolitical complexity in southern Africa began in the Shashi-Limpopo Valley before anywhere else in the region. Firstly, there are numerous Zhizo and Leopard's Kopje sites that predate Mapungubwe but contain prestige goods and stone structures dating from the late first millennium ad. Secondly, material culture studies and modelled radiocarbon dates indicate that Great Zimbabwe evolved out of Gumanye while Khami, like Mapungubwe, may have developed out of the Leopard's Kopje. In fact, Great Zimbabwe was already a place of importance when Mapungubwe collapsed. Thirdly, Khami and Great Zimbabwe overlapped for over a century, before the latter buckled. Therefore, the evolution of sociopolitical complexity in southern Africa may have followed trajectories that are different from what the current understanding implies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay is concerned with photographs produced in the context of applying for and issuing passports, permits, passes and identity certificates in Southern Africa in the 1920s and 1930s. On the one hand, it explores photography as part of a history of a modern state practice in order to shed light on the technologies used to regulate mobility and assess the place of citizens and subjects. On the other hand, the essay shows how men and women applying for identity and travel documents used portrait photography as a genre and means to challenge discriminating notions of nationality and citizenship enforced by the segregationist state. Instead of interpreting the photographs as signature images of processes of identity formation and identification, the argument developed here aims at sketching the place of visuality within contested regimes of personhood. The essay argues that within the bureaucratic practices considered, two distinct indexical registers emerged that regulated the ways in which colonial citizens and subjects came into view: photography and fingerprinting. But while the general argument accounts for the alignment of photography with the instrumental power of the state apparatus, the close-up engagement in the photographs uncovers the possibilities for counter-narratives and alternative subjectivities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction to the journal is presented which discusses several topics explored in the issue, including the notion of "work ethic" in Botswana, South African Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng, and xenophobic attacks against immigrants in South Africa.

The article considers the impact of new digital technologies and the internet on the process of commemorating the past and memorialising the dead in Southern Africa, with some comparative reference to the developed world context. The theoretical framework is inspired by Wulf Kansteiner's contention that collective memory is the result of the interaction between three overlapping elements – the media of memory, the makers and the consumers or users of memory. It is argued that internet-based commemoration represents the third successive and concurrent phase in the culture of collective remembrance in Southern Africa, following pre-colonial indigenous or vernacular memory practices and colonial forms of ‘institutionalised’ memory sites. Web-based commemoration is represented as a potentially new form of vernacular memory practice which collapses Kansteiner's groups of makers and users of memory. Selected case studies, mostly from South Africa, will be critically examined and their openness as a democratic space for negotiating the memory of the past assessed. The article maintains that new technologies, although currently still in their infancy, are bound to have an increasingly profound influence on commemoration and the formation and transfer of collective memory in Southern Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is provided in which the editor discusses various articles within the issue on topics related to Southern Africa including public concern about Satansim in South Africa during the 1980s, the Red Line border that segregated Namibia, and organised crime in the Cape Flats, South Africa.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles within the issue including a special section on topics of religious biography in Southern Africa, a section on the social impact of HIV/AIDS, and the cultural impact of Nyasa migrants on Salisbury, Rhodesia.

An introduction is presented in which the editors discuss articles within the special section on topics of religious biography in Southern Africa arising from the 2010 conference entitled "Transcending Boundaries: Biographical Research in Colonial and Postcolonial African History."

This introduction draws attention to the value of a parallel reading of the separately authored articles which follow. It shows how a consideration of historical and archaeological research across the regional divide of south-east and north-west southern Africa unsettles a number of disciplinary orthodoxies, notably notions of distinct Nguni and Sotho identities. Complex political arrangements relating to differential access to economic resources resulted in the active maintenance, within political configurations across the two regions, of distinctly different identities. These were often rooted in earlier identities and histories and then glossed in new ways. Our collaboration focuses on how the past was reworked in the light of new political-economic relations. We use the notion of ‘cultural inheritances’ to refer to ideas about the past and past identities and practices which enjoyed a certain continuity over time even as they were refashioned under changing conditions. We identify the operation of shared logics across the region which governed how this happened. While our work emphasises the significance of relationships between political dynamics and cultural inheritances at the level of the polity and its divisions, we also discuss their operation in the more intimate settings of households and homesteads. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the establishment of social categories in the increasingly centralised polities of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries east of the Drakensberg. It looks at the ways in which cultural and historical materials were used to shore up ideological claims and how they set limits on what could be claimed. Rulers manipulated and managed pre-existing ideas about origins, affiliations and cultural inheritances, as did those who resisted domination. The discussion reveals tenacious continuities over time of certain elements of cultural practices and understandings of origins, and the modification of others. When read alongside the article by Simon Hall, this points to the existence across a wide region of a shared cultural logic governing processes of political assimilation, incorporation, centralisation and expansion. The article further draws attention to the way in which congealed ethnographic stereotypes skew interpretation of the historical evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For the first time in more than two decades, historians and archaeologists are beginning to research the making of collective identities in southern Africa's pre-colonial past in some detail. Long-established notions about these identities are once again coming under critical scrutiny. Building on earlier research with Carolyn Hamilton on the historical meanings of the term amalala, this article looks at how Alfred Bryant examined the idea of who the ‘Lala’ were and where they came from in a series of influential works first published in the early twentieth century. In brief, Bryant saw the Lala as a group of related tribes that constituted one of several offshoots of the ‘Nguni’ peoples who supposedly migrated from the interior of southern Africa into what are now the KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape regions after about 1500. This article argues that there was very little basis for these notions in the earlier literature, and that Bryant's ideas were mainly the product of his own particular interpretation of scrappy and contradictory information derived from conversations with unnamed Africans. Such evidence as exists on the subject today lends itself to a very different set of interpretations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents reflections on the 23rd biennial conference of the South African Historical Society, entitled "The Past and its Possibilities: Perspectives of Southern Africa," held at the Howard College campus of the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa from June 27-29, 2011. It considers topics including anti-apartheid movements, South Africa in the Cold War, and transnational history. Academia, democracy, and archival resources in South Africa are also explored.

An introduction is presented which discusses the 23rd biennial conference of the Southern African Historical Society (SAHS), entitled "The Past and its Possibilities: Perspectives of Southern Africa," which was held at the Howard College campus of the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa from June 27-29, 2011.

A bibliography on the subject of Southern Africa is presented which include the articles "The Zimba, the Portuguese, and other cannibals in late sixteenth-century Southeast Africa," by Eric Allina, "Discovering Jews in Southern Africa: a critical approach to the comparative method," by Booker T. Alston, and "Contested paradigms of 'viability' in redistributive land reform: perspectives from southern Africa," by Ian Scoones and Ben Cousins.

The article discusses the preservation of historical sources and archival materials related to liberation struggles in east and southern Africa in the latter half of the twentieth century. It examines the management of these archives by political parties, such as the African National Congress (ANC) of South Africa and the Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU PF). Topics include the role of national archives in managing these sources and the physical security and digitization of archival materials.

One of the most important and complex aspects of Nadine Gordimer's thought is her ongoing attempt to find a voice that is appropriate to describe the experiences and histories of Southern Africans, who have been historically oppressed, dispossessed and exploited. The objective of this paper is to show how, in July's People (1981), Gordimer argues for the ability of the disempowered subaltern to "speak back" through the reversed relationship between July, the Native servant, and his European master and mistress, the Smales. Taking Spivak's theory of the Subaltern as a framework, this paper revisits the thorny issue of whether or not the subaltern can speak for himself against his master. The paper argues that Gordimer, by writing July's People, attempts to recover the silenced voice of the "subaltern" and repressed "colonial subject," the Black Servant, July, and , thus empowering the "subaltern" in such a way that might make the marginalized subaltern visible under colonial and postcolonial rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the Chinese presence on the African continent being perceived and portrayed as a new global phenomenon there has been a concomitant, albeit sporadic and nuanced, emergence of an aversion to things Chinese, gradually permeating popular consciousness. In a post-colonial world these anti-Sinitic or Sino-phobic sentiments are crudely reminiscent of the late nineteenth century colonial cries of the "yellow peril", which culminated in acts of exclusion and extreme prohibition that singled out and targeted the Chinese in the various colonies across the Atlantic and Pacific including South Africa. This article, however, proposes to trace the genesis of some of anti-Sinicism to a pre-industrial period by considering developments in colonial Southern Africa. It will show how in the early Dutch settler and British colonial periods at the Cape, when the number of Chinese present in the region was miniscule, negative feelings towards the Chinese as the "other" were already apparent and evident in the reactions to them prior to the arrival of the large numbers which came to America, Australasia and Africa from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers involved or interested in the 500 Year Initiative (FYI) gathered at the University of Cape Town in June 2008 to explore how different disciplines engaged in historical studies may better communicate and collaborate within and between each other. Appropriately titled 'Continuing Conversations at the Frontier', participants in this conference challenged themselves to cross the theoretical and methodological borders separating archaeology, history, geography, anthropology and linguistics, in order to understand how and under what influence modern southern African identities have taken shape over the past 500 years. These conversations made it clear that new insights are not only reliant on new data, but that it is equally important to expose our methodologies and processes of gaining understanding. In addition to confronting disciplinary boundaries and methods, social and spatial frontiers were key loci for discussion, although it became apparent that historians and archaeologists have approached frontiers in different ways. We briefly explore the roots of these approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the trajectory of the discipline of history from the inception of the Southern African Historical Society in 1965 up to the present time. The Society has arranged regular biennial conferences at which the Society's President has generally addressed the gathering on an aspect of history that not only reflects the position of the President, but also summarises the state of the profession as a whole. Using these addresses as benchmarks, and combining them with statements from the Presidents of the American Historical Association at similar gatherings, a number of articles in the South African Historical Journal and significant recent publications, the author points to new directions in historical studies in southern Africa, identifies fresh fields of endeavour and argues for greater interdisciplinary tolerance and collaboration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the changing political significance of Christianity in the interior of southern Africa during the 1850s, focusing primarily on the views of Tswana rulers, converts and others within their communities, and secondarily on attempts by European missionaries to reconcile their service both to African communities and to European expansion, which compelled them to articulate a rationale for their civilising mission. The article historicises the process whereby Christianity lost its initial universalistic ideals and became politicised by African-European competition, with divine sanction being claimed by one side or another. That process was accompanied by considerable debate and doubt: the separation of believers from unbelievers, faith from works and souls from bodies was far from clear or certain. Although African converts would ultimately continue to pursue the promise of equality offered by Christian teachings, they would do so more as individuals than as intact African communities, surrendering their bodies to European rule while entrusting their souls to the care of God. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regional institutions increasingly shape economic and political development in Southern Africa. In this review, I discuss the historical background of this region and examine the major regional institutions that address key common concerns of economic development, trade, regional migration, and shared natural resources. I also discuss the challenges for, and to, regional integration, including competition among different regional organizations, poverty, war, political instability, and the developing HIV/AIDS pandemic. This research can be understood as illustrative of general research on regions. In particular, it shows how political leaders have created new sets of institutions to deal with important regional concerns, how regional institutions have affected economic development, and how the development of regional organizations is the outcome of regional politics as well as the interaction of national-level decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on research conducted in the borderlands of South Africa, Mozambique and Swaziland. It proposes that sound, song and the affect of music-making represent a much under-utilised historical research resource, particularly in contexts of spatial and social rupture. Through the revitalisation of two traditional mouthbows and the jews harp - instruments once played by young Nguni women while walking, but remembered now by elderly women only - it explores music's capacity to operate as both historical text and oral testimony, providing a focus for mobilising collective evocations of self and place, and aimed at raising the level of the voices of a community whose livelihood and sociality are at variance with broader socio-economic and environmental development processes in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Southern African climatic change research is hampered by a lack of long-term historical data sets. This paper aims to extend the historical climate record for southern Africa to the semi-arid area of Namaqualand in the Northern Cape province of South Africa. This is achieved through extensive archival research, making use of historical documentary sources such as missionary journals and letters, traveller's writings and government reports and letters. References to precipitation and other climatic conditions have been extracted and categorised, providing a proxy precipitation data set for Namaqualand for the nineteenth century. Notwithstanding problems of data accuracy and interpretation the reconstruction enables the detection of severe and extreme periods. Measured meteorological data, available from the late 1870s, was compared to the data set derived from documentary sources in order to ascertain the accuracy of the data set and monthly rainfall data has been used to identify seasonal anomalies. Confidence ratings on derived dry and wet periods, where appropriate, have been assigned to each year. The study extends the geographical area of existing research and extracts the major periods of drought and climatic stress, from the growing body of historical climate research. The most widespread drought periods affecting the southern and eastern Cape, Namaqualand and the Kalahari were 1820-1821; 1825-1827; 1834; 1861-1862; 1874-1875; 1880-1883 and 1894-1896. Finally, a possible correspondence is suggested between some of the widespread droughts and the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the 25th biennial conference of the Southern African Historical Society, "Unsettling Stories & Unstable Subjects," held from July 1-3, 2015. Emphasis is given to topics such as historical periodization in Southern African historiography, rural health centers in South Africa, and the relationship between nationalism and archaeology.

Presents information on South African literature. Examination of brief life stories of semi-literate or illiterate black South Africans, and their relationship with apartheid; Political uses of South African autobiography.

Provides a geo-political perspective on how and why European colonists and their slaves displaced the Khoisan people from their lands. Analysis of strengths of settlers and indigenous peoples on the ground in frontier conditions; People's relationship to water and land; Europeans' disruptions of Khoisan patterns of life and destruction of their traditional societies.

Focuses on the book `Southern African Literature,' by Michael Chapman. Issues concerning the impossibility of writing literary history of Southern Africa; Reference value to scholars in writing histories; Author's suggestions on writing literary histories.

This paper outlines a new role for rock art in the writing of southern African history. The old view of the art as a pictorial record of Stone Age life needs to be discarded. What has been learned about southern African rock art has raised the status of its images from objects in need of explanation to evidence for historically situated social processes. These processes implicated not only the makers of the art but also neighbouring peoples with whom they interacted. The art became a site of struggle as 'egalitarian' values were eroded and shamans assumed political roles that included control of resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]