This eight-chapter volume has a daunting goal: to sum up what is known about pre-industrial South Africa. The task is gargantuan not only because the time span is vast, but also because academic history in South Africa, especially when written to attack or defend British and Afrikaner settlement, has tended to be ‘the continuation of politics by other means’ (p. 45). The authors had to reflect fairly and judiciously decades of contentious debates. They knew their hard work would be repaid by some indifference. (In South Africa today there isn't a great deal of interest in pre-industrial times.) In noting that there are other ways to tell stories about the past, including visually and by performance (as in San dances), the editors are making a broadly inclusive and even humble gesture, one aimed at kicking over the traces of South Africa's long, terrible heritage of separation and exclusion.
The book is advertised as having pulled together ‘four decades of revisionist scholarship’, a shorthand reference to research by a broad array of historians and archaeologists writing since the publication of the two-volume Oxford History of South Africa (OHSA) around 1970. The revisionists criticize this former classic for tending ‘not to recognize the fluidity of identities in Southern African history’ (p. xiii). The authors of the OHSA are also deemed to have paid insufficient respect to pre-industrial ways of thinking: dismissing, for example, the Xhosa cattle killing of 1857 as ‘pagan’ (p. 326), or claiming nationalistic achievements for the Sotho ruler Moshoeshoe. Further, the revisionists do not believe the British army can escape blame for having thrown the balance of power against African chiefdoms; in any case, ‘none of the objectives of colonialism were completely attained’ (p. xvii). And they think the ‘civilizing mission’ created the idea of the ‘barbarian’. The CHSA is thus the summing up of the ideas of a new generation, broadly defined, whose political context and experiences differ significantly from those of historians writing closer to the mid-twentieth century.
The authors caution against applying twentieth-century racial and ‘tribal’ categories and attitudes to previous centuries. They show pre-industrial ethnic boundaries constantly in flux. People who have believed the early nineteenth century rise of a Zulu empire (the ‘mfecane’) was a uniquely seminal event will be dissuaded here by the excellent narrative which ‘decentre[s]’ it. The Zulu kingdom led by Shaka was only one of three centralizing polities responding to the opportunities for wealth and conquest brought by increased contact with traders and settlers. The Gaza kingdom near Delagoa Bay and the Ndebele of the southern highveld possessed far larger spheres of influence. The identity of people living within them was, as elsewhere, opportunistic and thus constantly mutating.
The authors pay meticulous attention to regional differences, while integrating them into one coherent narrative. (The chapters are divided according to time and social processes rather than regions or ‘peoples’.) The British army may have defeated the Xhosa in the eastern Cape, but the Boer republics tell a different story. Afrikaner towns and farms in what became the Transvaal lived cheek by jowl with African polities in relationships of both conflict and mutual accommodation. African power ‘dictate[d]’ (p. 336) the nature of republican government and, even on an individual level, there were signs of Boers becoming acculturated. Similarly, Shepstone's highly influential native policy in Natal was essentially an accommodation to African power. The authors credit the British with ‘harden[ing] the hierarchies of race and strengthen[ing] the hegemony of white colonists’ (p. 314), suggesting that, left alone, Boers and chiefdoms might have worked out a modus vivendi. The interests of imperialists based in London aren't illuminated here, probably because settlers, who ‘ruthlessly minimized taxes on themselves’ (p. 365) and set about speculating in land, superseded them in local importance before the mineral revolution began.
All chapters are marked by a conspicuous effort to understand and to respect indigenous pre-industrial points of view. Sometimes the vast and hard-to-define object of this effort is called ‘consciousness’, a word that can appear quasi-theoretical, with a meaning that is not always clear. Assertions about pre-industrial consciousness tend to lack the humility and clarity that laudably characterize most of this book.
The volume is dedicated to Jessica Kuper, the commissioning editor, and it pays homage to her inadvertently, too. In her absence, Cambridge University Press has failed to maintain fastidious standards: the proofreading is, at best, haphazard, so that, to give only the most humorous of too many examples, a Great Trek leader has mutated from Louis to ‘Louise’ Tregardt, and Kas Maine has become the ‘biographer’ of Charles van Onselen (pp. 417, 418); the word ‘underpin’ is everywhere, promising a more certain connection between social conditions and events than is always proven; British colonial governors are called ‘masculinist’ (p. 257) as if that neologistic trait were unusual in the nineteenth century; dissertations are cited even though they've been published as books; a derogatory adjective like ‘shiftless’ is put in quotation marks when describing amaTonga but is naked before trekboers (pp. 343, 365); there is no bibliography or even a list of the excellent maps.
College professors wishing to challenge their advanced students would do well to assign a comparison of this book with Volume 1 of the OHSA. The exercise would illuminate the excruciating twists and turns in South African intellectual life, especially in the second half of the twentieth century, as professional historians grappled with a tough question: how did the ideals of the European Enlightenment manage to get so mangled at the southern tip of Africa?
