The history of Africa before the introduction of script has long presented methodological challenges and opportunities. These are, in several respects, different from the kinds of methodological issues that arise in relation to the history of periods when forms of written and oral discourse coexisted. Over the years these challenges and opportunities have been discussed in the pages of this journal. Digital technologies offer new possibilities to scholars working on the early history of Africa, an under-researched area, particularly in the southern parts of the continent. In light of these technologies, we consider afresh the challenges and opportunities of researching the history of times and places in which there was no contemporary writing, and then for some time, relatively little writing by indigenes.
We take the bulk of our examples from one region, centered in what is today the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal and provinces and countries, such as the Eastern Cape and eSwatini, bordering it, where the advent of written records occurred particularly late in time. It offers a case where important methodological issues emerge sharply because of local conditions and specific historical and political legacies. Some of these issues concern the shaping power of the colonial and subsequent production of knowledge and its effects. Others deal with how archives and sources are produced and reproduced. We suggest that these concerns are as germane, if less obvious, not only elsewhere in Africa and in relation to other former colonies, but in certain respects, for historical and humanities research, in and of itself, everywhere.
Using computing in the arts and humanities, in more recent years referred to as the “Digital Humanities,” is not a new phenomenon.Footnote 1 Defining the “Digital Humanities” is the subject of ongoing debatesFootnote 2 and scholars tend to focus on the practices of the digital humanities – employing digital technologies to facilitate humanistic inquiry – rather than a final definition.Footnote 3 What is clear is the ways in which the digital humanities literature identifies difficulties in how digital approaches and methods deal with the complexity of the human experience – the infinite variations in human responses, fluidity, incommensurabilities, contingencies, fuzzy chronologies, multiple geospatial referents, differences in orthographies, terms and spelling, etc. – the details of which are often the distinctive materials of qualitative historical research.Footnote 4 These difficulties occur in an especially pronounced way in relation to the history of remote eras for which there are no written sources from the time. These difficulties face scholars, in any areas of the humanities, who are prepared to relinquish the idea that the history of the subjects with which they are concerned began with colonialism.
In the first half of this paper we lay out key issues and challenges around sources and archive as they relate to remote pasts without contemporary written documents. Notable amongst these is the need to grapple with the history of the sources, produced as they are, later in time. We draw attention to what we consider to be pressing methodological requirements to look closely and critically at how material about the past has been framed, shaped and organized by, amongst other things, certain disciplines – in particular, but not only, archaeology and anthropology – and in a variety of institutions, many of them with deep colonial roots.
In the second part of the paper, we consider a range of digital interventions and affordances in relation to these issues and challenges.Footnote 5 In their 2017 explication of affordances in computer-mediated communication, Evans et al. draw attention to the relational aspect of the concept. Affordance, they stress, does not refer to the object (for example, the technological form), nor to a feature of the technology, nor to an outcome. Rather, the concept brings into focus the relationship between the technology and how it is used, and the way in which that relationship affects the outcome.Footnote 6 The methodological imperatives that we focus on in the first half of the paper are foundational to grappling with these relationships and with the significance of the interventions and affordances we discuss in the second half of the paper.Footnote 7 This paper is further a contribution to the emerging field of post-custodial praxis, much of which is driven less by concerns of preservation than by the activation of archive in public life – public life which includes, but is not limited, to academic activity.Footnote 8
In our discussion, we refer to the diverse range of sources pertinent to the early history of KwaZulu-Natal and surrounding regions, digitally convened by the experimental Five Hundred Year Archive (FHYA) project,Footnote 9 to illustrate our main arguments. The use of the case study enables us to bring into view the ways in which the technology is not simply something to be used by researchers, but itself influences users, variously nudging, prompting, and stimulating responses. In this way, we highlight the relationships that are central to the notion of affordance.Footnote 10
One of the main points that we make concerns the capacity of digital interventions to reframe a range of materials as archival, materials that historically have not been accorded the status of archive. We argue that the reframing assists researchers in moving beyond legacy institutional and disciplinary conventions and categories. We pay attention to the capacity for digital interventions not only to effect reframing but simultaneously also to keep track of the earlier history, arrangement, and rearrangements of the materials. This is important as it enables researchers to understand why some materials were preserved while many were not – as well as how earlier forms of framing ineluctably reshaped the materials.
Institutional and Disciplinary Framing, and the Making and Shaping of Records
In what is now KwaZulu-Natal and regions bordering it, all of the sources that researchers work with when enquiring into the long past before colonialism were produced – spoken, performed, documented, collected, recorded, or excavated – at the time of or after the arrival of the first Europeans in the 1800s. Much historical knowledge about the past was rapidly stitched up in imperial and colonial knowledge systems and recording practices, and subsequent disciplinary formations. This makes it especially challenging for those who are interested in the deep past to disentangle historically indigenous ideas and practices from latter-day European engagements with them.
Whatever the sources for the eras before writing, the conditions of their production as sources (almost always later in time than the subject being investigated) demand critical interrogation before such sources can be used. Here, we make a methodological distinction between the earliest production of an item and its designation later in time, and often in a different context, as a “source.” The significance of the history of sources is increasingly taken seriously by researchers enquiring into the eras before colonialism, not least because of the shaping effects of colonial institutions and disciplinary practices, and the search for decolonial approaches.Footnote 11
Archaeological Records
Archaeological evidence is one of the kinds of evidence about the past, before writing, that is tightly encased in institutional and disciplinary sheathing. This encasing makes repeated consultation of the excavated material challenging and frames the material in discipline-specific ways. Archaeological methods dictate a range of practices and protocols for the recording of excavations and the preservation of the materials excavated. Theoretically, this enables reconstruction of the process of excavation. In practice, this is not always easily achieved. Even professional archaeologists revisiting deposited material from past excavations may struggle to reconcile what is stored in a repository with the documented excavation process. Early excavations did not adhere to what is today considered professional practice, and, as one moves forwards in time, professional standards were applied in variant ways, sometimes unevenly in relation to a single site. While remains mostly end up correctly boxed in the designated repository, misplacement, loss, and even theft is more common than is realized. Preserved formal documentation can be patchy. Field notebooks, photographs, sketches, and a host of other kinds of excavation records are often retained in the hands of the excavators.
For the most part, an excavation is represented by site reports, archaeological publications, and specialist studies. Re-consultation of previously excavated material involves, amongst other things, substantial capacity to reconcile accession records, remains and associated documentation, the presentation of academic or other credentials, and costly trips to holding institutions. Few people other than professional archaeologists ever manage to consult archaeological holdings. While an art historian might manage to arrange to examine beads excavated at a particular site, a jewelry designer seeking inspiration from the same stored collection is likely to face institutional hurdles in getting the boxes opened for consultation. Furthermore, excavated materials that are not explicitly discussed in archaeological publications easily drop out of view altogether.
Digitization and some form of online access and viewing, while a far cry from intimate handling of the physical object in a repository, offer obvious gains. At the very least, it allows users, specialist and general alike, to explore the full extent of what exists, well beyond what is mentioned in archaeological publications or presented in museum displays of choice items. The motivation for readily accessible digital records is thus compelling and certain institutions are addressing this. How this happens merits consideration. It is possible for repositories simply to mirror online the organization of material in their holdings along with digitized versions of existing finding aids. They can thus reproduce digitally – in many possible formats, from thumbnails to high resolution 3D images – anything, from the acknowledged highlights of an excavation to the entirety of the stored material.
As we noted in the introductory discussion, however, researchers increasingly look carefully at how historical knowledge about the remote past came to be stitched up in particular disciplinary practices, and to question the assumptions and ideas that are taken for granted in such disciplines. To date, much digital archaeology mobilizes established disciplinary protocols and approaches, which has proved advantageous in managing large data sets and using geo-referencing. It is not concerned with the issue that we are foregrounding: the capacity of a digital approach to highlight the processes across time, in excavation and in museums, by which materials have been produced and shaped as archaeological sources.Footnote 12 By this we mean not how an object was made in the distant past for a purpose in the society being researched, but how that object was turned into a source through the interpretive processes brought to bear upon it subsequently by archaeologists and curators. These processes, we argue, require critical attention. This, in turn, creates a demand for as detailed as possible a record of who did what to the material, when, where, and how, from the time of excavation to the present.
Ethnographic Records
Ethnographic materials – texts, visual images, sound recordings, and objects – have long played a significant role in research into the history of eras before writing. Archaeologists make extensive use of ethnographic materials from the twentieth century to help them interpret what they find when they excavate sites that date to earlier periods. With the exception of the oldest items of preserved material culture, most ethnographic objects, texts, and recordings were created and collected well after the distant periods that they are mobilized to help interpret. The use of such materials – regarded as being largely “cultural” in nature – to help interpret remains from earlier periods depends on an understanding of such materials as changing little over time.
However, many practices that are considered “traditional” and are regarded as dating back to before the advent of writing have been subject to change over time. Such practices are typically a combination of some elements that are continuous with earlier eras and, for reasons related to later historical developments, other elements that came to be reworked, often in response to the demands that colonial politics made of colonized communities. For example, when Natal became a colony in the 1840s, the role of “chief” shifted in all sorts of ways from what it was in the decades immediately before that, in the times of the independent kings, Shaka and Dingane. It shifted again repeatedly as the Zulu kingdom was brought under colonial rule, as the colonial system of customary law was developed, and when the Union of South Africa was proclaimed in 1910. Thus, in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s, when many of the landmark ethnographic studies were undertaken of what were regarded as the most “untouched” traditional African communities, chiefship and other key institutions and cultural forms had undergone significant changes, albeit within a frame of preserving traditional forms. Who was identified or self-identified as “Zulu” similarly shifted over this period.Footnote 13 The increasingly weighty scholarship that draws attention to the extent of these kinds of changes means that ethnographic sources need to be carefully provenanced and dated, in a manner that resists collapsing diverse materials under generic ethnic labels and dealing with them as temporally undifferentiated.Footnote 14
In the twentieth century, many repositories with ethnographic collections treated items of material culture as specimens of cultural groups and organized their collections according to twentieth-century ethnic categories. They focused on classifying items as, say, “Zulu” or “Sotho,” based on gross stylistic grounds, often failing to accrue, or losing sight of, precise provenance details and dates. Sometimes items were misclassified in terms of the principles of this system itself. For the most part, these kinds of materials were organized on the basis of medium. Objects went into ethnographic or natural history museums, while photos, films, and notes were deposited in archives, sometimes in the same institution as the related objects but often elsewhere. The separations and dispersals were responsible for further stripping these materials of vital and specific contextualizing information.
Oral Materials
In the wake of Jan Vansina's seminal work on oral traditions, oral sources have been actively used to illuminate the eras before writing.Footnote 15 These include oral materials that have been recorded both sonically and in writing, often by people other than those speaking. They also exist in ongoing circulation in social and political life.Footnote 16 Some oral accounts are well-known, while many may only be incidentally encountered or be of limited accessibility, such as those that are in repositories without finding aids or those in private custody. Researchers increasingly understand the extent to which the act of recording excludes some things and focuses on others and is the result of complex relations of control and contribution, both by those recording and those being recorded. Researchers are accordingly attentive to the making and shaping of oral records.
Use of extant textual or sonic recordings often demands that researchers travel to the holding institutions and spend long periods of time listening, reading, taking notes, or copying using one or another form of technology. Here too there are obvious gains in being able to consult such materials online. Some institutions enable this, but many collections are not available online. Some collections are available in the form of published texts or curated sound recordings on CD or in other formats. In practice, historians rely on these kinds of published versions, often translated into English, that are in ready circulation. However, the kinds of selection, rearrangement, transcription, sound engineering, editing, translating, and annotating to which the materials are typically subjected over time fundamentally changes them. What is needed then is not only ready access to the original texts or sound recordings, subject to any ethical constraints, but as detailed as possible a record of who did what to the material, when, where, and how, from the time of recording into the present. This typically means paying attention to the record of multiple interventions and iterations, amongst them publication.
Digital Interventions and Affordances
Across all the main kinds of sources currently most used for enquiry into the eras before colonialism, we can see that there is a case to be made for putting source material online in order to make it more accessible and more readily available for re-consultation. However, our discussion thus far also points to a need to do more than reproduce online what is in the institutions. We see that there is an imperative for making available and visible a range of materials alongside the collected items – relevant institutional correspondence, retired and current accession registers, obsolete labels, index cards, and so on. These kinds of framing materials make it possible to investigate how materials came to be collected and curated over time, the processes to which they have been subjected, and the many hands that have shaped and interpreted them over time.
In each case, there are potential gains in enhancing contextual information and unstitching the existing categories under which these materials have historically been organized. In particular, this offers an opportunity for unpicking some of the seams of colonial knowledge categories. Of course, in each case, we can also see that it is important to keep in view the history of how the materials got stitched up in particular ways.
Beyond retaining the details of their curatorial and custodial history, and developing or restoring provenance and other contextual details, a digital format offers an opportunity for moving away from the practices of the institutions where the collected items are deposited. It is relatively easy to rearrange the material online, in multiple iterations, without rearranging it in the holding institution. This offers opportunities for the presentation of material in new ways that move beyond legacy institutional and disciplinary conventions, and for the elicitation and engagement of new kinds of material. The opportunities are not limited to creative and productive recombinations. They include openings for exploratory epistemological experimentation that seeks to grapple with the politics and limits of existing contextualizing information, including metadata. A digital format that is critically attentive to inherited metadata as a source worth exploring in its own right is capable of presenting the metadata in such a way that it can be used to reveal much about the history of the production of knowledge.Footnote 17 We see in all of this opportunities for the refiguring of archive.Footnote 18
Certain of these opportunities can be thought of as “affordances.” The term explicitly refers to what a particular setting offers or provides, without positive or negative connotations. Importantly, it signals that what results when an opportunity is taken depends on how it is taken.Footnote 19 It follows from this that we expressly eschew digital technologies as some kind of “silver bullet” for the field of method. Inevitably, while offering certain advantages, working digitally makes the already complex area of methods and sources even more complex than ever.Footnote 20
In the second part of this paper, we discuss a series of digital interventions that reframe these kinds of materials, relevant to the deep past, as archival – a status that, historically, most of them have not had. These interventions further address certain colonial and disciplinary assumptions, all the while keeping of track of the materials' earlier history and arrangement, subsequent interventions and rearrangements.Footnote 21 We look well beyond established collections. We make the argument for a radical expansion of the recognized archive for the eras immediately before colonialism to include, amongst other things, early texts produced in indigenous languages by black authors, as well as historical dictionaries and other texts which instantiate language and discourse as archive. We argue that bringing together all of these various kinds of materials into a shared and searchable digital space adds up to a form of research infrastructure that is more than the sum of its parts.
Convening Dispersed Materials
The archive pertinent to the site of the Zulu king Dingane's uMgungundlovu residence, in northern KwaZulu-Natal, is an expansive one, lodged in a wide variety of settings and assembled across almost two centuries. One part of the archive is its material remains, including the site itself. Over time and under a variety of conditions, materials were removed from the site and ended up in local collections. One of these was at the NG Sendingkerk Museum, a small, private museum adjacent to the site set up by the mission curate, Rev. P. P. Stander, in 1949 and later bequeathed to the Msunduzi-Voortrekker Museum in Pietermaritzburg.Footnote 22 Yet another collection is located in a private museum attached to a nearby hotel, Mtonjaneni Lodge, and it is probable that many other items are in individual hands, removed by the legions of trophy hunters who have toured Zulu battle sites.Footnote 23 Archaeologists began excavating the site in the 1970s and continued to do so well into the 1990s. In the 1990s, new political arrangements that flowed from South Africa's democratic transition led to the archaeological collections relevant to uMgungundlovu being split, on terms not clearly recorded, between two institutions, the new KwaZulu-Natal provincial heritage authority, Amafa, established in 1997, and the previous holding institution, the KwaZulu-Natal Museum.Footnote 24 Certain of the excavated materials were initially studied elsewhere in the country, and it is possible that some items may, inadvertently, have remained in other institutions. The numerous archaeologists involved also retained in their own hands many of the notes, photographs, diagrams, and other materials they generated in the course of the excavations.
Digital curation of the site undertaken by the FHYA project (yet ongoing at the time of writing) has provided an opportunity for these scattered materials to be convened on the FHYA’s archival website. This provides a detailed record in one place of what has been found at the site, as well as of the various collection and excavation processes. Active convening of the scattered records of the excavation further facilitates expansion of the available archive. This happens in a number of ways. The FHYA approaches retired archaeologists asking them to locate and make available materials forgotten in boxes and filing cabinets in their offices. The inauguration of the digital project and its curatorial activity thus has a type of nudging effect, encouraging archaeologists to locate original materials and even to deposit them in the designated holding institutions.Footnote 25 The digital nudge also prompts curators to look again at their collections and to reassess the institutional curation in light of online developments, interests, and new information. Digital archival curations further stimulate research interest in the material, enable its critical interrogation, and prompt creative engagements.Footnote 26 The FHYA created an online “contributions” section which allows new academic papers, research notes, clan histories, designs, performances and the like, concerned with uMgungundlovu, to be uploaded in the appropriate sections of the website, with a clear signature and dating of the contribution. In addition, the FHYA uploads onto the website all the accounts concerning uMgungundlovu which it is able to locate, including a growing corpus of early accounts in the Zulu language.
Online curation of this nature generates findable digital media, such as images of items that can help to identify missing objects. It creates conditions that enable either the voluntary return of a missing item by facilitating identification or the establishing of a record in the public domain that contributes to the limitation of illicit trade in antiquities. One such missing item is a brass bead and bangle mold excavated at uMgungundlovu. The convened archival curation allows for the identification of a variety of photographs and drawings of the mold from disparate sources.Footnote 27 The variety helps digital specialists create 3D reconstructions of the missing item that can be added to the existing digital archival curation.
Similarly, the convening of material online allows the identification of a variety of maps, diagrams, site plans, layout sketches, and various forms of geo-imagery and geo-spatial co-ordinates, dispersed across multiple locations. The variety of geo-spatial materials offers digital specialists the opportunity to create new kinds of resources or tools. In the case of uMgungundlovu, researchers at Wits University and the KwaZulu-Natal Museum geo-referenced a set of maps of uMgungundlovu that serve as a backdrop against which they can locate objects found or excavated at particular points in the landscape.Footnote 28 In a digital environment, such interventions can be easily updated or remade as technologies change or new information emerges. These kinds of research resources, with direct links to the materials used to make them, are the tools for new kinds of research into the eras before colonialism. The resources in turn can be archived digitally, not as primary sources, but as research products. In this way, the digital environment also becomes a place for the storage of, and access to, the wide variety of tools that researchers of the long past use to process or organize their data.
Crossing Institutions, Disciplines, and Mediums
The uMgungundlovu example demonstrates the convenience of convening online physically scattered materials. However, a digital archival curation makes possible a wide range of still more epistemologically innovative interventions.
Convening and reframing institutionally dispersed ethnographic materials online is an opportunity for overturning ethnographic specimization, deeply entrenched ideas about the timelessly traditional and the determinedly ethnic categorization of items of material culture. It is replete with possibilities for restoring provenance, dates, pre-collection and collection histories, and other contextual information that has one way or another been framed by ideas of the timelessly traditional and tribal. Restoration of that kind of information makes it possible to get past the oppressive, teleological, often simply inaccurate, ethnic ascriptions that bedevil ethnographic assemblages. In addition, explicit online crossing of the mediums – text, material, sonic, visual – that have historically been separated tends to expose medium-based assumptions rooted in specific disciplinary practices.
In many instances, the collectors of materials that have come to be classified as “ethnographic” undertook other activities which themselves throw light on the collected materials. Active around the turn of the twentieth century in what is now KwaZulu-Natal, the Austrian Catholic father, Franz Mayr, was a collector of ethnographic and botanical material. He also made sound recordings.Footnote 29 The scholars who use his collections are often disciplinary specialists who only know about his collections in the medium with which their discipline is associated. On some occasions Mayr appears to have used the opportunity of being in a new place to collect material in a variety of media. Information about date and place from one of his collections is often able to assist in establishing place, time, context, and rationale for the collection of items in another of his assemblages where such information is absent. Sometimes this kind of information is only available in original accession registers and catalogue cards, since superseded by new finding aids and digital registers. These can be located in basement stores and added to the materials available online. Specific date and place information is important in releasing materials trapped in “ethno” (read “tribal”) framing – as in ethnobotany, ethnomusicology, and ethnography – allowing them to be reconfigured as archival resources. The capacity of a digital archival curation to convene multimedia collections from numerous institutions thus enables researchers to find materials or information in places outside of the sources to which a discipline or medium is typically orientated.
Amongst the kinds of information that a multimedia archival curation can reveal, the preservation of the inadvertent deserves special comment. Inadvertent recording – the recording of something the recorder was not concerned with – offers important methodological opportunities of counterpoint to purposeful recording. Fieldtrip photographs may have been considered to be of no interest in botanical collections but were central in ethnographic ones. They were thus preserved in the latter collections and not the former, but can be of value to the former. Here, an obvious example would be flora captured inadvertently in anthropological photos. Another concerns local experts consulted by researchers who do not feature in the researchers' published accounts but who appear by chance in photographs, sometimes in separate collections altogether. The inadvertent – that which the European collector did not intend to record, nor attempt to frame – is of course, a unique kind of source amongst so much purposefully assembled material.
Reconvening Mayr's institutionally dispersed collections online thus allows the separated collections to contextualize each other.Footnote 30 This reveals more about how collection and subsequent institution- or discipline-specific curation happened than might be gleaned in relation to any one of the collections in their respective institutional settings, governed as they are by long-standing disciplinary practices, medium-based assumptions, or institutional conventions. In other words, the digital format constitutes an opportunity for revisiting the assumptions and ideas that are taken for granted in established institutional settings and in particular disciplines. The points made here about botanical, sound, and object collections apply equally to other kinds of materials that are used as sources.
Reframing Authoritative Knowledge as Material from a Particular Time Produced under Particular Circumstances
The interpretation of objects and physical remains relies heavily on related discursive material. When it comes to research into the history of the eras immediately before colonialism this has conventionally taken two forms. The first is the use of ethnographic studies from a later period to interpret material from an earlier period, an approach sometimes referred to as ethnographic extrapolation. Ethnographic studies pertinent to KwaZulu-Natal range from recorded observations by amateur researchers like Franz Mayr, who published articles in Anthropos and the Annals of the Natal Museum,Footnote 31 to monographs by academic anthropologists such as Eileen Krige writing in the 1930s and D. H. ReaderFootnote 32 in the 1960s. Some of these outsider researchers learned to speak Zulu and often spent long spells in the communities which they studied. They then wrote and published accounts, in English, of what they understood the people amongst whom they undertook research to be saying and doing. There were also professional anthropologists like Harriet Ngubane who were mother-tongue speakers of the Zulu language.Footnote 33
In the past, researchers used information in these kinds of ethnographic publications to illuminate society in the eras before colonialism. Today, most scholars recognize that the ethnographic texts need to be treated as historical sources in their own right, being the result of a set of activities and ideas from particular times and places and reflecting the sensibilities and orientations of the particular ethnographers. They are increasingly aware of the complexity of the processes of interlocution involved, notably how ideas of the anthropologists locked onto the ideas and practices of those whom they studied, in a manner that shaped what emerged as ethnographic knowledge.
Putting ethnographic publications into a digital archival curation with a variety of related materials pertinent to their histories makes it possible to frame the ethnographies as historical products of particular times and circumstances. It draws attention to who and what made and shaped these publications as well as the times and contexts of their production. In the digital environment these ethnographies become ontologically associated with multiple other items – papers and correspondence by their authors, archival items that reference the anthropologists' interlocutors, and so on – in what is theoretically an unlimited number of associations governed, in the first instance, by the choices of the digital archival curator and, ultimately, by the infinite possibilities of a digital search function. These multiple associations serve to underscore that ethnographic knowledge is not absolute and definitive but a product of particular circumstances. The digital affordance not only involves replacing ethnographic authority with an understanding of the ethnography as a particular kind of production under particular conditions, but it also supports research into those conditions. The point applies to any number of other forms of apparently authoritative knowledge.
Tracking Changes and Enhancing Explorations of Recorded Discourse
The second kind of discursive material used in the interpretation of physical remains and objects are accounts conventionally referred to as oral traditions. These are also used in their own right as sources for the remote past.
Large bodies of recorded oral material can have field-shaping effects. The James Stuart Papers, held by the Killie Campbell Africana Library at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, offer a case in point.Footnote 34 The Papers include, amongst other things, detailed notes taken by the colonial official, James Stuart, of his off-duty consultations between 1898 and 1920 with some 200 people, many of them Africans, discussing the history of the region. From the late 1960s, historians interested in using recorded oral sources began to consult the Stuart Papers.
In 1971, historians Colin de B. Webb and John Wright started work on arranging, translating, editing, and annotating a selection of the notes for publication as the James Stuart Archive Recorded Oral Evidence Relating to the History of the Zulu and Neighbouring Peoples. Footnote 35 The first volume appeared in 1976, with another five following at intervals until 2014 when the sixth volume appeared. The published versions now comprise one of the most used and cited sources in work on the early history of the region. The status of the notes has been the subject of critical review – are they irredeemably “tainted” by Stuart’s colonial background, or are they usable if one fully grapples with the conditions of their production?Footnote 36 The debate notwithstanding, the published versions are widely cited, with few scholars querying specific transcriptions, translations, and omissions and returning to the original papers. In this case, it is the published, translated versions that have had the field-shaping effect. The accessibility of the published text works against the intellectual imperative of paying attention to changes involved in publication, especially in the face of the relative inaccessibility of the increasingly fragile handwritten notes on which the published volumes are based.
Consultation of the handwritten notes requires on-demand provision by hard-pressed archivists of copies to individual researchers or costly in-person research trips to Durban. Ready access to the original notes online would address these problems. Even so, the notes would remain difficult to consult because the corpus is large and the notes are handwritten. Handwriting can be challenging to decipher. Unlike the published text, the handwritten notes are not indexed and cannot be electronically searched.
In this case, it is easy to digitize and make available online the published version. An immediate gain is that some two and a half thousand pages of published text can then be searched digitally – with single or multi-word search queries – and the researcher is no longer constrained by the publication’s index entries. As good as the indexes are, they are the product of the imagination of the indexer. Google and other search engines will also index the documents and direct potential users to relevant material buried in reams of text. It is also possible to digitize the handwritten corpus and make it equally available online, although at present it could not be searched electronically.
Importantly, the searchable published pages can be readily linked on a page-by-page basis to the handwritten notes, making it possible to use the published version as a giant index to the handwritten one. Of course, even this giant index has its limitations of which the researcher needs to take cognizance. For one, the published versions omit aspects of the handwritten corpus, although they do indicate where the omissions occur. Nonetheless, the advantages are significant. Direct links of this kind enable readers of the digital texts to switch effortlessly between the published versions and the handwritten notes, checking things like accuracy of transcription, nature of translation, and so on. Likewise, it is possible to digitize the annotated photocopies of the notes that the editors used to prepare the published volumes. These too can be linked to the published text, enabling manuscript scholars to follow the history of the texts across time and across the three – original handwritten, annotated photocopies, and the final published – versions.Footnote 37
The James Stuart Papers at the Killie Campbell Library also contain other of Stuart's writings: his diaries, lecture notes, correspondences, and so on. Making all of this material available online alongside the notes of his conversations would contextualize the notes and draw attention to Stuart's own aims and circumstances, enabling researchers to investigate how he shaped the recording process. In addition, Stuart published a number of texts, most notably his History of the Zulu Rebellion (1913),Footnote 38 and five school readers in the Zulu language (1924–1926).Footnote 39 Large blocks of text in the readers were drawn from instances in his papers where Stuart asked his interlocutors to repeat stories they had told him, which he then transcribed particularly carefully. It seems he did this to be able to present their words as exemplary Zulu in the readers. As a result, researchers are able to identify occasions where certain texts are likely to be verbatim or near-verbatim transcriptions of the spoken words of the interlocutors.Footnote 40 Finally, the people with whom Stuart conversed also left other kinds of records, such as court or commission testimonies, which are to be found elsewhere and which can be digitized and added to the existing materials.
Making all of these texts available online and searchable alongside Stuart’s handwritten notes not only expands resources available for research about Stuart and his interlocutors, but it is a game changer in the kind of analyses that can be undertaken in relation to the conversation notes. For one thing, a wide range of related texts augments possibilities of discourse analysis, of seeing the kinds of work that words were made to do in sentences in the many related texts, and of tracking the use of concepts at the time. Some of this was Stuart's discourse and some of it the recorded discourse, in Zulu, of the people with whom he was talking. The capacity for the digital exploration of the various bodies of text produced by Stuart and his interlocutors, together and separately, in varied formats and at different times, opens up a world of new methodological possibilities. Amongst other things, there are opportunities here for the design of tailored computational methods of authorship attribution and stylometry, identification of translation patterns, regional dialect perception, and many other forms of linguistic forensics.
At much the same time that Stuart was recording these conversations and publishing his readers, other writers were having their words recorded or were writing their own texts, many of them Africans discoursing in Zulu. The texts include, amongst other things, published histories, novels, letters, evidence in courts, and commissions and press articles. Historians of the eras immediately before colonialism have paid relatively little attention to what these writers have had to say about the remote past, often failing to find in their accounts, if they read them at all, any new “facts.” However, recent scholarship pays productive attention to concepts, and more specifically, concepts in motion across time. Even early texts that were not about the remote past often employed concepts inherited from that past to navigate the changing world in which the writers found themselves. In this respect, the collected texts comprise an extended language and conceptual archive. Subject to careful historicization and contextualization, these texts are green fields for historians.Footnote 41 How much more so when large numbers of such texts are also readily available digitally in a shared environment, with the added opportunity for the application of computational methods and new methods in the emerging areas of literary- and histo-infomatics.
Co-presence in a Shared Digital Environment
The collections that we have selected as our examples for discussion – those pertinent to uMgungundlovu, the various collections assembled by Franz Mayr, the James Stuart Papers, and publications, whether by the ethnographers, Stuart, or the African writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – conventionally exist in separated silos of academic engagement. Indeed, the same can be said for countless other resources that could have been discussed in this paper. It is rare that any one researcher knows about or can access many or all of these kinds of resources, and the histories of how they came into existence. At best, enquirers into the remote past find their way to some of them. The co-presence of these resources in a shared digital environment draws attention to an extended range of materials and is suggestive of – even prompts by existing – the addition of still more.Footnote 42
Researchers typically explore sources where they are likely to find what they are looking for. A shared search function that spans the full diversity of these materials makes it possible for researchers to find what they are looking for, and more, in new places. Thus, the archaeologist interested in uMgungundlovu will quickly find the accounts of growing up at uMgungundlovu in the 1830s recorded by Stuart from elderly men around the turn of the twentieth century. The archaeologist would probably be surprised to find an account by a French missionary in the Lesotho region, Eugène Casalis, which noted details of a village of diasporic baSotho traders based close to uMgungundlovu.Footnote 43 Botanists interested in the plant Cuassonia spicata might expect to find it in a botanical collection such as the Mayr collection in the Bews Herbarium in Pietermaritzburg. The specimen was collected by Mayr around 1900 who recorded its local name umsenge, as well as notes on its usage in the indigenous pharmacopeia of the region. More unexpectedly, botanists using a multidisciplinary digital platform would find a pertinent reference in a collection that they would be unlikely otherwise to consult, the James Stuart Papers. Stuart’s notes record lengthy conversations he had in 1902 with Mkando kaDhlova, who discussed umsenge-leaf skirts, worn by women who “dance the hunting dance whilst the assembly sings.”Footnote 44
Constituting a Dynamic Research Environment for New Interactions and Outputs
An earlier section of the paper pointed to the possibilities of readily tracking changes to sources over time in a digital environment.Footnote 45 Increasingly, historians research and write up histories of the sources and the changes they have undergone. Paying attention to the making and shaping of the sources is one of the ways that historians process their material, the equivalent of how other disciplines process what they term “data.” It is possible in a shared digital space to draw attention to – and make readily available in close proximity to the sources – varieties of this kind of processing, notably work by scholars on the history of the sources.
A general contributions facility that enables more than simply the deposit of additional excavation notes of the kind discussed earlierFootnote 46 means that researchers with all kinds of expertise can volunteer translations, interpretations, commentary, short research notes, histories of sources and links, all with signatures and dates of contribution. A contributions section further offers community and family historians an opportunity to enter material and interpretations that may be in ongoing circulation in social life into the public record if they wish to, or to create links to their own digital sites or publications.Footnote 47
Finally, it is readily possible to include curations and useful research tools of a wide variety on the same site as the collected materials. We have mentioned the archaeologists who are creating a spatially indexed platform of archaeological and historic material pertaining to uMgungundlovu. Other projectsFootnote 48 stimulated by the existence of the digital archival curation on uMgungundlovu include the following: a history of the burnisher mentioned above; a research bibliography pertinent to uMgungundlovu; a Research Note on the account of the baSotho trading village near uMgungundlovu and of the trade route that connected it to the baSotho capital; an archive-inspired musical composition; a podcast of chapters dealing with uMgungundlovu in the 1925 Zulu language school reader, uKulumetule, which offer the memories of people who in their youths were in the King’s service at uMgungundlovu and a translation into English of the same three chapters.Footnote 49
Contributions can take the form of curated online exhibitions, artworks, musical compositions, podcasts, curated research papers, small research notes, school resources, and so on, based on the materials in the digital archive, with hyperlinks to the digital holdings of materials that were utilized. In this way, accessible engaging presentations introduce people in the first instance to the digitized archival materials and, if they pursue the matter, to the materials in repositories around the world. In addition, curations of this kind are opportunities for epistemological experimentation appropriate to times of intellectual revolution and the current straining against the limits of authorized sources and inherited archives. They are opportunities for challenging the stifling authority of institutional repositories, disrupting congealed practices, and dismantling and reimagining. Some of these experiments will prove successful and productive. Others may not.
Conclusion
Some of the functions described above are digital versions of long-standing scholarly and public practices such as reading room consultations, source publication, the production of Notes and Queries, museum displays, and so on. But we have also delineated a number of new opportunities.
Online curations that present a view of the past differ from exhibitions in galleries in key respects. Most notably, online curations readily act as significantly more accessible portals into the digital holdings on which they are based.Footnote 50 Not only do they invite and facilitate public consultation of materials held in multiple institutions, but they can also provide openings for contributions to, and input on, the source materials by, amongst others, mother-tongue language speakers and contributors who historically have been excluded from institutionalized archival processes. They can offer opportunities for public or community historians of all kinds to link their own digital curations to formal and more institutionalized archival projects.Footnote 51
A significant number of the affordances that we have drawn attention to constitute new opportunities for breaking out of the mold of Eurocentric conceptual apparatuses, notably systems of categorization and forms of ascription. They further support systematic consultation of African language texts and historical research into concepts and discourses in those languages, offering important counterpoints to the sources by European writers.
In the last twenty years, and most markedly since about 2015, researchers have begun intensively to engage the publications of the region's early African writers. Much of this work exists in a scholarly space that is profoundly cognizant of, but separated out from, critical work on the colonial archive. Each scholarly silo engages with materials which instantiate views of the past before colonialism, that is, materials produced on the one hand by the African literati, and on the other hand by the incoming colonials. Both sets of views, and all the variations within them, were shaped by the perspectives of the parties concerned, the contexts in which the materials were produced, and the purposes for which the materials were produced. The result was often the entanglement of different ideas. Silo-ization makes it difficult for researchers in either of these spaces to grapple effectively with how the ideas, political aims, intellectual inheritances, apprehensions and sensibilities, amongst other things, of the newly colonized were affected and shaped by those of the incoming colonial power, and how they in turn affected and shaped those of the incomers.
In an overt way, a digital archival curation featuring material from the archives that both silos of expertise utilize makes a clear statement about the importance of long-marginalized discursive archives in indigenous languages and their capacity to support enquiry into the past before colonialism. It makes it possible for those who need or want to grapple with the entanglement in colonial times to do so. They are supported in undertaking the methodologically demanding work of grappling with the full complexity of the production, and the reshaping over time, of the materials with which they are concerned.
All this makes it possible to pursue history actively across a long-standing division which has marked off colonial history from the history of the many eras that went before it and which has designated separate specialists for before and after. This division has been responsible for most histories of the far south of the continent having, at most, a first chapter dealing with the longer past and take-off happening with the advent of colonialism. The earlier history seldom receives substantive treatment in its own right outside of archaeological studies. The problem is especially sharply etched in relation to the long and dynamic histories of local African concepts and ideas.
Achieving an understanding of how dominant knowledge systems and recording practices shaped the production of knowledge about the history of present-day KwaZulu-Natal and surrounding regions before the arrival of the first Europeans, and making use of alternative materials shaped under different circumstances, such as the writings of the early African literati, is an especially pressing matter. This is because the understanding of eras without writing is so heavily dependent on materials generated under a variety of circumstances later in time. But the issues involved are not confined to this region.
All historical knowledge is bound up in processes of the shaping and reshaping of archives and source material over time, with discourses and practices – public, political, and academic – shaping the material and the material shaping and reshaping discourses and practices in mutually constituting spirals across time.
Grappling with this mutual making and shaping across time means that historians are not always well served by the combination of short discussions of evidence preceding substantive historical reconstruction, with the latter then attested to by references in footnotes citing numbered boxes in distant repositories.Footnote 52 Critical readers want to know as much as possible about how historians approached the material they use as evidence; what they considered to be its history and how they have grappled with it; and what sources, and approach to the changes involved, they used to reconstruct the history of the evidence they cite. This requires bringing the material referenced in the footnote to the fore.
The kind of online environment that we have sketched comes to the aid of the footnote, making it possible to easily explore not only the sources that are cited but also increasingly dense histories of the sources themselves. Hyperlinks encourage and enable critical readers to probe the footnotes, to readily access not only digitized sources but also essays, books, curations, podcasts, videos, and the like on the sources. While all of this is manifestly crucial in situations where colonial knowledge forms have had an obvious, and often iniquitous, shaping force, it is surely no less pertinent for historical research everywhere.
Acknowledgments
We wish to thank colleagues at the Five Hundred Year Archive project for their support in preparing this paper, in particular, Henry Fagan, for his efforts in referencing and readying the paper for submission. We would also like to thank colleagues from the Archive and Public Culture research initiative, and the anonymous reviewers for critical feedback on earlier versions of the paper.
