Southern African Humanities

From the 1950s onwards, a Modernist architectural paradigm characterized many trading store buildings in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. In contrast with the vernacular buildings that formed the majority of the early trading stores, these latter-day examples have formed the basis of the architectural toolkits that comprise contemporary African-owned community shops or spazas offering a much reduced level of trade in rural areas. These post-1994 structures are constructed in the image of the old and successful trading stores, suggesting a transfer of architectural idiom that transcends commonly constructed ideas of power and domination and offers a very different view of a past social landscape and the relations between traders and their customers. This paper discusses the architectural frameworks, examines the encoding of the trading store and recoding into the spaza shop, as well as its lodgment in memory. The Modernist trading store and its offspring, the spaza, have an embedded visceral recognition, connoting different ideas and memories and culminating in the suggestion that these structures comprise anamnestic repositories in the South African landscape.

Archaeological charcoal specimens from two Sibudu stratigraphic layers were identified and the spatial patterns resulting from the distributions of the 141 woody taxa (53 families, 91 genera and 114 species) were analysed for behavioural information about wood selection and use in the Middle Stone Age of KwaZulu-Natal. The layers, Brown under Yellow Ash 2(i) (BYA2i) and Spotty Camel (SPCA), contain post-Howiesons Poort assemblages that are approximately 58 ka old, though BYA2(i) is older than SPCA. The wood bundles in each hearth consist of species recognised today as good fuel and tinder, plus a selection of plants that today are used medicinally. Woods potentially suitable for making fire-sticks for starting fires are also present. Charcoal from Spirostachys africana, tambotie, occurs in one hearth in each layer. This wood is avoided today in cooking fires as it is poisonous. It may have been selected deliberately and burnt for insecticidal smoke or other medicinal purposes. Tarchonanthus parvicapitulatus, small-head camphor bush, charcoal occurs in SPCA and the camphor-like aromatic plant also has medicinal and insecticidal uses. Wood use is different amongst the hearths and between the two occupations. Several vegetation communities were exploited, demonstrating a succession of vegetation and wood use. The vegetation mosaic at 58 ka differed from the coastal forest and savanna near Sibudu and conditions were colder and drier than today.

The Groot Winterhoek Mountains northwest of Port Elizabeth contain a body of largely unexplored rock art. McAll’s Cave, one of 38 recorded sites, contains exceptionally rich and well-preserved imagery. The range of images found in this shelter is representative of the rock art of the larger area. The content of the art places it firmly within the pan-San worldview. The presence and absence of specific imagery, quantitative analysis and manner of depiction of images show that although this art zone lies almost equidistant between the Cederberg and the Maloti-Drakensberg it shares many more similarities with that of the Cederberg and Western Cape art.