Southern African Humanities

In the 1970s, I began an ethnoarchaeological study into types of structures, pottery and population numbers in rural areas of Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). This study extended to every major linguistic cluster in Zimbabwe, including Kalanga and Matabele, and provided a background to different macro-identities in the material-culture record. In the process, I acquired various ‘scientific mementoes’ for my personal use. These mementoes ranged from axes, beadwork and pottery to doors, drums, thumb pianos and ritual objects. Here I provide some background to Tonga and Korekore items collected from the Zambezi Valley, as well as from Central Shona in the Runde and Buhera areas and Ndau villages near Chikore Mission. The larger project encompassing these diverse areas had three goals: to clarify excavated features uncovered at Great Zimbabwe and Leopard’s Kopje Main Kraal; to estimate prehistoric populations based on the ratio of structures to people; and to record different ceramic traditions. At the time, the minimum household throughout the country comprised a kitchen, sleeping room and granary. Although low, a ratio of four people per household provides an average for estimating prehistoric populations. For ceramics, collections were sufficient for stylistic analyses but because of modern market forces, frequencies of functional types are not relevant to archaeological assemblages. Even so, these field data help to elucidate the human context for the kind of pottery fragments archaeologists often study. Conclusions such as these informed later research but original field data appear here for the first time.

On 6 April 1966, there was a whites-only display opening for the newly established South African Cultural History Museum in Cape Town. A week later, on 13 April, there was a separate opening for the Malay community. This paper chronicles the attitudes and circumstances leading to the creation of the displays and the ideological imperatives that informed them. It demonstrates that Malays and slaves were both included in the first display schedule, developed in 1959, although the emphasis was on European culture, white nation-building, and ‘ancient civilisations’. Yet when the museum opened in 1966, slavery was omitted, despite the fact that it was housed in the Slave Lodge, while the Malays were given an expanded format, without reference to slavery, even though many had been brought to the Cape as slaves. The reasons for this outcome are explored, proposing that apartheid ideologues were continuing a trend in their understanding of Cape history that denied slave history for decades in order to avoid uncomfortable questions being asked about the labour that had been used to build the Cape colony. In contrast, the Malays were included to emphasise their perceived link to the Afrikaners, such as their role in the development of Afrikaans.

Ethnologist Dr Paul-Lenert Breutz (Department of Native Affairs, 1948–1960) authored eight volumes on South Africa’s Tswana-speaking communities as well as many other lesser known publications. The oral traditions and histories embedded in Breutz’s ‘tribes series’, as well as in his self-published compendium, have provided a major source for scholars of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Tswana. His methods in compiling this ethnohistorical record have not been understood, and his background, thinking, and professional training have gone unexamined. This study explores Breutz’s views of the world, and of Africans in particular, which were shaped and influenced by a set of racial theories, including anti-Semitism. It also closely examines Breutz’s oral historical accounts, which stand up to close scrutiny and remain essential to the exploration of the early Tswana past. Though Breutz’s mind was skewed by racism, his craft of recording the past was systematic, based on knowledgeable informants he interviewed and guided by the ethnological and language tradition of his doctoral studies at the Hamburg School. Breutz was foremost an antiquarian collector of information. Scholars will find some of his interpretations wanting, but they can place confidence in the historical record he carefully recorded.