The myth of the Zulu homestead: archaeology and ethnography

Africa ◽  
1984 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Hall
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Southern Africa ◽  
Colonial Expansion ◽  
Opening Paragraph ◽  
Historical Accounts

Opening ParagraphTo those outside the anthropological disciplines, the Zulu are probably the best known chiefdom of southern Africa. Zulu military prowess acted as a sharp break on the process of colonial expansion in the nineteenth century and led to a series of battles which have been immortalized on celluloid and in the more popular historical accounts of the era. Despite this, the Zulu have prompted a comparatively sparse ethnography that is based largely on the work of nineteenth-century observers and is less comprehensive than the literature on some other southern African communities.

Archaeological evidence and conventional explanations of southern Bantu settlement patterns

Africa ◽  
1986 ◽  
Vol 56 (3) ◽  
pp. 280-298 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas N. Huffman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Southern Africa ◽  
Environmental Conditions ◽  
Social Stratification ◽  
Settlement Patterns ◽  
Archaeological Evidence ◽  
Cultural Preference ◽  
Opening Paragraph

Opening ParagraphThe settlements of Bantu-speaking people in Southern Africa vary widely in size and distribution, ranging from the dispersed homesteads of the Nguni to the large towns of the Tswana. These two extremes have interested Africanists since the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Europeans first encountered the Thlaping at Dithakong near present-day Kuruman. Today the contrast between Tswana and Nguni settlements are most often attributed to differences in social stratification, cultural preference or environmental conditions.These conventional explanations provide a focus for considering the meaning of settlement patterns among the southern Bantu. I first develop a model of political and settlement hierarchies to isolate the essential differences between Nguni and Tswana communities, and then I present archaeological evidence that calls into question the conventional explanations.

scholarly journals The past and present of pandemic management: health diplomacy, international epidemiological surveillance, and COVID-19

2021 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Flavio D’Abramo
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Epidemiological Surveillance ◽  
Health Diplomacy ◽  
The Past ◽  
Colonial Expansion ◽  
Administrative Systems

AbstractThe establishment of international sanitary institutions, which took place in the context of rivalry among the great European powers and their colonial expansion in Asia, allowed for the development of administrative systems of international epidemiological surveillance as a response to the cholera epidemics at the end of the nineteenth century. In this note, I reflect on how a historical analysis of the inception of international epidemiological surveillance and pandemic management helps us to understand what is happening in the COVID-19 pandemic today.

Firearms in Southern Africa: A survey

1971 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 517-530 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shula Marks ◽  
Anthony Atmore
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Southern Africa ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
Settler Population ◽  
White Settlement

The relationships of the peoples of southern Africa after the establishment and expansion of the white settlement in the mid-seventeenth century can be seen in terms of both conflict and interdependence, both resistance and collaboration. The conflict often split over into warfare, not only between black and white, but also within both groups. As time passed, firearms came to be used by ever-widening circles of the combatants, often as much the result of the increased collaboration and interdependence between peoples as of the increased conflict. As Inez Sutton has pointed out, ‘in contrast to most of the rest of [sub-Saharan] Africa, the presence of a settler population ensured that the supply of arms was the most modern rather than the most obsolete’, and on the whole non-whites were acutely aware of changes in the manufacture of firearms in the nineteenth century.

Historical Account or Discourse on Identity? A Reexamination of Fulbe Hegemony and Autochthonous Submission in Banyo

1998 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 93-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
Quentin Gausset
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Islamic State ◽  
Local Populations ◽  
Northern Cameroon ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Historical Accounts ◽  
In The Beginning ◽  
Almost All ◽  
The Military

Traditional accounts of the nineteenth-century Fulbe conquest in northern Cameroon tell roughly the same story: following the example of Usman Dan Fodio in Nigeria, the Fulbe of Cameroon organized in the beginning of the nineteenth century a “jihad” or a “holy war” against the local pagan populations to convert them to Islam and create an Islamic state. The divisions among the local populations and the military superiority of the Fulbe allowed them to conquer almost all northern Cameroon. They forced those who submitted to give an annual tribute of goods and servants, and they raided the other groups. In these traditional accounts the Fulbe are presented as unchallenged masters, while the local populations are depicted as slaves who were powerless over their fate; their role in the conquest of the region and in the administration of the new political order is supposed to have been insignificant.I will show that, on the contrary, in the area of Banyo the Wawa and Bute played a crucial role in the conquest of the sultanate and in its administration. I will then re-examine the cliche that all members of the local populations were the slaves of the Fulbe by distinguishing the fate of the Wawa and Bute on one side from that of the Kwanja and Mambila on the other, and by showing the importance of the Fulbe's identity in shaping the definition of slavery. Finally I will argue that, if the historical accounts found in the scientific literature invariably insist on Fulbe hegemony and minimize the role played by the local populations, it is because those accounts are often based on Fulbe traditions, and because these traditions are remodeled by the Fulbe in order to correspond to their discourse on identity.

Event and Portent: the Fall of Old Oyo, a Problem in Historical Explanation

Africa ◽  
1971 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 186-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Smith
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Main Issue ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
Crucial Importance ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Explanation ◽  
Covering Law ◽  
Opening Paragraph

Opening ParagraphExplanation, or the identification and assessment of the causes of events and situations, occupies the central place in nearly all historical writing in the present century. It is also the aspect of history which is most keenly debated by philosophers, and is the main issue today in the unending, wearisome, but seemingly inescapable controversy as to whether history belongs, or belongs more, with the sciences or with the humanities. The scientific or positivist school, numbering among its recent exponents Popper and Gardiner, emphasizes the extent to which historical explanation attains a regularity akin to, though not identical with, that found in the physical and other sciences, Hempel adding the contention that such explanation can always, and often should, be reduced to a ‘covering law’, or single universal statement subsuming the whole explanation. The idealists, among whom Croce, Collingwood, and most recently Oakeshott are prominent, stress conversely the uniqueness of history, and Dray has reinforced their position by his attack on the covering law thesis. The debate is one in which historians themselves have taken little part, and African historians none at all, despite its crucial importance for almost every aspect of their profession. Yet it is a debate which needs continuous illustration from the historiographical process, a need which historians are best able to meet. The aim of the present article is to contribute to the debate by examining as a problem in historical explanation the fall of Oyo, the powerful state of the northern Yoruba, in the early nineteenth century.

The socio-ecology of firewood and charcoal on the Freetown peninsula

Africa ◽  
1987 ◽  
Vol 57 (4) ◽  
pp. 457-497 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Akindele Cline-Cole
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Energy Demand ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Wood Fuel ◽  
Western Area ◽  
Opening Paragraph ◽  
Political Economic

Opening ParagraphIn a country which in the last 200 years has undergone continuous and often momentous political, economic and social changes, few things are capable of conveying as strong an impression of stability and changelessness as wood fuel (charcoal and firewood) consumption and production; and nowhere is this more striking than on the Freetown or Western Area (formerly Colony) peninsula. In this region, which has always accounted for the major share of national electricity, kerosene and cooking gas (LPG) consumption, not only is current percentage household firewood consumption only fractionally lower than in the nineteenth century but a much higher proportion of households consume charcoal now than at any time in the last two centuries (Cline-Cole, 1984a). Today firewood and charcoal combined supply a minimum of 80 per cent of total peninsula energy demand for both domestic and non-household uses (Davidson, 1985). Freetown's firewood consumption also represents some 10 per cent of the national total (Atlanta, 1979).

Esotericism in Botswana

Aries ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Podolecka ◽  
Leslie Nthoi
Keyword(s):  
Southern Africa ◽  
New Age ◽  
Knowledge Systems ◽  
African Christianity ◽  
Colonial Expansion ◽  
Shamanic Healing ◽  
First Time

Abstract The article argues that “esotericism” can usefully be applied to a number of religious currents in Southern Africa. With a focus on Botswana, we survey a range of practices, from traditional “shamanic” healing to Pentecostal NRM s to New Age spiritualities and neoshamanism, some presented here for the first time. The term esotericism is useful for analysing the religious situation in Southern African contexts for three reasons. First, through a typological understanding of esotericism as initiation-based knowledge systems, we define one part of the landscape (usually termed “shamanism”) as constituting a form of “indigenous esotericism”. Second, through the European colonial expansion, this indigenous esotericism faced a violent rejection campaign that parallels the construction of “rejected knowledge” in Europe. While this forced many practices underground, they have resurfaced within Southern African Christianity. Third, “western” esoteric currents have recently been imported to Southern Africa and enter into dialogues with the “indigenous” forms.

Bureaucratic Civilization

2019 ◽  
pp. 143-162
Author(s):  
Padraic X. Scanlan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Reform Movements ◽  
Economic Exploitation ◽  
Colonial Expansion ◽  
Missionary Movement ◽  
History Of ◽  
Bourgeois Culture ◽  
Imperial Governance ◽  
Domestic Reform

This chapter shows how Europe's colonial expansion and imperial economic exploitation contributed to the rise of European middle classes and at the same time shaped European bourgeois culture and values. It points out that Britain's nineteenth-century middle class was as much a product of imperial expansion and the integration of global markets as it was one of religious introspection or the politics of bourgeois respectability. The chapter reveals that the Victorian middle class made, and was made by, the domestic and imperial reform movements of the nineteenth century. Campaigns for reform in imperial governance, for the end of slavery in British colonies, and for the expansion of the British missionary movement shared practices, ideas, and key personnel with many vigorous domestic reform programs. The chapter locates the connections between the imperial and domestic faces of Victorian values in the history of Britain's place in an emerging global capitalism and points to the spread of “Victorianism” far beyond the British archipelago.

Ireland: Realm of the Four Masters

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Rowley-Conwy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
English Translation ◽  
Ancient History ◽  
Irish History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ancient Manuscripts ◽  
To Come ◽  
Historical Accounts ◽  
Or History

On 9 January 1843, Richard Griffith addressed the Royal Irish Academy (RIA) about some antiquities found in the River Shannon. The river was being dredged to render it navigable, and the artefacts were discovered during the deepening of the old ford at Keelogue. Griffith was the chairman of the Commissioners carrying out the work, and his expertise was in engineering rather than ancient history. He stated that the finds came from a layer of gravel; in its upper part were many bronze swords and spears, while a foot lower were numerous stone axes. Due to the rapidity of the river’s flow there was very little aggradation, so despite the small gap the bronze objects were substantially later than the stone ones. The river formed the border between the ancient kingdoms of Connaught and Leinster. The objects had apparently been lost in two battles for the ford that had taken place at widely differing dates; stressing that he was no expert himself, Mr Griffith wondered whether ancient Irish history might contain records of battles at this spot (Griffith 1844). This was probably the earliest non-funerary stratigraphic support for the Three Age System ever published, but it did not signal the acceptance of the Three Age System. Just as telling as Griffith’s stratigraphic observation was his immediate recourse to ancient history for an explanation; for, as we shall see, ancient history provided the dominant framework for the ancient Irish past until the end of the nineteenth century. The Irish had far more early manuscript sources than the Scots or the English, although wars and invasions had reduced them; the Welsh scholar Edward Lhwyd wrote from Sligo on 12 March 1700 to his colleague Henry Rowlands that ‘the Irish have many more ancient manuscripts than we in Wales; but since the late revolutions they are much lessened. I now and then pick up some very old parchment manuscripts; but they are hard to come by, and they that do anything understand them, value them as their lives’ (in Rowlands 1766: 315). In the seventeenth century various Irish scholars brought together the historical accounts available to them. Geoffrey Keating (Seathrú n Céitinn, in Irish) wrote the influential Foras Feasa ar Éirinn or ‘History of Ireland’ in c.1634, and an English translation was printed in 1723 (Waddell 2005).

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