Posted: April 24th, 2025
History I NEED HELP ON MY HOMEWORK
Turn in a document with your research title, thesis statement, abstract, and preliminary sources.
Professor Chikowero,
History/Black Studies 49 A Fall 2024
How to conduct your research project: A guide
1. Think about the
specific subject or theme that you would like to explore
further (it is not sufficient to repeat a lecture that I have given, or to reproduce an article; that would be punishable crime called plagiarism).
2. What is the particular angle that you would like to look into? Why do you think it is
viable?
3. Think about
sources. What have you read on the subject? What other preliminary sources have you identified, and how much more do you think you will find?
4. Develop a clear, brief
title
and one paragraph
thesis
statement (or abstract) articulating your argument. Nobody writes anything scholarly without a thesis.
Does the thesis elaborate the title? These two things are your compass. You can’t sail Iteru Harupwi (the Nile that does not dry) without it.
5. Sketch out the key points of your paper, indicating how each advances your thesis.
6. List your preliminary sources, annotating them for relevance and possibly indicating which source will help you with which point. Lectures are not sources; you can use them for guidance—for knowledge on the subject, to read some of the sources that I cite.
7. Develop your bibliography as you conduct your research and write your paper. Do not leave this until later.
8. Choose a specific citation style, use it correctly and consistently throughout.
Further guidelines
Your paper has to be on an aspect of ancient African history. You can use sources listed on the syllabus and/or uploaded on Canvas, but go beyond them. Strive to also find and use primary sources. Talk to me and your Tas as you develop your research; do not wait for the final few weeks or days before the due date. The best consultation is done face-to-face, not via email: utilize office hours. I am in
HSSB 4253 every Wednesday 9-11AM. If the time does not work for you, email me for options.
As the syllabus says
: 8 pages, double-spaced; 12-point font; Times New Roman; 1” margins; single spaced headings; consistent citations (footnotes).
about
search
site map
editors
donate
contact
help
Announcements
Job Guide
Reviews
Discussion Networks
|
View the h-west-africa Discussion Logs [date] [author] [thread] View the [date] [author] [thread] Visit the h-west-africa home page
From: Charles BECKER X-Posted from H-NET List for African History and Culture From: Colleen Vasconcellos
— —- REPLY 1 Date: 5 Aug 2005 From: Akin Ogundiran African Tribe? Are we reinventing the wheel? I would think that Africanists have jettisoned this caricature. Barbara Jean Palmer writes “Even Julius Nyerere used the term “tribe” in his speeches and writings in English, and definitely not in an offensive way when he talked about African tribes.” With due respect to Barbara, this type of excuse is common in perpetuating a terminology that belittles African peoples. How come that all Tanzanians are tribes(wo)men and the Welsh, Scots, Irish, English, and other peoples of the British Isles are nations or peoples. The fact that Nyerere or any other African used the term does not excuse the scholar or someone involved in the production of knowledge to use the term “tribe”. We cannot underestimate the impact of colonial education on the consciousness of the people who inherited the colonial state. Maybe decolonization really never took place, or it was a mere window dressing. We must even be more conscious of these derogatory terms now given the reinvigoration of the “Coming Back of the Empire”. By the way, what does the term “tribe” really mean? For readers who may not be aware of this, Africa Action some years back created a website devoted to this discussion. The conclusion is that the word “tribe” as a term designated for non-European peoples is a product of colonial racism, well ingrained in colonial education, and carried on by uncurious and intellectually lazy populace, whether in the West or in Africa. Please check out the website: http://www.africaaction.org/bp/ethall.htm. Naming, name-calling, and defining the “Other” are at the roots of knowledge production. We must avoid terminologies that kill; and abandon classifications that dehumanize so that we don’t keep producing tyrannical knowledge about the “Other”. Akin Ogundiran Dept. of History Florida International University Miami, FL 33199 —— REPLY 2 Date: Fri, 5 Aug 2005 12:15:09 -0400 From: Colleen Vasconcellos Date: 5 Aug 2005 From: Mwangi Githinji While accepting the use of Kabila , by swahili speakers the assumption that they would have meant tribe before it got translated as such is problematic. It could just have meant my people. In fact the other use of the word is to mean “type”. Tribe as used by Africans is not derogatory but we have accepted a Colonial nomenclature that does not describe the social formations that exist on the continent and as practiced by colonial authorities did suggest that there peoples had not reached nationhood. Ethnic group I believe is a move useful nomenclature to describe the various groups of differing Socio – political organization as it carries no connotations about the type of sociopolitical organization other than relation to common language and culture. Salaam, Mwangi Program in African American Studies and Dept. of Economics Gettysburg College 300 N. Washington Street Gettysburg, PA 17325 Tel: 717 337 6791 Email: mgithinj@gettysburg.edu —— REPLY 3 Date: Fri, 5 Aug 2005 12:15:59 -0400 From: Colleen Vasconcellos Date: 5 Aug 2005 From: Philip Havik As to the usage of the above mentioned terms in (Portuguese) Creole languages spoken in West Africa, it is worth noting that some, e.g. ‘race’, in the sense of ‘tribe’, and ‘nation’ have become household words, here in Kriol or the Creole of Guinea Bissau. However, emulating a process that occurred in other African languages already mentioned in the thread, signification may be subject to change. For example, the term ‘rasa’ (from Portuguese ‘raÁa’) in Kriol means ‘ethnic group’, i.e. more akin to ‘tribe’ than to ‘race’. It derives from the colonial usage of the term in Portuguese, but without the stigma currently attached to it. Another way of expressing oneís roots is the term ëtchoní (from the Portuguese ëch“oí in its meaning of region of origin), combining geographical with community vectors. The ëethnicí group will then be added on to specify the community or ëethnicí group in question. Although the term clan is not used in a derivation of its Portuguese form (i.e. cl“), ‘gan’ (in the sense of the Latin ‘gen’ , also ëgensí in English, or clan, although the Kriol term has an African root) is used in Kriol to designate a trade lineage or residential compound (in towns), as well as a ward or neighbourhood. The name of the lineage of or of the dominant ëethnicí group follows; here again we have a composite of toponyms and social unit, common to African languages. Finally, ‘nasson’ (from the Portuguese ënaÁ“oí) also became part and parcel of Guinean Creole after the nationalist war against portuguese colonialism (1963-1974), being absent from Kriol idiom before that period. It would be interesting to hear about other cases of derivation and shifting meanings in Creole languages (e.g. in Gambian ëAkuí or ëKrioí?) in order to compare processes of ëtransculturationí, as some have called it, with regard to meanings and their local connotations. —— REPLY 4 Date: Fri, 5 Aug 2005 12:17:11 -0400 From: Colleen Vasconcellos Date: 5 Aug 2005 From: Christopher Lowe Someone suggested that clan, like tribe, is derogatory. I don’t think the negative connotations of clan are nearly as numerous or as strong as those of tribe in English. It is true that “nation” cannot simply be substituted for “tribe,” given the huge range of meanings given to “tribe.” However, clearly there are cases where “nation” would be the best substitute. In others, it might be an acceptable one, where “[a] people” might also be close to what is meant, or perhaps some senses of “ethnic group.” What to use instead of tribe? To my mind the first step is to ask, what is meant, in context, from among the many meanings of “tribe.” A list of possibilities for which the word “tribe” gets substituted would include: band, village, chiefdom, kingdom, kin-group, clan, nation, nationality, ethnic group, people, political clientele, and community. Doubtless there are others. Sometimes “tribe” presumes or imputes the unity of more than one. The point isn’t just to use a different word. The point is to describe better, more clearly, in a fuller way — or to recognize that one doesn’t know enough to do so and avoid pretending at knowledge. Chris Lowe Portland, Oregon USA —— REPLY 5 Date: Fri, 5 Aug 2005 12:18:22 -0400 From: Colleen Vasconcellos Date: 5 Aug 2005 The Africa Action/APIC background paper mentioned, “Talking About Tribe,” of which I was co-author, began its life in an H-Africa discussion in 1997. The paper contains a short list of references, including Archie Mafeje’s piece but not Bernard Magubane’s. The discussion in 1997, which was extensive, and an earlier discussion along similar lines in about 1995 or so, included a larger number of references to published pieces, as I recall. For those interested in the topic, going back to those discussions might be worthwhile, as the cast of participants was different and included some colleagues no longer with us, such as the late, much-missed Harold Marcus. As “jpool” (unfortunately full name is not on message) points out, a fundamental problem with the term “tribe” is that it has no coherent referent or common or consistent usage. If one delves into the anthropological literature of the 1950s and 1960s, one will find various attempts to create coherent definitions. Isaac Schapera’s definition in _Politics and Government in Tribal Life_ is admirable as such an exercise, and exemplifies the problem. To achieve coherence, Schapera specifically rejects the idea that a tribe in practice is (was?) based on kinship, noting that rules of exogamy require multiple clans (say kin-groups if you prefer) in a given area, and concludes that the fundamental character of a tribe is political, meaning, in the southern African context on which he focuses, followers of a chief. However, not much later one can find at least one U.S. anthropologist arguing that “real” tribes don’t have chiefs, that the tribal is a social evolutionary stage that predates chieftaincy, with the latter seen as a proto-state or small state kind of entity. Some said tribes must be face-to-face corporate groups, others used the term to refer to identities shared by numbers in the millions of people, and so on. Using any given one of these approaches, one can make a reasonable approximation of a coherent definition, but one must admit that most entities called tribes won’t fit that definition even remotely. Or one can accept widespread usages that include everything from small forager-hunter collectivities to nations of millions, but then one must admit that the term does not actually *distinguish* any kind of grouping or entity, but rather *lumps together* many different kinds, and is intellectually incoherent. The deeper epistemological and political critiques such as those by Mafeje and Magubane that Jesse Benjamin mentions, and many others, emerged both in the context of decolonization (particularly for Africa) and in the context of the increasing obviousness of the intellectual incoherence. So too did recognition that tribal status in many places has become a legal phenomenon with a bearing on access to social and material resources, as Betsey Brada notes. (While the Mashpee case has a particular recent literary salience, the rather chillingly named “Termination Policy” of the Eisenhower administration, which sought and the “termination” of tribal status in general, with accompanying extinguishing of sovereignty claims, treaty rights and so on, and indivualization and privatization of collective resources, especially land, and actually “terminated” at least two tribes, the Klamath here in Oregon (since re-recognized) and one in Wisconsin, set the stage for legal and legislative counter-activism since the 1960s aimed at adding resource content to tribal status, which formed the context for Mashpee and like efforts). In these days of trying to shut people up by ignoring the substance of arguments with the label of “political correctness” (ultimately an attack on motives), it is important in my view to stress the fundamental intellectual incoherence of the term. It is not useful analytically. The question then arises, what is the use of an intellectually incoherent, analytically useless idea? At that point, epistemology, politics, and questions of intentionality enter in. Here I think we ought to recognize that while there may be circumstances in which tribe has been seen by people as “a resource for their [own] collective representation,” in the longer intellectual, cultural, social and political run, it has been a resource for collectively representing people who were being collectively dispossessed and subordinated in the processes of modern European empire-building and colonization, including colonies of settlement. In that context, uses for collective self-representation, while perhaps often strategically deployed for what purchase could be gained within colonial contradictions, might still need to be seen as elements of rituals of subordination and domination, analogous to symbols like a rural English worker approaching a landlord “hat in hand.” ——- ———- Barbara Jean Palmer, I don’t exactly want to “correct” you, having no basis or standing to do so. But I would like to figure out if I disagree with you, with respect to what conclusions can or should be drawn from your points. I am uncertain what conclusions you yourself draw. I don’t doubt that Julius Nyerere used the term “tribe” when speaking in English, although I would be surprised if he didn’t also apply the term nation or people to the same groups in other instances. You say he did not use the term in a pejorative way, and again that is unsurprising, although it would be surprising if he was not critical of “tribalism” in the sense of divisively opportunistic ethnic politics (an accusation of course often itself deployed for tribalist ends). The record of African nationalists and Pan-Africanists speaking or writing in English in the 20th century is replete with similar examples, including speeches and writings of Nelson Mandela I think. But such uses depart radically from the meanings most U.S. Americans or Europeans associate with the term “tribe” and related words. Thus they tell us very little about what it means when used or heard in U.S. or European contexts, whether in the press and by news readers/ listeners/ watchers, in classroom settings, on academic e-mail lists, by officials, or elsewhere. Whatever Nyerere meant, it wasn’t the same thing that caused U.S. and European journalists to call conflict in the Balkans in the 1990s “tribalist” at some times and “genocidal” at others. This disparity of denotation reflects another dimension of the incoherent vagueness of the term. As to “qabila” and “kabila,” it would be interesting to know what “qabila” means in Arabic. Since, as someone noted, Arabs have been and in some times and places still are said to come in tribes, is “qabila” an Arabic term that Arabs applied to groups or identities among themselves? If so, given the prestige of putative Arab ties among Muslims in Africa and especially in areas once under Arab power, the idea that “our” groups/ identities are the same as or similar to Arab ones would be easy to understand. If, however, it originally had a more charged differentiating and subordinating connotation that has been transformed, something more complex would be going on — and it would be interesting to know what “qabila” originally was intended to connote that differentiated Africans from Arabs. I have more questions about whether “kabila” and “tribe” really are synonyms, however, beyond a phrasebook or translation dictionary sense. I am pretty sure that if I asked most Zulu-speakers what isiZulu word means “tribe,” they would tell me “isizwe.” There are also dictionaries that will define “isizwe” as “tribe,” although even by the 1950s South African academics in a translation dictionary included the glosses “nation” and “people” as well. But if there were an isiZulu equivalent the _Petite Larousse_ or _Webster’s Third International_ or the OED, that went deeper into the meanings of the term, it would be a longish entry I think, and I think the semantic field it would cover would depart extensively from any thorough investigation of the senses of “tribe” and related words in English. My suspicion is that something similar probably is true about “kabila” and “tribe,” but I’d be interested in your comment and willing to learn otherwise, since I have no actual knowledge on the point. But let me also back up a step and ask, what do Swahili speakers mean by either term, when they use them as synonyms? And is their use of either “kabila” or “tribe” really much like English uses of the term “tribe”? Chris Lowe —— REPLY 6 Date: Fri, 5 Aug 2005 12:19:12 -0400 From: Colleen Vasconcellos Date: 5 Aug 2005 From: “Benjamin, Jesse J. ” The two early critiques of tribe that I have found so useful in my work, both from 1971, are: Mafeje, Archie, 1971, “The Ideology of Tribalism,” Journal of Modern African Studies 9: 253-261. Magubane, Bernard, 1971, “A Critical Look at Indices Used in the Study of Social Change in Colonial Africa,” Current Anthropology 12: 419-430. Jesse Benjamin —— REPLY 7 Date: Fri, 5 Aug 2005 12:23:26 -0400 From: Colleen Vasconcellos Hi Michael, I wanted to talk with you a bit about your post below. I’m concerned a bit about the word “racist”. I know you are not calling subscribers participating in this discussion a “racist” but I am afraid that your post may be misconstrued. Subscribers may feel that is what you are doing. I was hoping that you could reword that sentence a bit to avoid using that term. My reasoning behind this is to just keep the discussion on track and avoid a whole flare where people start screaming at each other…namely you…about this instead of focusing on the discussion at hand. This discussion is too important for that to happen, in my opinion. Would you mind to do that? Best, Colleen Vasconcellos Editor, H-Africa —— REPLY 8 Date: Fri, 5 Aug 2005 21:26:29 -0400 From: Colleen Vasconcellos Date: Fri, 05 Aug 2005 01:07:23 +0000 From: michael loutzenhiser No one here is trying to turn back the clock, and I realize that people often have simultaneous roles in different social structures. White supremacist paradigms will be dominant as long as the idea that tribes are generally more primitive than nation-states is dominant. Why? Tribes weren’t primitive. If people think that “tribes” are primitive then we shouldn’t stop using the word tribe, rather we must, of course, show people that tribes were not primitive. Nation-states did not unify the tribes, they did not integrate them; they conquered them. Huge difference. I will address the matter about Africans conquering Africans on the other thread. Here are some quotes from Margery Perham’s Introduction to ‘African Discovery: An Anthology of Exploration’ (1963): “Trade was indeed almost everywhere encountered [throughout Africa]]. (…) It [precolonial Africa] is thus at times a society almost in dissolution, or at least deeply wounded by its first contact with _an outer word more cruel than itself_, that we are being shown. [my underscore] (…) only two of these ten Europeans were killed. the strange often came to a tribe straight from the headquarters of its bitterest enemies. they were generally unable to gve any intelligible reason for their presence. (…) Their behavior was generally unaccountable and often menacing and improper. They made sinister attempts to reach places that were profitless or forbiddenn. They were possessed of possessions which were a standing temptation to robbery (…) Yet these men, utterly dependent and sometimes destitute, were allowed to pass chief after chief and tribe after tribe (…) violence which was well within the power f these chiefs. (…) The equal friendship in sport and arms formed by Bruce with the young bloods of the Abyssinian Court; the hospitality of Rumanika; the discreet generosity of Mansong- what counterparts could they have to-day, as between Africans and Europeans.” Another great source is ‘Religion in Africa: Experience and Expression’ (1994) edited by T.D. Blakely, W.E.A. van Beek and D.L. Thomson. —— REPLY 9 Date: Fri, 5 Aug 2005 21:28:17 -0400 From: Colleen Vasconcellos Date: Fri, 05 Aug 2005 16:55:24 +0000 From: adamczyk@comcast.net My problem is, what term(s) should I use in my writing to substitute for “clan” and “tribe” that won’t carry the pejorative baggage. Perhaps the ubiquitous “we” should try to address the baggage, but I don’t think it’s practical to put an asterisk linking to a 100 word essay on how I don’t mean the term in a pejorative way, every time I use it in my writings. The baggage is what it is. I also disagree with whoever said that “clan” doesn’t have as much of a pejorative connotation. For instance, the Hatfields and McCoys were “clans” (for non Americans who don’t understand the reference, email me off line for an explanation). There’s “clannish”. I guess my underlying issue here is that when I think of “clans” and “tribes”, I don’t think of technologically sophisticated and well educated people; yet the Iraqis, many of whom _do_ identify strongly or even primarily with a clan/tribe structure, are clearly all of this. Joe Adamczyk —— REPLY 10 Delivered-To: h-africa@h-net.msu.edu Date: Fri, 5 Aug 2005 21:29:36 -0400 From: Colleen Vasconcellos Date: Fri, 05 Aug 2005 13:02:24 -0400 From: Barbara Jean Palmer One point of clarification: Nyerere rejected the use of the term “tribe” when discussing the Nigerian civil war in his pamphlet The Nigeria-Biafra Conflict (available at Michigan State University library and elsewhere) by asking questions – are the Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa-Fulani, tribes, and are the Welsh and Scots tribes? Others may know the context in which he used the term “tribe” n some of his speeches in Freedom and Unity and Fredoom and Socialism: Selected Speeches and Writings. Barbara Jean Palmer —— REPLY 11 Date: Fri, 5 Aug 2005 21:30:38 -0400 From: Colleen Vasconcellos Date: Fri, 05 Aug 2005 13:08:36 -0400 From: Barbara Jean Palmer Mwangi, What does Professor Frank Chiteji, a Tanzanian and your colleague at Gettysburg College, say about Nyerere’s use of the term tribe in Freedom and Unity and Freedom and Socialism: Selected Writings? Both of you know Kiswahili. And Chiteji, as a Tanzanian, may know something I don’t about President Nyerere’s use of the term “tribe.” Barbara Jean Palmer —— REPLY 12 Date: Fri, 5 Aug 2005 21:32:34 -0400 From: Colleen Vasconcellos Date: Fri, 5 Aug 2005 12:38:26 -0600 From: Jack Betterly > Someone suggested that clan, like tribe, is derogatory. I don’t think > the negative connotations of clan are nearly as numerous or as strong > as those of tribe in English. Speaking as a descendant of Celts, Angles and Teutons – the Celts, at least, not the least embarrassed by “tribe” – while I can understand some “civilized” (citified) people considering the term derogatory, the judgment seems to be read into the word by individuals and “civilizations.” Certainly in my long contacts with American Indians (yes, they say “Indians”), and among my Welsh relatives and forbears who tried desperately to persuade me of our tribalism which was truly long gone) the term itself seems to be judgment only if one makes it so. Definition? I would say a society of humans which sees itself as a complex of familial and clan relationships and obligations, imposed by birth, rather than as a polity. – Jack — Jack Betterly, World History Association Editorial Board, World History Connected Emma Willard School, Emeritus 6350 Eubank Boulevard NE, Apt. #1013 Albuquerque, NM 87111 E-mail: jbetterl@yahoo.com New Web Site: —— REPLY 13 Date: Fri, 5 Aug 2005 21:35:10 -0400 From: Colleen Vasconcellos Date: Fri, 5 Aug 2005 17:16:39 -0400 From: Tim Cleaveland I’d like to respond to Chris Lowe’s question about the word ‘qabila, which I’ve pasted immediately below: “As to “qabila” and “kabila,” it would be interesting to know what “qabila” means in Arabic. Since, as someone noted, Arabs have been and connote that differentiated Africans from Arabs.” The word ‘qabila’ has long been translated into Western languages as ‘tribe,’ but this practice may be as misleading and problematic as the European translation of other African words as ‘tribe.’ Hans Wehr’s English-Arabic dictionary (which I think is the most popular among US Arabists) gives ‘tribe’ as the only translation of ‘qabila,’ which is unusual as it gives most words multiple possible meanings. In my experience most scholars have translated ‘qabila’ more or less this simplistically. I use Arabic to research eighteenth to twentieth-century West African history, but Arabists who study other regions and periods might know better the history of Western translations of this word. At first glance, the small nomadic lineages of the Sahara most closely approximate what many dictionaries give as the ‘technical’ definition of ‘tribe’: “a group of people who identify themselves as being descendants of a particular ancestor. For example, the Awlad Hassan (or Banu Hassan) are literally “the sons of Hassan,” and this aspect of their identity was relatively important in the precolonial period. [Of course, we are all the sons and daughters of Adam, but this aspect of descent is so broad that today (alas) it has little significance]. But the Awlad Hassan and similar Saharan lineages often adopted lots of strangers into their lineages, and most individuals seem to have considered this to be normal. Indeed this adoptive process was described at least as early as the fourteenth century in the works of Ibn Khaldun. Emrys Peters was one of the first scholars (in the 60s) to recognize the diverse nature of nomadic lineages and to argue against segmentary lineage theory, which suggested that the social and political relations of ‘tribal’ individuals were determined by proximity of patrilineal descent. The recognition of the diversity of apparent descent groups has led several scholars to reconsider the translation of ‘qabila’ as ‘tribe,’ though I am not aware of anyone having published a detailed critique. The word ‘qabila’ derives from the Arabic root ‘qbl,’ which generally means ‘to accept’, or ‘to receive kindly’ or ‘be close to’. Nothing in the root seems to suggest a connection to the notion of descent, except that these kindly feelings can sometimes arise out of kinship, as well as other social connections. And it is quite possible that many of the Arabic speakers who historically used the word ‘qabila’ were referring to social affection rather than descent. In my own research on the southern Saharan town of Walata I often translated ‘qabila’ or lineage names as ‘coalition’ or ‘confederation.’ For example, in the early nineteenth century several families of MandÈ, Berber, and Arabic origin formed a coalition in order to counter the growing power of several families that had immigrated to Walata the generation before. The Arabic texts that described the formation of this coalition used the word ‘qabila,’ despite also describing the families as diverse. After a couple generations most of the coalition members did develop kinship ties, because Walata politics encouraged the coalition families to marry among themselves and discouraged ‘exogamy’ with their rivals. So, in the case of Walata, social forces and choices were creating kinship relations– rather than descent or ‘real kinship’ determining the social relations. This is exactly the opposite of the colonial theory of ‘tribal relations.’ After several generations all those families that remained in the Walata coalition defined themselves as Arabs, though they also acknowledged their diverse origins. Families that became disassociated from the coalition, usually because they had left Walata and resettled in a predominantly non-Arab community, often became Bamana, Wolof, Fulbe, or something else altogether. As to whether non-Arab African may have often adopted the word ‘qabila’ or aspects of its meanings, I think that is quite possible. But I would suspect that the adopted word might also carry this broader social significance and not be so directly linked to the notion of descent as the Western translation would suggest. Tim Cleaveland University of Georgia ——- REPLY 14 Date: Sat, 6 Aug 2005 08:43:59 -0400 From: Colleen Vasconcellos Date: Sat, 6 Aug 2005 12:58:28 +0100 From: Sara Rich Dorman I’m forwarding a useful contribution from a non-list member: A brief look at Wehr; a couple of other Arabic-English and English-Arabic dictionaries; and a very useful chapter by Richard Tapper “Anthropologists, Historians, and Tribespeople on Tribe and State Formation in the Middle East” in Philip S. Khoury & Joseph Kostiner eds., Tribes and State Formation in the Middle East (Univ California, 1990) suggests the following: The plural of qabila, qaba’il, appears in the Qur’an (Sura 49, verse 13): “O mankind: We created you from a male and a female and made you into peoples and tribes that you may know each other.” This and the thrust of the chapters in Khoury & Kostiner suggest that, yes, qabila is one of several indigenous Middle Eastern categories used to describe “groups and identities” — and which have been translated as ‘tribe’. With respect to the linguistic roots of the term, Wehr translates a related word, qabil, also as ‘tribe’ and as ‘guarantor’. This perhaps points to the notion of tribes as defined by “accepted mechanisms for settlement of disputes” (Tapper, p. 51). In this context, tribes are perhaps defined by their ability to offer protection and impose obligations on their putative members. For those interested in how such terms are used in a Middle East studies context, the Tapper chapter seems a very useful place to start. Among other things he provides a good overview of the literature, noting that descent groups are only one of the ways in which tribalism can be understood, while warning against easy generalizations and urging empirical specificity. W.J. Dorman (Univ Edinburgh)
Humanities & Social Copyright © 1995-2006 – Contact Us RSS XHTML CSS |
Africa Action
1634 Eye Street, Suite 810, NW ♦ Washington, DC 20006 ♦ (t) 202-546-7961♦ (f) 202-546-1545♦ www.africaaction.org
Talking about “Tribe”
Moving from Stereotypes to Analysis
Updated February 2008
This Africa Action resource, originally written for our predecessor organization the Africa
Policy Information Center, has proved to be one of the most enduring and useful documents
generated in Africa Action’s rich history. Although it was written over a decade ago, the
arguments presented here remain powerfully relevant for understanding current events.
The crisis in Kenya that emerged following the tarnished elections in December 2007 has
captured the attention of the Western media and population alike. The dominant frame by
which the situation has been represented by most American and European reporters and
commentators is as a “tribal conflict” between the Luo and Kikiyu. The violence and turmoil
that erupted after the elections are explained as the result of deep-rooted mutually hostile
identities present among Kenya’s people.
Not only does using the term “tribe” in this instance promote a racist conception of African
ethnicities as primitive and savage, it prevents observers from coming to an accurate
understanding of the causes of this conflict. To go beyond an ethnic analysis and consider
the political, social and economic dimensions of Kenya’s conflict, please see Africa Action’s
statement on the crisis available here:
http://www.africaaction.org/newsroom/index.php?op=read&documentid=2707&type=15&is
sues=256®ions=4.
Rethinking the use of “tribe” in the African context can support a discourse on Africa
grounded in African realities that escapes the intellectual laziness of a term that has no
coherent meaning. Whether dealing with Kenya, Rwanda, Sudan or any other African nation
that experiences a conflict with ethnic dimensions, the U.S. should ground its policies in a
nuanced understanding of the specific context of each situation rather than succumbing to
the misleading and simplistic “tribal conflict” interpretation that so often enables
policymakers to abdicate responsibility.
Originally published November 1997
The main text of this paper was drafted by Chris Lowe (Boston University). The final version
also reflects contributions from Tunde Brimah (University of Denver), Pearl-Alice Marsh
(APIC), William Minter (APIC), and Monde Muyangwa (National Summit on Africa).
For most people in Western countries, Africa immediately calls up the word “tribe.” The idea
of tribe is ingrained, powerful, and expected. Few readers question a news story describing
an African individual as a tribesman or tribeswoman, or the depiction of an African’s motives
as tribal. Many Africans themselves use the word “tribe” when speaking or writing in English
about community, ethnicity or identity in African states.
Yet today most scholars who study African states and societies–both African and non-
African–agree that the idea of tribe promotes misleading stereotypes. The term “tribe” has
Africa Action
1634 Eye Street, Suite 810, NW ♦ Washington, DC 20006 ♦ (t) 202-546-7961♦ (f) 202-546-1545♦ www.africaaction.org
no consistent meaning. It carries misleading historical and cultural assumptions. It blocks
accurate views of African realities. At best, any interpretation of African events that relies on
the idea of tribe contributes no understanding of specific issues in specific countries. At
worst, it perpetuates the idea that African identities and conflicts are in some way more
“primitive” than those in other parts of the world. Such misunderstanding may lead to
disastrously inappropriate policies.
In this paper we argue that anyone concerned with truth and accuracy should avoid the
term “tribe” in characterizing African ethnic groups or cultures. This is not a matter of
political correctness. Nor is it an attempt to deny that cultural identities throughout Africa
are powerful, significant and sometimes linked to deadly conflicts. It is simply to say that
using the term “tribe” does not contribute to understanding these identities or the conflicts
sometimes tied to them. There are, moreover, many less loaded and more helpful
alternative words to use. Depending on context, people, ethnic group, nationality,
community, village, chiefdom, or kin-group might be appropriate. Whatever the term one
uses, it is essential to understand that identities in Africa are as diverse, ambiguous,
complex, modern, and changing as anywhere else in the world.
Most scholars already prefer other terms to “tribe.” So, among the media, does the British
Broadcasting Corporation. But “tribal” and “African” are still virtually synonyms in most
media, among policy-makers and among Western publics. Clearing away this stereotype,
this paper argues, is an essential step for beginning to understand the diversity and
richness of African realities.
Section 1: What’s Wrong with “Tribe?”
Tribe has no coherent meaning.
What is a tribe? The Zulu in South Africa, whose name and common identity was forged by
the creation of a powerful state less than two centuries ago, and who are a bigger group
than French Canadians, are called a tribe. So are the !Kung hunter-gatherers of Botswana
and Namibia, who number in the hundreds. The term is applied to Kenya’s Maasai herders
and Kikuyu farmers, and to members of these groups in cities and towns when they go
there to live and work. Tribe is used for millions of Yoruba in Nigeria and Benin, who share a
language but have an eight-hundred year history of multiple and sometimes warring city-
states, and of religious diversity even within the same extended families. Tribe is used for
Hutu and Tutsi in the central African countries of Rwanda and Burundi. Yet the two societies
(and regions within them) have different histories. And in each one, Hutu and Tutsi lived
interspersed in the same territory. They spoke the same language, married each other, and
shared virtually all aspects of culture. At no point in history could the distinction be defined
by distinct territories, one of the key assumptions built into “tribe.”
Tribe is used for groups who trace their heritage to great kingdoms. It is applied to Nigeria’s
Igbo and other peoples who organized orderly societies composed of hundreds of local
communities and highly developed trade networks without recourse to elaborate states.
Tribe is also used for all sorts of smaller units of such larger nations, peoples or ethnic
groups. The followers of a particular local leader may be called a tribe. Members of an
extended kin-group may be called a tribe. People who live in a particular area may be called
a tribe. We find tribes within tribes, and cutting across other tribes. Offering no useful
distinctions, tribe obscures many. As a description of a group, tribe means almost anything,
so it really means nothing.
Africa Action
1634 Eye Street, Suite 810, NW ♦ Washington, DC 20006 ♦ (t) 202-546-7961♦ (f) 202-546-1545♦ www.africaaction.org
If by tribe we mean a social group that shares a single territory, a single language, a single
political unit, a shared religious tradition, a similar economic system, and common cultural
practices, such a group is rarely found in the real world. These characteristics almost never
correspond precisely with each other today, nor did they at any time in the past.
Tribe promotes a myth of primitive African timelessness, obscuring history and
change.
The general sense of tribe as most people understand it is associated with primitiveness. To
be in a tribal state is to live in a uncomplicated, traditional condition. It is assumed there is
little change. Most African countries are economically poor and often described as less
developed or underdeveloped. Westerners often conclude that they have not changed much
over the centuries, and that African poverty mainly reflects cultural and social conservatism.
Interpreting present day Africa through the lens of tribes reinforces the image of
timelessness. Yet the truth is that Africa has as much history as anywhere else in the world.
It has undergone momentous changes time and again, especially in the twentieth century.
While African poverty is partly a product of internal dynamics of African societies, it has also
been caused by the histories of external slave trades and colonial rule.
In the modern West, tribe often implies primitive savagery.
When the general image of tribal timelessness is applied to situations of social conflict
between Africans, a particularly destructive myth is created. Stereotypes of primitiveness
and conservative backwardness are also linked to images of irrationality and superstition.
The combination leads to portrayal of violence and conflict in Africa as primordial, irrational
and unchanging. This image resonates with traditional Western racialist ideas and can
suggest that irrational violence is inherent and natural to Africans. Yet violence anywhere
has both rational and irrational components. Just as particular conflicts have reasons and
causes elsewhere, they also have them in Africa. The idea of timeless tribal violence is not
an explanation. Instead it disguises ignorance of real causes by filling the vacuum of real
knowledge with a popular stereotype.
Images of timelessness and savagery hide the modern character of African
ethnicity, including ethnic conflict.
The idea of tribe particularly shapes Western views of ethnicity and ethnic conflict in Africa,
which has been highly visible in recent years. Over and over again, conflicts are interpreted
as “ancient tribal rivalries,” atavistic eruptions of irrational violence which have always
characterized Africa. In fact they are nothing of the sort. The vast majority of such conflicts
could not have happened a century ago in the ways that they do now. Pick almost any place
where ethnic conflict occurs in modern Africa. Investigate carefully the issues over which it
occurs, the forms it takes, and the means by which it is organized and carried out. Recent
economic developments and political rivalries will loom much larger than allegedly ancient
and traditional hostilities.
Ironically, some African ethnic identities and divisions now portrayed as ancient and
unchanging actually were created in the colonial period. In other cases earlier distinctions
took new, more rigid and conflictual forms over the last century. The changes came out of
communities’ interactions within a colonial or post-colonial context, as well as movement of
people to cities to work and live. The identities thus created resemble modern ethnicities in
other countries, which are also shaped by cities, markets and national states.
Africa Action
1634 Eye Street, Suite 810, NW ♦ Washington, DC 20006 ♦ (t) 202-546-7961♦ (f) 202-546-1545♦ www.africaaction.org
Tribe substitutes a generalized illusion for detailed analysis of particular
situations.
The bottom-line problem with the idea of tribe is that it is intellectually lazy. It substitutes
the illusion of understanding for analysis of particular circumstances. Africa is far away from
North America. Accurate information about particular African states and societies takes
more work to find than some other sorts of information. Yet both of those situations are
changing rapidly. Africa is increasingly tied into the global economy and international
politics. Using the idea of tribe instead of real, specific information and analysis of African
events has never served the truth well. It also serves the public interest badly.
Section 2: If “Tribe” Is So Useless, Why Is it So Common?
Tribe reflects once widespread but outdated 19th century social theory.
As Europeans expanded their trade, settlement and military domination around the world,
they began trying to understand the different forms of society and culture they met. In the
19th century, ideas that societies followed a path of evolution through definite stages
became prominent. One widespread theory saw a progression from hunting to herding to
agriculture to mechanical industry. City-focused civilization and related forms of government
were associated with agriculture. Forms of government and social organization said to
precede civilization among pastoralists and simple agriculturalists were called tribal. It was
also believed that cosmopolitan industrial civilization would gradually break down older
localized identities.
Over the course of the 20th century scholars have learned that such images tried to make
messy reality neater than it really is. While markets and technology may be said to develop,
they have no neat correspondence with specific forms of politics, social organization, or
culture. Moreover, human beings have proven remarkably capable of changing older
identities to fit new conditions, or inventing new identities (often stoutly insisting that the
changed or new identities are eternal). Examples close to home include new hyphenated
American identities, new social identities (for example, gay/lesbian), and new religious
identities (for example, New Age).
Social theories of tribes resonated with classical and biblical education.
Of course, most ordinary Western people were not social theorists. But theories of social
evolution spread through schools, newspapers, sermons and other media. The term tribe
was tied with classical and biblical images. The word itself comes from Latin. It appears in
Roman literature describing early Roman society itself. The Romans also used it for Celtic
and Germanic societies with which many 19th and early 20th century Europeans and
Americans identified. Likewise the term was used in Latin and English bibles to characterize
the twelve tribes of Israel. This link of tribes to prestigious earlier periods of Western culture
contributed to the view that tribe had universal validity in social evolution.
Tribe became a cornerstone idea for European colonial rule in Africa.
This background of belief, while mistaken in many respects, might have been relatively
benign. However, emerging during the age of scientific rationalism, the theories of social
evolution became intertwined with racial theories. These were used to justify first the latter
stages of the Atlantic slave trade (originally justified on religious grounds), and later
European colonial rule. The idea that Africans were a more primitive, lower order of
Africa Action
1634 Eye Street, Suite 810, NW ♦ Washington, DC 20006 ♦ (t) 202-546-7961♦ (f) 202-546-1545♦ www.africaaction.org
humanity was sometimes held to be a permanent condition which justified Europeans in
enslaving and dominating them. Other versions of the theory held that Africans could
develop but needed to be civilized by Europeans. This was also held to justify dominating
them and taking their labor, land and resources in return for civilization.
These justifying beliefs were used to support the colonization of the whole continent of
Africa after 1880, which otherwise might more accurately have been seen as a naked
exercise of power. It is in the need to justify colonizing everyone in Africa that we finally
find the reason why all Africans are said to live in tribes, whether their ancestors built large
trading empires and Muslim universities on the Niger river, densely settled and cultivated
kingdoms around the great lakes in east-central Africa, or lived in much smaller-scale
communities between the larger political units of the continent.
Calling nearly all African social groups tribes and African identities tribal in the era of
scientific racism turned the idea of tribe from a social science category into a racial
stereotype. By definition Africans were supposed to live in tribes, preferably with chiefs. The
colonizers proposed to govern cheaply by adapting tribal and chiefship institutions into
European-style bureaucratic states. If they didn’t find tribes and chiefs, they encouraged
people to identify as tribes, and appointed chiefs. In some places, like Rwanda or Nigeria,
colonial racial theory led to favoring one ethnic group over another because of supposed
racial superiority (meaning white ancestry). In other places, emphasis on tribes was simply
a tool of divide and rule strategies. The idea of tribe we have today cannot escape these
roots.
Section 3: But Why Not Use “Tribe?”
Answers to Common Arguments
In the United States no one objects to referring to Indian tribes.
Under US law, tribe is a bureaucratic term. For a community of Native Americans to gain
access to programs, and to enforce rights due to them under treaties and laws, they must
be recognized as a tribe. This is comparable to unincorporated areas applying for municipal
status under state laws. Away from the law, Native Americans often prefer the words nation
or people over tribe.
Historically, the US government treats all Native American groups as tribes because of the
same outdated cultural evolutionary theories and colonial viewpoints that led European
colonialists to treat all African groups as tribes. As in Africa, the term obscures wide
historical differences in way of life, political and social organization, and culture among
Native Americans. When we see that the same term is applied indiscriminately to Native
American groups and African groups, the problem of primitive savagery as the implied
common denominator only becomes more pronounced.
Africans themselves talk about tribes.
Commonly when Africans learn English they are taught that tribe is the term that English-
speakers will recognize. But what underlying meaning in their own languages are Africans
translating when they say tribe? Take the word isizwe in Zulu. In English, writers often refer
to the Zulu tribe, whereas in Zulu the word for the Zulu as a group would be isizwe. Often
Zulu-speakers will use the English word tribe because that’s what they think English
speakers expect, or what they were taught in school. Yet Zulu linguists say that a better
translation of isizwe is nation or people. The African National Congress called its guerrilla
Africa Action
1634 Eye Street, Suite 810, NW ♦ Washington, DC 20006 ♦ (t) 202-546-7961♦ (f) 202-546-1545♦ www.africaaction.org
army Umkhonto weSizwe, “Spear of the Nation” not “Spear of the Tribe.” Isizwe refers both
to the multi-ethnic South African nation and to ethno-national peoples that form a part of
the multi-ethnic nation. When Africans use the word tribe in general conversation, they do
not mean the negative connotations of primitivism the word has in Western countries.
African leaders see tribalism as a major problem in their countries.
This is true. But what they mean by this is ethnic divisiveness, as intensified by colonial
divide and rule tactics. Colonial governments told Africans they came in tribes, and
rewarded people who acted in terms of ethnic competition. Thus for leaders trying to build
multi-ethnic nations, tribalism is an outlook of pursuing political advantage through ethnic
discrimination and chauvinism. The association of nation-building problems with the term
“tribe” just reflects the colonial heritage and translation issue already mentioned.
African ethnic divisions are quite real, but have little to do with ancient or primitive forms of
identity or conflict. Rather, ethnic divisiveness in Africa takes intensely modern forms. It
takes place most often in urban settings, or in relations of rural communities to national
states. It relies on bureaucratic identity documents, technologies like writing and radio, and
modern techniques of organization and mobilization.
Like ethnic divisions elsewhere, African ethnic divisions call on images of heritage and
ancestry. In this sense, when journalists refer to the ethnic conflicts so prominent all across
the modern world — as in Bosnia or Belgium — as tribalism, the implied resemblance to
Africa is not wrong. The problem is that in all these cases what is similar is very modern,
not primitive or atavistic. Calling it primitive will not help in understanding or changing it.
Avoiding the term tribe is just political correctness.
No, it isn’t. Avoiding the term tribe is saying that ideas matter. If the term tribe accurately
conveyed and clarified truths better than other words, even if they were hard and
unpleasant truths, we should use it. But the term tribe is vague, contradictory and
confusing, not clarifying. For the most part it does not convey truths but myths, stereotypes
and prejudices. When it does express truths, there are other words which express the same
truths more clearly, without the additional distortions. Given a choice between words that
express truths clearly and precisely, and words which convey partial truths murkily and
distortedly, we should choose the former over the latter. That means choosing nation,
people, community, chiefdom, kin-group, village or another appropriate word over tribe,
when writing or talking about Africa. The question is not political correctness but empirical
accuracy and intellectual honesty.
Rejecting tribe is just an attempt to deny the reality of ethnic divisions.
On the contrary, it is an attempt to face the reality of ethnic divisions by taking them
seriously. It is using the word tribe and its implications of primitive, ancient, timeless
identities and conflicts which tries to deny reality. Since “we” are modern, saying ethnic
divisions are primitive, ancient and timeless (tribal) says “we are not like that, those people
are different from us, we do not need to be concerned.” That is the real wishful thinking, the
real euphemism. It is taking the easy way out. It fills in ignorance of what is happening and
why with a familiar and comfortable image. The image, moreover, happens to be false.
The harder, but more honest course, and the only course which will allow good policy or the
possibility of finding solutions (although it guarantees neither) is to try to recognize,
understand and deal with the complexities. To say African groups are not tribes, and African
Africa Action
1634 Eye Street, Suite 810, NW ♦ Washington, DC 20006 ♦ (t) 202-546-7961♦ (f) 202-546-1545♦ www.africaaction.org
identities are not tribal, in the common-sense meanings of those words, is not to deny that
African ethnic divisions exist. It is to open up questions: what is their true nature? How do
they work? How can they be prevented from taking destructive forms? It is, moreover, to
link the search for those answers in Africa to the search for answers to the similar questions
that press on humanity everywhere in the world today.
For Further Reading
There is an abundant academic literature on “tribe” and ethnicity, much available only in
specialized academic publications. The following are a few shorter sources which discuss the
issue in general terms and provide references to other sources.
In The Oxford Companion to Politics of the World edited by Joel Krieger (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1993), the articles by A. B. M. Mafeje on “Tribalism” and Okwudiba Nnoli
on “Ethnicity” are short essays with additional literature references.
A short statement from a standard textbook in African Studies, “On the Concept of Tribe”
can be found in John N. Paden and Edward W. Soja, The African Experience (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1970), Volume II, 20-22. This is followed by a section on the
“Nature of Ethnic Community.”
An often-cited early statement by a prominent anthropologist rejecting the term is Aidan
Southall, “The Illusion of Tribe,” in Peter Gutkind, ed., The Passing of Tribal Man in Africa
(Leiden: Brill, 1970), 28-51.
Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, Richard Lobban and Linda Zangari, “‘Tribe’: A Socio-Political
Analysis,” writing in UCLA’s Ufahamu VII: 1 (1976), 143-165, also argue the case for
discontinuing the use of the term.
“If It’s Africa, This Must be a Tribe,” originally published in a special 1990 issue of Africa
News, “Capturing the Continent: U.S. Media Coverage of Africa,” is available on- line at
http://www.africanews.org/info/tribe.html.
In the H-Africa discussion group of Africanist historians and other scholars, there have been
two recent discussions of the use of the word “tribe,” as well as other related discussions of
Western stereotypes of Africa. See http://h-net2.msu.edu/logs.
Then choose the H-Africa discussion, and check the logs for June 1995 and October 1997 in
particular.
Case in Point: Zambia
Zambia is slightly larger than the U.S. state of Texas. The country has approximately 10
million inhabitants and a rich cultural diversity. English is Zambia’s official language but it
also boasts 73 different indigenous languages. While there are many indigenous Zambian
words which translate into nation, people, clan, language, foreigner, village, or community,
there are none that easily translate into “tribe.”
Sorting Zambians into a fixed number of “tribes” was a byproduct of British colonial rule
over Northern Rhodesia (as Zambia was known prior to independence in 1964). The British
also applied stereotypes to the different groups. Thus the Bemba, Ngoni and the Lozi were
said to be “strong.” The Bemba and the Ngoni were “warlike” although the Bemba were
Africa Action
1634 Eye Street, Suite 810, NW ♦ Washington, DC 20006 ♦ (t) 202-546-7961♦ (f) 202-546-1545♦ www.africaaction.org
considered the much “finer race” because the Ngoni had intertwined with “inferior tribes and
have been spoiled by civilization.” The Lamba were labelled “lazy and indolent” and the
Lunda considered to have “an inborn distaste for work in a regular way.” These stereotypes
in turn often determined access to jobs. The Lunda, for instance, were considered “good
material from which to evolve good laborers.
”
After Zambia gained its independence in 1964, the challenge was how to forge these
disparate ethnic groups into a nation-state in which its citizens would identify as Zambians.
To a large extent, this has succeeded. Zambians identify with the nation as well as with
individual ethnic groups. Many trace their own family heritage to more than one Zambian
group. Most Zambians live not only within but beyond their ethnic boundaries. Identities at
different levels coexist and change.
With an economy focused on copper mining, the urban areas and mines became a magnet
for Zambians from across the country and all ethnic groups seeking employment. By the
1990s almost half of all Zambians lived in urban areas. Despite ethnic stereotypes, no group
had an overwhelming advantage in urban employment. Cultural diversity was combined
with a common national experience, which was reinforced by several factors.
First, Zambia adopted a boarding school system for grades 7-12. This system brought
together children from all ethnic groups to live and learn together for nine months of the
year. Along with English, several Zambian languages and social studies also became a
major component of school curricula enabling Zambians to learn about and to communicate
with each other. As a result of living together, interacting in the towns and cities, and going
to school together, the average Zambian speaks at least three languages.
Second, Zambia’s first president, Kenneth Kaunda, made a point of establishing policies and
using tools that would promote nation-building. For example, he popularized the slogan
“One-Zambia, One Nation”. This slogan was supported by the use of tools such as ethnic
balancing in the appointments to cabinet and other key government positions. The intent
was to provide Zambia’s various ethnic groups with representation and hence a stake in the
new nation that was being forged. Ethnic background has been only one among many
factors influencing political allegiances.
Third, after independence the marriage rate among people of different ethnic identities
increased. In the same way that one should not immediately assume that an American
called Syzmanski speaks or understands Polish, neither should one necessarily expect a
Zambian with the last name of Chimuka to speak or understand Tonga. As with most
Americans, Zambian names are increasingly becoming no more than one indicator of one’s
ethnic heritage.
Many Zambians do use the word tribe. Its meaning, however, is probably closer to that of
an “ethnic group” in a Western country than what Westerners understand by a “tribe.” The
word does not have negative undertones, or necessary implications of the degree of group
loyalty, but refers to one’s mother tongue and, to lesser extent, specific cultural traits. For
example, in the same way that Jewish Americans celebrate Bar Mitzvah as a rite of passage
into adulthood, various Zambian ethnic groups have similar rites of passage ceremonies,
such as Siyomboka among the Lozi and Mukanda for the Luvale. An urban family may or
may not celebrate a particular rite, and may need to decide which branch of the family’s
older generation they should follow.
Africa Action
1634 Eye Street, Suite 810, NW ♦ Washington, DC 20006 ♦ (t) 202-546-7961♦ (f) 202-546-1545♦ www.africaaction.org
Case in Point: Hutu/Tutsi
The deadly power of the split between Hutu and Tutsi in central Africa is witnessed not only
by the genocide of more than half a million carried out by Hutu extremists against Tutsi and
moderate Hutu in Rwanda in 1994, but also by a long list of massacres by extremists on
both sides in recent years, in Rwanda, in Burundi, and in eastern Congo.
Trying to understand this set of conflicts is as complex as trying to understand the
Holocaust in Europe, or current conflicts in the Middle East or the Balkans. No outside
framework or analogy to another region can substitute for understanding the particularities
of the tangled recent history of the Great Lakes region. But one point is clear: there are few
places in Africa where the common concept of “tribe” is so completely inappropriate as in
this set of conflicts. Neither understanding nor coping with conflict is helped in the slightest
by labelling the Hutu/Tutsi distinction as “tribal.”
Before European conquest the Great Lakes region included a number of centralized,
hierarchical and often warring kingdoms. The battle lines of pre-colonial wars, however,
were not drawn between geographically and culturally distinct “Hutu” and “Tutsi” peoples.
Furthermore, within each unit, whether pre-colonial kingdom or the modern countries
defined by colonial boundaries, Tutsi and Hutu speak the same language and share the
same culture. Stereotypes identify the Tutsi as “pastoralists” and the Hutu as
“agriculturalists,” the Tutsi as “patrons” and the Hutu as “clients,” or the Tutsi as “rulers”
and the Hutu as “ruled.” Some scholars have tried to apply the concept of “caste.” Yet each
of these frameworks also exaggerates the clarity of the distinction and reads back into
history the stereotypes of current political conflict.
In two respects, such stereotypes are misleading. First, shared economic, social and
religious practices attest to the fact that interaction was much more frequent, peaceful and
cooperative than conflictual. Second, the historical evidence makes it clear that there was at
least as much conflict among competing Tutsi dynasties as between Tutsi and Hutu polities.
What is clear from recent scholarship is that the dividing line between Hutu and Tutsi was
drawn differently at different times and in different places. Thus, leading Burundi scholar
Rene Lemarchand notes the use of the term “Hutu” to mean social subordinate: “a Tutsi
cast in the role of client vis-a-vis a wealthier patron would be referred to as ‘Hutu,’ even
though his cultural identity remained Tutsi” (Burundi: Ethnic Conflict and Genocide.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 10). But both “clients” and “patrons” could
be either Hutu or Tutsi. There were Hutu as well as Tutsi who raised cattle. A family could
move from one group to the other over generations as its political and economic situation
changed.
As historian David Newbury notes, the term “Hutu” in pre- colonial times probably meant
“those not previously under the effective rule of the court, and non-pastoralist (though
many ‘Hutu’ in western Rwanda owned cattle, sometimes in important numbers)” (David
Newbury, Kings and Clans. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991, 277). More
generally, the Tutsi/Hutu distinction seems to have made sense in relation to the political
hierarchy of a kingdom. It accordingly differed, and changed, in accord with the political
fortunes of the different kingdoms and with the degree of integration of different regions
into those kingdoms.
Under colonial rule, first by the Germans and then by the Belgians, this hierarchical division
was racialized and made more rigid. Ethnic identity cards were required, and the state
Africa Action
1634 Eye Street, Suite 810, NW ♦ Washington, DC 20006 ♦ (t) 202-546-7961♦ (f) 202-546-1545♦ www.africaaction.org
discriminated in favor of Tutsi, who were considered to be closer to whites in the racial
hierarchy. This was reinforced by versions of history portraying the Tutsi as a separate
“Hamitic” people migrating into the region from the north and conquering the Bantu-
speaking Hutu. In fact, current historical evidence is insufficent to confirm to what extent
the distinction arose by migration and conquest or simply by social differentiation in
response to internal economic and political developments.
In the post-colonial period, for extremists on both sides, the divide has come to be
perceived as a racial division. Political conflicts and inequalities in the colonial period built on
and reinforced stereotypes and separation. Successive traumatic conflicts in both Burundi
and Rwanda entrenched them even further. Despite the efforts of many moderates and the
existence of many extended families crossing the Hutu/Tutsi divide, extremist ideologies
and fears are deadly forces. Far from being the product of ancient and immutable “tribal”
distinctions, however, they are based above all in political rivalries and experiences of
current generations.
[For a collection of articles introducing the complex Great Lakes crisis, see the Association of
Concerned Africa Scholars Great Lakes Briefing Packet, December 1996 (available for
US$9.00 from ACAS, 326 Lincoln Hall, 702 S. Wright St., Urbana, IL 68101; e-mail:
acas@prairienet.org; web: http://www.prairienet.org/acas).]
Case in Point: Zulu Identity in South Africa
Zulu identity in South Africa is historical, not static. What it means to be “Zulu” has changed
over time, and means different things to different people today. Before the nineteenth
century, “Zulu” was the clan name of the kings of a small kingdom, which was tributary to
the Mthethwa kingdom. Beginning around 1815, the Zulu kingdom displaced the Mthethwa
kingdom and conquered dozens of other nearby small kingdoms which gradually took on
Zulu identity on top of older local identities.
Culturally these communities already had much in common. Similarities of culture and
mutually intelligible language extended south to the Xhosa, Mpondo, Thembu, Xesibe and
Bhaca kingdoms, as well as north to many but not all of the political communities in what
are now Swaziland and Mpumalanga province in South Africa. Ethnic identities within this
continuum of culture and language came mainly from political identification with political
communities. The expansion of political powers, such as the Zulu and Swazi kingdoms,
created new identities for many people in the 19th century.
White colonization began in the 1830s, when the Zulu kingdom was still quite new. White
conquest took decades. Many chiefdoms remained in the independent Zulu kingdom while
others came under the British colony of Natal. Many people and chiefs only recently
conquered by the Zulu kingdom fled into Natal, rejecting political Zulu identity, although
retaining cultural affinity. But as all Zulu-speaking people came under white South African
rule, and as white rule became more oppressive, evolving into apartheid, the Zulu identity
and memories of the powerful independent kingdom became a unifying focus of cultural
resistance.
Under South African rule, the term “tribe” referred to an administrative unit governed by a
chief under rules imposed by the white government. Tribes were thus not ancient and
traditional, but modern bureaucratic versions of the old small kingdoms. Yet the Zulu people
or nation was also referred to as a tribe by whites. Thus the Zulu “tribe” was composed of
several hundred tribes.
Africa Action
1634 Eye Street, Suite 810, NW ♦ Washington, DC 20006 ♦ (t) 202-546-7961♦ (f) 202-546-1545♦ www.africaaction.org
With apartheid, the government fostered ethnic nationalism or tribalism to divide Africans,
claiming that segregated, impoverished land reserves (“homelands”) could become
independent countries. Conversely, when the African National Congress (ANC) formed in
1912, it saw tribalism — divisive ethnic politics — as an obstacle to creating a modern
nation. But it saw diverse linguistic, cultural and political heritages as sources of strength.
The new nation had to be built by extending and uniting historic identities, not by negating
them.
Since the 1980s severe conflict between followers of the ANC and followers of the largely
Zulu-based Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) has killed tens of thousands of people. Sometimes
portrayed as reflecting primitivism and ancient tribal rivalries, this violence illustrates how
“tribe” misleads.
Most of the conflict has been Zulu people fighting other Zulu people in the province of
KwaZulu-Natal. There are complicated local causes related to poverty and patronage
politics, but the fighting is also about what Zulu ethnic or national identity should be in
relation to South African national identity. Zulu people are deeply divided over what it
means to be Zulu.
In the early 1990s the violence spread to the Johannesburg area and often took the ethnic
form of Zulu IFP followers vs. Xhosa ANC followers. Yet this was not an ancient tribal conflict
either, since historically the independent Zulu and Xhosa nations never fought a war. Rather
it was a modern, urban, politicized ethnic conflict.
On the one side, the IFP has continually stressed its version of Zulu identity. Also, since the
ANC has followers in all ethnic groups, as the 1994 elections showed, neighborhoods with
many Xhosa residents may have been specifically targetted in order to falsely portray the
ANC as a “Xhosa” organization. On the other side, the ANC at the time tried to isolate the
IFP in a way that many ordinary Zulu people saw as anti-Zulu, making them fearful. As has
been recently confirmed, the apartheid regime’s police and military were actively involved in
covert actions to instigate the conflict.
The IFP relies heavily on symbols of “tradition.” But to see that as making Zulu identity
“tribal” obscures other realities: the IFP’s modern conservative market-oriented economic
policy; the deep involvement of all Zulu in an urban-focused economy, with half living
permanently in cities and towns; the modern weapons, locations and methods of the
violence, and the fact that even as the IFP won the rural vote in the most recent elections, a
strong majority of urban Zulu-speakers voted ANC.
Case in Point: The Yoruba People
There are 20 million or more people who speak Yoruba as their mother tongue. Some 19
million of them live in Nigeria, but a growing diaspora are dispersed around Africa and
around the world. Yoruba-speaking communities have lived in other West African countries
for centuries. Yoruba culture and religion have profoundly influenced the African diaspora in
Brazil, Cuba and other New World countries, even among communities where the language
itself is completely or partially forgotten.
Taking a quick look at linguistic or national communities of similar size, one can see that
this is roughly equivalent to the total numbers of Dutch speakers (21 million, including
Africa Action
1634 Eye Street, Suite 810, NW ♦ Washington, DC 20006 ♦ (t) 202-546-7961♦ (f) 202-546-1545♦ www.africaaction.org
Flemish speakers in Belgium). It is more than the total population of Australia (18 million)
or the total number of speakers of Hungarian (14 million) or Greek (12 million).
Like parallel communities of Igbo-speakers (16 million) and Hausa-speakers (35 million),
situated largely within but also beyond the borders of the state of Nigeria, the Yoruba
people has a long and complex history which is hard to encompass within “tribal” images.
There is a long artistic tradition, with terra-cotta sculpture flourishing in the Ile-Ife city state
a thousand years ago. There is a common mutually understandable language, despite many
dialects and centuries of political and military contention among distinct city- states and
kingdoms. There is a tradition of common origin in the city of Ile-Ife and of descent from
Oduduwa, the mythical founder of the Yoruba people.
Notably, Yoruba common language and culture predate any of the modern “nations” of
North or South America. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the Oyo kingdom ruled over most
of Yorubaland, but included non-Yoruba speakers as well. Today that territory is within the
nation of Nigeria, with borders created by European conquest. Yoruba identity does not
coincide, then, with the boundaries of a modern nation-state. Its historical depth and
complexity, however, is fully comparable to that of European nations or other identities
elsewhere in the world that do.
Among Yorubas, a religious pluralism of traditional religion, Islam and Christianity has
prevailed for more than a century, with political disputes rarely coinciding with religious
divisions. Ancestral cities or polities (ilu, comparable to the Greek polis) are a far more
important source of political identity, along with modern political divisions.
In short, Yoruba identity is real, with substantial historical roots. But it corresponds neither
to a modern nation-state nor to some simple version of a traditional “tribe.” It coexists with
loyalty to the nation (Nigeria for most, but many are full citizens of other nations), and with
“home-town” loyalties to ancestral cities.
In determining what term to use in English, one cannot resort to the Yoruba language,
which has no real equivalent for the English word “tribe.” The closest are the words eniyan
or eya, with literal translations in English as “part” and “portion.” The term may refer to the
Yoruba themselves, subgroups or other groups. In Yoruba, Hausa-speakers would be
referred to as awon eniyan Hausa or awon Hausa, meaning “Hausa people.” Non-Yoruba-
speaking Nigerians of whatever origin may be referred to as ti ara ilu kannaa — “those of
the same country.”
In English, no term actually fills in the complexity that is in the history and present reality
so that outsiders understand it as do the people themselves. Terms such as “ethnic group”
or simply “people,” however, carry less baggage than “tribe,” and leave room open for that
complexity.
Africa Action
1634 Eye Street, Suite 810, NW ♦ Washington, DC 20006 ♦ (t) 202-546-7961♦ (f) 202-546-1545♦ www.africaaction.org
THE NORTHERN FACTOR IN THE HISTORY OF SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA: THE HAMITIC
HYPOTHESIS REVISITED
Author(s): I.R. Amadi
Source: Transafrican Journal of History , 1989, Vol. 18 (1989), pp. 80-89
Published by: Gideon Were Publications
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24328705
REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24328705?seq=1&cid=pdf-
reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Transafrican Journal of
History
This content downloaded from
������������169.231.119.112 on Mon, 27 Sep 2021 05:16:44 UTC������������
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24328705
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24328705?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24328705?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents
THE NORTHERN FACTOR IN THE HISTORY OF
SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA: THE HAMITIC HYPOTHESIS
REVISITED
I.R. Amadi
Accepted January. 15 1989
Archaeological, linguistic, and perhaps other pieces of evidence on their face
value seem, in respect of African history, at least in recent historiography to point
to a movement of peoples, cultures, and ideas southwards from the northern to
the southern half of the continent beginning from the end of the Makalian wet
phase some 5000 BP. Perhaps the European invasion of Africa during the
scramble and the partition may be said to be an extension, temporal and spatial,
of what has now come to be known as the Hamitic influence in the history of
Black Africa. Those who subscribe to the view of a pervasive northern impact
may often believe that black Africa was incapable of any cultural innovations
beyond those introduced among them by the superior Hamites from the north or
elsewhere. On the other hand, many historians challenge this impression and
take pains to prove the ron’rary view in some specific instances.
In this paper an attempt will be made to review briefly some of the major
historical and cultural indices, some of which are taken for granted, that have
been used by the exponents of the external influence and, against the backdrop of
the opposing arguments, determine how far Black African development has heen
influenced from outside in the early periods of African history. In the end there
will emerge, it is hoped, a position that emphasizes the weakness of the Hamitic
hypothesis and points to the possibility of Negroes actually influencing
developments northwards.
The hamitic hypothesis as an idea was first mooted by the explorer, J.H.
Speke, in relation to the Buganda Kingdom of the 19th century.1 It was later
more forcefully articulated by C.G. Seligman when he wrote:
Apart from relatively late Semitic influence . . . the civilizations of Africa
are the civilizations of Hamites, its history the record of these peoples and
their interaction with the two other African stocks, the Negro and the Bush
men, whether this influence was exerted by highly civilized Egyptians or by
such wider pastoralists as are represented at the present day by the Beja and
Somali. . . The incoming Hamites were pastoral ‘European’ — arriving
wave after wave — better armed as well as quicker witted than the dark
agricultural Negros.2
However, later-day scholars have abandoned Seligman’s superior race syndrome
and have chosen to take refuge in the diffusion of institutions rather than of
gQ Transafrican Journal of History, vol. 18, 1989: 80 –
89
This content downloaded from
������������169.231.119.112 on Mon, 27 Sep 2021 05:16:44 UTC������������
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Transafrican Journal of History
superior people. Thus recently, though without, perhaps, any obvious racist
colouration, scholars have come up with viewpoints that attribute major
developments south of the Sahara to diffusionist elements from the north. For
instance in a contribution to the debate J.D. Clark writes that ‘after the
Pleistocene, sub-Saharan Africa seems to have been more receptive than
contributary to cultural progress in the old World as a whole.’3 A study of the
existing literature on the immediate pre-history and history of Africa will
certainly throw up the looming shadow of this external old world influence which
in many cases merely acts as a red herring in the quest for an objective appraisal
of the African past. ‘Nothing has bedevilled the study of (African) history’,
Professor M.S. Kiwanuka has written, ‘more than the Hamitic theory, (of) J.H.
Speke’.*
Admittedly, modern scholarship in general is much more cautious in these
matters. However, the role of the Negro in the early civilization of the north —
Egypt which can be gleaned from the records appears to be essentially neglected.
It is noteworthy that, perhaps as a result, Cheikh Anta Diop has taken pains to
most persuasively argue for a Negro origin of civilization, asserting that the
ancient Egyptian civilisation was authored by the Negro race.5 His remarks and
conclusions have of course drawn not very charitable criticism from Professor
Raymond Mauny.6 Yet, in spite of some evident weaknesses in his thesis, ‘the
greatest merit of his work lies in pointing out in full measure the reality of Negro
input in the Egyptian civilisation. The Egyptian element, along with other factors
as can be seen in the following lines, would seem to render untenable the view
that it was the Hamites who engineered cultural sophistication in sub-Saharan
Africa.
Plant and Animal Domestication
First, let us consider the origins of food and animal domestication in history as
they affect Africa south of the Sahara. Gordon V. Childe, the theorist of the
neolithic evolution in his thesis of unitary origin believes that plants and animals
were first domesticated in the Near East from where the knowledge of that
invention diffused first to the Nile valley and thence across the Sahara to the
Negro peoples. This Near Eastern development according to him occurred in the
eighth millienuim B.C., while dates between the sixth and fifth millenia B.C.
have been suggested for its reaching Egypt. For sub-Saharan Africa the diffusion
occurred in the third millenium B.C., it is generally held.7 This north-south
trend would even appear well supported by archaeological excavations in the
southern half of Africa where occur the most recent Iron Age -settlement dates in
keeping with the late occupation of the region by the iron-using agricultural
Bantu. But, the Bantu it has been demonstrated , originated from West Africa
and not from across the Sahara’.
81
This content downloaded from
������������169.231.119.112 on Mon, 27 Sep 2021 05:16:44 UTC������������
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Hamitic Hypothesis Revisited \
To many modern scholars who write on these issues the question of the
Hamitic theory may never have been of any conscious concern to their
objectives; nevertheless one can hardly fail to discern an unconscious, at time
surreptitious, acceptance of the Hamitic thesis, given especially the recent
African colonial past. Indeed D.G. Coursey, with regard to the controversy
surrounding the origin of the African yam, has observed that ‘the psychological
climate of much of the colonial era in West Africa was . . . unfavourable to the
idea that African races could possibly have developed any useful crop’.8 In any
case it is not being argued that in these things no connexions had existed between
the Old World and Africa south of the Sahara. It is rather the nature and extent
of the former’s influence that raise some questions.
Contrary to the diffusionist view G.P. Murdock has postulated an independent
origin of crop domestication in West Africa among the Mande people who, he
says, domesticated the African rice around the headwaters (sic) of the River
Niger about 5000 B.C. He ranks the zone as one of four centres of agricultural
evolution, adding that ‘this was a genuine invention, not a borrowing from
another people’.9 Although the bases for his conclusion have been criticised,10 he
is not alone in the view of the indigenous invention of agriculture in West Africa.
For instance Richard Gray and Roland Porteres have expressed a similar
opinion. They say that ‘it would seem that many forest Africans knew cereal
cultivation (first) and that, at least in the case of rice, this knowledge owed
nothing to other areas of agriculture.’11 Three independent centres of
domestication — the Ethiopian region, tropical West Africa north of the rain
forest, and southeast Africa — have been assigned to sorghum.12 It used to be
thought that yam was not grown in Africa until the arrival of Asian yams.
Coursey has shown that yam cultivation doubtlessly evolved independently in the
Derived Guinea Savanna of West Africa or possibly under high forest
conditions.13 It is thus clear that it would be difficult to make a final statement
regarding the diffusion of crop domestication into sub-Saharan Africa from
outside. One can, therefore, not agree more with Thurstan Shaw who rightly
cautions that ‘in the present state of our knowledge any consideration of the
beginnings and development of agriculture in Africa must largely be a survey of
our ignorance or a reasoned essay in speculation. ‘
In respect of livestock it is generally accepted that the well known domesticates
— goats, sheep, and cattle — were introduced from outside especially as no
possible ancestors of these animals have been discovered in Africa south of the
Sahara. Consequently their origin has been traced through the Nile valley to the
Near East. Two observations need to be made on this matter: the first is that
evidence exists in support of cattle having been possibly domesticated earlier in
the Sahara than Egypt, the assumed first African port of call on the diffusionist
track; the second is that certain animals such as the ass, the cat, and the guinea
82
This content downloaded from
������������169.231.119.112 on Mon, 27 Sep 2021 05:16:44 UTC������������
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Transafrican Journal of History
fowl are accepted as authentic indigenous domesticates whose domestication most
probably owed nothing to external stimulus.
Iron Technology
The origin of iron technology in Africa is another area of controversy regarding
influence from across the Sahara. It is well known that the earliest iron culture in
Sub-Saharan Africa occurred in about the 5th century B.C. at Nok located south
of the Jos Plateau and far from the Saharan margin. It has been suggested that
owing to the complexity of iron technology, its independent invention must have
occurred only once — in the Middle East — and the knowledge diffused there
from to other places.14 It was known in North Africa first and later in Meroe.
Diffusionists are of the opinion that iron in Nok came either from North Africa or
Meroe.15 The rather slim difference in dates — 6th century B.C. for Meroe and
5th century B.C. for Nok — appears to be an important anchor against which the
Meroitic diffusion is secured. Yet a dissenting opinion exists which says that iron
in Nok was actually earlier than in.Meroe.16 If this is true, then the Meroe thesis
needs to be reviewed. A more direct evidence against Meroe is available in
relation to Daima, located south of Lake Chad, where excavations have shown
the Iron Age occurring much later than at Nok — actually about a thousand
years after Nok. The point is that if iron Had diffused from Meroe it would have
probably been at Daima earlier than Nok because Daima was well suited
geographically to play the role of a corridor through which cultural influences
flowed in an east — west direction.17
Those who argue that iron diffused from North Africa to Nok do so on the
assumed merits of Carthage as an iron-using Phoenician settlement beginning
from its foundation in the 9th century B.C. They also mention the copper mines
of Akjoujt in modern Mauritania where copper artifacts datable to the 5th
century B.C. have been excavated. The fact that the,equine phase of the Saharan
rock art shows chariot routes passing close to Akjoujt from a northerly direction,
they further contend, is suggestive of the art of .metal working having been
transmitted from Carthage. Other such routes existed elsewhere and could have
played a similar role, they also suggest.18 Although no iron artifact has been
recovered at Akjoujt, iron working is assumed by Oliver and Fagan who contend
that iron and copper were so intermingled in the mines ‘that it would have been
impossible to smelt one without the other.’ This, perhaps, is more so when
copper is believed to have provided the necessary intermediate technology for
understanding the more complex task of iron smelting.19
Rather than strengthen, this viewpoint weakens the general proposition
because, in the first place, it fails to adequately take into consideration the fact
that Africa south of the Sahara, with the possible exception of Mauretania
83
This content downloaded from
������������169.231.119.112 on Mon, 27 Sep 2021 05:16:44 UTC������������
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Hamitic Hypothesis Revisited
skipped the Bronze Age and moved from Stone to Iron Age ostensibly without
the benefit of the intermediate copper technology. Secondly, in spite of the
existence\>f other possible chariot routes in the Sahara there is no evidence of
copper mines in central Sahara that would have created a source of opportunity
for this technology around the fourth century B.C. It must be a great tribute to
the people of Nok if they did what the Carthagineans, Egyptians, and the
Kushites could not do, namely: understand the complex mechanics of iron
working before ever working on copper. The case for independent invention of
iron technology in Nok is therefore a strong one.20
Egyptian Culture, the Hamitic Theory and other Black Monarchies
Undoubtedly the blossoming of the oldest African civilization in Egypt is another
factor influencing the Hamitic theory. The Egyptian culture, classified as
Hamitic, is seen as diffusing southwards and southwestwards in its later years
with an important anchorage in Kush. It may never be disputed, as Diop does,
that Kush borrowed a lot from ancient Egypt especially after several centuries of
subordination and colonisation by Egypt. However, it is the nature of such
influence reaching the Negro peoples through Kush that remain contentious. We
have’already discussed the question of iron. One essential dimension of the
Egyptian factor calls for mention at this point, to wit: the alleged diffusion of the
traits of ‘divine kingship’. For certain reasons this hitherto widely held notion
appears improbable. Fage has aptly pointed out that the political institutions of
central and western Sudan could not have been affected by any eastern influences
other than from the Christian Nubian kingdoms that succeeded Kush as from the
6th century A.D. Secondly, he maintains that the monarchies of Shilluk and the
Babito of Bunyoro founded much later in the 16th century were the products of
Luo conquest of the Chwezi state of Bunyoro-Kitara. Kushitic influence, it would
seem, was confined in the direction of the Blue Nile where the Sidama were
possibly affected.21
In a similar vein the Hamitic element manifests itself in the traditions of origin
of monarchies and peoples of several Black kingdoms. For instance from those
traditions of the interlacustrine region of East Africa which indicate a northern
origin for the Chwezi some people have distilled the notion that these founders of
the Bunyoro — Kitara state were either Greeks, Portuguese, or Egyptians,22 all
in an effort to emphasize the inferiority of the Negro. Of course Were and Wilson
dismiss this idea as mere guess work. More importantly, Nkore tradition says
that the Abachwezi were indigenous to the interlacustrine region. Indeed an
informant claimed that they ‘were a ruling class within Bunyoro. They were born
here. They were hunters’.23
For ancient Ghana a similar proposition has been made as a result of Mahmud
84
This content downloaded from
������������169.231.119.112 on Mon, 27 Sep 2021 05:16:44 UTC������������
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Transafrican Journal of History
Kati’s Tarikh al Fettach and Es Sadi’s Tarikh al Sudan both of which mention the
presence of white kings in the kingdom in its formative years. According to the
latter there were twenty-two white kings before and twenty-two other white kings
after the Hejra. This belief has been’challenged because, among other reasons,
there is unmistakable Islamic influence in that tradition which apparently
chrystallized in the;hey day of Islam in the Western Sudan. Again, the notion has
been traced to al Idrisi who wrote in the 12th century A.D. It is noteworthy that
others before him such as al Yakubi, al Masudi and al Bakri spoke of Ghana as a
Negro kingdom.24 Finally Kati and es Sadi wrote in the 16th and 17th centuries
long after the collapse of Ghana and may have worked with imperfect and
unreliable sources. Against the background of this kind of skepticism -should be
weighted other similar traditions of exotic — often Middle Eastern — origins of
peoples and dynasties in this part of Africa. We have in mind such legends as
those of Kisra, Oduduwa, Bayejidda,25 and lately the wayward claims of
Jewish/Egyptians origins by the Igbo and the Efik.26
From the foregoing historical samples a minimum deduction can be made: the
northern origins of early Sub-Saharan African cultures remain in several
instances an assumption. It may therefore be of help to look more critically at the
other side of the coin and, in conjunction with additional information, further
sharpen our perspective on the subject. The march of events had not always been
in a north-to-south direction. Of course the first tool-making hominid evolved in
East Africa and if we should accept a unitary origin of the human species and
culture, then it can be said that proto-humans and their culture moved to North
Africa and beyond from the south. So far the true relationship between the rock
art of the Sahara and southern Africa has not been determined even though both
have been dated to about 6000 B.P.27 However, the early paintings throughout
Africa depict people living a nomadic way of life.28 Unless it can be proved that
one art tradition led to the other, it must be held that the rock paintings attest to
the probability of multiple independent origins of identical cultures. So far no
such outright proof may be said to exist.
The authors of the southern African paintings and engravings were the pre
Bantu San inhabitants of that part of Africa. Interestingly enough the early
Saharan paintings show humans with ‘very definite’ Negroid features. Skeletal
remains have indicated that in the past Negroid peoples lived as far north as
latitude 25° north.29 It is most likely that they were the authors of those paintings
even though Cooke does not think so.30 Be that as it may, J. Ki-Zerbo has warned
that the reconstruction which attributes the earliest art period in the Sahara to
Mediterranean people who were either White or half-caste is precarious and gives
undue weight to population movements from outside Africa.31 The crucial
question is: if these Negro peoples eventually drifted south as a result of the
desication of the Sahara had they at any earlier time moved northwards in the
85
This content downloaded from
������������169.231.119.112 on Mon, 27 Sep 2021 05:16:44 UTC������������
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Hamitic Hypothesis Revisited
first instance? The significance of this question arises from the view that the
Negroes of West Africa are said to have evolved from the ‘wét conditions of
equatorial and West Africa’,32 a view which is well buttressed by the discovery at
Iwo Eleru in Western Nigeria of the oldest skeletal remains of a Negroid human
dated to the tenth millenium B.C.33 If Negros had moved north as early as 5400
B.C.,34 for example, the movement must have significant implications for the
diffusionist theory.
At this juncture it may be apposite to refer to the opinion of Cheikh Anta Diop.
Making references to Egyptian painting, sculpture, religion and other cultural
traits, ancient and modern authors, including linguistics, he declares that it was
the Negroes who created the Egyptian civilisation. By implication therefore,
‘they were the first to invent mathematics, astronomy, the calendar, science, the
arts, religion, agriculture, social organisation, medicine, writing, technology,
architecture. . . ‘ Diop continues; ‘In saying all this one simply asserts that which
is, in all modesty, strictly true and which no one, at this time, can refute by
arguments worthy of the name’.35 In the present state of our knowledge, this is no
doubt an extremist view which may understandably outrage some people’s sense
of history. None the less, this does not make the opposite viewpoint (White origin
of Egyptian civilisation) any greater truth than the former. It would appear that
Egyptian civilisation was a joint contribution of the Black and the White races to
mankind. Already we have noted the discovery of negro skeletal remains deep in
the Saharan latitudes. It is even more intriguing that from the fourth millenium
Neolithic cemetary at Badari in Upper Egypt have been excavated skeletons
classified as belonging in about equal proportions to caucasoid, Negro, and
hybrid races.36 Badari was one of the early formative phases in Egyptian
civlisation. Apparently the Negroes were later displaced in the Nile valley and the
Sahara owing probably to social and natural factors such as the desiccation that
had afflicted the Sahara after the Makalian Wet Phase. These would have
engendered a southward movement of Negro peoples carrying with them the
cultural baggage they had been very familiar with, and to which they had
contributed, in the more northern latitudes. In all this we should not lose sight of
the fact of the hybridisation of population that would naturally have occurred.
Also we need not assume that in their new abode they met stagnant cultures. The
Nok culture may yet be a good testimony to this observation. In the
circumstances, therefore, the Hamitic hypothesis, whether as diffusion of alien
people “or diffusion of alien institutions remains highly controversial.
The Bronze Age in history is another crucial point in this debate. The Hamitic
theory does not seem to adequately explain why Africa south of the Sahara
skipped the Bronze Age and moved from Stone to iron technology. According the
C.C. Wrigley, tropical Africa suddenly lost contact with the north between the
fourth and the first millenia B.C., the period when northern peoples were
86
This content downloaded from
������������169.231.119.112 on Mon, 27 Sep 2021 05:16:44 UTC������������
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Transafrican Journal of History
constructing urban civilizations characterized by large scale social organisation,
metallurgy, and writing. Although absence of minerals has been given as a
possible explanation, he believes that isolation was the major culprit — the
isolation arising from the post Makalian dry phase.37 Not only was tropical Africa
as a result deprived of this technological innovation, it was as well pushed back
behind North Africa and Eurasia and in the process acquired the character of
technical and cultural backwardness which even the coming of iron could not
alter.38 The weakness of the case-for isolation as applied here is in the fact that the
period covered by the fourth to the first millenium B.C. corresponded with or
subsumed the period which diffusionists assign the presence of domestication in
tropical Africa. If desiccation had prevented the Bronze Age from penetrating the
Savanna zone, why had it not done the same to crop and animal domestication?
Be that as it may, the Sahara has never been a permanent obstacle to interaction
as attested by long-established contacts across it. This bronze question therefore
appears to be a very serious lapse in the diffusionist theory. The absence of
copper as an explanation is hardly helpful, otherwise what prevented copper from
being transported along the so-called chariot routes of iron diffusion?
A look at the Bantu migrations, events of immense historical importance, will
aid our understanding of the Negro’s place in history. These migrations which
culturally transformed the African sub-continent occurred without any external
Hamitic stimulus. In fact, so impressed were the early Europeans with the
civizations of Bantu Africa as represented by Zimbabwe and Buganda, for
example, that they sought to assign alien origins to them. It is on record that the
Bantu may have initially moved southwards from West Africa to the present
Katanga region in modern Zaire before they began later to disperse in various
directions. Moving in northerly and easterly directions some even displaced
earlier speakers of Afro-Asiatic and Cushitic languages.39
Perhaps the greatest weakness of the Hamitic hypothesis is its historically
slippery nature. The term ‘Hamitic’ initially meant ‘Black’ with all the attendant
derogatory epithets it pleased its authors to attach to it. At a time it formed the
basis of a polygenist interpretation of the creation of mankind which assigned
inferior species to the Black race which included Egypt. Later something
happened. The ancient Egyptian civilization was uncovered by the French
soldiers who had invaded Egypt in 1798. It was subsequently and amazingly
found that in ancient Egypt lay the beginnings of western civilization. This
created a serious problem for the European mind. To wriggle out of it, language
was evoked whereby Egypt became identified as Semitic which is non-Negro.
Suddenly the term ‘Hamitic’ changed from ‘Negro-Hamitic’ to ‘Caucasoid
Hamitic’ — ‘White’, unblemished, and superior.40
87
This content downloaded from
������������169.231.119.112 on Mon, 27 Sep 2021 05:16:44 UTC������������
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Hamtic Hypothesis Revisited
Conclusion
It should be stated that contact between peoples on both sides of the Sahel
throughout history has never been in doubt. This contact, however, is no
sufficient evidence of a one-way movement of culture. Movement could have
been both ways. The presence of Negroes at 25° north latitude and Badari may
even designate a diffusion of peoples and cultures northwards from the forest
margins. It is further argued that Africans south of the Sahara were capable of
inventive originality; and the Bantu migrations demonstrate their ability to
influence the march of events on their own. In the final analysis the Hamitic idea
remains* a myth and as Sanders aptly says, ‘the word still exists, endowed with a
mythical meaning; it endures through time and history, and, like a chameleon
changes its colour to reflect the changing light. As the word became flesh, it
engendered many problems of scholarship.41
About the Author
I.R. Amadi, Ph.D., is currently with the Department of History, University of Calabar, P.M.B.
1115, Calabar, Nigeria.
Not«
1. Kiwanuka, M.S.M. (1965), (ed) Kings of Buganda Nairobi: East, African Publishing Hosue, p.
xixff.
2. Seligman, C.G. (1966), Races of Africa, 4th Ed. London: Oxford University Press, p. 61.
3. Clark, J.D. (1962), ‘The Spread of Food Production in Sub-Saharan Africa’ in J. A H. Vol. 3,
No. 2, p. 211.
4. Kiwanuka, p. xix.
5. Diop first set forth his ideas in ‘Negro Nations and Culture’ published in Presence Africaine, Paris
1955; The publication was later incorporated into a larger volume: Cheikh Anta Diop, The African
Origin of Civilisation: Myth or Reality, M. Cook, editor and translator (Westport, Lawrence Hill and
Company) 1974. Diop also upheld his views at a ÜNESCO symposium on Hie Peopling of
Ancient Egypt, and the deciphering of the Meroitic text held in Cairo in 1974. In spite of
disagreements his views created an outstanding impact on the symposium. For abridged report of
the symposium see UNESCO General History of Africa Vol. 2 California: Heinemann, 1981) pp.
58-82.
6. Dïop’s Negro Nations and Culture’ and its review by Raymond Mauny appear in Rpbert O.
Collins (ed) Problems i n African History New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1968) pp. 10-24.
7. Clark, J.D. ‘The Spread of Food Production, etc. p. 228.
8. Coursey, .D.G. ‘The cultivation and Use of Y ams in West Africa’ in Z.A. and J.M. Konczacki
(eds) An Economic History of Tropical Africa, vol. 1 London; Frank Cass, 1977, p. 34.
9. Murdock, G.P. (1959), Africa, Its Peoples and Their Culture History New York, Mc-Graw Hill, pp.
64-7.
10. Baker, H.G. (1962), ‘Comments on the Thesis that there was a major centre of plant
domestication near the Headwaters of the River Niger’ J A. H. Vol. 3, No. 2.
88
This content downloaded from
������������169.231.119.112 on Mon, 27 Sep 2021 05:16:44 UTC������������
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Transqfrican Journal of History
11. Gray, R. and Porteres, R. (1962), ‘Conference Report on African History at S.O.A.S.,
University of London, 3 – 7, July 1961’ in J.A.H. Vol. 3, No. p. 180.
12. Harlan, J.R. et al (eds) Origins of African Plant Domestication Paria: Mouton Publishers, p.
124.
13. Coursey, D.G. in Z.A. andJ.M. Konczacki, p. 36.
14. Fage, J.D. (1973) A Histoiy of Africa, London: Longman, p. 43. Elizabeth Isichei, A History of
Nigeria, London: Hutchinson 8 Co., 1983 p. 18.
15. Oliver, R. and Fagan, B. (1975) Africa in the Iron Age, London: Cambridge University Press, pp.
60 – 62: J.D. Fage, p. 18.
16. Isichei, p. 43. Source of information not indicated.
17. Fage, pp. 17 – 19.
18. Roland Oliver and Brian Fagan, pp. 60 – 61.
19. Fage, p. 18.
20. Onwuejeogwu, M.A. (1986) ‘Intergroup Cultural Relations in Nigeria: A Survey from Dawn to
Present* A paper presented at the workshop on the Teaching of Nigerian History from a National
Perspective held in Lagos 2-8 February 1986, p. 4.
21. Fage, p. 41.
22. Were, G.S. and Wilson, D.A. (1968), East Africa Through a Thousand Years, New York: Africana,
p. 45.
23. See Uzoigwe, G.N. ‘Pioneers, Superstars, Nilotes and State Formation in the Interlacustrine
Region of East Africa’ being a paper presented at the second K.O. Dike Memorial Lecture, 18th
May 1986 at the University of Ife, p>. 11. The paper will be published in the forthcoming
December, 1986 issue of the . Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria.
24. Ajayi, J.F.A. and Crowder, S. (eds) (1971) History of West Africa, vol. 1, London, Longman, p.
122.
25. Fage, p. 63 ff.
26. See for instance Afigbo, A.E. (1981) Ropes of Sand London: OUP, 1981 ch. One: Monday Noah,
OldCalabar: The City State and the Europeans, Calabar: Scholars Press, 1980 ch. one.
27. Cookc, C.K. ‘The Rock P.aintings and Engravings of Africa’ in Tarikh vol. 1, No. 3 pp. 45 and
55.
28. Ibid.
29. Oliver and Fagan p. 60.
30. Cooke, C.K. ‘The Rock Paintings etc. ‘ p. 64.
31. Ki-Zerbo,J. ‘African Prehistoric Art’ UNESCO General History of Africa, Vol. 1, p. 678.
32. Fage, p.10.
33. Shaw, Thurstan (1971) ‘Prehistory’ in Obaro Ikime (ed) The Groundwork of Nigerian History
Ibadan, Heinemann, 1971, p. 30.
34. Fage, p. 10.
35. Collins, p. 16.
36. Fage, p. 11.
37. Wrigiey, C.C. (1960) ‘Speculations on the Economic Prehistory of Africa’ in J. A.H Vol. 1, No.
2, p. 200.
38. Ibid.
39. Fage, p. 32.
40. For greater details see Sanders, Edith R. (1969) ‘The Hamitic Hypothesis. Its Origin and
Function in Time Perspective’ in J.A.H. Vol. X, No. 4, pp. 521 – 532.
41. 7Äirf, p. 531.
89
This content downloaded from
������������169.231.119.112 on Mon, 27 Sep 2021 05:16:44 UTC������������
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
- Contents
- Issue Table of Contents
p. 80
p. 81
p. 82
p. 83
p. 84
p. 85
p. 86
p. 87
p. 88
p. 89
Transafrican Journal of History, Vol. 18 (1989) pp. i-vi, 1-200
Front Matter
THE GLOBAL DIMENSIONS OF AFRICA’S CRISIS: DEBTS, STRUCTURAL ADJUSTMENT AND WORKERS [pp. 1-53]
THE UNDERLYING CAUSES OF THE FOOD CRISIS IN AFRICA [pp. 54-79]
THE NORTHERN FACTOR IN THE HISTORY OF SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA: THE HAMITIC HYPOTHESIS REVISITED [pp. 80-89]
Judgement on a Colonial Governor: Sir Percy Girouard in Kenya [pp. 90-100]
þÿ�þ�ÿ���E���X���T���E���N���D���I���N���G��� ���L���A���G���O���S��� ���C���O���M���M���E���R���C���I���A���L��� ���F���R���O���N���T���I���E���R���S���:��� ���T���H���E��� ���B���A���C���K���G���R���O���U���N���D��� ���T���O��� ���T���H���E��� ���N���I���G���E���R���I���A���N��� ���R���A���I���L���W���A���Y��� ���R���E���V���I���S���I���T���E���D���,��� ���1���8���8���0��� ������� ���1���8���9���6��� ���[���p���p���.��� ���1���0���1���-���1���1���6���]
þÿ�þ�ÿ���S���W���A���Z���I��� ���R���E���S���I���S���T���A���N���C���E��� ���T���O��� ���B���O���E���R��� ���P���E���N���E���T���R���A���T���I���O���N��� ���A���N���D��� ���D���O���M���I���N���A���T���I���O���N���,��� ���1���8���8���1��� ������� ���1���8���9���8��� ���[���p���p���.��� ���1���1���7���-���1���4���6���]
þÿ�þ�ÿ���E���S���C���A���P���E��� ���F���R���O���M��� ���T���Y���R���A���N���N���Y���:��� ���F���L���I���G���H���T���S��� ���A���C���R���O���S���S��� ���T���H���E��� ���R���H���O���D���E���S���I���A���-���C���O���N���G���O��� ���B���O���U���N���D���A���R���Y��� ���1���9���0���0��� ������� ���1���9���3���0��� ���[���p���p���.��� ���1���4���7���-���1���5���9���]
HISTORICAL AND ADMINISTRATIVE PERSPECTIVE ON NIGERIAN URBAN PLANNING [pp. 160-172]
THE ALKALI COURT IN ILORIN EMIRATE DURING COLONIAL RULE [pp. 173-186]
IGBO-IKWU REVISITED [pp. 187-192]
BOOK REVIEWS
Review: untitled [pp. 193-195]
Review: untitled [pp. 196-197]
BACK ISSUES [pp. 198-199]
Back Matter
Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at
https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=reso20
Economy and Society
ISSN: 0308-5147 (Print) 1469-5766 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/reso20
Long-distance exchange and the formation of the
State: the case of the Abron kingdom of Gyaman
Emmanuel Terray
To cite this article: Emmanuel Terray (1974) Long-distance exchange and the formation of the
State: the case of the Abron kingdom of Gyaman, Economy and Society, 3:3, 315-345, DOI:
10.1080/03085147400000016
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147400000016
Published online: 28 Jul 2006.
Submit your article to this journal
Article views: 113
View related articles
Citing articles: 6 View citing articles
https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=reso20
https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/reso20
https://www.tandfonline.com/action/showCitFormats?doi=10.1080/03085147400000016
https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147400000016
https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?journalCode=reso20&show=instructions
https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?journalCode=reso20&show=instructions
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/10.1080/03085147400000016
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/10.1080/03085147400000016
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/citedby/10.1080/03085147400000016#tabModule
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/citedby/10.1080/03085147400000016#tabModule
Long-distance exchange and the
formation of the State: the case of the
Abron kingdom of Gyaman
Emmanuel Terray
Abstract
In the view of several present-day historians and economists, including
Samir Amin, Catherine Coquery and Yves Person, the structure of pre-
colonial African socio-economic formations may be described as the
combination of peasant communities organising their labour without
outside interference, and of warrior aristocracies basing their wealth and
power on their control of long-distance trade. In my own view, this
picture underestimates the economic and social role played in many
formations by captives: in Gyaman and in Ashanti, it is essentially
captives who produce the surplus from which the aristocracy’s means of
domination are drawn; and long-distance trade functions to allow the
aristocracy to ‘realise’ the surplus product extracted from its captives’
labour, not directly to obtain resources for itself in the form of rights
or tolls. These social formations are therefore constituted by the
conjunction of a kin-based tributary mode of production and a mode of
production based on the exploitation of slave labour. In conclusion, I
raise the question as to whether this kind of structure is not the
foundation of most social formations of pre-colonial Africa, at least
where States have been in existence.
One of the major contributions from Marxist thought to the study of
pre-capitalist societies is concerned with the problem of the origin of
the State. In defining the State as ‘a machine for the oppression of one
class by another’,l Engels formally links its emergence to the emergence
of social classes : according to him the development of class oppositions,
within a particular society, after a certain point evokes institutions that
appear on the surface to be the locus and instrument of arbitration or
conciliation between antagonistic classes, and which actually tend to
provide the dominant class with the means to maintain and reproduce
its supremacy. The State’s origin is therefore a consequence of the
development of social classes, and in its turn this is the product of a
transformation of the relations of production through which the
exploitation of man by man enters a previously egalitarian society.
More precisely, Engels sees in the birth of the State an effect of the
extension of ~ l ave ry ,~ which is in his view ‘the first great cleavage of
society into an exploiting and an exploited cl as^’.^
Now for some years, a certain number of Marxist and non-Marxist
anthropologists and historians, without explicitly questioning this
316 Ernrnanuel Terray
analysis, have been placing emphasis on another correlation: one which
links the establishment of the State with the development of long-distance
e ~ c h a n g e . ~ Already in 1964, Maurice Godelier produced a first endeavour
in this direction. Seeking to define the extension of the concept of the
Asiatic mode of production, Godelier asserts that, contrary to Marx’s
view, the Asiatic mode of production is not necessarily linked to the
existence of major economic projects-irrigation, drainage, road-
construction, etc. . . . – which would evoke at one and the same time the
intervention of a centralised State and the levy of a surplus from
the product of peasant communities to ensure the life and operation of
this State. Godelier writes :
We propose to add a second hypothesis to that of Marx. We
consider that another way and another form of the Asiatic mode of
production can exist, by which a minority dominates and exploits
the communities without direct intervention in their conditions
of production, but by intervening indirectly through levying a
surplus in labour or in products for its own profit. In West Africa,
the emergence of the kingdoms of Ghana, Mali, Songhai, etc.
. . . was not generated by the organisation of large projects but
seems to be linked to control of inter-tribal or inter-regional trade
exercised by tribal aristocracies over the exchange of precious
products, gold, ivory, skins, etc. . . . between Black Africa and
White A f r i ~ a . ~
I n this perspective, the formation of the State certainly remains linked
to the emergence of exploitation, but the latter does not operate in the
sphere of immediate production, where social relations are unchanged,
but in the sphere of the distribution of products : it is by controlling this
distribution that ‘tribal aristocracies’ appropriate the surplus necessary
to their existence and hegemony.
Some years later, Catherine Coquery, in developing the suggestions
thrown out by Maurice Godelier, endeavoured to specify the notion of
an ‘African mode of production’ defined by ‘the combination of a
patriarchal communal economy and the exclusive control of one group
over long-distance e~change ‘ .~ Catherine Coquery begins by remarking
on the low productivity of agriculture in tropical Africa: ‘Black Africa
is undoubtedly the part of the world where agriculture was the least
capable of producing surplus ~ a l u e ‘ . ~ Further, the tribute exacted from
peasant communities was above all ‘a symbolic value guaranteeing the
social structure^’.^ In fact, either the products, once collected, are
immediately redistributed, and the tribute exacted contributes toward
the consolidation of the aristocracy’s power simply by the extent to
which it makes itself sole agent of this redistribution; or they make
possible ostentatious consumption designed to demonstrate the aristo-
cracy’s wealth and power. Catherine Coquery continues the argument
by asserting that so far as its own immediate consumption is concerned,
Long-distance exchange and the formation of the State 317
the aristocracy procures this ‘with the help of limited domestic slavery,
not comparable with a slave mode of production properly so called’.D
Alternatively, it does not extract the basis of its fortune from its immedi-
ate dependants-subjects; captives: ‘The African despot exploited his
subjects much less than he did neighbouring tribes: it is in fact from
long-distance exchange that the major portion of surplus product
originated. . . . Major exactions of tribute were not imposed on the
village communities; they arose from outside the territory thanks to
annual raids or to peaceful commercial transactions that ensured the
monopolisation of products at rates far lower than their value’.lO
Catherine Coquery, in her contribution to the Centre d’8tudes et
de Recherches Marxistes colloquium on feudalism, states more clearly still
that the aristocracy’s power comes ‘from its domination over commercial
routes and transactions’,ll and she adds: ‘Maybe the State was not
constructed as a result of trade, but the aristocracy strengthened itself
through its grip on major trade. . . . Surplus value was extracted from
these long-distance exchanges, and this surplus value enabled the
ruling class to be reinforced through the accumulation of prestige goods,
sometimes hoarded, more often wasted, in the framework of an economy
of ostentation’.12 While still reserving the question of the precise
historical circumstances of the formation of States, Catherine Coquery
analyses the control they exerted over long-distance exchange as the
foundation of their power.
More recently Samir Amin has put forward a similar hypothesis; in a
study of the pre-capitalist social formations of tropical Africa he writes
‘with long-distance trade setting societies ignorant of each other in
relation to each other, that is to say in terms of products for which each
society does not know the production-cost, of products that are rare
and non-substitutable, the social groups who engage in this trade
occupy a monopoly position from which they draw their profit’.l3 He
then shows that long-distance trade can play a decisive role in the very
construction of certain social formations :
This is the case when the surplus that local dominant classes
can extract from the producers inside the formation is limited,
because of the lower level of development of productive forces,
and/or different ecological conditions, or because of successful
resistance by the village community to the levy of this surplus.
In this case long-distance trade enables the transfer (definitely
not the generation) of a fraction of surplus from one society to
another, through the monopoly profit it authorises. For the
society that benefits, this transfer may be essential and may
constitute the principal basis of the wealth and power of its
ruling classes.14
Starting from quite different premises other historians, who make no
explicit recourse to Marxism, arrive at conclusions quite close to
318 Emmanuel Terray
these. For example, in a study of the history of the commercial routes
linking the Niger valley with the Gulf of Guinea, Yves Person writes:
‘I consider it impossible for a commercial route of some importance to
be organised in a region occupied by Stateless societies without destroy-
ing very quickly their segmental structure’.l6 In practice the regular
flow of trade assumes the establishment of a state of peace and security
that segmental societies are incapable of guaranteeing; thus it evokes
the establishment of a centralised power capable of maintaining order
in important areas. In return, the formation of this power gives a new
impulse to trade, which is why Person asserts ‘It seems to me altogether
likely that the development of the major trading centre of Djenne was
made possible by the formation of the Mossi-Dagomba States. I t is
probable that the Malinke traders (Dyulas) profited from the security
guaranteed by the State organisation of the Mossi-Dagomba, and
borrowed their territory to descend toward middle Volta in search of
new goldmines.’16 Here again we have at one and the same time the
assertion of a reciprocal relation between the development of trade and
of State institutions, and the assertion that the second originate in the
first since it creates the need for security to which the second respond.
I should like then to show from research I have carried out in the
Ivory Coast, partly in Dida territory and partly in Abron territory, that
this kind of thesis greatly overestimates the role of major trade in the
formation of the States of tropical Africa. This role is undeniable, but
it is not direct, and it is impossible to isolate it from a whole series of
other factors whose operation is equally important. I t is these factors
which we shall try to illuminate in the following remarks.
In the first place let us examine the security problems raised by Yves
Person. As against him, I do not think that the operation of an important
trade route is incompatible with the persistence of a segmentally organised
social structure: the Dida example shows that coexistence is perfectly
possible. Two trade routes crossed Dida territory from North to South :
one linked the Divo region to Yokobwe via Tablegiku and Gitri, the
other the Lakota region to Fresco via Kazeribwe and Gbagbam. The
Dida transported along these routes toward the coast ivory, rubber and
captives, which they exchanged for European-style commodities with
their Avikam and Godie partners-fire-arms and munitions, textiles,
alcohol, iron bars-sea-salt and dried fish. In just the same fashion they
obtained the anklets that acted as dowry inside their own society. This
circulation was extended toward the North: in exchange for the anklets
brought from the coast, the Dida obtained breeches in Gouro territory
and Baule territory.17 The data gathered by Marc Auge in Alladian and
Avikam territory,ls and by myself in Dida territory, concur in under-
lining the intensity of this flow of trade.
Now up until French colonisation Dida society maintained a purely
segmental structure. The only authority recognised before the whites
Long-distance exchange and the formation of the State 319
arrived was the elders’; not only the canton chiefs but also the village
chiefs were the creation-and most often the creatures-of the colonial
administration. Does that mean that Dida territory had no experience
of security problems? Quite the contrary: I have shown elsewherelg
that war was endemic there, and abduction frequent. But the Dida
managed to confront, and to a certain extent to surmount these diffi-
culties with the help of the only resources that their kin-based social
structure provided them. In the first place, the dictates of trade con-
tributed appreciably to the maintenance of kinship cohesion: an
expedition toward the coast in reality was a dangerous undertaking
demanding the mobilisation of extensive supporting forces: the goods
conveyed in one or other direction needed to be placed under a good
escort, and the village needed to be left well guarded; only numerous
and strongly integrated kin-groups therefore were able to involve
themselves in this venture.20 Moreover, matrimonial strategy among the
Dida was partly determined by the requirements of trade : for preference
a Dida village sent its daughters to marry in areas further to the South;
in practice by doing so it obtained allies and maternal nephews in the
regions between it and the sea; its travellers could thus stay with these
allies and nephews when they got to the coast; each village where one
of their sisters had married represented for them a stage along the
route where accommodation and assistance were ensured.21 When the
network of kinship bonds had gaps in it, these were filled by institutions
which had the effect, if not the aim, of ensuring travellers’ safety. Let
us instance among them the systems of clans (yuru) and of political
alliances (meno). Elsewhere I have described the yuru system: all Dida
are divided into four clans called yuru, each being characterised by a
particular prohibition transmitted by the female line. Members of the
same yuru owe each other hospitality and protection. In villages where
the traveller has relatives, allies or friends (tekpa), these take the
responsibility of looking after him, but where he knows no one the
yuru intervenes to defend him against possible abduction atternpts.22
The bonds of political alliance that the Dida established with neigh-
bouring peoples, particularly the Abidji, the Godie and the Neyo, who
were also precisely their trading partners, had as an important conse-
quence this same duty of mutual assistance. Thanks to these various
arrangements, the Dida were able to maintain in their territory the
minimum order required for the regular flow of trade without discard-
ing the segmental character of their social organisation.
But, it will be said, if the Dida were able to dispense with a centralised
power, it was because exchange was organised among them in a system
of relays:Z4 the passage of commodities over the territory of a given
people was ensured by the jurisdiction of this people itself, without the
intervention of alien merchants whose protection would have required
more draconian measures. In the case of the Dida, this objection
is valueless : on the borders of Dida territory there circulated Apollonian
320 Emmanuel Terray
pedlars who penetrated as far as the regions of Lakota and Divo, several
hundred kilometres from the coast; it was they who more than anyone
kept the Dida blacksmiths supplied with ingots of crude iron. I t does
not seem then that there is any necessary correlation between the
presence or absence of the State and the fact that the circulation of
goods should be organised and ensured by aliens or ‘nationals’.
Now the Dida example is in no way an isolated one. Catherine Coquery
instances the case of the great Congo trade network ‘which drained
products and men from enormous di~tances’,~5 and whose agents were
drawn especially from among the Boubangui, a segmentally organised
people residing at the confluence of the Oubangui and Congo rivers.
She rightly concludes that ‘long-distance exchange and centralised
power (cannot) necessarily be linked to each other.’26 But it would then
be necessary to investigate in what circumstances and under what
conditions long-distance exchange favours the formation of States, and
to define what type of major trade contributes to this formation. Yet it
is precisely at this point that she leaves us unsatisfied.
We have seen how Catherine Coquery, and Maurice Godelier before
her, effectively explain the power and wealth of African aristocracies by
the control they exerted over trade routes and long-distance exchange.
Now the very varied cases that can be observed render this hypothesis
in my view too general to account satisfactorily for them. T o justify my
scepticism I shall make use of a precise example : the Abron kingdom of
Gyaman.
Founded in the last years of the seventeenth century, the kingdom of
Gyaman occupied up until the colonial conquest a territory situated at
the north-east of the present-day Ivory Coast and the north-west of
present-day Ghana, between the Komoe and the Black Volta, on the
edge of the savannah and the forest. Even before the construction of the
kingdom, this territory was already crossed by a very important trade
route linking Niger with the Gulf of Guinea via Bobo-Dyulaso, Kong
and Kumasi or Anyibilekru. The following products circulated along
this route : from South to North, kola from Ashanti, gold, the products
of European treaties, particularly fire-arms, gunpowder, sea-salt ; from
the North to the South, Bobo-Dyulaso ironware, Buna cotton, captives,
Sahara salt, cattle, ivory. At the beginning of the nineteenth century a
second route began to cross the first on Gyaman territory itself; it
linked Kong to Hausa territory via Kintampo, Salaga, Yendi, Sansanne
Mango and Nikki; it was therefore oriented from West to East; from
the West came Anno kola, Gyaman gold, Kong textiles; from the East
manufactured Hausa goods and especially leatherware.
Now in Gyaman we can see clearly, if not ‘exclusive control’-to use
Catherine Coquery’s expression-at least the domination of one group
over long-distance exchanges. This group is the Dyula, Muslim
merchants of Malinke origin, who established themselves in the great
Long-distance exchange and the formation of the State 32 1
merchant city of Bondoukou in the very heart of the kingdom. Thanks
to the bonds uniting them to neighbouring Dyula communities-in
Kong, Bobo-Dyulaso and Buna-the Dyula knew the state of supply of
various markets and the price-differences that are the source of com-
mercial profit. Through their ownership of large numbers of captives
and beasts of burden, they effected the transport of an important section
of commodities in circulation, and especially those from the Sudanese
savannah. I n Bondoukou itself they entertained the caravans and
provided them with food produced by their slaves in nearby hamlets;
they put the network of correspondents they used in all the major
commercial centres of the region at their guests’ disposal. In fact they
took on the largest share of the tasks associated with long-distance trade.
The largest share, but not all of it; in their case it is possible to talk in
terms of supremacy but not of monopoly. In the first place they were
not to be found to the same extent on all routes. If the trafficking
between Bondoukou and the Niger valley was practically under their
control, they ran into competition with the Apollonians along the
Komoe river, with Ashanti merchants along the Kumasi road, and with
the Hausa in the area of Salaga. Moreover the non-Dyula travellers in
the kingdom also organised commercial expeditions ; most of these were
directed toward the Gulf of Guinea, but some journeyed to Kong. The
Dyula cannot then be ‘attributed with ‘exclusive’ control over long-
distance exchange.
Nonetheless, the Dyula did appropriate most of the benefits that this
exchange made possible, thanks to the size and effectiveness of their
commercial organisation. So far, Catherine Coquery’s description is
more or less adequate in the case of Gyaman; but now the difficulties
are about to begin: for from a political point of view the Dyula were in
no way the kingdom’s dominant class ;every form of political, administra-
tive, judicial and military power was in the hands of a warrior aristocracy
of Akan origin, the Abron. Ruled by a king and four provincial chiefs,
this aristocracy subjected the cultivators of Kulango stock when it
arrived in the territory. They also levied a tribute from them, though a
relatively light one.
I n theory the Abrons’ sovereignty extended to the Dyula as to the
other peoples in the kingdom. I n fact the Dyula enjoyed the status of
privileged guests in Gyaman. The Imam of Bondoukou sat as a privileged
royal counsellor. Many karamoko resided at the royal court and with the
provincial chiefs, as advisers and suppliers of amulets, which were
much sought after in war, epidemic, drought, etc. . . . The Dyula
could not be subjected to a fine, nor sacrificed following the funeral of
major figures, and, as we shall see, they paid no tribute. How did the
Abrons’ authority assert itself over them? The king intervened as
supreme arbiter in conflicts between Dyula; in the time of wars, the
Dyula were bound to give military assistance to the Abron. I n all, even
if Dyula influence was very great, it would not be possible to extend this
322 Emmanuel Terray
to say they were part of the dominant class properly so called, and the
Abron were concerned to maintain the difference: any Abron who
converted to Islam was immediately and by that fact excluded from any
political function; moreover, though Bondoukou was far and away the
most important population centre of the country, it had never been
either the capital of the kingdom nor even of one of the provinces. I t
follows that in the case of Gyaman, hegemony over long-distance
exchange cannot be argued to be the direct and immediate foundation
of political hegemony, since these two hegemonies belonged to two
distinct social groups.
This duality is not only found in Gyaman; we find it in different
ways in Buna between Dyula traders and an aristocracy of Dagomba
origin,27 in Salaga between Hausa traders and local Gonja chiefs, to
which were added representatives of the Asantahene in the beginning
of the nineteenth century,?* and even in Kong, where power seems to
have been at issue between the town’s major traders and the ‘princes’,
descendants of the founder of the Seku Wataru empire, who lived in
the neighbouring villages.29 In Ashanti itself, if the king and the chiefs
took an active part in commercial transactions, the basic long-distance
connections were maintained by Dyula and Hausa caravans.
I t would always be possible to imagine an indirect connection between
long-distance exchange and political power, which would give strength
to Catherine Coquery’s thesis: in Gyaman the wealth accumulated by
the Dyula might have been the base of Abron supremacy had the latter
been in a position to constrain the former to share it with them. Since
the Abron were masters of the territories crossed by the trade routes, it
might be supposed that they utilised this to assert their rights over the
commodities passing through. But that is precisely not the case; the
Abron levied neither tax nor toll on trade and the reason seems clear for
their lack of involvement: to go from Bobo-Dyulaso to Kumasi it was
possible to travel via Kong and Bondoukou, but equally well via Buna
and Bole : in the same way, from Kong to Salaga, it was possible to travel
either via Bondoulou or Buna. Consequently if the Abron had attempted
to install ‘customs’ or toll rights on their territory, this would simply
have had the effect of diverting to Buna the trade that otherwise would
have been directed toward Bondoulou and Gyaman. On three occasions,
1750, 1805 and 1825, the Abron did invade Buna and attempt to gain
a real monopoly for themselves by the elimination of the rival city; but
Buna seems to have been adequately protected by the very old alliance
linking it with A~hanti;~O the Abron seized it, but were never able to
hold it; and so they were prevented from exacting any dues on trade by
being permanently in competition with Buna. The gifts that caravans
customarily offered to the sovereign of the territory they were crossing
could certainly be presented as a disguised due; but in the case of
Gyaman these gifts were amply compensated for by those the Dyula
received from the king in exchange for their advice and amulets.
Long-distance exchange and the formation of the State 323
Here again the case of Gyaman is not an isolated one. In the Ashanti
kingdom certain commercial transactions-on kola and captives-were
certainly subject to laws, but these laws solely affected the Ashanti
partners in the transaction, and not aliens. The Asantahene Osei Bonsu
replied to Dupuis when he suggested to him that he extend these laws
to compensate for the loss of revenue occasioned by the abolition of the
slave treaty :
I cannot act thus, Ashanti custom is different. Here only kings
and great figures engage in trade, as I do. . . . If they come from
another country to trade at Kumasi, they display their friendship
and make me a gift; after that I most certainly cannot ask them
for gold when they come and buy commodities. Moreover, some
of the traders are the sons or brothers of kings, or great captains;
I cannot say to them: give me some gold; I must give them gold
and provisions and send them back to their land happy and
wealthy so that in other countries it may be known that I am a
great king and that I know what is corre~t .~l
I t is interesting to note that according to the information gathered from
the Moroccan sherif Shabayni in 1790 and published by Jackson, in
Timbuktu ‘the Moors paid no customs duties; they say that if they are
made to, they will stop bringing commodities’;32 similarly in Hausa
‘foreign merchants paid nothing because the inhabitants of Housa
thought they needed encouragement’.33 A commercial route or a market
cannot give rise to the perception of a right unless they represent a
necessary access point or waterway for trade. But whenever there were
many possible routes, as was most often the case between Niger and the
Gulf of Guinea, local aristocracies were in a supplicant position vis-d-vis
traders: their problem was not to exact tolls from them but to attract
them. So they not only denied themselves any direct or indirect
extraction from the traders’ profits; but also as we shall see there are
reasons to think that at least a fraction of these profits were levied on the
wealth of local aristocracies. By the same consideration it is out of the
question that this wealth could have originated from a presumed control
that they exerted over commercial routes, since in most cases competition
made this control ineffective; nor did this wealth arise out of gains
made through long-distance exchange, since these gains remained in the
hands of the traders and escaped the local chiefs’ avarice ; consequently
the question of its origin stays completely open.
Nevertheless, certain definitions in the work of Catherine Coquery
and Samir Amin suggest another interpretation: the former for instance
writes : ‘Control over long-distance exchange certainly required the
subordination of the rest of the population to its beneficiaries, who were
concerned to retain their privilege. But the ruling class’s control was
mainly demonstrated indirectly through exclusive consumption of
324 Emmanuel Terray
foreign commodities, according to a process similar to the hoarding of
prestige goods by the elders within a communal subsistence economy.’34
In other words the control over long-distance trade maintained by local
aristocracies was over the populations they dominated, not over the
agents of trade. The aristocracies endeavoured to establish themselves
as sole clients of the traders and to exclude their subjects from any share
in the transactions. Thus they would obtain ‘exclusive consumption’ of
the goods supplied by long-distance trade. Their wealth and supremacy
would then arise on one side from the fact that they took part in long-
distance trade, and on the other side from the fact that apart from
specialised merchants, they were the only ones to take part in it.
I t is true that the hegemony of local aristocracies was especially
realised through the almost exclusive possession of certain goods
brought in by long-distance trade. Having said that, two problems
remain; Catherine Coquery tells us that local aristocracies made
themselves wealthy through taking part in long-distance exchange:
but it was still essential for them to have something to offer to match the
prestige goods sold by the traders, and we therefore come up once more
against the question of the origin of their wealth. On the one hand,
Catherine Coquery also tells us that local aristocracies arrogated to
themselves a kind of monopoly on these prestige goods because they
kept their subjects out of the exchange process. Now this phenomenon
of exclusion cannot be found in Gyaman or in Ashanti. Every traveller
from Gyaman provided he had the material means could organise a
commercial expedition toward the coast or Kong; every one could
frequent the market at Bondoukou. As regards the Akan States of
Ghana at that time, K. Y. Daaku writes: ‘As for the organisation of
trade, the evidence suggests that no Akan State monopolised this to the
exclusion of its subjects. On the contrary all subjects were encouraged
to participate in it.’35 This assertion no doubt needs modifying slightly
in relation to Ashanti: on the one hand the Asantahene and the leading
chiefs had legal privileges in certain cases : the first kolas sold on Salaga
market were theirs, and after these had arrived the routes were closed
until stocks ran out; so the kings and the chiefs alone profited from the
high prices that the traders were ready to pay for the first deliveries of
the year.36 On the other hand, if Bowdich is to be believed, the Ashanti
aristocracy barely encouraged its subjects’ commercial activities :
[The Ashanti] are as little involved in trade as the early Romans,
and their government, considering that a State can only expand
through conquest, would tend to repress rather than favour this
impulsion to trade from fear that it might blunt their warrior
genius, and also from fear that if the merchants became too
powerful for their desires to be opposed, or too skilful for their
activities to be clearly in view, they would sacrifice the glorv and
ambitions of the nation to their greed.37
Long-distance exchange and the formation of the State 325
The fact remains that public opinion seems to have been the only
weapon that the Ashanti chiefs used to divert their subjects from trade :
no positive measure was adopted to this end, and in fact numerous
Ashanti of all ranks became involved in trade, to the North as muchzas
toward the coast. Bowdich and Dupuis ran into many caravans of all
sizes on the route to Kumasi; and the origin of several conflicts between
the Ashanti and their southern neighbours was in the problem of free
access for these caravans to the river banks.
I n all, it can be conceded to Catherine Coquery that the kings and
chiefs were the main clients of long-distance trade. ‘Here only the
kings and major figures are involved in trade’, said the ~santahene Osei
Bonsu to D ~ p u i s . ~ ~ We shall return to this. But their dominant position
was not the result of formal exclusion measures proclaimed by them and
operated against their subjects. Here again, it is possible to talk of
privilege and supremacy but definitely not of exclusive control or
monopoly.
Three questions remain open in terms of this analysis:
(I) If local aristocracies did not draw their wealth and power from
exercising control over long-distance exchange or from tribute levied on
peasant communities, whose relatively slight dimensions we have
already noted-on this point agreeing with Catherine Coquery-where
did this wealth and power come from?
(2) If local aristocracies did not formally exclude their subjects from
long-distance trade, how did they ensure a dominant position in this
trade in relation to their subjects?
(3) Lastly, if long-distance trade was not the origin of their hegemony,
why were they so keen to attract it on to the territory they governed?
We shall now try to answer these questions, utilising as previously
the example of the kingdom of Gyaman.
How did Gyaman intervene in long-distance exchange? I n two ways,
apart from its function as a place of transit already mentioned earlier:
by the export of two principal products, ivory and gold, and by the
appropriation of a certain quantity of manual labour for the transport
tasks implied by this exchange.
As regards ivory, the king and the chiefs totally controlled the trade:
in practice the hunters were bound to remit to them the tusks of
slaughtered elephants ; these were either transformed into ornaments or
horns for the king and chiefs, or sold externally for their profit. Here, by
way of a monopoly on the exported product, Catherine Coquery’s
analysis is verified. But the place held by ivory in the ‘foreign trade’ of
Gyaman was always far inferior to that held by gold.
From the most ancient times, the territory occupied by the kingdom
of Gyaman from the eighteenth century was renowned for the wealth
3 26 Emmanuel Terray
of its gold resources. Well before the establishment of the kingdom, it
was this wealth which seems to have drawn Nafana gold-prospectors
into the regions-today their descendants still inhabit several villages
around Bondouk~u~~-and Dyula traders, who at the beginning of the
fifteenth century founded the great city of Bighu (Begh~).~O In my
opinion, Ivor Wilks has convincingly demonstrated that Bighu can
be identified with the Beetuu of Pacheco Pereira as well as with the Bitu
of As Sadi;41 now each of these authors celebrates independently the
wealth of the gold seams in the country they designate by this name.
Thus abundance was also underlined at the beginning of the nineteenth
century by British travellers to Kumasi. Bowdich notes that Gyaman
‘is without comparison being possible the wealthiest country in gold’.42
More precisely, Dupuis writes : ‘Gyaman, and especially its provinces
of Ponin, Safoy, and Showy, contains the richest gold-mines that my
informants know in this region or in any other region of Africa. By way
of illustration they said that in Ashanti, Denkyira and Wassaw, metallic
veins could be found at a depth of twelve cubits (twenty-two feet)
below the ground, but that in these provinces of Gyaman this depth is
five cubits (nine feet)’.43 In the same period this reputation also ex-
tended as far as Fezzan: Lyon, who stayed in Murzuk in 1819, writes:
‘It is said that the capital of Ouangara to the south of Timbuktu is
called Battagoo, and that it is a great town where much gold is found
round about it.’44 If it is remembered that the Hausa gave Bondoukou
the name of Bitugu, there can hardly be any hesitation in recognising
Bondoukou in Lyon’s Battagoo.
Some thirty years later, Gordon, who stayed on the Cape Coast in
1848, notes in turn: ‘The principal mines possessed by the Ashanti are
in Gyaman; . . . they are said to be extremely rich; according to our
reports, forty thousand men work in them’.45
The Abron transformed part of this gold into jewels and ornaments;
they utilised it to make the gold-encrusted chairs of kings Abo Miri and
Adingra, so provoking the wrath of the Asantahenes Opoku Ware and
Asei Bonsu and two separate invasions of their country; the massive
gold stairway that according to Bowdich king Adingra used to ascend
to his bed;46 and the massive gold scabbard of King Kwaku Agyeman’s
sword, described by Binger.47 But the rest was exported. In what
direction? According to Collier ‘almost all the gold that the Ashanti
bring to the coast is produced in Gyaman’.48 But according to Dupuis
this fraction was only a small part of the gold traded by the Abron. To
begin with, this gold was directed toward Kong and Mandingo territory ;
but subsequently he says-in 1820-
it gets to Ashanti; from there it moves in small quantities
through the maritime provinces of Appolonia, Ahanta, Fanti. . .
but the largest part of the metal is taken by traders from the
interior or sent to Muslim correspondents in Yendi, Salaga,
Long-distance exchange and the formation of the State 327
Banko, Wabea and other major towns and cities of the North-East.
In this condition of money, it soon reaches Zogho, Salamo, Kook
and eventually Nikki . . . where it is transformed into jewels or
ducats (Mitskal). Under this new form, it is also rapidly
transported along the Niger to Hausa . . . and from there it
circulates in all the regions of Sudan, in the desert and its
kingdoms, Bornu, Egypt, Gharb.49
Gold appears therefore to have been the principal Gyaman export.
Now its status is clearly different to ivory’s : practically all the kingdom’s
travellers could be involved in the search for and extraction of the
precious metal. To be sure, the gold-prospector had to pay a toll to the
chief of the land and the village chief whenever he operated outside the
land of his own village ; and to the provincial chief or the king as master
of the royal domain when he worked outside the frontiers of his own
province; moreover, all nuggets had to be remitted (but they were not
traded: the royal artisans melted them down to produce the jewels and
ornaments referred to above). Lastly, the king and the chiefs were able
to appropriate a fair amount of the gold accumulated by private individ-
uals, through their judicial powers and the fines they imposed. Given
these privileges, gold-prospecting in Gyaman was a free activity. Whole
villages could devote themselves to it in certain seasons, as Braulot who
journeyed through Gyaman in 1893 testifies: ‘The Asikaso . . . is the
richest country in gold in the whole region. At the end of the rainy
season the populations of the villages of the plain go there en masse
and apply themselves actively to washing gold-bearing sands. I t is thus
that we found in Surmakourou all the inhabitants of Kandena, near
Sa~ia.’~O
But this legal freedom disguised a profound real inequality. Gold-
prospecting took two different forms. In the first place, the inhabitants
of the country filtered the sands deposited by the watercourses flowing
over gold-bearing ground by a method similar to the water-trough.
That was a simple method ; it required little labour, even if it seems to
have been not particularly profitable; the head of every family could
therefore practise it with the help of his immediate dependants; this is
why all along the gold-bearing rivers captives of the king and his chiefs
worked side by side with free Abron and Kulango men and their wives.
But on the other hand, real mines were exploited; when a vein was
discovered, shafts were sunk at a depth of thirty or more feet; a miner
went down to the bottom of the shaft and extracted earth and lumps of
gold-bearing quartz by means of a kind of hoe. These were immediately
brought back up to the surface in calabashes on ropes. In the day-time
the quartz was crushed and ground, and the earth washed in the water
of a nearby stream, or in a dyke dug for that purpose.
Now this second method presented three characteristics; in the first
place, it was far more productive than the first. In the second place,
G
328 Emmanuel Terray
each mining unit brought into play many more important activities
than in the former instance. Simply washing the sand required the
presence of a collector or diver and a washerwoman. Sinking a shaft
itself meant the presence of a miner, a labourer to get the mined earth
out of the pit, and of a crusher or a washerwoman. Because of the
exhausting character of the work and the necessity of keeping it at
maximum stretch during the short period when it was possible, two
teams worked in relays on each shaft. As moreover the discovery of a
vein was uncertain, numerous shafts had to be sunk before production
started; when once it was found, every effort was made to get it all;
since the miners of the country did not use wooden props and made no
galleries, the pits were dug at very short intervals along the line taken
by the vein. In the third place, the work at the bottom of the mines was
very dangerous : in practice, once the vein was reached, the miner began
to dig around himself horizontally; the pit gradually therefore took the
form of a cone whose sides were in constant danger of falling in. In was
the general opinion that collapses were numerous, and the buried miner
had only a tiny chance of escape; also the exploitation of the mines was
reserved for captives.
By bringing together the preceding observations, a very important
consequence emerges: if the exploitation of the mines presupposed a
considerable labour-force and if this labour was recruited from among
captives, it follows that only those who possessed a sufficiently numerous
reserve supply of captives could profitably engage in this exploitation.
Now only the kings and chiefs had access to this supply, and that is why
the mines belonged to them: ‘The mineral is principally extracted from
large pits, which were the property of the dead king around Briquanti
and Kontoosoo’, writes Dupuis after the death of King Adingra.51 This
appropriation of the mines by the king and the chiefs did not result, as
against an overpopular belief among European travellers of the time,
from some monopoly they possessed on the products of the subsoil, but
from the fact that they alone had in their possession the human means
necessary for such activities. More generally, the production of gold in
both forms largely depended on the labour of captives since, once more
by Dupuis’ testimony, washing gold-bearing sands also occupied a great
number of them: ‘On the banks of the Barra, a river whose source is
near the great Muslim city of Kherabi and which flows south to join
the Tando or Assinia river, the Gyaman also practise gold-washing, and
my informants relate that during the rainy season there is work there
for eight to ten thousand slaves for two months’.52 Being founded on
slave labour, it naturally follows that the production of gold was domi-
nated by the Abron with the greatest number of captives, that is by the
king and the chiefs.
In the same way too, the carriage of commodities acquired or yielded
by the Abron was to a large extent ensured by their captives. On his
return from Gyaman Lonsdale wrote in 1883: ‘The traders in all the
Long-distance exchange and the formation of the State 329
regions of the interior mostly use slaves as porters’.53 Nine years later
Lang echoes him as he journeyed to Bondoukou: ‘A trader from the
interior transports his commodities to the coast by means of half a
dozen slaves who can be used to carry loads on the way back if they
have not been sold’.54 Certainly captives were not alone in acting as
porters. We have seen that all travellers from the kingdom could engage
in trade and send caravans toward the coast or to Kong; the head of a
family could use his neighbours or immediate dependants to carry the
products he wished to take. Moreover free men could hire themselves as
porters for a wage. But the most important expeditions were made up by
captives who were placed under the surveillance of a son or servant of
the originator of the enterprise. There again the major owners of captives
played a determining role; now in the first rank of these major owners
were the king and the chiefs.
Thus in Gyaman the captives had a far more important place in the
economy than the ‘limited domestic slavery’ which Catherine Coquery
mentions in passing.55 Once this importance is clear we can now
answer two of the questions raised above: in the first place, the wealth
of the local aristocracy arose essentially from the surplus labour it
extorted from its captives; it was this surplus labour which provided it
with the products which it introduced into long-distance trade ; and if it
held a predominant position among the local clients of this trade, this
was because it controlled the greatest share of captive labour, whose
activity from Gyaman swelled the flow of long-distance exchange.
Now it must be stressed again, that the case of Gyaman was not
unique, and that it cannot be explained simply by the peculiarites of
gold production. Let us take up again the Ashanti example. In the
eighteenth century, Ashanti trade was principally directed toward the
coast, and Ashanti exported mainly captives, gold and ivory; during this
period, the Ashanti situation is identical to that described for Gyaman.
At the start of the nineteenth century, following on the one hand the
abolition of the transatlantic black slave-trade, and on the other the
long conflict between Ashanti and Kong, a kind of redirection took
place: Ashanti trade turned gradually from the coast, from which the
Ashanti now only expected arms and salt, and from then on moved
toward Salaga, the Mossi, and Hausa territory;56 at the same time, one
product came to dominate Ashanti export: the kola nut. From 1819
Bowdich tells us the reasons for this primacy of kola:
When I pressed them why they cleared the ground, managed
plantations and supervised their slaves at work, they replied that
the Bossee or Gooroo nut grew spontaneously and required no
labour; that salt was brought to their frontier by people poorer
than themselves and sold cheaply without anyone having to take
the trouble to go and look for it; and that thanks to these articles
-to which was added the very high price that small quantities
330 Emmanuel Terray
of rum and iron fetched in the interior, because they forbade all
trade between the coast and the interior save their own-they
were able to obtain at a much better rate silk and cotton textiles
of a greatly superior manufacture and quality.57
Half a century later, Bonnat confirmed this explanation: ‘With this
unique product which costs them nothing, not even the least attention,
the Ashanti obtain all they wish from the different people ,who come
to this market’.58
Now the production and trade of kola in Ashanti were organised on
principles very close to those that governed production and trading in
gold in Gyaman; here as there, anyone could engage in these activities;
no one held any legal monopoly. But the equality provided was apparent
only. The only labour required by kola export was collection, packing
and transport; productivity varied little from one production unit to
another ; consequently the importance of a commercialised harvest was
a direct function of the extent of the factors of production that could be
mobilised. Now while a free man of low rank could only utilise his
immediate dependants, the king and the chiefs could put to this task
the numerous captives they possessed. Kwame Arhin shows very well
moreover how the Ashanti utilised the mechanism of pawning in the
production of kola to obtain new captives whose labour in turn increased
the wealth of the kin-group:
In the region of Bechem and Techimentia, persons who had
put themselves in pawn or slaves, until then mainly employed
in the extraction of gold, were subsequntly used in its gold trade.
People who had put themselves in pawn came mostly from the
most westerly regions of West Ashanti ; they borrowed money,
in many cases to pay the costs of a trial, and promised to pay
their debt and recover their liberty by collecting kola nuts,
transporting them and selling them in Kintampo. . . . At the
twilight of the Ashanti kingdom, the utilisation of people who
had put themselves in pawn was the fastest way of obtaining
slaves. Enterprising men would invest their fortune in acquiring
them, would expand their kola trade and so would obtain still
more slaves who in their turn would make a still larger expansion
possible. With the labour of people who were placed in pawn and
of captives, a man could sell more nuts in Kintampo and buy
cattle, sheep and goats, whose sale would augment what the
Ashanti elders regarded as the true criterion of their wealth:
their stocks of g o l d – d u ~ t . ~ ~
Now as Arhin himself points out, the pawn was often the effect of the
costs of justice and of fines imposed by a chief. The insolvent debtor
either entered the former’s service or that of the man from whom he had
borrowed the necessary sums to meet the debt. But most often the latter
Long-distance exchange and the formation of the State 33 1
was always a chief or a notable figure ; in practice, the fines were payable
in gold-dust, and only the chiefs and notables had at their disposal a
sufficient stock of gold-dust to provide credit to penniless debtors. In
all, if the Ashanti chiefs emerged as winners in the competition sur-
rounding the kola trade, it was because they had captives as well as gold
concentrated in their own hands, and not because they were invested
with any kind of institutional monopoly.
A more general conclusion can be drawn from this comparison
between Ashanti and Gyaman. Given the degree of development of
productive forces attained by economies such as those of these two
social formations, the principal factor in the work process was labour-
power. I t was the only source of disposable energy, apart from donkeys
used to carry the loads. The instruments of labour were rudimentary;
as a general rule, they were individual tools whose productivity scarcely
varied; consequently, the impact of the labour-process, the size of the
transformation of nature that could be produced, were a direct function
of those human resources that could be assembled. Thus, it was
command over men-and so the possibility of organising their coopera-
tion on a large scale-that was the key to economic power. In the frame-
work of the kin-based system, this authority belonged to the elders, but
the segmental character of the system reduced the number of workers
who could be brought together under a single head; to be sure, there
were different forms of association which enabled the assembly of
several elementary work groups, but quite apart from its occasional
character, this mobilisation stayed within narrow limits. Essentially,
kin-based organisation inevitably implied a certain dispersal of the
labour force. Moreover in Ashanti as in Gyaman, the earth was plenti-
fully available ; the instruments of production were made of materials-
wood, iron-that could be obtained directly, easily or by exchange, and
their simplicity meant the vast majority of people could make them
themselves; also, the subjection of the producer was not able to be
accomplished through the appropriation of the material factors of
production, as was the case under feudalism with the ground, and in
capitalism with machines. Consequently the establishment of bonds of
direct personal dependence was the chief means of expanding control
over men, and so of access to wealth. Now slavery and captivity were the
most effective and rigorous forms of these bonds of personal dependence ;
this is why the functioning of the entire social formation was organised
around them.
In fact, it is possible to consider the Abron or Ashanti States as in
many ways existing as machines destined to create and reproduce the
material and social conditions for the exploitation of captives. The
central place occupied by captivity in these societies allows us
straightaway to understand why the aristocracies in power were first
and foremost military aristocracies. As is known, in Ashanti as in
Gyaman, the structure of the State closely followed that of the army,
332 Emmanuel Terray
and the subdivisions of the first closely corresponded to the different
sections of the second; among the obligations binding vassals to the
sovereign feature first of all the duty of assistance in time of war; and
among the rights reserved by the aristocracy to itself was first of all that
of organising captive raids and of deciding on peace and war: now a
number of captives were prisoners of war; these formed the most
important part of the booty gained by the conquerors, and the rules of
sharing this booty favoured the kings and the chiefs. On the ideological
level, major themes of the ritual and religious activity of the State
were the exaltation of the great deeds of the past, and the quest for the
support of ancestors and supernatural powers in view of conflicts to
come; and it was seen above that if the Asantahene discouraged his
subjects from engaging in trade, this was especially to preserve their
warlike spirit.60 Why this domination of military factors in public life?
In a more general way, Jack Goody has shown how in this region the
military technology in use exerted a profound influence on the organisa-
tion of political power: in cases where it rested on the use of horses,
we have dynastic kin-groups with considerable military capacity and a
rotation of power between the segments of these descent-groups; in
cases where it rested on fire-arms, the government was more autocratic,
and was based on much narrower d y n a ~ t i e s . ~ ~ Why did military tech-
nology have the power to bring such considerable consequences in its
wake?
The preceding remarks give us the answer to these questions: we
are in the presence of social formations in which the relations of
captivity in some way constitute the central core. Now in the last
instance it was military force that enabled these relations to be established
and maintained: its utilisation was above all the basis of the very
existence of most captives, since the majority of them we have seen to
consist of prisoners of war; even if some were bought on the market,
they first had to be enslaved by others, and here again this enslavement
was most often the result of violence; in any case, given the occasional
nature of trade in captives, no State could allow itself to rely on trade
alone to obtain such an indispensable resource for itself; also for each
State war continued to be the most certain method of procuring slaves;
lastly, only indisputable military superiority covered the local aristo-
cracies against a possible revolt by their captives. I t followed that
since the relations of captivity were the dominant element in the social
formation, and since military might was the chief instrument of their
establishment and reproduction, it was natural for the problems raised
by the creation and use of this force to be at the very heart of the social
formation’s functioning; and also natural that among the multiple
variables determining the organisation of the State, the decisive factor
should be the various forms this force took, the various methods in
which it was used, and the different types of control which could be
exercised over it.
Long-distance exchange and the formation of the State 333
But the dictates of the reproduction of the relations of captivity
made their mark on many other aspects of the system and of political
life. Above, in connection with the Ashanti kingdom, we mentioned
judicial power. The kings and the chiefs had a monopoly of this power;
by the biassed nature of fines, which were the most frequently applied
sanction and could only be paid off in gold dust, the kings and chiefs
drained off gold to their advantage. This enabled them either to buy
captives or to buy arms which would assist in capturing them. We have
also seen how an unpaid fine led to the guilty party being pawned,
and how this practice led directly or indirectly to the increase in
captives, either because through the high rate of interest the person
pawned could not discharge his debt and gradually became a captive
in effect, or because his labour produced the resources necessary for
the purchase of extra captives. Similarly, analysis of Abron or Ashanti
diplomacy demonstrates that it paid especial attention to two major
preoccupations: it was necessary to win free access to zones where the
means of military supremacy could be obtained-in practice this meant
the coast, where European ships unloaded guns and gunpowder-and
to forbid this free access to one’s rivals ; and it was necessary to transform
certain adjoining regions into captive reserves, forbidding the import
of arms to them and the genesis of strongly organised States.
In all, therefore, the study of the Abron and Ashanti states confirms
fully the definitions produced by Engels : the State, he said, is ‘a machine
for the oppression of one class by another’,62 ‘the collective organi-
sed power of the possessing classes . . . as against the exploited
cla~ses’,6~ ‘an organisation of the particular class which was pro tempore
the exploiting class, an organisation for the purpose of preventing any
interference from without with the existing conditions of production,
and therefore, especially, for the purpose of forcibly keeping the ex-
ploited classes in the condition of oppression corresponding with the
given mode of p r o d ~ c t i o n ‘ . ~ ~ In fact the Abron State and the Ashanti
State certainly appear as the instruments ‘which the local aristocracies
provided themselves with to ensure and perpetuate the exploitation
of their captives.
I t is certainly the case that this exploitation ran up against certain
barriers. An account of these will enable us to understand at one and
the same time the relations which the dominant aristocracies maintained
with their free subjects, the articulation of the entire social formation,
and the specificity of Abron or Ashanti slavery in relation to ancient
slavery, correctly underlined by Catherine Coquery. These barriers
were in the first instance economic. T o what usage was the surplus
produced by the captives directed? T o start with, it ensured the
immediate subsistence needs of the members of the dominant class,
who were consequently relieved by it of any compulsion to productive
labour. Next, it enabled the dominant class to obtain for itself certain
goods-alcohol, textiles-which for it were the object of conspicuous
334 Emmanuel Terray
consumption, and which proclaimed its power and social hegemony.
In both cases, the needs of consumption-‘basic’ or luxury-determined
the volume of surplus labour produced by the captives. I t was not the
realisation of a commercial profit which had this determining effect.
Lastly, the surplus product produced by the captives was also exchanged
for goods that played a part either in the immediate production process-
iron, cotton–or in the reproduction process-weapons, captives
themselves. But here again, as Claude Meillassoux has shown very
well, these goods were sought after because of their own utility; what
governed the transaction from the point of view of the buyers was not
the desire to obtain an extra quantity of exchange value by reselling the
commodities, but concern to acquire a particular commodity on the
most advantageous terms.65 In other words, as Marx said, ‘when the
form of a society is such, from the economic point of view, that it is not
exchange value but use value which predominates in it, surplus labour
is more or less circumscribed by the range of determinate needs; but
the character of production itself in no way gives birth to a devouring
appetite’.66 Thus this pre-eminence of use value explains at one and
the same time why the captives were not subjected in Ashanti or
Gyaman to an exploitation as intense as the slaves of ancient Rome
or of the southern United States, and why Abron or Ashanti slavery
did not manifest that tendency to expansion and generalisation inherent
in ancient or American slavery: it always allowed another mode of
production to exist by its side, usually of a domestic or kin-based
character, within whose framework the free subjects of the aristocracy
in power worked and produced.
This persistent presence of a kin-based mode of production in the
social formation is also due to the operation of another series of factors :
I wish to speak of the political limits which the exploitation of captives
confronted. Let us again quote Marx: ‘This supervision work neces-
sarily arises in all modes of production based on the antithesis between
the labourer, as the direct producer, and the owner of the means of
production. The greater this antagonism, the greater the role played
by supervision. Hence it reaches its peak in the slave system’.67 Again,
it is necessary for the State to be capable of carrying out this work, in
other words for it to dispose of the military, political and ideological
means needed for this purpose. If these means are limited, the expansion
of slave production and the severity of the treatment meted out to
captives are themselves also proportionally limited. In the light of this
remark, certain obstacles to extending slavery to the whole social
formation, and at the same time helping to maintain the kin-based
mode of production, may be noted.
In the first place, the society could not have survived unless a certain
numerical ratio had been preserved between the power of the free men
and that of the captives. The Asantahene Osei Bonsu retorted to Dupuis,
who had expressed anger at the massacre of the prisoners the Ashanti
Long-distance exchange and the formation of the State 335
had brought back from Gyaman in 1818: ‘If I do not kill them or sell
them, they will become powerful and kill my s~bjects ‘ .~8 Moreover,
the majority of captives present in the country was made up of strangers,
imported or seized in a raid. A free man could only be reduced to
slavery because of his bad behaviour ; in Gyaman, he would be moreover
sold immediately externally so that he would be spared the temptation
of escape; in Ashanti, the Asantahene Osei Kwame forbade the export
of captives originating in the kingdom;69 but these latter were not
exactly assimilated to their alien fellows; in particular they could be
bought back by their next-of-kin; the same was true of people in pawn.
Several reasons explain this preference for captives from outside : being
isolated, deprived of any attachment of social relationship, they accepted
their fate more easily; born in different regions and among different
peoples, it was hard for them to associate in a joint rebellion. Still more,
the cohesion of the kingdom and its defensive capacity would have been
seriously compromised if its free subjects could have been transformed
into captives at the pleasure of the sovereign and the chiefs; rather
the opposite happened, for it was the descendants of captives who
gradually merged with free subjects : as we have pointed out elsewhere,
the Abron and Ashanti states had none of the necessary solidity to
counter the mortal danger that a real class of captives would have –
constituted, with not merely the transmission of their status from one
generation to another but also of their resentment and spirit of revolt.70
All these reasons of a political nature ensured a relatively genuine
protection for free men, and to captives the hope of a progressive
enfranchisement of their children: they guaranteed by the same fact
the continuation of the kin-based mode of production.
Finally, the requirements of the reproduction of the relations of
captivity determined the functioning of the kin-based mode of pro-
duction itself. We mentioned above the relatively light tribute exacted
by the aristocracies from their free subjects: we consider-and we will
refer if we may to the article just noted on this point-that this modera-
tion is to be explained by the concern the aristocracies had to treat their
free subjects carefully so as to be able to count on their help in military
conflicts. In this sense, the slave mode of production appears certainly
to be the dominant element in the social formation, since it subordinated
the functioning of the other mode of production in it to the dictates of
its own reproduction.
One last question was raised: why were the Abron and Ashanti
kings and chiefs so concerned to attract the flow of long-distance
exchange on to the territory they governed? We have already indicated
the answer, and it will be enough to recall it here: the Abron and
Ashanti aristocracies were anxious to take part in long-distance trade
because apart from hoarding it was the only means at their disposal
for ‘realising’ the surplus product they extorted from their captives,
and so to obtain for themselves on the one hand the luxury goods
336 Emmanuel Terray
which served as material basis for their social superiority, and on the
other hand goods-captives, weapons-which enabled regular re-
production of the social formation. In this sense, but only in this sense,
long-distance trade was an essential element in the functioning of the
entire social formation: like every distributive mechanism, it created
no wealth; that was born in the process of production; but it gave it
a concrete form appropriate to the requirements of reproduction.
If we now work from a diachronic point of view, if we cease to examine
the functioning and switch to the genesis of the social formation and of
the State which is its political superstructure, will we have to grant
long-distance exchange a more important role? At first sight in fact, it
certainly seems that long-distance trade-and in practice, the exchange
of gold and kola for Sahara salt-did play a decisive part in that genesis.
The researches of Wilks71 and Levtzion72 have shown that in the zone
that interests us, the appearance of the State accompanies or closely
follows the Mande traders-Ligbi or Duyla-and the opening up of
commercial routes between the northern limits of the forest and the
Niger valley. As a result of the corrections made by L e v t ~ i o n ~ ~ and
Flight74 to the chronology put forward by Mrs Meyerowitz, the oldest
of the Akan States, the kingdom of Bono-Mansu, appears to have been
constructed during the first half of the fifteenth century. Now Mrs
Meyerowitz tells us ‘the town of Bono had from its beginnings a twin
city, Songo, inhabited entirely by Muslims, of which many were
literate; there were also commercial connections with the Muslim
populations of West Sudan and North A f r i ~ a ‘ . ~ ~ The second king of
Bono, Akumfi Ameyaw, who according to Flight reigned from 1440
to 1450, had also sent his nephew and successor the prince Obunu-
mankoma into these far countries, so that he could study the gold trade,76
and it was under the reign of the latter that Bono really took wing. In
particular, Obunumankoma had imposed the use of gold dust as
currency and invented the system of weights to measure the gold.
The relation of these innovations to trade has no need to be ~ n d e r l i n e d . ~ ~
More generally, the prosperity of Bono and the high level reached by
its civilisation depended, Mrs Meyerowitz tells us, on trade.78
Similar remarks can be made concerning the great merchant city
of Bighu whose origin Wilks places at the beginning of the fifteenth
century.79 Bighi had been foucded by Ligbi and then by Dyula traders,
originating respectively from the upper Niger and from the empire of
Mali, and both drawn by the wealth of gold-bearing seams in the
region. Now it appears that relations fairly similar to those that much
later united the Dyula of Bondoukou to the Abron State were im-
mediately established between the Mande of Bighu and the Nafana
kingdom of Banda; according to the traditions collected by Kwabena
Abeyaw, ‘the Muslim group which lived among the Nafana was placed
under the authority of Sullemamu (the imam) in Bighu. These Muslims
Long-distance exchange and the formation of the State 337
spoke Ligbi which today is still the language of their descendants. These
Ligbi-speaking Muslims were traders, and the town of Bighu . . .
became at that time a great commercial centre. . . . Some years later,
over and above trade, the kings of Banda asked the Muslims to pray
for them, especially in time of war’.80 According to Mrs Meyerowitz,
Bighu had even been the capital of the kingdom of Banda,81 which is
not confirmed by the data collected by Goody and Levtzion.
Whatever the truth of the matter, the links created in this way un-
doubtedly explain why the Ligbi of Bighu took refuge with the Nafana
of Banda when they abandoned the town.82 I t is not easy to specify
the date by which the kingdom of Banda was constructed; we only
know that it existed for certain at the beginning of the seventeenth
century, since at that time it was attacked by the king of Bono, Kurompe
Ameyaw, whose reign is placed by Flight between 1600 and 1 6 1 5 . ~ ~
According to Levtzion, Bono and Bighu, who both had relations
with Djenne, nonetheless did not belong to the same commercial
network: ‘While from Bono the route extended along the White Volta,
the trade from Bighu moved either via Buna and Bobo, or by way of
Bole and Wa, to the East or West of the Bla~kVol ta ‘ .~~ On this hypothesis,
the two leading States of the region were formed at the junction of
the two principal routes linking the Akan forest to the Niger valley,
and were both associated with a flourishing commercial centre. Now
the Abron State and the commercial town of Bondoukou only really
took the place vacated by the decline of their predecessors. In Bono,
this decline broke up the State, which from the end of the eighteenth
century was seriously shaken by internal conflicts ;a5 in Bighu it was the
commercial centre that fell victim to decline: it also experienced a
crisis or a series of crises internally, and its activity was severely sapped
by the troubles that ravaged Nigerian Sudan after the conquest of
Songhai by the Moroccans.86 But in both cases the kingdom and the
market were sufficiently closely linked for the difficulties of the one to
rebound inevitably on to the other. Gyaman and Bondoukou developed
strongly as a result of this dual eclipse, but what changed with their
emergence was the identity of the elements forming the political and
commercial structure of the region, not the structure itself.
The correlation cannot then be contested between the expansion
of long-distance trade and the construction of the State, and the
thesis of Catherine Coquery and Samir Amin seems therefore to recover
its validity on this level. But the problem is to know whether this
correlation expresses a direct causal relationship, or whether the nexus
of causes and effects that led from the first process to the second did
not include some intermediate link whose nature must be specified. Now
if we examine the social relations established in the region following the
arrival of Mande traders, we establish beyond doubt that from the end
of the fifteenth century captives fulfilled the economic functions which
were to be theirs in the heart of the Abron social formation.
338 Emmanuel Terray
In his Description de Z’Afrique, published in 1506-7, Valentim
Fernandes draws a quite precise picture of the gold mines where the
Djenne merchants went for their supplies, and Mauny has shown how
this picture can really only refer to the gold-bearing seams of the Akan
forest.87 In the same period, Pacheco Pereira writes: ‘Two hundred
leagues from this kingdom of Mandingua there is a region where there
is much gold. The inhabitants of this region have the faces and teeth
of dogs, and tails like dogs. . . . The Mandingua merchants go to the
markets of Beetuu, Banbarranaa and Bahaa to obtain gold from these
monstrous peoples’.E* Now it is known that the Mande referred to the
Akan as Ton. It seems then that these two descriptions refer to one
and the same area: the country of Bitu that Wilks has shown was
confused with the neighbourhood of Bighu in local t r a d i t i ~ n . ~ ~ What do
these descriptions tell us about the economic role of captives? In the
first place, the extraction of gold was their burden: ‘There are seven
gold-mines. They are shared between seven kings, each with his own
mine. The mines are dug deep into the ground. The kings have slaves
whom they send down the mines, and they give them women whom they
take down with them; and they give birth and bring up children in
these mines. The kings also provide them with food and drink.’g0 On
the other hand, the captives were involved in the transport of mer-
chandise : ‘When these Ungaros arrive at Djenne, each merchant brings
with him one or two hundred black slaves or more, to carry the salt
on their heads from Djenne to the gold-mines, and from there to bring
back the gold’.91 From this period, it is then the labour of captives
which supplied and enabled long-distance exchange.
The importance of slave labour for the region explains why it very
quickly became an importer of captives. These came from several
quarters and mostly from the Niger valley. Pacheco Pereira describes
the gold trade to us as a trade by relays: in the first place, we have
seen, when they wished to obtain gold, the Mandingo merchants went
to the Beetuu markets and the neighbouring cities; in the second
place ‘the inhabitants of the towns called Beetuu, Banbarranaa and
Bahaa go into this country of Toom to obtain gold in exchange for
commodities and slaves which they bring there’.92 It is then probable
that the inhabitants of Beetuu were acting as simple middlemen, and
that the slaves they soId in Toom were entrusted to them by their
Mandingo partners. This is what the relevant traditions collected by
Kwabena Ameyaw indicate: ‘Bighu became at this time an important
commercial centre. . . . The principal products coming from the
forest were kola and gold, which were taken from Bighu on the northern
route and exchanged for cattle, pearls, slaves, textiles, and copperware
which the caravans transported South’.93 But other captives no doubt
arrived from the South. From the end of the fifteenth century, Portu-
guese ships brought slaves purchased in Benin to the Gold Coast;94
now we know through Pacheco Pereira that at that time the Mandingo
Long-distance exchange and the formation of the State 339
merchants frequented the castle of La Mine.95 They directed northwards
at least part of the slaves unloaded by the Portuguese : in fact a quarter
of a century later King John 111, who reigned from 1521 to 1527,
forbade this trade because the slaves which were its object ‘are dedicated
to serve the devil for ever: in fact, either they remain in their original
condition, or they become Muslims when because of the manner of
the exchange between the Moors and the blacks of Mandingua province,
they fall into the power of the former’.96 It may then be considered
that some of them did not get further than Bighu and were compelled
by the inhabitants of the region into extractive and porterage work of
the kind we have described.
In the light of these data, how should the specific effects of long-
distance trade be characterised? In our view, its real role consisted in
the introduction of slave-type relations of production into social
formations dominated until then by the kin-based mode of production,
accompanied in mature cases by simple domestic slavery; and that it
was in their turn these slave relations which evoked the formation
of a State as the condition of their functioning and reproduction. From
this point of view, we criticise Catherine Coquery and Samir Amin, not
for having asserted that the development of long-distance exchange
exerted an influence on the formation of States, but for having let it be
understood that this influence operated in an immediate and direct
manner: we consider ourselves that it acted on the social formation
and on its political superstructures by the intermediary of a trans-
formation of the relations of production which were its basis.
Certainly, it is impossible within the limits of this article to decide
whether Gyaman and Ashanti constitute particular cases, or whether
on the contrary the hypotheses we have drawn from the examination
of these two States may be extended to other social formations of West
Africa. We shall restrict ourselves on this topic to the following remarks :
the importance of the role of salt and copper in long-distance exchange
during the whole period from the eleventh to the sixteenth century, is
well known. At this period, it was the mines of Teghazza that ensured
essential salt supplies to the Sudan;97 now according to the testimony
of Ibn Batuta who visited them, they were exploited by the slaves of
Massufa: ‘Teghazza is inhabited solely by the slaves of the Messufites,
slaves who are employed in the extraction of salt’.9s The same is true
of the copper veins of Takedda, which had the same role in relation
to this metal that Teghazza enjoyed in relation to salt; again according
to Ibn Batuta ‘the copper mine is outside Tacada. They dig in the
ground and take the mineral into the town to melt it down in the
houses. This duty is carried out by slaves of both sexes.’g9 It is data of
this kind which allow Fage to write: ‘It appears that around the
fourteenth century the merchant economies of the great States of
West and Central Sudan depended in large measure on slave labour.
I t also appears that with the expansion of trade from the Sudanese
340 Emmanuel Terray
centres, the elements of a slave economy had stretched out at the
beginning of the sixteenth century to regions as far to the South as the
Gold Coast and Benin.’loO We leave to Fage the responsibility for these
assertions; but it if were possible-which we do not know-to produce
other proofs in their favour over and above those laid out above, they
would mean then that the implications of our analysis largely trans-
cend the sole cases of the Abron and the Ashanti.
We should like to end on a problem of methodology. Marx writes
in The Poverty of Philosophy: ‘In general the form of exchange of
products corresponds to the form of production. Change the latter, and
the former will change in consequence.’101 Thirty years later he stated
the same in the third volume of Capital:
The determinate relation of distribution only expresses the
relation of production, historically defined. . . . What are called
the relations of distribution consequently correspond to specific
social forms, historically determined, of the production process
and the relations which are established between men in the process
of reproduction of human life correspond to these and flow from
them. The historical character of these relations of distribution
is the historical character of the relations of production of which
they only express one facet . . . each form of distribution
disappears with the determinate mode of production from which
it issued and to which it corresponds.lo2
Consequently the relations of production determine the relations of
distribution and through them the totality of social relations. Thus a
social formation cannot be understood except by beginning with an
analysis of the relations of production which are its base. In asserting
in this way the primacy of the viewpoint of production for the study of
social reality, Marx clearly separates himself from bourgeois economics
which, not being very concerned with unveiling the real origins of
profits, addresses itself for preference to the relations of distribution.
Now why we criticise Catherine Coquery and Samir Amin is precisely
for having overestimated the role of long-distance exchange, and for
having isolated it from the relations of production of which it is the
effect, or the reflection; it is then for having mistaken the primacy of
the viewpoint of production over that of distribution.
Certainly, Catherine Coquery and Samir Amin foresaw this objection,
and attempted to answer it in advance. But Catherine Coquery rejects
it by means of an argument which it is hard to see as anything more
than a play on words: ‘Let us not be accused here of giving privileged
status to the mode of circulation at the expense of the mode of production;
the fundamental problem was not the transport of merchandise, but
its procurement-in some way its “production”. . . .’lo3 Samir Amin
for his part keeps well away from this strange assimilation of production
Long-distance exchange and the formation of the State 341
and exchange: ‘long-distance trade, he says, is clearly not a mode of
production’,104 and he specifies that the effect of this trade is to allow
‘the transfer-and certainly not the generation-of a fraction of surplus
from one society to another.’lo5 But he stays completely silent on the
conditions under which this surplus is formed. There is then a certain
incoherence in putting forward an explanation of the political super-
structures of the social formation by phenomena-control of long-
distance exchange, and the monopoly profit it permits-which belong
exclusively to the sphere of distribution. If applied to the capitalist
mode of production, Samir Amin’s procedure would revert to trying
to understand the bourgeois State solely in the light of the relations and
antagonisms which may exist between the different social strata-
industrial entrepreneurs, landed proprietors, commercial and financial
capitalists-associated with the distribution of surplus value, while
entirely neglecting the process by which the latter is created and the
fundamental conflict-between exploiters and exploited-which is born
from this process.
As far as we are concerned, on the contrary, we mainly set ourselves
the task of discovering the origin of the surplus which long-distance
trade ensured was distributed; to this end, we investigated the social
relations inherent in the production process itself, and so we were led
to provide evidence for the decisive importance of the exploitation of
captives in the functioning of the social formation. The analysis of
fresh cases will without any doubt permit this conclusion to be made
more precise or to be attacked; in return, the method adopted seems to
us to be a requirement for all researchers who see in Marx’s work the
foundation of the science of societies and history; for, to leave Marx
with the last word,
this specific economic form in which unpaid surplus labour is
extorted from the direct producers determines the relation of
dependence insofar as it flows directly from production itself
and in its turn reacts in a determining fashion on the latter. I t
is the basis of every form of economic community, directly
issued from its relations of production and at the same time the
base of its specific political form. It is always in the immediate
relation between the owner of the means of production and the
direct producer (a relation whose different aspects naturally
correspond to a definite degree of development of the methods
of labour, and so to a certain degree of social productive force)
that the most profound secret, the hidden foundation of the
whole social edifice must be sought, and consequently the
political form which assumes the relation of sovereignty and of
dependence, in sum the base of the specific form which the
State takes on at a given period.lo6
Translated by John Downing
342 Emmanuel Terray
Notes
I. F. Engels, Preface to K. Marx (1971), in Marx and Engeb (1968), p. 258.
2. F. Engels (1884), in M a n and Engels (1968), p. 578.
3. Ibid., p. 581.
4. For a definition of long-distance exchange, see Meillassoux (1971), p. 25.
5. Godelier in Centre d’E?tudes et de Recherches Marxistes (1969), p. 87.
6. Coquery (19691, P. 73.
7. Ibid., p. 70. The term surplus-value is used here quite improperly, since
it is has no meaning outside the capitalist mode of production, where it
designates the result in terms of money or a commodity of surplus labour
extracted from a productive wage worker. Here it would be necessary to
speak of surplus or surplus product.
8. Ibid., p. 71.
9. Ibid., p. 71.
10. Ibid., pp. 71-2.
11. Coquery in Centre d’gtudes et de Recherches Marxistes (1971), p. 244.
12. Ibid., p. 245. On the use of the term surplus-value, see n. 7.
13. Amin (1972), p. 7.
14. Ibid., p. 7.
15. Person, in Vansina, Mauny, Thomas (1964), p. 332. Peter Morton-
Williams also asserts the existence of a link between long-distance trade and
State formation, and illustrates his thesis with the aid of examples drawn
from the area that interests us. But he describes, rather than explains, this
link (Douglas and Kaberry (1969), pp. 79-98).
16. Ibid., p. 331.
17. Terray in Meillassoux (1971), pp. 146-7; Terray (1969), p. 298.
18. Auge in Meillassoux (1971), p. 157.
19. Terray (1969), pp. 302 ff.
20. Terray in Meillassoux (1971), pp. 148-9; Terray (1969), p. 328.
21. Terray in Meillassoux (1971), p. 150; Terray (1969), p. 189.
22. Terray in Meillassoux (1971), p. 150; Terray (1969), pp. 248 ff.
23. Terray in Meillassoux (1971), p. 151. Terray (1969), pp. 310 ff.
24. On the notion of relays and the distinction proposed between relays and
networks by Boutilier, in the I.A.I. Colloquium in Freetown, see
Meillassoux (1971), p. 30.
25. C o q u e ~ (1969)3 P- 69.
26. Ibid., p. 68.
27. Boutilier in Meillassoux (1971), p. 246.
28. Levtzion (1968), pp. 28-9; Wilks in Meillassoux (1971), p. 128.
29. Person, Samory et la Revolution Dyula, book 111, in MS., forthcoming.
We here thank Yves Person for his kindness in sending us this text.
30. Fuller ( I ~ z I ) , p. I.
31. Dupuis (1824), p. 167.
32. Jackson (1820), p. 14.
33. Ibid., p. 44.
34. Coquery (19691, P. 72.
35. Daaku, in Meillassoux (1971), p. 172.
36. Rattray (1929), pp. 109-10.
37, Bowdich (1819), pp. 335-6.
38. Dupuis (1824), p. 167.
39. Person, in Vansina, Mauny, Thomas (1964), p. 330.
40. Wilks (1961), p. 5 .
41. Wolks (1969), p. 15.
42. Bowdich (1819), p. 169.
Long-distance exchange and the formation of the State
43. Dupuis (1824), part 11, p. LVI.
44. Lyon (1822), pp. 150-1.
45. Gordon (1874), p. 40.
46. Bowdich (1819), p. 307.
47. Binger (1892), 11, p. 174.
48. Collier (1824), p. 229.
49. Dupuis (1824), 11, pp. LVII f.
50. Braulot (1893), p. 80.
51. Dupuis (1824), 11, p. LVI. According to Dupuis’ map, Briquanti and
Kontoosoo were West of Bondoukou, between Bondoukou and Herebe.
52. Ibid., p. LVII. The ‘Barra’ is actually the river Ba, which flows into the
Komoe.
53. R. La T. Lonsdale, Full Report on his mission to Ashanti and Gaman,
April 14, 1883. Parliamentary Papers C 3687, in vol. XLVIII, 1883.
54. Capt. Lang, Report. November 17, 1892. Public Record Office, Colonial
Office, African West no. 435.
55. Coquer5′ (1969)j P. 71-
56. Wilks, in Meillassoux (1971), pp. 125-30.
57. Bowdich (181g), pp. 336-7. See also p. 334.
58. Gros (1884), p. 165.
59. Arhin (1965), PP. 144-5.
60. Bowdich (181g), pp. 335-6.
61. Goody (1971), p. 55.
62. Engels, Preface to Manr (1871), in Marx and Engels (1969), p. 258.
63. E n d s (18731, P. 547.
64. Engels (1880), in Marx and Engels (1968), p. 424.
65. Meillassoux in Meillassoux (1971), p. 26.
66. Marx (1867), Volume One, p. 235.
67. Marx (1894)~ Volume Three, p. 384.
68 Dupuis (1824), p. 164.
69. Reindorf (1895), p. 135.
70. Terray, in La Captivitk duns le Royaume Abron du Gyaman, forthcoming
in a collective work on captivity in western and central Africa, prepared by
Claude Meillassoux.
71. Wilks, in Ajayi and Crowder (1971), pp. 354-64.
72. Levtzion (1968), pp. 3-14.
73. Levtzion (1968), pp. 194-5.
74. Flight (1970), pp. 264, 267.
75. Meyerowitz (1962), p. 79.
76. Ibid.,p. 82, n. 2.
77. Boahen (1966), p. 61.
78. Meyerowitz (195 I), p. 198.
79. Wilks (1961), p. 5.
80. Banda Stool History, collected by Kwabena Arneyaw, I.A.S.R.A.1,
Institute of African studies, Legon.
81. Meyerowitz (1952), p. 35.
82. Levtzion (1968), p. 11.
83. Meyerowitz (1958), p. 118.
84. Levtzion (1968), p. 8.
85. Meyerowitz (1962), p. 83.
86. Wilks (1961), p. I I ; Levtzion (1968), p. I I.
87. Mauny (1961), pp. 359-60.
88. Pereira (1937), p. 89.
89. Wilks (1969), p. 15.
90. Fernandes (1938), p. 87.
H
Emmanuel Terray
91. Ibid. The ‘Ungaros’ are the Wangara or Dyula.
92. Pereira (1937), p. 89.
93. Banda Stool History (see n. 80).
94. Pereira (1937), pp. 121, 126.
95. Barros (1937)~ p. 124.
96. Ibid., p. 125.
97. Levtzion (1973), p. 172.
98. Ibn Batuta (1969), IV, p. 378.
99. Ibid., p. 441.
100. Fage (1969), p. 94.
101. Marx (1847), p. 86.
102. Marx (1894), Volume Three, pp. 282-3.
103. Coquery (1969), p. 71.
104. Amin (1972), p. 6.
105. Ibid., p. 7.
106. Marx (1894), Volume Three, p. 791.
Bibliography
Ajayi, J. F. A., and Crowder, M. (1971)
Histmy of West Africa (Longman).
Amin, S. (1972) ‘Sous-dkveloppement et
dbpendance en Afrique Noire’, Partisans
649 PP. 3-34.
Arhin, K. (1965) Market Settlements in
North Western Ashanti: Kintampo, in
Ashanti and the North West. supplement
No. I to Research Review, 1nsfitute of
African Studies, Legon.
Barros, J. de (1937) De Asia, in G. R.
Crone (tr.) The Voyage of Cadamosto
(Hakluyt Society).
Binger, L. G. (1892) Du Niger au Golfe
de Guinke (Hachette), 2 vols.
Boahen, A. (1966) Topics in West African
History (Longrnan).
Bowdich, T. E. (1966) (1819) A Mission
from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee (Cass).
Braulot, L. (1893) ‘Rapport de Mission’,
Archives FOM C6te d’lvoire 111. 3.
Centre d’dtudes et d e Recherches
Mamistes (1969) Sur le Mode de
Production Asiatique (editions Sociales) ;
(1971) Sur le fCodalisme (Editions Sociales).
Collier, Sir G. R. (1824) West African
Sketches (S. B. Seeley & Son).
Coquery, C. (1969) ‘Recherches sur un
mode de production africain’, La Pens&
14.4, pp. 61-~8.
Douglas, M, and Kaberry, P. (eds) (1969)
Man in Africa (Tavistock).
Dupuis, j. (18;~) (1~66) ~ournal of a
Residence in Ashantee (Cass).
Engels, F. (1873) The Housing Question
in K. Marx and F. Engels. Selected
Works, 2 Volumes (Lawrence & Wishart,
1955) 1 (1880) Socialism Utopian and
Snentlfic, in K. Marx and F. Engels,
Selected Works in One Volume (Lawrence
and Wishart) ; (I 884) Origins of the Family,
Private Property and the State, in K. Marx
and F. Engels, as above.
Fage, J. D. (1969) A History of West
Africa (Cambridge U.P).
Fernandes, V. (1938) Description de
Z’Afrique (tr. P. de Cenival and T. Monod,
Larose).
Flight, C. (1970) ‘The chronology of the
kings and aueen mothers of Bono Manso:
a r&evalua&on of the evidence’, Journal of
African History, X I , pp. 259-68.
Fuller, Sir F. (1968) (1921) A Vamihed
Dynasty: Ashanti (Cass).
Goody, J . (1971) Technology, Tradition
and the State in Africa (Oxford U.P.).
Cordon, Sir C. A. (1874) Life on the Gold
Coast (Baillere Tindall, Cox).
Gros, J. (1884) Voyages, Aventures et
CaptivitC de J. Bonnat chez les Achantis
(Plon et Noumt).
Ibn Batuta (1969) Voyages d’lbn Batuta
(tr. Defremery and Sanguinetti) (An-
thropos).
Jackson, J. G. (1820) An Account of
Timbuctoo and Housa (Longrnan).
Levtzion, N. (1968) Muslims and Chiefs in
West Africa (The Clarendon Press).
Lyon, G. F. (1822) Voyage duns Z’Inttieur
de 1’Afrique Septentrionale (Librairie de
Gide) .
Marx, K. (1847) The Poverty of
Philosophy; (1867) Capital, Volume I ;
(1871) The Civil War in France, in
K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works in
One Volume (Lawrence & Wishart); (1894)
Capital, Volume 111.
Marx, K., and Engels, F. (1968)
Selected Works in One Volume (Lawrence
& Wishart).
Mauny, R. (1961) Tableau Gkographique
Long-distance exchange and the formation of the State
de I’Ouest Africain au Moyen-&e (IFAN – .
Dakar). –
Meillassoux, C. (ed) (1971) The Develop-
ment of Indigenous Trade and Markets in
West Africa (Oxford U.P.).
Meyerowitz, E. L. R. (1951) The Sacred
State of the AKan (Faber & Faber); (1952)
Akan Traditions of Origin (Faber & Faber);
(1958) The Akan of Ghana (Faber &
Faber); (1962) A t the Court of an African
King (Faber & Faber).
Pereira, P. (1937) Esmeraldo de Situ Orbis
(tr. Kimble) (Hakluyt Society).
Rattray, R. S. (1969) (1929) Ashanti Law
and Constitution (Clarendon Press).
Reindorf, Rev. C. C. (1966) (1895)
The History of Gold Coast and Asante
(Universities Press, Accra).
Terray, E. (1969) L’Organisation Sociale
des Dida du CBte d’Ivoire. Annales de
L’UniversitC d’Abidjan, SCrie F, tome 1,
fascicule 2.
Vansina, J., Mauny, R., Thomas, L. V.
(1464) The Historian in Troaical Africa
( e f z r d U.P.).
Walks, I. (1961) The Northern Factor in
Ashanti History (Institute of African
Studies, Legon); (1969) The Early Dyula
Towns (Centre of African Studies, School
of Oriental and African Studies, London).
Journal of African History, aa (1981), pp. 1-22
Printed in Great Britain
THE INLAND NIGER DELTA BEFORE THE EMPIRE OF
MALI: EVIDENCE FROM JENNE-JENO*
BY RODERICK J. McINTOSH AND SUSAN KEECH McINTOSH
F R O M the sixteenth century until the late nineteenth century, when French
colonial mercantile interests altered centuries-old trade patterns in the Inland
Niger Delta, the city of Jenne dominated the central delta as a major
commercial centre. Linked to Timbuktu by 500 kilometres of navigable
riverway, Jenne was a major entrepot in the long-distance trade networks
along which passed major commodities like gold, salt, copper, slaves, and
kola, and a host of minor commodities.
Historical sources permit a great deal of certainty about the preceding two
statements. For periods earlier than the fifteenth century, however, Jenne
retreats into historical obscurity. The failure of any Arab or European source
prior to the mid-fifteenth century to mention the town by name has convinced
various historians of the Western Sudan that Jenne did not exist substantially
prior to this time. Such a conclusion is contradicted by the oral traditions
of Jenne, which state that the town was founded in the second century after
the Hegira (i.e. in the eighth century A.D.). Until now, however, the negative
evidence of the early written sources has tended to prevail over the testimony
of the oral traditions. Archaeological investigations undertaken in 1977 at the
ancestral site of Jenne, known as Jenne-jeno or Djoboro, have demonstrated
that the settlement was established by the third century B.C. and had
developed into an urban centre of considerable proportions by the eighth or
ninth century A.D. In this article we present a summary of the excavation
results and briefly consider the implications of the archaeological data for our
understanding of the development of the Western Sudan during the first
millennium A.D.
We begin with a discussion of historical sources for the Western Sudan in
order to assess the quality of available information on the origins of the city,
the reasons for its growth, and its function within the extensive trade
networks of the second millennium A.D. The available sources include: the
scholarly compendia of mediaeval Arab geographers and historians based in
North Africa, Spain, and the Near East, European accounts, local histories
* Djenne was the preferred spelling during the colonial era. More recently Malians have
dropped silent letters and accents from many placenames. The authors are grateful to Dr
Alpha Oumar Konare, now Minister of Culture in Mali, for granting official permission
for the research. The assistance of M. Hama Bocoum and M. Ali Tamboura was also
central to the success of the field season at Jenne. Special thanks are extended to Professors
Brian Fagan, Merrick Posnansky, Albert Spaulding and Dr John Alexander for their
suggestions and guidance on the research.
Funding was generously provided by the National Science Foundation, the University
of California, the American Association of University Women, and the Crowther-Benyon
Fund of Cambridge University.
This article was written while one of the authors (R. J. M.) held a postdoctoral fellowship
provided by the American Council of Learned Societies. An earlier version of this article
was presented at the African History Seminar, Institute of Commonwealth Studies,
University of London, on 14 March 1979.
0021-8537/81/2828-2050 $02.00 © 1981 Cambridge University Press
terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700018983
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 10 Oct 2021 at 05:32:03, subject to the Cambridge Core
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700018983
https://www.cambridge.org/core
2 RODERICK AND SUSAN McINTOSH
(taWikhs) written in Arabic by native African scholars, and indigenous oral
tradition.
Chronology of written documentation
The earliest details on the Western Sudan are provided by Arab geographers
and historians, none of whom mentions Jenne by name. From the works
produced between the eighth and the fifteenth centuries, a fairly detailed
picture emerges of principal political, ethnic and religious divisions in the
Sahara, and of important trade routes from North Africa to the southern
trans-Saharan trade termini of Awdaghust, Walata, Ghana, and Tadmekka.
The transfer of commercial control from Arab or Berber hands to black hands
in the southern Sahara is reflected in the Arab sources by a decline in the
amount and precision of detail given for trade routes and commercial centres
south of the Sahara.1 The southern frontier of Arab knowledge of the Western
Sudan seems to be the Senegal and Niger Rivers,2 which the Arabs believed
to be but one river, the Nile, ultimately flowing past Cairo and into the
Mediterranean. South of the river, the Arabs knew only that a pagan tribe
of blacks, the Lamlan, lived. Beyond the Lamlan lay uninhabited territory.3
It is difficult to know how much of the vague reportage of sub-Saharan
Western Sudan by Arab authors stems from genuine ignorance or confusion
(possibly created in part by deliberate obfuscation on the part of Sudanese
traders seeking to conceal the trade routes to the gold fields) and how much
is a function of selective reporting. It is possible that the towns of black Africa
held little fascination for cosmopolitan Arab scholars, many of whom wrote
for royal patrons who possessed black slaves. Particularly since many black
societies were pagan at this time, Arab authors may have been reluctant to
give them detailed treatment.4 Whatever the reason, the pattern of vague and
confused reportage for sub-Saharan Africa is sufficiently consistent in the
Arab sources that we may conclude that their failure to mention Jenne cannot
be assumed necessarily to mean that the town was not yet in existence.
Ibn Battuta requires special mention here because, unlike other Arab
authors of this period, he actually travelled through the Western Sudan
1 Ibn Hawqal’s Saharan itinerary, for example, is quite consistent with respect to travel
times between Sijilmassa, Awdaghust and Ghana, and Kawkaw, Marandet and Zawila.
But travel times between the (presumed) Sahel/north savanna centres of Kugha, Sama,
and Kuzan are greatly exaggerated, unless a great deal of doubling back and circular travel
were involved (Ibn Hawqal, in J. M. Cuoq, Recueil des Sources Arabes concernant VAjrique
Occidentale du VIII’ au XVI’ Siecle (Paris, 1975), 73). Also, reports of towns near or on
the ‘Nile’ (i.e. the Niger or Senegal Rivers) are almost invariably vague, and range from
confusing to contradictory, as in the case of Sama, Barisa/Yarasna, Ghiyaru, and Kugha,
variously mentioned by Ibn Hawqal, al-Bakri and al-Idrisi, among others.
2 But only as far south as perhaps 15° and 140 latitude. Even when describing pagan
Lamlam territory, which is about as far south as Arab knowledge extended, al-Idrisi
provides details of a very dry savanna or Sahel habitat, where the inhabitants raise camels
and goats and eat camel meat dried in the sun (al-Idrisi, in Cuoq, Recueil, 132
).
3 al-Idrisi, in Cuoq, Recueil, 131; al-Harrani, ibid. 248.
4 In the introduction to Ibn Hawqal’s Surat al-Ard we find an example of this attitude:
‘ I have not described the countries of the blacks in the west… because the characteristics
of organized states.. .are utterly lacking among them’, translated in J. S. Trimingham,
A History of Islam in West Africa (Oxford, 1962), 1-2.
terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700018983
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 10 Oct 2021 at 05:32:03, subject to the Cambridge Core
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700018983
https://www.cambridge.org/core
JENNE-JENO AND THE INLAND NIGER DELTA 3
0352-3) to the capital of the kingdom of Mali and thus provides numerous
details of the sub-Saharan towns through which he passed. Although he
visited Walata, Timbuktu and Gao in his travels, Ibn Battuta makes no
mention of Jenne. This might appear to be a particularly strong piece of
negative evidence for either the non-existence or relative unimportance of
Jenne in the mid fourteenth century. There are several reasons, however, why
negative evidence from Ibn Battuta should be regarded critically. Excellent
as many of Ibn Battuta’s descriptions are, there are large gaps in his narrative
wherein a journey of many days’ duration received only a paragraph’s notice.5
Either his daily journal or his memory was very selective, although part of
the problem surely was that his notes from twenty-four years of world travel
were dictated to a professional writer in Fes who produced a synthesis in only
three months’ time.6
Ibn Battuta’s account of his trip both to and from Mali is particularly sparse
in detail; as a result, his itinerary has been the subject of substantial debate.
Delafosse7 argued that Ibn Battuta entered the Inland Niger Delta after
crossing the Niger southwest of Jenne, from whence he travelled to Segou
and on to Mali. If this were true, Battuta’s failure to mention Jenne would
strongly imply that the town came to play a critical role in riverine transport
in the upper Inland Delta only after the mid-fourteenth century. However,
both Meillassoux8 and Hunwick9 offer interpretations of the itinerary that
keep Ibn Battuta well to the north of the Inland Delta. We are especially
partial to Hunwick’s reconstruction, which emphasizes the important point
that neither on his journey from Walata to Mali nor en route from Mali to
Timbuktu did Ibn Battuta mention crossing the Niger River.10 Given that
Ibn Battuta travelled overland, probably to the north of the Inland Delta,
it is perhaps not particularly significant that he does not mention Jenne, since
we would necessarily expect him to do so only if he travelled through the
Inland Niger Delta by boat, which he clearly did not. It initially appears
puzzling that Ibn Battuta should have travelled overland on his return rather
than taking advantage of the efficient transport by boat, especially between
Koulikoro and Timbuktu. However, it may well be that his journey, in the
company of a merchant, merely reflected the seasonal shift in commercial
routes as the water level became too low for successful heavy transport along
6 Ibn Battuta’s month-long stay in Gao merited only seven sentences (Ibn Battuta, in
Cuoq, Recueil, 316).
* R. Mauny, V. Monteil, A. Djenidi, S. Robert and J. Devisse, Textes et Documents
Relatifs a I’Histoire de I’Afrique: Extraits Tires des Voyages d’lbn Battuta, Universite de
Dakar, Publications de la Section d’Histoire, No. 9 (Dakar, 1966).
7 M. Delafosse, ‘Le Gana et le Mali’, Bulletin du Cotnite d’Etudes Historiques et
Scientifiques de I’A.O.F. vn (1924), 479-542.
8 C. Meillassoux, ‘L’ltineraire d’lbn Battuta de Walata a Mali’, J. Afr. Hist, xm
(1972), 389-95-
‘ J. O. Hunwick, ‘The mid-fourteenth century capital of Mali’, J. Afr. Hist. x\v (1973),
195-206.
10 If Hunwick’s interpretation of the southward journey is correct, Ibn Battuta
approached the Niger at a point well to the southwest of Jenne, but never crossed the Niger
or travelled in the Delta. His return from Mali would have taken him north of the Niger,
via Mema, until he reached the Niger again at Timbuktu, from whence he travelled by
boat downstream to Gao.
terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700018983
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 10 Oct 2021 at 05:32:03, subject to the Cambridge Core
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700018983
https://www.cambridge.org/core
4 RODERICK AND SUSAN McINTOSH
the middle Niger.11 Claims that Ibn Battuta’s overland itinerary proves that
the Middle Niger had not yet developed by the mid-fourteenth century as
an important transport axis should be reconsidered.
In general, factors of selective reporting and the northern perspective of
Arab authors (focusing on overland trade routes to the north of the Niger,
particularly trans-Saharan routes) help account for their failure to mention
Jenne. We must wait until 1493—6 for a reference to Jenne in an Arab source.
At this time, the Moroccan al-Maghili wrote a long epistle to the Askia
Mohammed, ruler of the Songhay Empire, concerning the proper conduct
of a Muslim ruler and his subjects. In the course of a discussion on the
prevention of public nudity, al-Maghili noted that the offence was particularly
widespread at Timbuktu and Jenne.12
The first European reference to Jenne occurs in a letter sent from Tuat in
1447 by the Italian merchant, Antonio Malfante. The letter, written in Latin,
mentions various civitates bordering the Land of the Blacks, including
Chuchiam (Gao), Thambet (Timbuktu), Geni (Jenne), and Meli (Mali).13 As
Prussin14 points out, the interpretation of the term civitate is extremely
ambiguous. It may be translated as city or state, but Malfante’s connotation
of the term probably was closest to that of the fifteenth-century Italian
city-state, implying the presence of a civitas and an administered cantado, or
hinterland. Although Malfante gives no information on the location of
Jenne,15 several other details in his narrative suggest that his informant, a
wealthy merchant who claimed to have lived in Timbuktu for thirty years,
was specifically describing the Inland Niger Delta when he spoke to Malfante
of the Land of the Blacks. Malfante recounts:
Every day he [the informant] tells me wonderful things of these peoples [the
Blacks]. . .they all go naked, save for a small loin cloth to cover their privates. They
have an abundance of flesh, milk and rice, but no corn or barley. Through these
lands flows a very large river, which at certain times of the year inundates all these
lands. This river passes by the gates pf Thambet.. .There are many boats on it,
by which they carry on trade.16
The seasonally inundated land upstream of Timbuktu which produces an
abundance of rice can only be the Inland Delta. Thus we learn that trade by
pirogue was common on the Niger between the Inland Delta and Timbuktu
in the mid-fifteenth century.
Malfante’s mission in Tuat was apparently to reconnoitre a commercial
11 The middle Niger is easily navigable only during the flood season (mid-July to
December); as soon.as the floodwaters recede, sandbars lie very close to the water surface.
Even pirogue traffic comes to a virtual standstill between Markala and Mopti from March
to the end of June (J. Champaud, ‘La navigation fluvial dans le Moyen Niger’, Cahiers
d’Outre-Mer, LV(I96I) , 255-92, esp. pages 259, 281, 287). Ibn Battuta travelled from Mali
to Timbuktu in late February/early March (Cuoq, Recueil, 289, footnote 1).
12 al-Maghili, in Cuoq, Recueil, 430.
13 G. R. Crone, The Voyages of Cadamosto (London, 1937), 87; original letter reproduced
in Ch. de La Ronciere, La Decouverte de I’Afrique au Moyen Age, Memoir of the Royal
Society of Geographers of Egypt, No. 5 (Cairo, 1924), 1, 151-8.
14 L. Prussin, ‘The Architecture of Djenne: African Synthesis and Transformation’
(Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1973), 66-7.
16 La Ronciere proposed the equation of Geni with Jenne: La Ronciere, Decouverte,
148, 154-
16 Crone, Voyages, 88.
terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700018983
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 10 Oct 2021 at 05:32:03, subject to the Cambridge Core
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700018983
https://www.cambridge.org/core
JENNE-JENO AND THE INLAND NIGER DELTA 5
route to the interior of West Africa in order to secure gold at its source for
Italian interests before it could reach Portuguese merchants on the Guinea
coast.17 Malfante’s explicitly southern, sub-Saharan interests might help
explain why he mentions Jenne, whereas other, Arab writers availing
themselves of informants in North Africa failed to do so.
Much greater detail on Jenne is available in the early sixteenth-century
Portuguese accounts of V. Fernandes (1506-7) and Pacheco Pereira (1506-8).
Both were seamen employed by King Joao II of Portugal to assess the overland
and river routes to the heartland of the gold trade in the interior of West
Africa. Fernandes specifically mentions the desire of King Joao to reach the
cidades of Timbacutu (Timbuktu) and Gyna (Jenne) via the Senegal River,
which he clearly believed to be connected to the Niger. Despite the fact that
all Fernandes’ information was obtained second-hand, his descriptions of the
riverine trade network linking Jenne to Timbuktu, and the Wangara-controlled
gold trade are detailed and accurate.18 Both Fernandes and Pacheco Pereira
describe Jenne as a walled city and emphasize her role in the gold and salt
trade; the latter author also mentions the demand in Jenne for tin, copper,
and cloth.19 It is interesting to note that during less than a century of
Portuguese navigation along the Guinea coast, more was learned about the
structure of the gold trade between the mines and the northern Sudanese
entrepots than during seven centuries of Arab observation from the north.
Another important source for information on the Western Sudan is Leo
Africanus, who travelled extensively in the interior in both 1511 and 1512—14
and provided eyewitness descriptions of both Timbuktu and Gao. However,
Mauny20 suggests that Africanus’ descriptions of Jenne and the capital of
Mali were probably second-hand. Had he actually travelled upstream from
Timbuktu to ‘the kingdom of Ghinea’ and Mali, Africanus could not have
claimed, as he does, that the Niger flows westward along that route.21
Africanus’ contradictory description of Jenne has caused some confusion. He
states that the capital of Genni (also called Gheneoa, Ghinea22) was ‘ a certaine
17 N. Levtzion, Ancient Ghana and Mali (London, 1973), 133; E. Herbert, ‘Timbuktu:
a case study of the role of legend in history’, in B. K. Swartz and R. Dumett (eds.), West
African Culture Dynamics (The Hague, 1980), 439.
18 V. Fernandes, Description de la Cote d’Afrique de Ceuta au Senegal, 1506-7 (translated
P. de Cenival and T. Monod), (Paris, 1938), 85, 87.
19 D. P. Pereira, Esmeraldo de Situ Orbis (translated G. H. T. Kimble) (London, 1937),
80-1.
20 R. Mauny, Tableau Geographique de I’Ouest Africain au Moyen Age, Memoire de
PInstitut Fondamental d’Afrique Noire, no. 61 (Dakar, 1961), 47, 499.
21 L. Africanus, The History and Description of Africa (translated J. Pory) (London,
1896), 1, 12. Using this reasoning, however, it is difficult to see how Africanus could have
overlooked the fact of the Niger’s eastward flow at Timbuktu.
82 This is an excellent illustration of the problem of toponymy in tracing the historical
sources for Jenne. Medieval writers and cartographers used a bewildering number of
spellings – Gyna, Gyni, Genni, Ghinea, Genehoa – which are sufficiently similar that it
is often unclear whether reference is being made to a city (Jenne), a kingdom (possibly
Jenne or ancient Ghana), or an entire region (Guinea – the Land of the Blacks). Flemish
and Portuguese maps of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries show an area variously
designated as Gine, Guinea, Genoia, and Genna. These apparently are all variants of a
generic term for Black Africa. During the early seventeenth century the term Genehoa
began to appear with the term Guinia on European maps, such as that by Jodicus Hondius
in 1606. The former term refers to both a city and a kingdom or region, whereas the latter
terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700018983
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 10 Oct 2021 at 05:32:03, subject to the Cambridge Core
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700018983
https://www.cambridge.org/core
6 RODERICK AND SUSAN McINTOSH
greate village onely’, but then goes on immediately to describe the settlement
as the capital of a large kingdom. Not only does the capital boast a highly
stratified population, including a prince, priests, doctors, lawyers, and
merchants, but it also is involved in a voluminous trade along the Middle
Niger to Timbuktu.23
In general, the period from the mid-sixteenth to the early nineteenth
century is virtually devoid of any European sources offering precise informa-
tion on Jenne’s location, physical description, or historical development.
This gap in the European sources is filled by three major African sources, all
specifically concerned with the Western Sudan and the upper Niger Bend:
Ta’rikh al-Sudan, Ta’rikh al-Fettash and Tadhkirat an-Nisyan. Of these the
Ta’rikh al-Sudan, completed by al-Sa’di in 1655, is by far the richest in detail
concerning Jenne. Although his style when describing Jenne is a bit florid
(‘This city is large, flourishing and prosperous; she is blessed by Heaven and
favoured by the Almighty’),24 the role al-Sa’di accords Jenne in the
long-distance trade networks agrees well with Fernandes’ earlier description:
Jenne is one of the great markets of the Muslim world. There the salt merchants
of Teghaza meet merchants carrying gold from the mines of Bitou… Because of
this blessed city, caravans flock to Timbuktu from all points of the horizon.25
Al-Sa’di goes on to describe Jenne’s productive and well-populated hinter-
land, albeit with some degree of exaggeration:
The territory of Jenne is fertile and populous; numerous markets can be found there
every day of the week. Be assured that it contains 7,077 villages closely spaced.26
He claims that the territory of Jenne extends from Lake Debo in the north
to the Volta Bend in the south, and borders on the Bandiagara highlands to
the east.27 It is not clear whether Jenne’s territory was defined by political
suzerainty, economic domination, or some other means entirely.
In 1828, Rene Caillie became the first explorer to reach Jenne and
subsequently provide a detailed account of the city.28 Caillie reported that
Jenne was a city approximately 2 | miles in circumference, surrounded by an
ill-constructed wall ten feet high and fourteen inches thick, pierced by several
small gateways; it housed a population of 8,000-10,000 Mandingo, Fulani,
Bambara, and Moors.29 By far the most important details in Caillie’s account
of Jenne concern the city’s role in commerce along the Middle Niger. We
learn that in 1828 Jenne was no longer the central point in the gold trade,
owing to a westward re-direction of the trade as a result of wars between the
Fulani of the Inland Delta and the Bambara of Segou.30 Because of its
is apparently a more generic term for the whole of West Africa. By the end of the
seventeenth century both the city and the kingdom of Genehoe (Jenne?) were always
indicated in addition to the generic term Guinea. See Prussin, Architecture, 76, 276.
23 Africanus, History, 822.
24 al-Sa’di, Ta’rikh es-Sudan (translated O. Houdas) (Paris, 1900), 22. Translated from
the French by S.K.M.
26 Ibid. 22-3. Translated from the French by S.K.M.
26 Ibid. 24. Translated from the French by S.K.M.
27 Ibid. 25.
28 R. Caillie, Travels Through Central Africa to Timbuktu and Across the Great Desert
to Morocco: Performed in the Years 1824-1828 (London, 1830).
29 Ibid. 1, 459-60.
30 Ibid. 1, 465-6; Mungo Park also mentioned that political instability in the region had
disrupted trade – M. Park, Travels in the Interior of Africa (London, 1907).
terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700018983
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 10 Oct 2021 at 05:32:03, subject to the Cambridge Core
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700018983
https://www.cambridge.org/core
JENNE-JENO AND THE INLAND NIGER DELTA 7
profitable trade in staples with Timbuktu, however, Jenne continued to
prosper despite the decline in the gold trade:
Timbuktu, though one of the largest cities I have seen in Africa, possesses no other
resources but its trade in salt, its soils being totally unfit for cultivation. The
inhabitants procure from Jenne everything requisite for the supply of their wants,
such as millet, rice, vegetable butter, honey, cotton, Soudan cloth, preserved
provisions, candles, soap, allspice, onions, dried fish, pistachios. Bousbehey and
Toudeyni being only supplied with the grains which the merchants of Timbuktu
receive from Jenne would of course be reduced to famine if the trade between these
latter two cities should be interrupted.31
Caillie went on to describe how agricultural produce, cloth, dried fish and
slaves were bulked at Jenne, where they were brought by individual producers
or small volume traders.32 At Jenne, staples bound for Timbuktu and points
north were loaded on to pirogues, of which there was a large commercial
variety measuring 90—100 feet long by 12-14 feet wide, drawing 6—7 feet
water depth, and capable of carrying 60-90 tons.33
Through Caillie’s account, Jenne appears as a prosperous commercial
centre for regional trade based on a highly productive, diversified, and
well-populated regional hinterland. The city’s dual role as both an entrepot
in the long-distance gold and salt trade and a major production and bulking
centre for regional commerce in staples is revealed. We now see that al-Sa’di’s
claim that Jenne is the cause of Timbuktu’s commercial success was by no
means idle flattery.
There were no further eyewitness accounts of Jenne until French conquest
in 1893, although the city figures prominently in traditions of the theocratic
state of Seku Amadou in the first half of the nineteenth century.34 It is only
with the French conquest that Jenne’s correct geographical position on a
tributary linking the Niger and Bani Rivers finally appears on a map. Thus
was ushered in a period of intense interest in Jenne, highlighted by Dubois’
account of his visits to Jenne and Timbuktu35 and Monteil’s classic monograph
on the city.36 However, French conquest also initiated the present decline in
the city’s commercial status in favour of Mopti, the port town at the
Bani-Niger confluence with year-round access by motorable road.
Summary of historical documentation
It is in many ways extraordinary that the Western world remained so
completely ignorant of Jenne for so many centuries. In striking contrast to
its sister-city, Timbuktu, which was well-known, the sources discussed above
indicate that the city was almost a total unknown prior to the nineteenth
century. Part of the reason for Jenne’s obscurity is surely, as L. Prussin37 and
31 Caillie, Travels, 11, 57-9.
32 Ibid. 11, 202-3; ‘ n Vol. 1, 435-8 Caillie suggests that certain villages specialize in the
production of particular commodities.
33 Ibid, ii, 59.
34 A. H. Ba and J. Daget, L’Empire Peul du Macina (1818-1853) (Paris, 1962); W. A.
Brown, ‘The Caliphate of Hamdullahi c. 1818-1864: A Study in African History and
Tradition’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1969).
35 F. Dubois, Timbuctoo the Mysterious (translated D. White) (London, 1897).
36 Ch.Monteil,MonographiedeDjenne(Tu\\e, i9O3);Ch.Monteil, UneCiteSoudanaise:
Djenne (Paris, 1932). 37 Prussin, Architecture, 77.
terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700018983
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 10 Oct 2021 at 05:32:03, subject to the Cambridge Core
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700018983
https://www.cambridge.org/core
8 RODERICK AND SUSAN McINTOSH
E. Herbert38 suggest, that most European and Arab traders and explorers
approached the Western Sudan from the north, for which Timbuktu was the
natural terminus from the fourteenth century onwards. The most detailed
information about Jenne is furnished by those few travellers and merchants
who either approached Jenne from the south (e.g. Caillie) or obtained
information from the Guinea coast (Fernandes and Pacheco Pereira) from
Dyula (Wangara) traders for whom Jenne was the northern terminus of the
trans-savanna trade routes.
The available written documentation provides a fairly consistent picture
of the city’s function within the trade networks of the second millennium A.D.
Jenne’s prosperity depended on its dual role as a critical transhipment point
for long-distance trade, and as a major production and exchange centre for
regional commerce in staples and raw materials. Two factors appear to have
been critical to Jenne’s development: its situation at the most south-westerly
point of the navigable Inland Niger Delta, and its extraordinarily productive
agricultural hinterland. Although the historical documents give us no direct
information on Jenne’s existence before the fifteenth century, we have
suggested that neither do they prove that the town was not an important trade
centre prior to that time. For direct references to the town’s origins and
growth, we must turn to the oral traditions.
Oral tradition
Unlike oral traditions in many other Mande-speaking parts of West Africa,
Jenne’s traditions are fragmentary. In the sense of verbally related and
retained chronologies of events passed on from one generation to another in
the form of minstrel epics (like those recited by Bambara griots), oral
traditions are essentially non-existent at Jenne. The city has no griot,3S and
it has no unified coherent tradition of its pre-Islamic history. This is
understandable in view of the ‘multi-ethnic, polygot, heterogeneous charac-
ter’ of the city.40 Six or more different ethnic groups co-exist in Jenne41
without relinquishing their individual sense of ethnic and historic identity.
As no one group is dominant, no one group has become the guardian of the
city’s history.
An additional factor which undoubtedly compromised the integrity of
earlier oral tradition was the growing influence of Islam and literacy in Jenne.
Native Muslim scholars, such as al-Sa’di, transcribed some of the local oral
traditions into Arabic, although the pagan past was always discounted. As
literacy and Islam spread, the verbal transmission of tradition may have
diminished in frequency and importance, especially if the oral traditions were
subverted by state-approved standardized histories like those created by Seku
Amadou in the nineteenth century.42 Jenne’s oral traditions have clearly
undergone a good deal of chronological telescoping and political editing
through the centuries. However, those details which have survived these
38 E. Herbert, ‘Timbuktu’, 450.
38 D. Robinson, personal communication (1978).
40 Prussin, Architecture, 94.
41 Bambara, Bobo, Nono (Marka), Bozo (Sorogo), Fulani and Songhay.
42 Brown, Caliphate, 4-7; M. Johnson, ‘The economic foundations of an islamic
theocracy – the case of Masina’, J. Afr. Hist, xvn (1976), 484.
terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700018983
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 10 Oct 2021 at 05:32:03, subject to the Cambridge Core
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700018983
https://www.cambridge.org/core
JENNE-JENO AND THE INLAND NIGER DELTA 9
processes provide an alternative to slavish dependence on historical docu-
mentation for information on Jenne’s chronology.
Three sources furnish the bulk of what is known of Jenne’s oral traditions:
Ta’rikh al-Sudan, Monteil’s Monographie de Djenne, and Delafosse’s Haut
Senegal-Niger. All accounts agree that Jenne was founded in the eighth
century A.D., that the city was first situated on the site of Zoboro, and
subsequently moved to its present location. The Ta’rikh al-Sudan provides
the following account:
In the beginning, the town had been built in a place called Zoboro; later it was
moved to the spot where it still exists today. The former town was situated near
the modern town in a southern direction… The town was founded by pagans in
the mid-second century A.H….The inhabitants did not convert to Islam until
towards the end of the sixth century A.H.43
The site of Zoboro is still well known to the inhabitants of Jenne; it is a mound
situated three kilometres southeast of Jenne and also known as Jenne-jeno
(‘ancient Jenne’ in Songhay), Jenne-sire, Djoboro, and Do-Djoboro.44
There is disagreement, however, over which city is indicated by the foundation
date: Jenne or Jenne-jeno (Zoboro) ? Monteil45 believes that the eighth-century
date refers to Zoboro, whereas Trimingham46 seems to accept it as the
foundation date for Jenne.
Oral traditions collected by Monteil47 and Delafosse48 add flesh to the bare
bones of al-Sa’di’s report. Zoboro was initially a Bozo settlement.49 According
to the traditions, Soninke-speaking Nono (Marka) entered the upper Inland
Niger Delta from the northwest and superimposed themselves on the Bozo
autochthones.60 The most commonly accepted derivation of the name Jenne
is from the Nono ‘Djanna’ (as Jenne was originally pronounced), meaning
‘Little Dia’, thus commemorating the town from whence the Nono came.51
The duration of the Nono occupation at Jenne-jeno prior to moving the city
to its present site is not specified in the oral traditions collected by Monteil
and Delafosse, although both imply that the move had taken place before the
conversion to Islam of the 26th chief of Jenne, Koi Kombora, between A.D.
1200 and 1300.62 In fact, all we can state with confidence is that Jenne-jeno
must have been abandoned by at least A.D. 1468, at which time Sonni Ali
garrisoned his troops there.53
Several historians have found it difficult to accept the eighth-century date
claimed for the city by oral tradition. Delafosse54 felt that Jenne must have
43 al-Sa’di, Ta’rikh, 23. Translated from the French by S.K.M.
44 The tendency, demonstrated here, for different ethnic groups to assign place names
in their own language raises the possibility that Jenne-jeno was known by another name
earlier in time. 46 Monteil, Cite, 33.
46 Trimingham, History, 31. But also see ibid., 63.
47 Monteil, Cite, 20-33.
48 M. Delafosse, Haut-Senegal-Niger (Paris, 1912), I, 253-70.
48 Monteil, Cite, 32; Delafosse, Haut-Senegal-Niger, 1, 263.
60 Monteil, Cite, 31.
61 The Nono originally founded Dia, on the edge of the Inland Delta, from which Nono
groups budded off to found new towns, including Sansanding, Diakha-sur-Bafing and
Jenne. Monteil, Cite, 31-2; Monteil, Monographie, 263, 286.
68 Monteil, Monographie, 285; Delafosse, Haut-Senegal-Niger, 1, 269-70.
63 al-Sa’di, Ta’rikh, 26.
64 Delafosse, Haut-Senegal-Niger, 1, 269-70.
terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700018983
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 10 Oct 2021 at 05:32:03, subject to the Cambridge Core
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700018983
https://www.cambridge.org/core
IO RODERICK AND SUSAN McINTOSH
been founded c. A.D. 1250 as a direct consequence of the Soninke dispersal
following the destruction of Ghana in c. 1240 by the Mansa of Mali. The
Nono, he argued, would have entered the Inland Delta in great numbers at
this time.
Levtzion56 discounts both of al-Sa’di’s dates (c. A.D. 800 for Jenne’s
foundation; c. 1200 for conversion to Islam) as ‘much too early’. He argues
that Jenne owed her existence to two things: Timbuktu, and the opening of
the Akan goldfields (usually believed to have occurred in the fourteenth
century although this is by no means proven). Timbuktu was founded only
in the early twelfth century and increased slowly in prosperity until it became
very prominent in the fifteenth century. Levtzion reasons that the close
commercial relations between Timbuktu and Jenne suggest that these two
important market towns developed simultaneously ;56 thus, Levtzion supports
Delafosse’s date of A.D. 1250 for the founding of Jenne.
Triaud prefers to see Jenne as an artifact of Islam, founded near the end
of the thirteenth century by Muslims in co-operation with indigenes. He
dismisses the oral traditions as pure fabrication on the part of the inhabitants
of Jenne who, ‘suffering from the late creation of their town, needed to
fabricate a history that gave them more ancient origins’.57
Despite decades of commentary on the chronology of Jenne’s origins,
Monteil’s statement that ‘we know nothing of the first centuries of Jenne’58
was still appropriate to the state of knowledge in 1977. The oral tradition
versus historical reconstruction debate was clearly stalemated: archaeological
research offered the most promise for resolution of this issue. This was one
of several questions we sought to answer by excavating at Jenne-jeno in 1977.
The 1977 excavations at Jenne-jeno
The site of Jenne-jeno is a roughly teardrop-shaped mound which rises up
to 8 metres above the floodplain of the Inland Niger Delta approximately 3
kilometres southwest of the present-day city of Jenne ( i3°53’2o”N,
40 32′ 25″ W). The mound rests in an abandoned channel of the Bani River
(Fig. i), which now flows four kilometres to the southeast of Jenne-jeno; it
is surrounded by floodwaters from September through December annually.
The total surface area of the site is 330,810 square metres (33 hectares or 82
acres) and features visible on the surface include mudbrick house foundations,
funerary urns, concentrations of iron and slag, and segments of a city wall
(Fig. 2).
Excavations were carried out at Jenne-jeno from early February to late
April 1977 as part of a programme of archaeological research designed to
provide a preliminary framework for interpreting the prehistory of the
western Inland Niger Delta. A major goal of the excavations was to establish
a stratigraphic, ceramic, and radiocarbon chronology for the site which could
then be applied to the investigation of other sites in the vicinity of Jenne.
Other issues of interest included the chronology of technological and
66 Levtzion, Ancient Ghana, 159.
69 Levtzion, Ancient Ghana, 157; also Herbert, ‘Timbuktu’, 433.
” J. L. Triaud, Islam et Societes Soudanais au Moyen Age, Recherches Voltaiques no.
16 (Paris, 1973), 128. Translation from French by S.K.M.
68 Monteil, Cite, 37.
terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700018983
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 10 Oct 2021 at 05:32:03, subject to the Cambridge Core
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700018983
https://www.cambridge.org/core
JENNE-JENO AND THE INLAND NIGER DELTA I I
^JENNE
W * . V I C I N r r Y
Fig. i. Location of Jenne and Jenne-jeno in the Inland Niger Delta of West Africa.
economic change — for example plant domestication and the introduction of
iron and, most relevant to the present article, the possibility of early urban
development in the Inland Niger Delta. Since much of the information we
hoped to extract from the site was of a chronological nature, vertical
excavation units measuring three metres on a site were used, and rigorous
stratigraphic control was maintained. Two excavation units, M i and M2,
were dug 110 metres apart in a central area thought to have been residential
because of the numerous mudbrick house foundations visible on the surface.
Excavation unit JF1 sampled a cemetery area near the southeast periphery
of the mound. We felt that excavation of these units would permit a
preliminary assessment of differences in the nature and depth of the deposits
at various points on the mound. Clearly, however, the possibility of sample
bias is so great in these excavations that extreme care must be exercised in
extrapolating from the excavated data to the unexplored areas of the site.
Summary of excavation results
In the two central excavation units (M 1 and M2), well-stratified, continuous
cultural deposits extended to a depth of 5 metres, at which point sterile
floodplain alluvium was encountered, thus confirming our initial impression
that Jenne-jeno is a tell. In both units, iron and slag were present in the
earliest levels, indicating that the original settlers at Jenne-jeno knew the use
and manufacture of iron. A domestic function throughout the occupation is
suggested for M 1 by the presence of large amounts of domestic debris (animal
bones, broken pottery, etc.), charcoal and ash concentrations that may have
terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700018983
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 10 Oct 2021 at 05:32:03, subject to the Cambridge Core
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700018983
https://www.cambridge.org/core
12 RODERICK AND SUSAN McINTOSH
Contour interval 0-5 m
– ” ” – ‘ 0-25 m Contour
cm 1 Vertical datum
Not
to
scale
Depression
‘.”.’. City wall
• Excavation unit
» Cement marker
. Funerary urn
o Round house; cylindrical brick
4 Square house; cylindrical brick
I n Square house; square brick
i V House, uncertain shape; cylindrical brick
0 SO 100 metres 20
0
1 . . . . I . I . I . I
Fig. 2. Topographic map of Jenne-jeno, Mali.
been hearths, and mud brick and tauf (coursed mud) structural remains. The
residential character of M 2 is less certain, however. Several mudbrick house
foundations were uncovered within the upper 15 metres of M2, but
associated deposits failed to reveal the abundant domestic refuse and hearth
deposits so characteristic of M 1. The recovery of several unusual classes of
artifacts, including a terracotta statuette59 and pottery with raised relief
59 R. J. Mclntosh and S. K. Mclntosh, ‘Terracotta statuettes from Mali’, African
Arts, XII (i979), Si-3.91.
terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700018983
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 10 Oct 2021 at 05:32:03, subject to the Cambridge Core
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700018983
https://www.cambridge.org/core
JENNE-JENO AND THE INLAND NIGER DELTA 13
representations of human and animal figures, from deposits inside the M 2
mudbrick structures may indicate a ritual rather than domestic function
during part of the occupation.
On the southeastern periphery of the mound, JFi provides information
on another functionally distinct area: the cemetery. Burial practices for both
male and female adults comprised inhumation in large funerary urns covered
with either a pot-lid or an inverted pot, or regular inhumation outside urns.
Remains of eleven individuals, seven of whom had been interred in urns and
four regular inhumations, were excavated from J F i . There were no
accompanying grave-goods, other than an occasional broken pot and a sliver
of a copper ring. Cultural deposits in JF1 extended to a depth of 15 metres.
A gross chronology for the excavated material from Jenne-jeno was
established by means of stratigraphic analysis, pottery seriation, and radio-
carbon dating. Each aspect of the enquiry was pursued independently, and the
conclusions of each were then compared. One of us (R.J.M.) carried out
stratigraphic analysis of the two central excavation units (M 1 and M 2). These
units were located only n o metres apart and exhibited several marked
stratigraphic similarities. Three corresponding sets of levels (bench levels)
were identified with M 1 and M 2, based on the virtually identical texture and
colour of deposits. It is thought that each pair of bench levels was laid down
contemporaneously in M 1 and M 2 by the same depositional process or event
(Fig. 3)-
A study of ceramics from Jenne-jeno60 revealed that the popularity of
certain pottery attributes, including carinated form, certain types of twine
decoration, painted decoration, and sand tempering, exhibited consistent,
unimodal change through time, such that a ‘battleship curve’ or some
segment of it was formed when the relative frequencies of these attributes
were plotted through time (represented by stratigraphic ordering). Of course,
the reliability of the pattern of change thus obtained depends heavily upon
the amount of stratigraphic control maintained during excavation. For this
reason M 1 served as the standard for ceramic seriation because the degree
of correspondence between excavated levels and natural strata was high.
Attributes which proved to be time sensitive in M 1 also exhibited battleship
curves for the pottery from M 2 and JF 1. The conclusions about contem-
poraneous bench levels in M 1 and M 2 were confirmed by the results of pottery
seriation: the pottery from each pair of levels identified as contemporaneous
on the basis of stratigraphic analysis proved to have virtually identical relative
frequencies of time-sensitive attributes.
The independent conclusions drawn by the two authors about the relative
chronology of the three major excavation units were confirmed by an
internally consistent series of nine radiocarbon dates which also served to
anchor our relative chronology in calendar years.61 Eight of the nine Jenne-jeno
radiocarbon dates come from M 1 and M 2; they are displayed in Fig. 3, which
indicates their stratigraphic position in relation to the M i and M2 bench
80 The pottery from Jenne-jeno and methods used in its analysis are fully described
in S. K. Mclntosh and R. J. Mclntosh, Prehistoric Investigations in the Region of Jenne,
Mali. Cambridge Monographs in African Archaeology, no. 2 (Oxford, 1980), part i.
61 In discussing radiocarbon dates, we follow the convention of using ‘ b.c.’ and ‘ a.d.’
when speaking of simple, uncalibrated dates, and ‘ B . C ‘ and ‘A.D.’ when dates are
expressed in calendar years after calibration.
terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700018983
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 10 Oct 2021 at 05:32:03, subject to the Cambridge Core
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700018983
https://www.cambridge.org/core
M
l
M
2
M
od
er
n
L
ev
el
1
2
—
a.
d.
5
20
±
1
70
Ph
as
e
IV
c.
A
.D
.
90
0-
14
00
Ph
as
e
H
I
c.
A
.D
.
4
0
0
-9
0
0
—
ad
.
11
20
±
1
40
—
a.
d.
1
03
0
±
1
5
0
Le
ve
l
12
Ph
as
e
II
c.
A
.D
.
5
0
-4
0
0
Ph
as
e
I
c.
25
0
B
.C
-A
.D
.5
0
Le
ve
l
18
Fi
g-
3
–
Ph
as
es
o
f
oc
cu
pa
tio
n
at
J
en
ne
-j
en
o,
i
llu
st
ra
tin
g
st
ra
tig
ra
ph
ic
b
en
ch
l
ev
el
s
(d
ep
os
ite
d
co
nt
em
po
ra
ne
ou
sl
y
un
de
r
si
m
ila
r
co
nd
iti
on
s)
a
nd
r
ad
io
ca
rb
on
d
at
es
(
de
pt
hs
a
t
w
hi
ch
s
am
pl
es
w
er
e
ta
ke
n
de
no
te
d
by
t
ri
an
gl
es
).
o D z o en C z H o en X
terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700018983
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 10 Oct 2021 at 05:32:03, subject to the Cambridge Core
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700018983
https://www.cambridge.org/core
JENNE-JENO AND THE INLAND NIGER DELTA 15
levels discussed above. The dates suggest that habitation of the site began
around 250 B.C. and continued through to the twelfth century A.D. at least.
Gradual abandonment of the site was probably in progress soon thereafter,
with complete abandonment accomplished by A.D. 1468, at which time the
site was garrisoned by the Songhai conqueror Sonni Ali during his siege of
Jenne.62 Thus the date RL-794 (modern) from level 4 of M 1 cannot be
accepted, even in calibrated form (> A.D. 1530) because doing so would imply
that the top 60 centimetres of M 1 deposits accumulated in fairly recent times.
We believe A.D. 1400 to be a reasonable terminus ante quern for the abandonment
of Jenne-jeno, although it remains possible, given the nebulous state of our
current evidence concerning the end of occupation, that the abandonment
process was completed as early as A.D. 1200.
Armed with confirmatory information from all three aspects of the
investigation concerning temporal relationships of the three major excavation
units, a framework for further analysis was created by arbitrarily dividing the
deposits into four occupation phases. The definition of each phase was based
on the identification of discrete series of stratigraphic events as well as on
temporally significant changes in pottery and other cultural characteristics.
The chronological outline in calendar years for the four phases is largely
derived from the radiocarbon dates, although it must be noted that the
standard deviation for most of the Jenne-jeno dates is greater than 100 years,
which means that the phase chronology is very approximate indeed. This
chronology may be altered by future excavations at Jenne-jeno, as may the
defining characteristics of each occupation phase presently outlined; the four
occupation phases were conceived merely to facilitate the ordering, analysis
and description of the data recovered during the 1977 excavation season.
The early occupation of Jenne-jeno
The earliest phase of occupation at Jenne-jeno lasted from approximately 250
B.C. to A.D. 50. Phase I is currently defined by the absence of permanent mud
architecture and predominance of finely made, sand-tempered pottery of
Saharan affinity. The first occupants at Jenne-jeno made and used iron, and
had a subsistence base that was heavily reliant on aquatic resources, including
fish, tortoise, crocodile and waterfowl, and on various bovids.63 Although a
definite identification could not be made owing to the high degree of
post-depositional fragmentation, it is probable that the bones of a small
bovine present in the faunal remains belong to domestic cattle (Bos taurus).™
No evidence of domesticated plants was recovered from Phase I deposits in
1977, but the possibility of sampling error should not be overlooked.
The lower boundary of Phase II is provided by a level of mud wall collapse
in one of the central excavation units. Associated charcoal yielded a radiocarbon
date of a.d. 40 + 50. From the same level we recovered a substantial sample
of well-preserved chaff of Oryza glaberrima. This is the earliest occurrence
62 al-Sa’di, Ta’rikh, 26.
83 Including waterbuck, Redunca redunca. A discussion of the subsistence information
from Jenne-jeno may be found in S. K. Mclntosh and R. J. Mclntosh,’ Initial perspectives
on prehistoric subsistence in the Inland Niger Delta (Mali)’, World Archaeology xi (1979),
227-43.
64 R. G. Klein, personal communication (1978).
terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700018983
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 10 Oct 2021 at 05:32:03, subject to the Cambridge Core
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700018983
https://www.cambridge.org/core
l6 RODERICK AND SUSAN McINTOSH
of African rice yet known. Other economic elements show a great deal of
continuity with Phase I; faunal remains continue to be dominated by fish and
bovids.
According to the pottery chronology developed and successfully applied
to excavation units M i and M2, JF i deposits began to accumulate during
Phase II. Over one metre of deposits appears to have accumulated some time
between A.D. 50 and 400, based on the relative frequencies of attributes of
pottery taken from these levels. The nature of the lowest JF1 deposits
suggests that they consist of material eroded from higher areas of the Phase
II settlement. The fact that Phase II deposits were present in all three major
excavation units (Mi , M2 and JFi ) , separated by a maximum distance of
400 metres, indicates that the Phase II settlement measured at least this
distance along one axis. This apparent increase in site size by Phase II may
possibly be correlated with the appearance, at the beginning of the phase, of
permanent mud architecture and domesticated rice. On the other hand, their
seemingly simultaneous appearance may merely be an accident of our
extremely small excavation sample. Only further excavation can resolve this
question. Also to be clarified by future excavation are the rate of physical
expansion of Jenne-jeno in Phase I, and the areal extent of the mound at the
beginning of Phase II. On the basis of present evidence, however, it seems
reasonable to suggest that Jenne-jeno was growing in size throughout Phase
I and was a settlement of considerable dimensions, possibly exceeding 10
hectares, by Phase II.
The urban expansion and subsequent decline of Jenne-jeno
There are indications that the occupation of Jenne-jeno became increasingly
intensive in Phase III (A.D. 400—900). An increasing number of wall stumps
is visible in section, and the stratigraphy of Phase III deposits becomes
noticeably more complex. In M 1, wall stumps are associated with fairly deep
deposits, suggesting that occupation of a house could span an appreciable time
span, perhaps several centuries. The appearance of crowded cemeteries may
be further evidence of population growth and intensified site occupation. All
four inhumation burials and six of the nine urn burials in JF 1 appear to have
been interred during Phase III, based on the ceramic material contained in
the cemetery deposits. The significance of a single radiocarbon date of a.d.
1130+180 (RL-950) on bone taken from one of the urns cannot be assessed
at the present time. Bone tends to yield radiocarbon dates that are too young,
and this date is younger than expected from the pottery chronology. The date
does, however, fall within the expected Phase III time limits when two
standard deviations are considered.
Jenne-jeno probably reached her greatest areal extent in late Phase
Ill/early Phase IV. Thereafter, the site slowly began to decline. At her
apogee, perhaps from A.D. 750 to 1150, Jenne-jeno covered 33 hectares (the
present city of 10,000 inhabitants covers 44 hectares). To this can probably
be added the 9-hectare expanse of Hambarketolo, a mound immediately
adjacent to Jenne-jeno and actually connected to it by an earthen dike (Fig.
1). Pottery from the surface of Hambarketolo indicates that it too was
abandoned during Phase IV. Deposits are shallower at Hambarketolo than
terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700018983
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 10 Oct 2021 at 05:32:03, subject to the Cambridge Core
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700018983
https://www.cambridge.org/core
JENNE-JENO AND THE INLAND NIGER DELTA 17
at Jenne-jeno, achieving a maximum depth of approximately 3 metres. This
may mean that Hambarketolo was founded later than Jenne-jeno and
functioned as part of the city at the time of its fluorescence.
The causes of the decline and ultimate abandonment of Jenne-jeno and
Hambarketolo are unknown. As meagre as the data for the chronology of this
process are, it nevertheless appears from the archaeological evidence that the
beginnings of site abandonment coincide closely with the thirteenth-century
date for Jenne’s islamization reported by al-Sa’di. It is possible that a new,
Islamic Jenne was founded on a new site unpolluted by pagan practices
shortly after the king of Jenne(-jeno) or perhaps the community’s elite
converted to Islam. If, as there is every reason to believe from the historical
records, commercial control became vested in the hands of native, Muslim
merchants, the new Jenne would soon replace pagan Jenne-jeno as the hub
of economic activity. Farmers, fishermen and craftsmen, who undoubtedly
comprised the majority of Jenne-jeno’s population, would have been attracted
to Jenne because of her growing market for their produce. Our hypothetical
reconstruction of the decline of Jenne-jeno sees economic incentives at the
new, Muslim market centre of Jenne as the primary cause of Jenne-jeno’s
abandonment. This process was complete by at least the mid-fifteenth
century.
The development of Jenne-jeno’s rural hinterland
A large site like Jenne-jeno does not evolve in isolation. Although archaeo-
logists tried for years to devise a list of traits by which urbanism could be
positively identified at an archaeological site,65 no set of criteria was ever
recognized as totally satisfactory or universally applicable. A more productive
approach has been borrowed from geographers, who have found it useful to
investigate the relationship between the urban centre and its surrounding
hinterland. They have recognized an increase in the number and variety of
services available as one progresses up the regional settlement hierarchy from
the agricultural hamlet to the true town. Trigger, for example, defines a city
as ‘a unit of settlement which performs specialized functions in relation to
a broader hinterland \68 The most effective way for the archaeologist to study
the emergence and principles of urbanization in a region, therefore, is not only
to excavate the culmination of the process (i.e. the largest site in the region)
but also to attempt to identify a hierarchy of settlements in which the
direction of complexity is revealed by increasing heterogeneity of remains
(artifacts and features) and often by size.87 The results of a field survey
covering a i,ioo-square-kilometre area of Jenne-jeno’s hinterland provide
useful insights into the development of this region.
Archaeological sites within a 2 5-kilometre radius to the north and west of
86 Most notably V. G. Childe, ‘The Urban Revolution’, The Town Planning Review
xxi (1950). 3-17-
” B. Trigger, ‘Determinants of urban growth in pre-industrial societies’, in P. J. Ucko,
R. Tringham, and G. W. Dimbleby (eds.), Man, Settlement, and Urbanism (London,
1972). 577-
” R. J. Mclntosh, ‘The Development of Urbanism in West Africa: The Example of
Jenne, Mali’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge, 1979), 74-7.
terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700018983
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 10 Oct 2021 at 05:32:03, subject to the Cambridge Core
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700018983
https://www.cambridge.org/core
l8 RODERICK AND SUSAN McINTOSH
Jenne-jeno were located and selected for investigation on an explicit sampling
basis employing probability theory;68 the approximate date of abandonment
for each site investigated was determined by comparing surface pottery
collections with the Jenne-jeno ceramic chronology. One of the startling
conclusions of the survey was that, of 42 sites investigated in the course of
the sample survey, almost three-quarters had been abandoned by the end of
Phase IV (A.D. 1400), and none was abandoned before Phase III.69 Almost
all sites investigated are tells with deposits exceeding 2 metres in height above
the floodplain. Such an accumulation probably represents several centuries
of occupation prior to abandonment. Surface remains on several of the largest
sites in the immediate vicinity of Jenne-jeno indicate a maximum extent of
occupation during Phase III and a reduction in area of more recent deposits
before abandonment at a later time. These results, preliminary as they are,
imply that site density in Jenne-jeno’s hinterland reached its greatest
expression in late Phase Ill/early Phase IV, and thereafter began to decline.
At its maximum, site density in the survey region may have been as great as
ten times the density of occupied settlements in the same region today.
Most of these sites were quite small: 26 per cent are smaller than the
smallest presently occupied village and the mean size of 0-95 hectare for sites
compares with a mean size of 198 hectares for modern villages. Five sites
exceed 10 hectares in size and one nearby site, Kaniana (Fig. 1), even exceeds
the area of Jenne-jeno. In general, site complexity, as measured by the
number of different artifact and feature classes noted in careful examination
of each site’s surface, varies directly with site size. Ceramics and features
resemble those at Jenne-jeno to a remarkable extent. There is strong indirect
evidence, then, that sites in Jenne-jeno’s rural hinterland were integrated in
a settlement hierarchy with Jenne-jeno as its apex. It must be stressed,
however, that in the absence of refined chronological control for sites in a
region, direct and satisfactory evidence for the nature and integrative
principles of a settlement hierarchy is elusive. Sites in Jenne-jeno’s hinterland
form a distribution by size which would be recognized by geographers as
conforming to a ‘rank-size rule’;70 however, it is also possible that this
distribution is in reality a palimpsest of various non-hierarchical settlement
clusters.
The survey results accord well with the excavation results: both indicate
that Jenne-jeno and her hinterland were developing rapidly during Phase III
(c. A.D. 400-900). Site density reached a maximum in the hinterland in late
Phase Ill/early Phase IV, at approximately the same time that Jenne-jeno
68 The sampling methodology is explained fully in S. K. Mclntosh and R. J. Mclntosh,
Prehistoric Investigations, part ii. Tells are highly visible on aerial photographs of the
survey region; 404 sites were identified by this method alone.
69 The results of archaeological investigations by R. Bedaux et al. at two sites in the
Inland Delta provide some support for these conclusions. Both sites examined by Bedaux
appear to have been first occupied in the eleventh century A.D. Radiocarbon dates at the
site of Doupwil, approximately 90 kilometres northeast of Jenne, indicate that it was
abandoned in the fifteenth century A.D.; Galia, 12 kilometres east of Jenne, was probably
abandoned within two centuries after Doupwil. R. M. A. Bedaux, T. S. Constandse-
Westermann, L. Hacquebord, A. G. Lange and J. D. van der Waals, ‘Recherches
archeologiques dans le Delta Interieur du Niger’, Palaeohistoria xx (1978), 91-220.
70 G. A. Johnson, ‘Aspects of regional analysis in archaeology’, Annual Review of
Anthropology VI (1977), 479-508.
terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700018983
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 10 Oct 2021 at 05:32:03, subject to the Cambridge Core
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700018983
https://www.cambridge.org/core
JENNE-JENO AND THE INLAND NIGER DELTA 19
achieved its maximum areal extent. Jenne-jeno apparently began to decline,
and was ultimately abandoned, as part of a general population reorganization
in the western Inland Niger Delta, manifested by abandonment of large
numbers of sites on the floodplain. The reasons for this population shift are
unknown, but the event appears to have preceded the political dislocations
caused by migrations of Bambara and Fulani and by the demise of stable
government in the region.
Conclusions and interpretations
The 1977 excavations have demonstrated that Jenne-jeno existed as early as
250 B.C., and was rapidly developing during the early centuries of this era into
a town measuring a half-kilometre or so along one axis. By A.D. 900 or 1000,
it appears likely that Jenne-jeno and neighbouring Hambarketolo formed an
urban unit covering more than 40 hectares. It is likely, in our opinion, that
the development of local and regional trade networks in the Inland Delta and
adjacent areas was a factor in the early expansion of Jenne-jeno. Situated in
an alluvial plain lacking in stone and iron ore, at the interface of two major
vegetation zones (dry savanna and sahel), the site is a natural candidate for
the early growth of inter-regional exchange. Indeed, Phase I deposits strongly
indicate early involvement in trade. Not only are the stone beads from the
earliest deposits foreign to the Inland Delta, but there is also evidence that
the iron must have been obtained from outside the Delta, presumably by
trade.71
To the best of our knowledge, there are no sources of iron ore in the Inland
Niger Delta suitable for smelting. The presence of slag at Jenne-jeno and
many other sites in the survey region suggests that either iron ore or bloomery
iron72 with slag still adhering was imported into the central delta. The latter
possibility seems the more reasonable, since transport costs would be
appreciably reduced by removing the weight of useless silicates at the source
area. Smelting in the Jenne area would seriously reduce the tree cover of the
Inland Delta, which was probably never great. There is historical documen-
tation that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Jenne imported bloomery
iron or iron preliminarily forged into bars from the Benedougou region near
San.73 If, as we suspect, the Benedougou is the nearest source of abundant
iron ore to Jenne, the iron trade between the two areas is likely to be of
considerable antiquity, perhaps dating back to the foundation of Jenne-jeno.
71 Although nodules, which we originally took to be limonite or haematite, are abundant
on the alluvium, samples collected from the floodplain and from Jenne-jeno proved to be
not ferric oxide nodules, but concretions of quartz and clay stained by ferric oxides. P.
Jacobberger, the geologist who examined these nodules petrographically, concluded that
they were completely unsuitable as a source of iron ore (P. Jacobberger, personal
communication, 1979). In the course of regional survey, we noted no potentially
ferruginous outcrops or lateritic crusts within the Delta proper.
72 The bloom is the spongy mass of metallic iron which results from smelting. In the
smelting process, silicates (the principal impurities present in iron ores) form a glass-like
slag. The worst of this slag can be detached from the bloom after smelting, but to achieve
workable iron the bloom must be forged to help consolidate the metal and to squeeze out
any slag remaining in it. H. Hodges, Artifacts (London, 1976), 83.
73 M o n t e i l , Monographie, 1 9 3 . C a i l l i e n o t e d t h a t J e n n e ‘ s i r o n w a s s m e l t e d in B e r e ( in
the Benedougou), where there was a great deal of ferruginous stone on the surface of the
soil. Bloomery iron from Bere was exchanged in Jenne for salt. Caillie, Travels, 1, 421.
terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700018983
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 10 Oct 2021 at 05:32:03, subject to the Cambridge Core
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700018983
https://www.cambridge.org/core
2O RODERICK AND SUSAN McINTOSH
Evidence that the exchange networks within which Jenne-jeno functioned
had expanded by the fifth century A.D. is provided by copper ornaments in
the earliest Phase III deposits. The three closest known sources of copper
ore are in the Sahara: Akjoujt, Nioro, Air.74 This evidence strongly implies
that inter-regional trade for Saharan copper existed by the mid-first millen-
nium A.D.75 Other Saharan commodities carried in this early trade can only
be guessed at: salt is a major possibility, given the historically documented
demand in the Sudan for Saharan salt and copper during the second
millennium. Unfortunately, salt trade is difficult to document archaeologically.
If Saharan copper and salt were reaching Jenne-jeno in any quantity by the
fifth century A.D., then it is reasonable to suggest that the navigable middle
Niger was functioning as an important north-south transport axis by that
date. The ease of riverine transport, at least seasonally, and the annual
migration by pirogue of fisherfolk downstream to the Niger Bend76 would
have made this a natural early development.
Commodities sought by Saharan traders in exchange for copper and salt
may have been largely agricultural, including rice from the Jenne region and
fruit or other savanna products from the Benedougou.” Gold may also have
been one of the savanna commodities moving along the exchange networks
at this early time, although we have no direct evidence for this.78 This
hypothetical reconstruction of the development of first millennium inter-
regional exchange along the Niger emphasizes Jenne-jeno’s role as a producer
of surplus staples, such as dried fish, fish oil, and rice, which were potentially
desirable to communities in the adjacent dry savanna and Saharan zones.
Such a theory explains Jenne(-jeno)’s location more satisfactorily than do
interpretations of the town’s development which stress its excellent situation
for riverine trade with the Niger Bend or its defensible location. Indeed, Jenne
is perhaps not in the best location for trade down the Niger. The most direct
waterway from Jenne to the Niger, the Souman-Bani, is too shallow for travel
during four months of the year.79 Rather, Jenne(-jeno)’s location is optimal
with respect to three different requirements: proximity to a richly productive
agricultural hinterland; access to the Benedogou savanna highlands to the
southeast; and riverine transport, throughout most of the year, to the Saharan
contact zones at the Niger Bend. We suggest that Jenne-jeno’s location at
74 Mauny, Tableau, 307.
75 This conclusion is supported by the radiocarbon dates of a.d. 550+ 100 and a.d.
640+100 for the apparently pre-Islamic copper industry at Marandet in the Ai’r. M.
Posnansky and R. J. Mclntosh, ‘New radiocarbon dates for northern and western Africa’,
jf. Afr. Hist, XVII (1976), 183.
76 The Bozo of the Jenne region penetrate beyond Lake Debo seasonally, following the
migration of shoals of oil-rich Alestes or Nile perch. L. Sundstrom, Ecology and Symbiosis:
Niger Waterfolk, Studia Ethnographica Upsaliensia no. 35 (Uppsala, 1972), 41, 134.
77 A list of agricultural and pastoral products of the floodplain or savanna nearby which
were bulked at Jenne at the time of French penetration is provided in Monteil,
Monographie, 41-62, 215-25.
78 The accessibility of Jenne to the Lobi goldfields should not be overlooked. Meniaud
notes that ‘Le Lobi est peut-etre la region du Haut-Senegal-Niger ou l’or est le plus
abondant, le plus facile a exploiter, et, en tout cas, le plus beau’. J. Meniaud, Haut-
Senegal-Niger (Paris, 1912), 11, 193.
79 For example, the pirogue in which Caillie travelled from Jenne to Mopti in March
1828 had to be off-loaded several times in order to clear sand congestion. Caillie, Travels,
11, 2. See Monteil, Monographie, 14-15, 26-7.
terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700018983
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 10 Oct 2021 at 05:32:03, subject to the Cambridge Core
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700018983
https://www.cambridge.org/core
JENNE-JENO AND THE INLAND NIGER DELTA 21
the southwestern extreme of the navigable and agriculturally productive
Inland Niger Delta promoted its growth as a trade centre where Saharan
commodities like copper and salt could be traded for dried fish, fish oil and
rice produced in the Inland Delta, and where savanna products, including
iron from the Benedougou, could be obtained with a minimum of overland
travel in exchange for salt, copper, rice, fish and other staples.
The historically documented existence of trade centres by the eleventh
century in the agriculturally impoverished Niger Bend area offers the first
confirmatory evidence, however circumstantial, that the Inland Delta was
firmly established as the agricultural support system for the Niger Bend. It
is probable that sizeable settlements on the Niger Bend could not produce
enough food locally to maintain their population, as in the case of Timbuktu.
Al-Bakri mentions the towns of Safanku and Bughrat along the Niger route
to Tirekka, located at the southward turning of the river:80 Tirekka’s market
attracted the merchants of Ghana and Tadmekka,81 the latter of which is
described as ‘a great town… better built than Ghana or Kawkaw. The
inhabitants… import millet and all other cereals from the Land of the
Blacks’.82
More direct evidence for Jenne-jeno’s participation in inter-regional trade
during the first millennium A.D. will have to come from archaeological
research. The above explanation for the town’s growth is merely an hypothesis
which attempts to account in a reasonable way for the archaeological fact that
Jenne-jeno existed throughout the first millennium A.D., that it was receiving
copper, probably of Saharan origin, by the fifth century, and that it had grown
into an urban centre of considerable proportions by A.D. 900 or 1000.
The conspicuous silence of the historical sources about the early town
remains a puzzle. Might there be alternative names for the site present, but
unrecognized, in the sources ? If the community were late to accept Islam
would the Arab sources fail to mention it ? The historical sources were for
so long dependent upon second-hand information passed along the long-
distance commercial networks. If Jenne-jeno were until relatively late a
principal participant in an independent, although ancient and voluminous
intra-Inland Delta trade, the outside world may have remained ignorant. Or
perhaps there was a successful policy by the merchants of Jenne, at least in
the second millennium, to withhold information about the southern sources
of gold and the wealth of the city itself. Trade in staples and luxury goods
down the Niger was controlled in recent centuries by the merchants of Jenne;
there is a mound outside Jenne called Wangaradaga, where the Dyula from
the south, forbidden to enter the city, waited while subordinates of the chief
of Jenne negotiated with the merchants of the city for the best price for their
goods. The merchants of Jenne were in a position to control the flow in both
directions of information, which, as speculators have known throughout time,
is a critical commodity to trade.
80 al-Bakri, in Cuoq, Recueil, 106.
81 Cuoq, Recueil, 105; according to the Ta’rikh al-Sudan, Tirekka was populated by
Sanhaja merchants and it declined as T i m b u k t u prospered: Montei l , Cite, 33.
88 Cuoq, Recueil, 107. Trans la ted from the French by S . K . M . Elsewhere we have
argued that Jenne-jeno’s agricultural surplus may have helped support the early urban
centre of Kawkaw (Gao) – S. K. M c l n t o s h and R. J. Mc ln tosh , Prehistoric Investigations,
terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700018983
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 10 Oct 2021 at 05:32:03, subject to the Cambridge Core
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700018983
https://www.cambridge.org/core
22 RODERICK AND SUSAN McINTOSH
SUMMARY
The dates and circumstances of early references to Jenne have led historians to
conclude that the city originated relatively late in time. It is widely believed that
the city developed simultaneously with Timbuktu in the mid-thirteenth century
as an artifact of trans-Saharan trade. Persistent oral traditions of the foundation
of Jenne in the eighth century are generally discounted.
Recent archaeological excavations at the ancestral site of Jenne-jeno have
established that iron-using and manufacturing peoples were occupying the site in
the third century B.C. The settlement proceeded to grow rapidly during the first
millennium A.D., reaching its apogee between A.D. 750 and 1100, at which time the
settlement exceeded 33 hectares (82 acres) in size. The archaeological data are
supported by the results of site survey within a 1,100-square-kilometre region of
Jenne’s traditional hinterland. During the late first millennium A.D., several nearby
settlements comparable in size to Jenne-jeno existed, and the density of rural
settlements may have been as great as ten times the density of villages in the
hinterland today.
Evidence from excavation and survey indicates that Jenne participated in
inter-regional exchange relations far earlier than previously admitted. The stone
and iron in the initial levels at Jenne-jeno were imported from outside the Inland
Delta; levels dated to c. A.D. 400 yield copper, presumably from distant Saharan
sources. The importance of the abundant staple products of Jenne’s rural hinterland,
including rice, fish and fish oil, is examined in a reassessment of the extent of
inter-regional commerce and the emergence of urbanism during the first millennium
A.D. Jenne-jeno may have been a principal participant in the founding of commercial
centres on the Saharan contact zone of the Bend of the Niger, rather than a product
of the luxury trade serviced by those centres.
terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700018983
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 10 Oct 2021 at 05:32:03, subject to the Cambridge Core
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700018983
https://www.cambridge.org/core
Journal of African History, xm, i (1972), pp. 55-80 re
Printed in Great Britain
KHOISAN RESISTANCE TO THE DUTCH IN THE
SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES1
BY SHULA MARKS
T H E Khoisan peoples of South Africa, or, as they are usually called in
the literature, the Bushmen and Hottentots,2 have on the whole had a
bad press from historians, as indeed they had from most of their seven-
teenth- and eighteenth-century European contemporaries. To this day,
the Shorter Oxford Dictionary has as one of the definitions of ‘Hottentot’
‘a person of inferior intellect and culture’, and illustrates its use with the
sentence: ‘The most I can do for him is to consider him a respectable
Hottentot.’ Jan van Riebeeck, the first commander of the Dutch East
India Company’s settlement at the Cape, was neither the first nor the last
to refer to the Hottentots as ‘a dull, stupid, lazy, stinking nation’—who
were, at the same time, ‘bold, thievish and not to be trusted’.3 Stereo-
types of the San or Bushmen as ‘incorrigible banditti’, ‘ineducable’ and
‘unassimilable’ also abound in the literature of South Africa.4
History tends to be the history of the successful, and the Khoikhoi
herders and San hunter-gatherers, whom Europeans encountered when
they first rounded the African continent, have all but disappeared from
twentieth-century South Africa, at least in their earlier guise. Most
historians writing of South Africa dismiss them in passing; to take a
recent, but very typical example, Robin Hallett, in his History of Africa
to 1875, assesses the whole of their experience in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries in half a sentence:
1 This paper was first presented in slightly different forms to Seminars at Sussex and
the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, Oxford. I am most grateful to members of the
Seminars for their comments, as well as to Dr Martin Legassick for his extremely help-
ful criticisms
.
* For the limitations of the earlier terminology, and my choice of the term ‘Khoisan’,
see below.
* For these and other negative stereotypes of the Khoi, both before and after van
Riebeeck, see I. D. McCrone, Race Attitudes in South Africa. Historical, Experimental
and Psychological Studies (Johannesburg, 1957), 10, 13, 47-9, 122. The first 136 pages of
McCrone’s work constitute an interpretation of South African history in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries. This section ends in 1806, and serves as an introduction to his
experiments measuring race attitudes in the 1930s. The attempt to use seventeenth and
eighteenth century evidence to evaluate twentieth century race attitudes is, however,
methodologically unsound. Race attitudes are not static and cannot be divorced from
their socio-economic context; the contemporary pattern of race relations in South Africa is
as much, if not more, a product of nineteenth and twentieth century developments as of
events in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Moreover, by using the earlier period
to introduce the later, McCrone tends to overlook those aspects of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries which could have led in a very different direction.
* McCrone, Race Attitudes, 122.
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700000268
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 22 Oct 2021 at 01:53:46, subject to the Cambridge
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700000268
https://www.cambridge.org/core
56 SHULA MARKS
The Boers . . . advanced northwards and eastwards [from the Cape]. The Bush-
men they hunted down; the Hottentots provided them with cheap labour; but
the Bantu they encountered . . . in the 1770’s presented a block of population
too massive for them to penetrate… .5
The ‘liberal’ historians of the 1930s—W. M. Macmillan, J. S. Marais,
and C. W. de Kiewiet—while working on the history of their nineteenth
century descendants, the Cape coloured and ‘Griqua’ communities, tend
to see the Khoisan past in similarly cliched terms. Thus Macmillan, in
the Cape Colour Question, maintains:
Of the unlucky Bushman there is little for history to say. The 18th century had
all but completed their extermination. . . . Their resistance to colonial en-
croachment took the form of ‘thieving’ and was at one time almost formidable.
. . . As a factor in later history, the Bushmen are negligible.
. . . Hottentot resistance . . . to the advance of the Dutch settlers was hardly
even as vigorous as that of the more primitive Bushmen, so that by the 19th
century free Hottentot captaincies had all but disappeared…. Nothing what-
ever had been done to adapt [the Hottentots] to the changed conditions brought
about by the advent of the white man.6
In similar, if contradictory, terms, J. S. Marais in his Cape Coloured
People remarks:
The Hottentots put up a remarkably feeble resistance to the weak white com-
munity. . . . Hottentot tribes in the neighbourhood of the company’s settle-
ment fought two little wars . . . but from the year 1689 onwards there was no
resistance on the part of the Hottentots to the European advance . . . Unlike the
Bantu, they were surprisingly ready to barter away their cattle in exchange for
copper, beads, tobacco and . . . brandy and arrack.7
In Maynier and the First Boer Republic, Marais goes on to suggest that
The Bushmen proved a more dangerous enemy [to the whites]. During the last
thirty years of the 18th century they unceasingly harassed the stock-men and
drove many of them from their farms.8
Ultimately, though, it was the ‘Bantu’, who ‘had reached a considerably
higher stage of civilization’, who were to prove the formidable opponents
of white expansion.9 Even those authors like I. D. MacCrone, M. Spilhaus
and P. J. van der Merwe, who have worked on the documents and written
at length on the Dutch period in South Africa, still tend to contrast the
servility of the Hottentots with the bitter resistance of the hardy but
anachronistic and primitive Bushmen, who were able for a time to hold
up colonial expansion. Despite their criticisms in other respects of the
work of G. M. Theal, the ‘father’ of South African historiography, most
6 Africa to 1875 (Michigan, 1970), 238. • London, 1927, 26-7.
7 Johannesburg, 1957 (reprint, 1st published 1939), 6-7, 13.
8 Cape Town, 1944, 3. • Ibid. 4.
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700000268
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 22 Oct 2021 at 01:53:46, subject to the Cambridge
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700000268
https://www.cambridge.org/core
KHOISAN RESISTANCE TO THE DUTCH 57
of these authors appear to draw very largely on his conclusions with refer-
ence to the Khoisan. Thus, although Theal deals with the first two Khoi
wars in considerable detail, he maintains that after the small-pox epidemic
of 1713 the Khoi were so decimated that from that date ‘until the Bantu
were reached . . . the only difficulty with the coloured inhabitants was
occasioned by Bushmen’—this, despite the fact that Theal quotes these
‘Bushmen’ as complaining explicitly that they had been robbed of their
cattle by the colonists.10
In general, there is some truth in these views. It is, of course, correct
that the Bantu-speaking peoples, who lived by agriculture as well
as pastoralism, were far more numerous than the Khoisan bands with their
more precariously based economy. As a result they undoubtedly did
form a more solid block of people which it was far more difficult to dis-
lodge in the long run. Nevertheless, the usual stereotypes should be
challenged. Not only do they seriously telescope the events of nearly
two hundred years of culture contact; the very terms in which the argu-
ment is conducted seem to distort reality. It is clear from anthropological
evidence that ‘Hottentot’ and ‘Bushman’ are not discrete racial categories.11
Although it is commonly believed that the San were smaller in stature than
the Khoi, here again the evidence is inconclusive. Dutch sources in the
seventeenth century noted that the Narna were considerably taller than
the Cape Khoi, while Desmond Clark has drawn attention to a similar
difference between the northern and southern Bushmen.12 The Dutch did
not distinguish between Khoi and San on physical grounds in the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries, though the words ‘Hottentot’ and
‘Bosjesman’ did describe a way of life: a Hottentot or Khoi was a herder;
a Bushman or San someone who quite literally lived in or by the ‘bush’.
Yet there is little to distinguish a landless and cattleless Khoi from a
Bushman, or a Bushman who has acquired cattle from a Khoi.13 Thus,
despite the reservations of the linguists, who point out that the Khoi
and San language groups are quite unrelated, the term Khoisan appears
10 McCrone, Race Attitudes, 122; M. W. Spilhaus, South Africa in the Making 1652-
1802 (Cape Town, 1966), 94, 100, 104, passim; P. J. van der Merwe, Die Noordwaartse
Beweging van die Boere voor die Groot Trek (1770-1842) (The Hague, 1937). See also
Die Trekboer in die geskiedenis van die Kaapkolonie (1657-1842) (Cape Town, 1938).
G. M. Theal, History and Ethnography of South Africa before 1795, 11 (London, 1909),
1-242. The quotation comes from p. 433.
11 M. Wilson and L. M. Thompson eds., Oxford History of South Africa I (Oxford,
1969)) PP- >x> 4’~4; Antonio de Almeida, Bushmen and other non-Bantu Peoples of Angola
(Johannesburg, 1965), 3; P. V. Tobias, ‘Bushmen of the Kalahari’, Man, LVII, no. 36
(i957)-
13 J. Desmond Clark, The Prehistory of Southern Africa (London, 1958), pp. 17, 20.
See also P. V. Tobias, ‘Somatic Origins of the Hottentots’, African Studies, xiv (1955).
13 John Philip, in his Researches in South Africa (London, 1828), n, 2, maintained that
all Bushmen were originally Hottentot herders who had been deprived of their cattle.
Later authors, partly in an attempt to refute him, have tended to throw out the baby with
the bath water and have failed to see that just as ‘Hottentots’ may be Bushmen who acquired
cattle, so some ‘Bushmen’ were Hottentots who had lost their stock. See below for an
elaboration of how this occurred.
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700000268
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 22 Oct 2021 at 01:53:46, subject to the Cambridge
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700000268
https://www.cambridge.org/core
58 SHULA MARKS
best suited to refer to the Late Stone Age peoples of the Cape whom the
Dutch encountered in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, unless
their precise tribal groupings are made clear from the documents.14
The question of which groups acculturate, and why, is clearly of
crucial importance in African history. In a recent review of what he calls
‘differing forms of inter-ethnic accommodation’, M. G. Smith has sug-
gested that bands of hunter-gatherers in contact with more advanced
societies face the alternatives of ‘decimation by external assault’, en-
capsulation and subordination, serfdom, or the ‘withdrawal to freedom
in refuge areas’.15 In fact, a study of the accommodation and adaptation
of the Late Stone Age societies of southern Africa suggests a more com-
plex picture still, and one can point to groups all along the continuum
from ‘unassimilability’, whether in terms of cultural, political or economic
adaptation, to complete social change. Thus the evolution of the Khoi
as a distinct socio-economic group was itself an aspect of the ‘inter-
ethnic accommodation’ of hunter-gatherers, for, as Ray Inskeep has
recently pointed out, ‘the evidence of archeology and physical anthro-
pology [suggests that] . . . the yellow-skinned cattle and sheep herders
represented components of a basic indigenous hunter-gatherer population
of the Late Stone Age, whose culture had been variably altered by con-
tact with Early Iron Age farmers and metal-workers’.16 In prehistoric
times, then, the Stone Age hunter-gatherers were able to adopt and adapt
new social and economic mores, and the same was to be true of their
responses throughout the historic period. By calling the ‘Bushman’
unassimilable, previous historians have been arguing by definition: those
people who retained their ‘Bush’ culture and therefore remained re-
cognizably ‘San’ were, by definition, ‘unassimilable’. Those who were able
to adopt a new way of life passed imperceptibly into the ranks of the Khoi,
Coloured, or Bantu-speaking populations—and, therefore, failed to
remain ‘Bushmen’.
Nor was the change-over from hunting and gathering to pastoralism
a once-and-for-all-time change. The relationship of the Khoi herders
with those groups which remained hunter-gatherers was a fluid one. On
occasion, the divisions between the Khoi and the San resembled class
divisions as much as ethnic or cultural ones. Thus Simon van der Stel,
Governor at the Cape (1679-99), was to describe the ‘Souqua’ as ‘just
the same as the poor in Europe, each tribe of Hottentots . . . employing
11 Professor E. O. J. Westphal has shown that there are distinct Khoi and San language
families and at least four probably unrelated San languages. The present-day Naron and
Gwi, who are hunters, speak ‘Khoi’, while in Angola speakers of a San language similar
to Kung are beginning to practise agriculture. E. O. J. Westphal, ‘The Linguistic Pre-
history of Southern Africa’, Africa, xxxin, p. iii (1963); Oxford History, 43; Almeida,
Bushmen . .. of Angola, 1, n .
16 ‘Pluralism in Precolonial African Societies’ in L. Kuper and M. G. Smith, Pluralism
in Africa (U.C.L.A., 1969), n o .
18 ‘The Archaeological Background’ in Oxford History, 24.
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700000268
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 22 Oct 2021 at 01:53:46, subject to the Cambridge
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700000268
https://www.cambridge.org/core
KHOISAN RESISTANCE TO THE DUTCH 59
them’ as soldiers and hunters.17 This relationship indeed takes care of
Professor Smith’s categories of subordination, encapsulation and serfdom,
though at times it was closer to the system of free-lance clientage des-
cribed by Colin M. Turnbull in The Forest People and Wayward
Servants.19 In addition, while many of the San acted as clients to the
Khoi, others resisted the cattlemen: within a year of the Dutch arrival
at the Cape, the Khoi at the Peninsula were complaining of the thieving
activities of the ‘Souqua’. On the whole, San cattle-thieving has been
regarded almost as a racial characteristic, and has been ascribed to the
encroachment on their hunting lands by pastoralists and farmers. While
this was almost certainly occurring, it also appears likely that some groups
of ‘Bushmen’ were stealing cattle in order to set up as pastoralists in their
own right. Thus, in 1653 the ‘Visman’ or ‘Soaqua’ were described to the
Dutch as having ‘some cattle, but not many, against which people we
must be well on our guard . . . as . . . they never had any other means of
subsistence than plunder, and their stock was not their own property
but plundered from the Saldanhars [i.e. a Cape Khoi group] . . .’, while
in 1662, in a Memorandum left by the first Dutch Commander at the Cape
for his successor, Jan van Riebeeck maintained that the ‘Little Changuri-
qua’, a people who lived between Saldanha Bay and mid-way between
Robben and Dassen Islands, were originally subject to the Cochoqua
chief, Oedasoa, and ‘were accustomed to be his stock-keepers, but approp-
riated his cattle to their own use; and therefore they are not recognized
by any of the Hottentots as a people who have . . . a hereditary king or
chief. . ,’.19
Moreover, while groups of San could acquire cattle and become herders
17 In his Journal of his expedition to Namaqualand, 16 Sept. 1685, translated and edited
by G.Waterhouse (London, 1932). See also Report of Landdrostof Stellenbosch 1705 in
Precis of the Archives of the Cape of Good Hope. The defence of W. A. van der Stel, ed.
H. C. V. Leibbrandt (Cape Town, 1897), Ann. N2, 158; P. Kolbe, The Present State of the
Cape of Good Hope or A Particular Account of the Several Nations of the Hottentots,
transl. G. Medley (London, 1738), I, 76.
18 Great Britain, 1961 and 1966.
19 van Riebeeck, Journal, 9 Jan. 1653; Memorandum 5 May 1662. See also the
frequent complaints of the so-called ‘Strandloper’ (beach ranger) Herry to van Riebeeck
about the thefts of the ‘Souqua’, especially after he himself began to accumulate cattle,
van Riebeeck, Journal, 12 Mar. 1654, 30 May 1655, passim. All these documents are
reprinted in D. Moodie, ed., The Record or a Series of Official Papers relating to the
condition and treatment of the native tribes of South Africa (Amsterdam and Cape Town,
1960, reprint). Moodie’s The Record, first published in the late 1830s and early 1840s, is
an invaluable source for seventeenth century relations between the Dutch and Khoisan.
Originally commissioned to refute Dr Philip’s Researches in South Africa, Moodie main-
tained that his object was to put together ‘all documents relating to the relations of the
frontier colonists and the native tribes without exception so that a just impression can be
formed . . . it is not too much to say that nothing short of the entire publication of all that
is to be found applying to the subject of its native tribes in all the public offices of the
colony can enable the British Government to arrive at just conclusions’ Moodie, Afs-
chriften (Cape Archives), xi, copy of letter from Moodie to Governor 3 Mar. 1836. The
Record is, as a result, a meticulous compilation and translation of the documents he found
in the Cape Archives on the treatment of the indigenous population by the Dutch in the
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700000268
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 22 Oct 2021 at 01:53:46, subject to the Cambridge
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700000268
https://www.cambridge.org/core
60 SHULA MARKS
—a process which probably became more difficult once the Dutch settled
at the Cape—it is equally clear that Khoi herders who lost their cattle
reverted to hunting and gathering, and became ‘Bushmen’. Indeed, by
the second decade of the eighteenth century ‘tame Bushmen’ were working
for white settlers—and cattleless Khoi had become ‘Bushman’ resisters.
The responses of both groups to the first Europeans to land at the Cape were
part of a far longer process of adaptation which had probably started with
the coming of the Iron Age to southern Africa more than 1,000 years
earlier.
Though the Portuguese had tended to avoid the Cape on their east-
ward journeys, from the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Dutch,
the British and to some extent the French, with their sturdier vessels and
different sea-routes, found the Cape a useful half-way house.20 The Khoi
pastoralists they encountered at the Cape were initially quite willing to
exchange a certain number of their cattle for iron, and later the copper,
tobacco, brandy and beads of the Europeans. These, as Gerrit Harinck
has recently shown, they exchanged for more cattle, tobacco and dacha
(Indian hemp) in the interior. Trade routes extended all the way to the
Xhosa in the East, and probably to Bantu-speaking groups across the
Orange River in the north.21 The Khoi, whose economy and social
cohesion depended very largely on their stock, were unaccustomed to
trading large numbers of cattle; they preferred to get rid of the stock
they considered surplus, and sailors frequently complained that the Khoi
had sold them their old, lame and lean beasts. Nevertheless, the Khoi
response to the newly created market for cattle was surprisingly quick
periods covered by the three sections published, viz. I, i64g-i6go, III, Ij6g-ij8i, V,
i8og (Col. Collin’s Reports on the Eastern and Northern frontiers). Sections II and IV
were never published. Checked against H. C. V. Leibbrandt’s various Precis of the Cape
Archives, H. B. Thorn (ed.) Journal of Jan van Riebeeck, 1651-62, 3 vols. (Cape Town,
1952-8), and a selection of the verbatim copies of seventeenth-century documents in the
Cape archives, Moodie’s work showed remarkably few lacunae or errors. I have cited
extensively from The Record in the account that follows. The occasional conflict in the
dating of documents between Leibbrandt and Moodie and the lacunae are indicated in
the notes below.
In addition to The Record, Moodie left thirteen volumes of Afschriften (transcripts
and translations of documents) in MSS, which are to be found in the Cape archives.
Many of the documents transcribed are no longer traceable in the original. Unfortunately,
the Afschriften are in no particular order, and many of the documents are illegible, or
almost so.
For later complaints of the Khoi herders or San thefts see, e.g., The Record, part 1,
passim, and C441 (Council of Policy, Incoming Letters, Cape Archives) Landdrost,
Stellenbosch, to C of P, 29 Jan. 1729, p. 42. Cattleless raiders were also the scourge of
the Xhosa on the Eastern frontier, who, like the Khoi, were prepared to join hands with
White cattle farmers against their common foe. (See, e.g., G.R. 1/9—Records of Graaf
Reinet, Cape Archives—Report of J. A. Hurter’s commission to the Kafirs, 5 June 1792,
where he reports Chief Shaka [Gqunukwebe]’s offer to assist the white ‘with all his Kaffirs’
against the Bushmen. The offer was refused.)
20 E. A. Walker, A History of South Africa (3rd ed., London, 1957), 16-17, 24-5, 29-
3°-
21 ‘Interaction between Xhosa and Khoi: emphasis on the period 1620-1750’ in L. M.
Thompson (ed.), African Societies in Southern Africa (London, 1969), 160-5.
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700000268
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 22 Oct 2021 at 01:53:46, subject to the Cambridge
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700000268
https://www.cambridge.org/core
KHOISAN RESISTANCE TO THE DUTCH 6 l
for a group generally considered outside long distance trading networks,
and suggests that they were by no means unfamiliar with trading practices
even at the beginning of the seventeenth century.22
Their willingness to trade only a limited number of beasts probably
accounts for their fierce resistance to what they considered unfair practices
on the part of Europeans, and the fairly constant inflation of meat prices
at the Cape. This was especially marked in 1614, after the return to the
Cape of one ‘Coree’, whom the British had taken to London in an effort to
teach him English and to use him as mediator in the trade. On his return
Coree promptly spoilt the market by informing the Khoi of the low value
of the goods they were being offered in exchange, so that, as one English-
man bitterly remarked, ‘itt were better hee hadde been hanged in Englande
or drowned homewarde’ than returned to his people.23
If Coree proved a recalcitrant intermediary, the Dutch and British
were able to find more willing collaborators at the Cape from quite early
on, both to negotiate in the trade and to look after the mail they left
behind for the return fleets, and even to help fetch wood and carry water
when ships were stranded at the Bay. By 1624 the Khoi were trading in
ivory24 as well as cattle, and two years later a local curio trade had sprung
up in ostrich feathers, shells, wood and sorrell, which the sailors exchanged
for ‘iron hoops’ and ‘brasse’. By 1632 one ‘Haddah’ was acting as postman
for the English in return for bread, and was ‘dressed in English habitte
from head to foote’.25
Already by 1639 Europeans noted the existence of a small class of
Khoi whom they termed ‘Beachrangers’, who lived at the Bay and who
had lost their cattle, either in the course of the trade or through the inter-
tribal warfare which may have been its result.28 By the 1650s their leader
was ‘Herry’, who may have been the same as ‘Haddah’ the postman, a
man of many parts.27 Herry spoke broken English, having been taken to
11 See, e.g., S. Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas His Pilgrimes (Glasgow), III,
6th Voyage of the E.E.I.C. under Sir Henry Middleton, 1610. P. Floris, His Voyage to
the East Indies in the Globe 1611-15. The contemporary translation of his journey, ed.
W. H. Moreland (Hakluyt Society, 1934), 4-5. Remonstrance of Leendert Jansz and N.
Proof, 26 July 1649, in D. Moodie, The Record, 3-4.
13 VC 58, No. 7 (verbatim copies of Documents in the India Office, London, made by
G. M. Theal in the late nineteenth century. Cape Archives). Letter E. Bletterman to Sir
Thos. Smythe, from Bantam, 20 Feb. 1614. See also J. Jourdain, The Journal of John
Jourdain, ed. W. Foster (Hakluyt Soc., 1905), 13-14, 341-2 for the inflation and ‘Coree’s*
part in it. E. Terry, A Voyage to East India (London, 1616), and T. Herbert, A Description
of the Persian Monarchy . . . and other parts of the Greater Asia and Africk (London, 1634),
also contain reports of Coree/Corie/Corye’s activities. The most recent and only full-
scale secondary account is J. Cope, The King of the Hottentots (London, 1967).
M On the whole, this was in very small quantities and from animals that were already
dead. By the 1670s, however, some Khoi were hunting elephants with guns.
” VC 58, No. 42. J. Milward (Surat) to Rt. Hon. J. Hopkinson, 11 July 1732. G. S.
Nienaber, Hottentots (Pretoria [in Afrikaans], 1963), 24, 26-30.
” Nienaber, Hottentots, 24.
•’ Major R. Raven Hart, Before van Riebeeck. Callers at South Africa from 1488-1652
(Struik, 1967), 127-8.
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700000268
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 22 Oct 2021 at 01:53:46, subject to the Cambridge
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700000268
https://www.cambridge.org/core
62 SHULA MARKS
Bantam on a ship of the English East India Company, and on the strength
of this acted as interpreter to British and Dutch visitors to the Cape.
The Khoi at the Cape were already relatively sophisticated traders, re-
fusing to take thin copper or notched and rough copper wire, and insisting
on only fresh and strong Caribbean tobacco, which had rapidly become an
essential element in any trading transaction.28 The variety of relationships
established in this half century of trading profoundly influenced the nature
of the contact between the Khoi and the Dutch, when they decided to
establish a more permanent refreshment station at the Cape.
In the early days of the outpost, middlemen, mediators, and inter-
preters were essential to the Dutch, and they took great pains to establish
a class of collaborators, like the interpreter Herry, even though at times
the attempts appeared to backfire. As soon as the Khoi realized that,
unlike their previous visitors, the Dutch had come to stay, their initially
friendly overtures turned to hostility. They asked longingly when the
more generous English would return,29 and their petty pilfering culmin-
ated in the murder of a Dutch herd-boy in 1657. Van Riebeeck was con-
vinced that Herry was the chief instigator of the crime.30
Disillusioned with Herry, the Commander was forced to look for
substitutes, and chose Eva, Herry’s ‘niece’, who was brought up in his
own home, and Doman, who was sent to Java to learn Dutch.31 Like
Coree before him, however, and also like many an African nationalist leader
of the twentieth century, Doman returned from his education abroad to
lead Khoi resistance to European intrusion at the Cape. Within months
of his return, van Riebeeck was complaining: ‘Doman . . . is three times
worse and more mischievous to the Company than Herry ever was.’
Doman now turned against his fellow-interpreter, Eva, calling her a
sycophant and saying
that she speaks on the side of the Dutch rather than of the Hottentoos [sic], and
calling out when she comes . . . ‘See! there comes the Hollanders’ advocate
again, she is coming to deceive her own countrymen with a parcel of lies, and to
betray them to the last’ and other expressions tending to make her odious;
so that it were to be desired that this scamp [? guyt] had never left the Cape… .32
Clearly his experiences in Java had sharpened Doman’s perception of
the nature of the Dutch presence and its potential repercussions. At the
same time, the white presence at the Cape disturbed the normal pattern
of transhumance, as Herry and his ‘Beachrangers’ or Goringhaikons
28 The Record, p p . 31-2 . J . van Riebeeck to Chamber of Seventeen ( C of X V I I ) , 14
Apr . 1653.
29 The Record, 26. J . van Riebeeck, Journal , 24 Dec . 1652.
30 The Record, 37. Resolut ion a n d Proc lamat ion of Counci l of Policy, 21 Oct . 1653.
“McCrone, Race Attitudes, 35-6; Spilhaus, South Africa in the Making, 27-8. The
Record, 123. Desp. from van Riebeeck to C of XVII, 31 Mar. 1658, and pp. 129-30.
Resolution of Council 23 June 1658, for a fascinating insight into the relationships between
the three mediators.
” The Record, 138-9; van Riebeeck’s Journal 26 Aug. 1638.
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700000268
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 22 Oct 2021 at 01:53:46, subject to the Cambridge
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700000268
https://www.cambridge.org/core
KHOISAN RESISTANCE TO THE DUTCH 63
tried to build up their own herds again by insisting on mediating in the
cattle trade and taking a commission. They thus prevented other Khoi
groups from coming to the Company’s fort, except in their presence and
by their leave. Within a short time Herry had built up a herd of more than
2,000 head of cattle, and van Riebeeck became convinced that he was
deliberately impeding the vital trade.33 Van Riebeeck gave vent to his
fantasies of revenge in bloodcurdling letters to the Directors,34 who,
fully aware of the weakness of the settlement, refused to sanction his
punitive proposals; they instructed van Riebeeck to keep the peace as
long as possible, for, as they remarked to his successor, Commander
Wagenaar, ‘neither war nor any other troubles will do us any good there,
nothing unreasonable should be required of them [the Khoi] and they
should be protected from all injustice, rather passing over what is not too
intolerable than that you should . . . put on a coat of mail’.35
Partly because of the reluctance of the Khoi either to part with sufficient
cattle to meet the demands of the Company’s ships, or to engage in agri-
culture, it became apparent that in the short term it would be easier to
release some of the men as free burghers and allow them to cultivate and
raise cattle on the Company’s behalf. Almost imperceptibly, and despite
the reluctance of the Company’s Directors, the refreshment station began
to change into a colony of settlement, though one governed by, and in every
way subordinated to, the interests of a commercial company anxious to
maintain its trading monopolies and maximize its profits. White settlers
were intended to be, in Professor Robinson’s succinct phrase, ‘the ideal
prefabricated collaborators’.36
In 1657 the first handful of free burghers were granted lands along the
Liesbeck River, behind Table Mountain. Their first demand was for
labour. The local Khoi people were not regarded as suitable for this
purpose. Although the Dutch had found it possible to employ individuals
on a temporary basis as herders, and to fetch and carry water and wood,
while they still had an abundance of cattle and sufficient grazing and their
social system was intact, there was little reason why more than those few
already dispossessed of their cattle should take regular employment with
the white intruders. Dutch law, moreover, had forbidden the enslavement
of the local population from the first.37 To have done so would have
M Van Riebeeck felt this to be the case as early as Nov. 1652, when Herry demanded
brokerage fees. The Record, 19: Journal, 24 Nov. 1652. See also pp. 49, 86, and 94, des-
patches to C of XVII, 22 Apr. 1654, 10 June 1656 and 5 Mar. 1657.
14 The Record, 19, op. cit., 38-9, Journal, 23 Oct. 1653; p. 49, Desp. to C of XVII
22 Apr. 1654; p. 67, Desp. to C of XVII, 4 May 1655.
36 H. C. V. Leibbrandt, Pricis of the Cape Archives of C. of G.H., Part II, 1659-62.
Letters Received. Also in The Record, 259 (slightly different translation), C of XVII, 17
Sept. 1662, to van Riebeeck and his successors, p. 204. For similar advice of caution
see The Record, 54, 75, 99, 107, 140, 240, passim.
** R. E. Robinson, ‘Collaboration in the Politics of the Colonies’, unpublished paper
given to the Seminar on the Recent History of the Commonwealth, Institute of Com-
monwealth Studies (London), 1969. ” McCrone, Race Attitudes, 47.
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700000268
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 22 Oct 2021 at 01:53:46, subject to the Cambridge
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700000268
https://www.cambridge.org/core
64 SHULA MARKS
imperilled the cattle trade on which the outpost depended;38 in any
case, the Khoi were a purely pastoral people who did not take easily
to the idea of cultivating for others and, as slaves, could easily have
deserted to the hinterland. To answer the demand from the freemen,
as well as from Company servants, for an additional labour supply, the
first batch of slaves was landed at the Cape, also in 1657.39
As the first freemen took up their lands, tensions between them and the
Khoi inhabitants of the Cape peninsula—whom they called the Capemen—
increased. The introduction of slaves exacerbated the situation, as they
immediately tried to escape, and the Khoi were accused of harbouring
them.40 In 1659, the first of the two Khoi wars in the seventeenth century
broke out.
All the Khoi groups or Capemen, of the peninsula, were involved:
Herry’s Goringhaikona; the more powerful Goringhaiqua under Gogosa
and Doman, who had by this time acquired a useful knowledge of the
limitations of European firearms; and the Gorachouqua, who had already
received the revealing epithet, the ‘Tobacco Thieves’.41 From being the
first collaborators, Doman and Herry now became the leading resisters
to the Dutch presence, though Herry spent most of the period of the war
in captivity on Robben Island. For the following year the Khoi, by stealing
the plough-oxen, and by conducting elusive guerrilla warfare on rainy days
when the Dutch muskets would not fire, brought agricultural work in the
small colony virtually to a standstill. It is not generally realized how near
the Khoi were to success: largely as a result of the war, almost half (57)
the total number of Company servants and freemen tried to abscond by
stowing away on passing vessels.42 In April 1660, however, perhaps in
response to pressure from other groups for a resumption of the trade,
the Capemen sought peace, though they had by no means been conquered.
They complained that the Dutch were
taking every day . . . land which had belonged to them from all ages and on
which they were accustomed to depasture their cattle. They also asked whether
if they were to come into Holland they would be permitted to act in the same
manner.43
And this was to be echoed by fresh Khoi groups through the next century
and more, as they came up against the expanding Dutch settlement.
Though the number of actual settlers was extremely small, the con-
stant demand of Company ships for meat led to considerable expansion
as McCrone , Race Attitudes, 47.
39 Walker, History of Southern Africa, 39.
40 McCrone , Race Attitudes, 32 ; The Record, 93 , 125-6, van Riebeeck’s Journal , 20
F e b . 1657, 12 May 1658, 15 May 1658 et passim.
41 McCrone, Race Attitudes, 35-6; Spilhaus, South Africa in the Making, 27-8.
42 The Record, van Riebeeck to C of XVII 16/19 Mar. 1660; van Riebeeck to C of
XVII 4 May 1660; van Riebeeck to Batavia 7 July 1659.
48 The Record, 205, van Riebeeck’s Journal 4 Apr. 1660. Also cited in McCrone, Race
Attitudes, 37.
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700000268
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 22 Oct 2021 at 01:53:46, subject to the Cambridge
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700000268
https://www.cambridge.org/core
B
uf
fa
lo
R
S
C
O
D
E
St
—
Su
ll
en
bo
sc
h
Sw
—
Sw
el
le
nd
am
T
ri
ba
l
na
m
es
i
n
ca
pi
ta
ls
.
^
”
^
•”
M
ou
nt
ai
n
ra
ng
es
.
>
G
O
R
IN
G
H
A
IK
O
N
A
s o w w C
O
C
O H o a M o G H n X
Sk
et
ch
M
ap
o
f
th
e
C
ap
e,
s
ho
w
in
g
ap
pr
ox
im
at
e
po
si
tio
ns
o
f
K
ho
is
an
g
ro
up
in
gs
i
n
th
e
se
ve
nt
ee
nt
h
an
d
ei
gh
te
en
th
c
en
tu
ri
es
.
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700000268
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 22 Oct 2021 at 01:53:46, subject to the Cambridge
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700000268
https://www.cambridge.org/core
66 SHULA MARKS
from the Cape in search of new cattle supplies, and fresh Khoi groups
were brought into the Company’s orbit. By 1663 cattle traders had crossed
the Hottentots Holland to the Chainouqua people in the area between the
Caledon River and Danger Point, and were bartering with the Hessequa be-
yond the Storms River area, as far east as Riverdale and the River Zonder
End. In the next decade, they had reached the Nama in the north, and the
Attaqua in the east. Thousands of sheep and hundreds of head of cattle
were bartered for iron, copper, beads, arrack and tobacco.44 As one group
became improverished or reluctant to trade, another would take its
place. This in turn set up rivalries between the Khoi chiefdoms, and
partly explains the fighting observed amongst them in this period. Thus
in 1664 the Cochoqua requested Dutch aid against their rivals in the cattle
trade, the Chainouqua and the Hessequa—which was refused—and in
1671, when the Cochoqua were being supplanted in the trade by these
chiefdoms, war broke out between them.45 The pattern was to repeat
itself to the end of the century.
Rivalry over the trade, and fear of the gradual encroachment of whites
on his preserves, appears to have been behind the second conflict between
the Dutch and the Cochoqua under-chief Gonnema, which broke out
in the early 1670s.46 Although the Cochoqua, who were probably the most
powerful of the groups near the Cape, had remained neutral during the
war of 1659-60, Gonnema had been suspicious of white intentions from
the outset, and had already moved towards the middle distance between
the Berg River and the Fort to escape their demands.47 At the end of 1670,
the Cochoqua and their client soldiers, the Ubiqua, probably a mixed
San or Bushman and Khoi group,48 were reported as committing ‘in a
spiteful manner various acts of mischief, breaking into farmhouses,
stealing provisions and assaulting freemen and soldiers.49 Moreover, their
44 E . E . M o s s o p (ed . ) , Journals of the Expeditions of Hon. Ensigns Olog Bergh (1682-3)
andlsaq Schrijver (i68g) (Van Riebeeck Society, 1931), Introduction, p. 15. Also p. 200.
45 The Record, 289, 293-4. Z. Wagenaar to C of XVII, 15 Apr. 1664. Memorandum, Z.
Wagenaar, 24 Sept. 1666. H. J. Le Roux, ‘Die Toestand, Verspreiding en Verbrokkeling
van die Hottentotstamme in Suid Afrika 1652-1713’ (unpublished M.A. thesis, University
of Stellenbosch, 1945), 226-7.
44 McCrone, Race Attitudes, 60-2; Spilhaus, South Africa in the Making, 38-40.
47 Le Roux, ‘Hottentotstamme’, 41 , 46, 56-7. van Riebeeck thought they were 17,000-
18,000 strong, and as late as 1711 Bogaert estimated they had 100,000 head of cattle,
which seems unlikely. By the beginning of the eighteenth century the name ‘Gunjemans’
(a corruption of Gonnema) was, however, being applied to all the Khoi in the neighbour-
hood of the Cape. (Le Roux, 52 ff.)
48 A Resolution of the Council of Policy described them as ‘a kraal of Sonquas called
in the Hottentot language Obiquas, but dependants of Gonnema and regarded as bush-
rangers’. Ace. to E. C. Gode’e Molsbergen (Reizen in Zuid Afrika in de Hollandse Tijd, 1.
Journal of J. Croes, 123 n.), they were ‘Hottentotten waarin veel Boesman bloed was’.
They also apparently had cattle of their own, despite their reputation as ‘Bushman’
robbers. In 1673 the ‘Oebeiquaes’ are described as allies of Gonnema’s rivals, the Chain-
ouqua. The Record, 324.
48 H. C. V. Leibbrandt, Pricis of the Archives of the Cape of Good Hope: Journals 1662-
1670 (Cape Town, 1901), 343, Journal 22 Dec. 1670. This document is not in Moodie’s
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700000268
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 22 Oct 2021 at 01:53:46, subject to the Cambridge
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700000268
https://www.cambridge.org/core
KHOISAN RESISTANCE TO THE DUTCH 67
continued war against the Company’s allies was hampering the cattle
trade. By the end of 1672, when plans were afoot to open the Hottentots
Holland to white settlement, hostilities between Gonnema and the whites
broke out in more serious fashion, and between 1673 anc^ ^76 several
commandos were sent out against him.50 On no occasion were they able
to do more than capture a few hundred head of cattle, perhaps through
the double dealing of their San spies.51 It was not until 1677 that Gonnema,
still unsubdued, sued for peace.
After the peace with Gonnema, white expansion, which had been held
up by his resistance, was rapid, both to the north and the east. In part
this was the result of the increase in the white population at the turn of the
century, in part a function of economics and geography.62 Despite one
or two sporadic attempts, the Dutch East India Company made little
effort to follow the trekboers. Though the new districts of Stellenbosch
(1685), Swellendam (1745) and Graaf Reinet (1785) were formed, they
were large and unwieldy and their centres far from the expanding frontier.
The authority of the full-time magistrate or landdrost and his burgher
assistants, the heemraden and veldkorporaals, was without an adequate
police force and could hardly control the trekboer, who became accustomed
to handling emergencies on his own and taking the law into his own hands.53
Thus it was that already by the end of the seventeenth century Simon
van der Stel noted with concern the existence of a class of cattle farmers
beyond the confines of the settlement, where they supported themselves
by combining hunting with the illegal cattle trade with the Khoi.64 At
times it was difficult to distinguish their trading from their raiding opera-
tions. Although increasingly dire penalties were proclaimed against anyone
indulging in the illegal cattle trade with the Khoi, this injunction was being
disregarded even during the first Khoi war.65 After 1680, as the colony
The Record; Moodie apparently did not find the Journals for 1667-71 and 1674-6 in the
Cape Archives in the 1830s. Leibbrandt’s transcriptions may have been made from the
verbatim copies made in Holland and sent to the Cape at the end of the nineteenth century.
60 Leibbrandt, Prfcis of the Archives . . . : Journals 1671-4, 1676 (Cape Town, 1902),
6-11, 85. The question of opening up the Hottentot’s Holland area was discussed in the
late 1660s, and the first steps taken in Feb. 1671, though the decision to take final possess-
ion of the area was made only after it had been ratified by the C of XVII in 1672.
51 Spilhaus, The Making of South Africa, 38-40. The Record, 345, Resolution C of
P 25 Nov. 1676.
11 Oxford History, 208-13. For a detailed examination in English, S. D. Neumark,
Economic Influences on the Cape Frontier, 1632-1836 (Stanford, 1957), and P. J. van der
Merwe, Trek: Studies oor diepioniers-bevolking aan die Kaap (Cape Town, 1945), 100 ff.
a Though one should beware of the current stereotypes about the influence of the
‘frontier’ on the trekboer, as Dr. Martin Legassick has shown in “The Frontier Tradition
in South African History’, in Collected Seminar Papers on the Societies of Southern
Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, vol. 2, (Univ. of London, Institute of
Commonwealth Studies, forthcoming) this generalization does seem a valid one, both in
terms of numerous observations made at the time, and the actual events of the later eight-
eenth century in the frontier zone.
” van der Merwe, Trek, 41-3.
‘* In 1660 one Herman Remajenne was trading illicitly even with the Goringhaiqua,
who were at war with the colonists.
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700000268
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 22 Oct 2021 at 01:53:46, subject to the Cambridge
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700000268
https://www.cambridge.org/core
68 SHULA MARKS
expanded, Company servants began to grow tobacco on their out-stations
for cattle trade on their own behalf, and burghers built up their stock
in similar fashion.56
For the majority of the Khoisan peoples of the interior, the expansion
of the trekboer ultimately spelt the destruction of their social system and
their independent existence, although the process took longer and was
more complex than is generally realized. Already by the end of the century,
however, the groups nearest the Cape had become impoverished. The
‘Capemen’ participants in the first Khoi war, then the Cochoqua parti-
cipants in the second war, and by 1699 the Chainouqua and the Hessequa,
amongst the wealthiest of the Khoi groups fifteen years earlier, had lost
their cattle. Though the Hessequa apparently recouped their losses for a
while in the early eighteenth century, they did this in part by working for
the colonists for cattle.87 The Nama and the Grigriqua to the north and the
Attaqua and the Inqua to the east were now in the line of colonial advance.
Though most, if not all, secondary authorities state that, after the
defeat of Gonnema, Khoi resistance to the advance of the colonists was
at an end, this is not borne out by the evidence, though to some extent
the resistance did change in character. It was not so much that it was
now more sporadic and less well organized; it was more that the white
settlement was stronger and better able to cope. From 200 in the 1660s, the
white population increased to about 2,000 by the beginning of the eight-
eenth century, 5,000 to 6,000 by the mid-century, and almost 20,000 by
the end of the Dutch period.58 With the growth of the burgher population
and, even more important, with the rise of a few wealthy meat contractors
like Henning Husing, Jacob van der Heyden, and the Governor himself,
the Company was no longer so dependent on Khoi intermediaries, who
were, moreover, finding it difficult to supply the largely increased numbers
of cattle in demand in the last decade of the seventeenth century.69 In
1696, it is true, Simon van der Stel was drawn into a dispute between the
rival Chainouqua captains, Koopman and Klaas, ostensibly because
Klaas, formerly the most reliable of the Company’s intermediaries,
was now hampering the cattle trade.60 In fact, by this time the days of the
66 Le Roux, ‘Hottentotstamme’, 50.
67 E. E . Mossop (ed.) , Journals of the Expeditions of the Hon. Ensign Olof Bergh and the
Ensign Jsaq Schrijver, 69, footnotes. Precis of the Archives . . .: Letters Received, z6gs-
1708 (C.T. 1896), 220. O. Bergh, Rivier Zonderend, to C of P 25 Nov. 1699. As late as
1694, the Hessequa were described as the ‘magtiste en veerykste van alle bekende Hot-
tentotte’ (V.C. 13, Dagregister, 373-4, 8 Jan. 1694); P. Kolben, The Present State of the
Cape of Good Hope, I, 75 .
68 C. F. J. Muller (ed.), 500 Years. A History of South Africa (Pretoria and Cape Town,
1969), 23, 33, 58, 67.
68 van der Stel, for example, claimed to have supplied 206,000 more head of cattle
during the past fifteen years than his predecessor had over the same period. (Leibbrandt,
Pricis of the Archives.. .: Letters Desp. 1696-1708 (C.T. 1900) Gov. to C of XVII,
Middleburg, 16 June 1696).
60 Theal, History and Ethnography of South Africa before 1795, n, 351-4. VC 13 and 14
Dagregister 15 Mar. 1694, 20 July 1694, 13 Feb. 1696, and 6 Dec. 1698.
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700000268
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 22 Oct 2021 at 01:53:46, subject to the Cambridge
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700000268
https://www.cambridge.org/core
KHOISAN RESISTANCE TO THE DUTCH 69
independent Khoi intermediary were virtually over. Individuals like
Herry, Doman or Klaas were no longer necessary, and their names
disappear from the records of the central government.61
In an attempt to meet the escalating demand for fresh meat, the Com-
pany tried various expedients. In 1699 the ban on the cattle trade between
the Khoisan and burghers, which had existed since the early days of the
colony in order to avoid conflict, was lifted, contrary to the wishes of the
Governor. An immediate outbreak of violence on the lifting of the ban
led the Governor to reimpose it in 1702, but with his dismissal in 1707
the cattle trade was once again thrown open, this time for a further
twenty years. In 1727 it was reimposed once again because of the violence
which had resulted from the ‘free for all’. In fact, the ban was always
honoured more in the breach than the observance.62
At the same time, new grazing areas were opened up in Riebeeck’s
Kasteel, Groenekloof and Waveren by the large meat contractors, who
were now able to trade with Khoi pastoralists in their own right. And
this shift in the geographic focus of interaction from the centre to the
periphery of the settlement is also reflected in the nature of the evidence.
The highly circumstantial journals of the Cape Commanders, which
relate every detail of their relationships with the Khoisan, now give way to
far more sporadic accounts of raids and counter-raids, in which tribal
names are barely mentioned. Individual settlers were undoubtedly in-
jured by these attacks but, in part because of the scattered nature of
settlement in the outlying districts, the colony as a whole was no longer
threatened in the same way.
The 1690s, indeed, saw a mounting tide of violence on the periphery,
which continued into the eighteenth century, perhaps the result of this
insatiable demand for cattle. Not only were there wars between the Nama,
Grigriqua and Cochoqua, the Hessequa and Attaqua, and within the
Chainouqua; from 1700 onwards white farmers and Khoi loyalists in the
northern part of Stellenbosch began complaining of the robbery of their
cattle, and there is little doubt that these were raids by Nama and Gri-
griqua peoples, accompanied by their San client-soldiers, in retaliation
for earlier plundering by the white man and his allies. The large meat
contractors in the newly opened grazing lands suffered especially large
81 Undoubtedly individual Khoi continued to exploit the colonial situation, and pro-
cesses of accommodation, collaboration and subordination also continued apace, but the
evidence for this is now to be found in the judicial and local records of the colony, and is
beyond the scope of this article, except in so far as it affected Khoisan resistance.
” Even before the ban on the cattle trade between the colonists and the Khoi was
lifted in 1699, the amount of illegal trade had increased very considerably. Despite in-
creasingly stringent prohibitions, the Company appears to have been unable to control
the trade in which the Governor and many high officials appear to have been involved in
their personal capacity. It may be a recognition of this which lay behind the Chamber of
XVIPs decisions in 1699 and 1707. See Oxford History, 1, 208-9; Muller (ed.), 500 Years,
34, 46-7. VC Dagregister, 196-7, 20 July 1693. VC 14, 613-14. Dagregister; Plakkaat and
Resolusie, 19 Oct. 1697. Also Kaapse Plakkaatboek, 1, 282-3.
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700000268
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 22 Oct 2021 at 01:53:46, subject to the Cambridge
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700000268
https://www.cambridge.org/core
70 SHULA MARKS
losses.63 Though the raiders, who are generally described in the documents
as ‘Bosjesmans-Hottentotten’, have been identified by most previous
writers with the San or ‘Bushmen’,64 there is strong evidence to suggest
that, while the San were undoubtedly involved in the raids both on this
occasion and through the eighteenth century—and even Gonnema had
his San spies and mercenaries—these so-called ‘Bosjesmans-Hottentotten’
were Khoi who had lost their cattle and had reverted to a ‘Bushman’ way
of life. There was, after all, little to distinguish the two groups, once the
Khoi had lost their cattle and grazing lands. There is also some evidence
to suggest that even at this stage they were being joined by runaway
slaves.66
The process whereby a herder-Khoi became a ‘Bushman’ was well
delineated by the landdrost of Stellenbosch, commenting on the results
of the temporary lifting of the ban on the cattle trade between 1699 and
1702: not only had it led to retaliatory raids of revenge, but it had turned
kraal against kraal, ‘so that from a contented people peacefully supporting
themselves with their cattle, they have mostly all been changed into
bushmen [my italics] hunters and robbers, scattering everywhere and
among the mountains’.66
The pattern of violence and counter-violence, raid and counter-raid,
punctuated every decade in the eighteenth century. The documentary
evidence suggests a close connection between cattle-trading expeditions,
which tipped easily over into raiding expeditions when the Khoi were
reluctant to barter a sufficient number of cattle on the terms offered, and
Khoi counter-raids to recover their stock. Far from being ‘surprisingly
willing’ to barter away their cattle for brandy, tobacco and baubles, on
very many occasions it had to be extorted by force, and the Khoi were
swift to retaliate.67 Though the power of the Khoi to resist white expansion
was undermined by the disastrous small-pox epidemic of 1713, attempts
to dislodge the white intruders on their grazing lands continued.68 In
63 H. C. V. Liebbrandt, Prids of the Archives . .. Journal z6gg-i732 (Cape Town,
1896), entries 13 Mar. 1701, 10 Apr. 1701, 16 June 1701, 26 Aug. 1701, 7 Oct. 1701,
26 Nov. 1701, 29 Nov. 1701, 22 Jan. 1702. The entry for 3 Mar. suggests that the land-
drost accused the Ubiqua of the thefts, but W. A. v.d. Stel thought the Grigriqua were
responsible. On 10 April and 16 June Grigriqua and Nama are explicitly named as
responsible by Khoi informants.
“E.g. Theal, History and Ethnography of South Africa before 1795, 11, 390; Oxford
History, 212; Muller (ed.), 500 Years, 34.
•* The Dagregisters for 1696-7 have numerous references to deserted slaves fleeing
to the Grigriqua. See VC 14 passim, but esp. 405-6, 411, 416-20, 423-4.
•• H. C. V. Leibbrandt: Prids of the Archives … The Defence of Willem Adriaan v.d.
Stel (Cape Town, 1898), Ann. N2, p. 161, Report of Landdrost Starrenburg, Oct. 1705.
Sim. Leibbrandt, Prids of the Archives … Letters Despatched 160.6-1708, 191, Gov. to
C of XVII, 20 Mar. 1702.
67 See above n. 5, p. 56.
88 This was probably the worst of the epidemics to hit the non-immune Khoi, though
even before this they had suffered from European-introduced disease which played a
large part in reducing their numbers. Khoi cattle also appear to have been hit by disease in
1713-14 and in 1755, when another smallpox epidemic raged.
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700000268
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 22 Oct 2021 at 01:53:46, subject to the Cambridge
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700000268
https://www.cambridge.org/core
KHOISAN RESISTANCE TO THE DUTCH 71
1715-17 ‘Bosjesman-Hottentotten’, or Khoisan, raids along the Berg
River and in the land of Waveren led to the first garrison Commando
being called out without a complement of Company soldiers from the
Cape, a precedent which established itself thereafter as the norm. As in
1700-1, the Khoisan raids may have been provoked by an earlier Boer
raid.69 Certainly in 1719, when a strong body of ‘Bushmen’ stole 700
cattle from the cattle station on the River Zonderend belonging to the
Company’s licensed butcher, Jacob van der Heyden, they stated that it
was because they had been robbed when Ensign Fierabent was sent to
barter cattle on the Company’s behalf with the ‘Inquas’ and Gauris’.70
By 1724 the Nama complained that the Company had cleared them of all
their cattle and they were no longer prepared to trade—perhaps the
result of the violent ‘trading’ expedition sent out by Jacob van der Heyden
in the previous year. So violent was this that it led the Church Council
of Drakenstein to request a government enquiry, and the permission he
had to trade with the Khoi was withdrawn.71 Four years later a band of
300 ‘Bosjesman-Hottentotten’—probably Nama and Grigriqua—stole
cattle from behind the Piquetbergen.72
Both in 1731 and in 1739 the political motivation behind the Khoisan
raids was made explicit. Thus, on the former occasion, the raiders, a
small band called ‘the sons of Giebenaar’, told the pursuing Commando:
‘We Bushmen have more people, we shall give the Dutch no rest’; while
in 1739 a Khoi interpreter was told that the object of the raids was ‘om
hun [the Dutch] uyt haar land te verjagen derwijl sy in haarlieden land
woonen en dat dit maar een begin was dog dat zy alle de daaromtrent
menschen sulx souden doen . . ,’73 (‘to chase the Dutch out of their land
as long as they live in their land, and that this was but a beginning but
they would do the same to all the people around there’). They further
threatened to set all the Dutch corn on fire so that they would have to
give up their farms north of the Berg River. This attack of 1739 was pro-
bably the largest to take place up to this point; more than 400 head of
cattle and 2,400 sheep were captured. At least 100 Khoisan were involved,
some of them armed with muskets, and their raids extended along the
Piquetberg, Bokkeveld and Lange Valley, forcing fifty-nine cattle-stations
•• C 10. Resolutions of Council of Policy, 19-26, 101-7, 162-70: 15 Oct. 171s, 20
Nov. 1715, 7 Jan. 1716. C 435 Inkomende Brieven III, 101-6. Sergt. H. Treurniet, Land
of Waveren to Gov. (Report), 20 Nov. 1715.
70 Leibbrandt, Precis of the Archives . . . Journals l6gg-i732, 276, 31 Jan. 1719. Sim.
C 13 (Resolutions), 290-1.
71 E. E. Mossop (ed.), The Journals of Brink {1761-2) and Rhenius . . . {1724), V.R.
Soc. 28 (Cape Town, 1947), 137. This may have been the result of the plundering ex-
pedition of J. v.d. Heyden in 1723, which led to a protest from the Church Council
of Drakenstein. C 17, 11 (Resolutions), 593-7, incl. letter from Minister and Kerkraad,
Drakenstein to Gov. 9 Mar. 1723. C 439 (Ink. Br.) 509-11, Landdrost, Stellenbosch, to
Gov. 5 Apr. 1723. Theal, History and Ethnography of South Africa before I7Q5, n, 439.
7 1 C 441 (Ink. Br.), 773-5. Landdrost, Stellenbosch, to Gov. 19 Dec. 1728. Theal,
History and Ethnography …, 11, 447.
” C 442 (Ink. Br.), 113-14, Landdrost, Stellenbosch, to Gov. 8 Mar. 1731.
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700000268
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 22 Oct 2021 at 01:53:46, subject to the Cambridge
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700000268
https://www.cambridge.org/core
72 SHULA MARKS
to be deserted.74 In all, four commandos had to be sent against them and
burgher service in the Commandos became compulsory for any whites with
interests in the outlying districts.76 In this instance again, the immediate
spur to Khoisan action appears to have been the activity of an illegal
‘trading party’ in which a number of Nama had been shot and their cattle
stolen by the Boer leaders and their Khoi servants.76
The early 1750s saw a further spate of Khoisan attacks, which the land-
drost of Swellendam attributed to the fact that a number of white in-
habitants were making their way into the ‘woestyn’ (i.e. beyond the
settled areas) with their guns and wagons, where there were all too many
opportunities for them to vent their spleen (‘om synen boesem uytte-
storten’) on the Khoisan.77 The first attack seems to have come from a
smallish band of ‘Bosjesman-Hottentotten’ secretly aided by a white
farmer, Jacobus Botha, who had in fact led a commando against Khoisan
raiders in 1747, during which a number of women and children had been
killed78; by 1754 whole herds of cattle were being driven off in the area
of the Olifants River, Bokkeveld, Roggeveld and Doom River, and the
raiders had entrenched themselves in ‘klip heuwels’ (stone huts).79
74 St 11iz (SteUenbosch Archives, Cape Town), Notule van landdrost en heemraden,
20 Apr. 1739. Sim. C 466 (Ink. Br.), 440-1, Landdrost to Gov. 22 Oct. 1738. Also cited
van der Merwe, Noordwaartse Beweging, 8. C 31, 163-203. Report of J. Cruywagen of his
Commando’s activities, 28 May 1739. According to Cruywagen, the raiders had guns
and ammunition, which they used with accuracy.
76 v.d. Merwe, Noordtoaartse Beweging, 8.
78 G. M. Theal in his History of South Africa under the D.E.I.C., 11, 28, gives a highly
tendentious account of this episode, laying the blame for the violence and robbery on
the Khoi servants and exonerating the settlers under Willem van Wyk. The contemp-
orary documents suggest that the servants were acting under orders. The affair came to
the attention of the government through the Khoi servants, who reported it when they
were cheated of their promised share of the booty. When the government attempted to
punish the guilty party, it led to much excitement amongst the white community and a
small-scale uprising under Etienne Barbier, a French deserter. The movement collapsed
when the Government offered a pardon to all Barbier’s followers who joined the Com-
mando against the ‘Bushmen-Hottentot’ raiders. The raid on the Nama took place ‘after
the ploughing season’ in 1738; the Khoisan raids from the area of the ‘Kleine Nama’
began in October 1738 and continued through the first half of 1739. According to Cruy-
wagen’s Report (C 31, 28 May 1739) ‘Titus’ and ‘Swarte Booy’, two of the informants
against the van Wyk party, were participants in these attacks. The Moravian missionary,
George Schmidt, at that time still working at Baviaans Kloof, was also convinced that
the Khoisan raids were retaliation for the van Wyk episode. See B. Kruger, The Pear
Tree Blossoms (Cape Town, 1969), p. 26.
C 31 Resolutions, 101-10, Evidence Khoisan witnesses before Council of Policy,
13 Mar. 1739. St. 10/2 Report Landdrost, Stellenbosch, 22 Oct. 1738. C 31 and C 446
Letters from Landdrost and Heemraden to Gov. and C of Policy, 3 Nov. 1739, 21 Nov.
1739, 20 Apr. 1739, 28 Apr. 1739.
” C 453 (Ink. Br.), 771. Landdrost and heemraden, Swellendam, 17 Nov. 1753.
Also p. 70s, ibid. 5 Mar. 1753, and end. and C 452, 234-44 Report of Commando under
C. P. de Jager, 25 Oct. 1751.
78 C 452 (Ink. Br.), 203, Report of Commando under Dirk Marx, May 1750. Ibid. p.
353, Landdrost and heemraden, Swellendam, to Gov. 30 Sept. 1750. C 42 Resolutions,
202, 13 Oct. 1750.
“van der Merwe, Noordtoaartse Beweging, 9. C 654 Dagregister, Stellenbosch, 28
May 1754.
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700000268
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 22 Oct 2021 at 01:53:46, subject to the Cambridge
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700000268
https://www.cambridge.org/core
KHOISAN RESISTANCE TO THE DUTCH 73
The snowball effect of cattle marauding was felt beyond the confines of
the colony, as groups of Khoi sought to regain their stock by raiding their
weaker fellows. Thus in 1752 Ensign Beutler found the Khoi on the
Gamtoos poor and starving, having been robbed by ‘Bushmen’, while
the Attaqua had moved to the sources of the Gouritz and Olifants River
from Attaqua’s Kloof, or had taken service with the farmers in order to
escape. Between the Lange and Cromme Rivers, the Khoi had become
so impoverished through wars with the ‘Bushmen’, between themselves,
and with the Xhosa, that ‘now they lived like the Bushmen on theft,
hunting and veldkos [food of the field]’80 added confirmation of the way
in which herders were turned into hunter-gatherers. The process was
probably exacerbated by the outbreak of small-pox and cattle disease
in 1755, which may also have held up Khoi resistance for a generation:
in 1758 a party of 200 men who stole 400 cattle from the Roggeveld
farmers appear to have come from a considerable distance (they may
even have been Tswana from across the Orange River), as their language
was unintelligible to the local Khoi.81
In the 1770s, however, when the whites reached the southern ridge
of the central plateau, the level of Khoisan attacks reached a new pitch.82
The increased ferocity of the so-called ‘Bushman wars’ in the last quarter
of the eighteenth century may have been the result, at least in part, of
increased pressure on the Khoisan, not only from the white trekboers
in the south-west but also from the Xhosa, moving slowly westwards, and
the half-caste Kora and Tswana groups who were at this time establish-
ing themselves on the Orange River from the south and north respectively83
Moreover, the scale of Boer reprisals and the capture of Khoisan children
to act as servants undoubtedly added a new dimension to the warfare.84
For whatever reason, however, the entire northern frontier now erupted
in violence, with escaped slaves, white deserters and Khoi servants joining
the Khoisan ranks.86
It would be tedious to relate the details of their incursions, though the
80 E. C. Godee Molsbergen: Reizen in Zuid-Afrika, i n , Journey of Ensign Beutler
1752, 279-80, 291-3 . Sim. A. Sparrman, A Voyage to the Cape of Good Hope 1772-6
(Dubl in , 1785), 11, 14s, talking of the Khoisan in Agter Bruintjes Hoogte , and C 470/11
(Ink . Br.) , 727, Landdros t Woeke, Graaff Reinet , 10 Dec . 1786.
81 C 456 1, 335-7 . Report Landdros t , Swellendam, 30 June 1758.
8a According to van der Merwe , Noordwaartse Beweging, 10, this was because it was
the ‘real Bushman frontier*.
88 Splits within the Xhosa royal lineage and the movement of small fragmented chief-
doms westward probably accelerated in the eighteenth century ; together with the growth
of half-caste communit ies nor th of the Cape sett lement and the establishment of the
Koranna on the Orange River, and the presence of Whi t e deserters from t h e Cape Colony,
they made ‘frontier zones’ areas of very considerable instability.
84 van der Merwe, Noordwaartse Beweging, 96-7.
” In the 1780s Le Vaillant described the ‘Boshiesmen’ as ‘a set of vagabond deserters
of no particular nation, living by robbing alike Caffree’ (sic), ‘Hottentot or Colonist’. F.
Le Vaillant, Travels into the Interior Parts of Africa . . . in the Years 1780-85 (London,
>. 338.
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700000268
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 22 Oct 2021 at 01:53:46, subject to the Cambridge
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700000268
https://www.cambridge.org/core
74 SHULA MARKS
records of Stellenbosch, Swellendam, and, after 1786, Graaf Reinet,
consist very largely of the numbers of sheep and cattle stolen and herders
murdered, together with the reports of the reprisals taken by the burghers.86
Unfortunately, the records give very little indication of the nature of
Khoisan organization, leadership or objectives. The bands, however, were
sometimes several hundred strong—in 1790 one band was reported of
a thousand, while hundreds of head of cattle and thousands of head of
sheep were captured annually.87 Though the Commandos were out
constantly during the last thirty years of the century they were unable
to subdue the raiders, though thousands of Khoisan were killed.88 By
1785 the Khoisan had taken over the land from the Hex River to the
Swarteberg, from the Roggeveld, Koup, Sneeubergen and Camdebo,
and the Commandant of the North, appointed specifically to deal with the
threat, prophesied that before long they would penetrate to the wine and
wheat farms of the land of Waveren.89 Those farmers who were not ruined
by the robberies were being exhausted by constant military service.
Though farmers began to wear the Khoisan down by pure blood-letting,
further colonial expansion northwards was prevented for some thirty
years.90
This was the more serious for the trekboers, in that it coincided with
their coming up against the far more numerous and better organized
Xhosa chiefdoms. Their expansion was thus blocked on both fronts,
while they were facing two enemies simultaneously. In the eighteenth
century, contrary to popular belief, the Khoisan were the more formidable
foe.91 By comparison with the robberies committed on the northern
frontier, the cattle thefts complained about by farmers through Xhosa
depredations were paltry.92 Nor was the Xhosa mode of warfare necess-
arily more damaging, though undoubtedly in the nineteenth century their
superior numbers and evolution of new tactics made them an increas-
ing threat. Initially, however, the advantage would appear to have
86 See, for example, St 10/162, 10/164 O.R. 1/1 and 1/12 in the Cape Archives.
87 Ace. to Mara is , Maynier and the First Boer Republic, 22 n . 20 , be tween 1786 and 1795
19,161 catt le and 84,094 sheep were stolen, and 276 he rde r s were killed. I n 1786 alone
1,328 cattle and 2,738 sheep were stolen. C C 471 (Ink. Br.), Landdrost Graaff Reinet to
Gov. p . 609.
88 For the 1790 band, see v.d. Merwe Noordwaartse Beweging, 19-20. According to
van der Merwe, the numbers of the Khoisan bands were so great that the Commandos
were too weak to tackle them and this is certainly borne out by the records. Op . cit. 40.
89 v.d. Merwe op. cit. 10-15. St. 10/164, 39 Landdrost to Gov. 19 Apr. 1785.
80 Afrikaner historians have tended to be more aware of this than their English speaking
compatriots. Cf. v.d. Merwe, Noordwaartse Beweging, cc 1 and 11 with the opening
pages of MacMillan’s Bantu, Boer and Briton.
91 Cf. Oxford History, 227 which suggests the Commando system was more effective
against the San than the Xhosa—in fact it was probably ineffective in both cases. It took
the arrival of British troops both on the northern and eastern frontier to tip the balance
of power in favour of the White man.
92 Marais, Maynier, 19-21. These tables of cattle losses alleged to be the result of
Xhosa theft in the period immediately preceding the 1793 war show a total of 493 cattle
and 2 sheep stolen and 8 herders killed. This was probably an overestimate.
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700000268
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 22 Oct 2021 at 01:53:46, subject to the Cambridge
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700000268
https://www.cambridge.org/core
KHOISAN RESISTANCE TO THE DUTCH 75
lain with the Khoisan. According to the Swedish traveller Sparrman in
1775, ‘the Bushmen are more than a match for the Caffres, as long as
they keep a good distance . . . by means of their poisoned arrows’,93 while
Burchell, writing in 1811, remarked that the Xhosa ‘are, in general,
much in dread of the Bushmen, whose insidious mode of warfare and in-
defatigable activity in expeditions against their enemies render them
. . . more than a match for the . . . Caffre’.94 From the point of view of the
colonists, by far the most disastrous of the three ‘frontier wars’ of the
eighteenth century occurred in 1799-1802, when the Xhosa were joined
by an uprising of Khoisan servants, who deserted from the farms with
their masters’ horses and guns. Although the wholesale desertion of
servants and their combination with the numerically stronger Xhosa
was novel, this was by no means the first time the Khoisan servants had
joined the ‘resisters’—the raiders of the last three decades (and possibly
even the earlier bands) undoubtedly contained a good proportion of
deserters, many of them armed with guns.95
The end of the Dutch period did not see the end of Khoisan resistance,
though it is impossible to tell the nineteenth century story, with its many
new and complex facets, here. It would need to show, however, how it
took a further twenty years before the Cape’s northern frontier was ex-
tended to include ‘Bushmanland’, as well as to trace the history of the
‘Griqua’ and other mixed Khoi-San-slave-white groups.96
Most writers on colonial resistance end with some reflections on the
achievements of the resisters; many take these achievements up to the
rise of modern mass nationalism and their contribution to colonial in-
dependence. Of course, in the Khoisan case one can point to no such
achievement, though today there are signs of an awakening interest amongst
some middle-class coloureds in the struggles of their progenitors in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.97 At this earlier period, however,
one cannot really talk of an ‘independence movement’.98 Not only did
the Khoisan fail to dislodge the white man; they undoubtedly also lost
M Span-man, A Voyage, xi, 159.
M W. J. Burchell, Travels in the Interior of South Africa, ed. I. Schapera (London,
1953). i,3°2-
•• Spilhaus, South Africa in the Making, 271-3, 303-10.
M Though van der Merwe (op. cit. 98) suggests that the warfare in the nineteenth
century was less bitter, and some attempt was made to only punish those Khoisan who
actually participated in raiding activities, eyewitness accounts in the first twenty or thirty
years of the nineteenth century cast considerable doubt on this contention. See. e.g. G.
Thompson, Travels and Adventures in Southern Africa (London, 1827), 11, 6, 40-1;
J. Philip, Researches in South Africa, 11, cc. n, in, xrv and xv Great Britain: Parliamentary
Papers: re Native Inhabitants, 1835, passim, esp. p. 59; J. Pringle, African Sketches
(London, 1834), 371.
” J . Leeuwenberg, “The Griqua Reformation Movement in the 20th Century* (un-
published seminar paper, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, London, 1970), 4.
18 Though the movement of the Khoi and mixed groups like the Griqua out of the
Cape and their state-building activities can be seen in this light, especially in the early
nineteenth century. See M. Legassick, “The Griqua, the Tswana and the Missionaries,
1780-1840: The Politics of a Frontier Zone’ (unpublished Ph.D. U.C.L.A., 1969).
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700000268
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 22 Oct 2021 at 01:53:46, subject to the Cambridge
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700000268
https://www.cambridge.org/core
76 SHULA MARKS
their ethnic identity. In part this must be attributed to their relatively
small numbers and social organization. But this is by no means the entire
answer. Dutch numbers, especially in the seventeenth century, were also
extremely small, and, although the Khoisan failure to unite effectively was
important, lack of unity is a feature not only of small pastoral or hunter-
gatherer societies.
Of greater importance, perhaps, was their ambiguous relationship with
the whites. Resistance was only one of their responses to the Dutch and
perhaps not the dominant one. Even in the first two Khoi wars, the Dutch
were heavily dependent on ‘loyal’ Khoi levies and outnumbered by them.
In 1670, when there were rumours of a French invasion, the Dutch
defences were augmented by Khoi soldiers, while throughout the eight-
eenth century they formed the backbone of the colonial defences against
both internal and external enemies. All the Commandos were accompanied
by Khoi servants, some of them armed, who sometimes outnumbered the
burghers.”
Even those groups which remained theoretically ‘independent’ under
their own chiefs, were willing to collaborate with the Dutch—often for
their own purposes. The Company soon adopted the custom of recognizing
‘loyal’ Khoi chiefs, or, as the Dutch called them, captains, who were
granted copper staffs of office and official white recognition in exchange
for their services. Though at the beginning it would appear that the
Company was simply acknowledging the already legitimate heads of
Khoi chiefdoms, by the end of the eighteenth century, and probably a
good deal earlier, trie effect was to separate chiefs from their people in the
manner familiar to nineteenth and twentieth century colonical Africa.
Thus one Khoi informant remarked to Sparrmann in 1775:
Captain . . . is merely an empty title, formerly bestowed by the regency at
Cape Town on some princes and patriarchs of the Hottentots, and particularly
on such as had distinguished themselves by their fidelity to their allies by be-
traying their countrymen or by some remarkable service . . . it is required of the
captain that he shall be a spy on the other Hottentots.100
Already by the 1690s some six or eight of these staffs of office had been
granted to Khoi captains, and by the beginning of the eighteenth century
chiefs as far off as the Nama had come to seek Company recognition at the
Cape.101
In Cape Town itself there was considerable acculturation. There was
even some intermarriage between the whites and Khoi women—like that
of Eva, the interpretress, who was married, amidst public celebration,
” Spilhaus, South Africa in the Making, 3 7 – 8 , 5 8 – 9 , 1 0 0 – 1 , 121, 129, 188, 256, 263,
272 , 306, 375-
1 0 0 Span-man, A Voyage, 1, 240.
1 0 1 Leibbrandt, Precis of the Archives . . . Letters Despatched 1695-1708, 2 4 – 5 . Gov .
to C X V I I Middelburg, 1 Aug. 1696. Theal , History and Ethnography of South Africa
before 1795, 11, 392.
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700000268
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 22 Oct 2021 at 01:53:46, subject to the Cambridge
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700000268
https://www.cambridge.org/core
KHOISAN RESISTANCE TO THE DUTCH 77
to the ship’s surgeon and explorer, Pieter van Meerhoff.102 Although inter-
marriage between white men and Khoi and freed slaves became rarer—
it was expressly forbidden by the metropolitan Commissioner, van Goens,
in the 1680s—concubinage undoubtedly continued in both town and
country, to give rise in the course of the eighteenth century to a consider-
able half-caste population, who became known as the Cape Coloureds.103
For some, the strain of acculturation proved too great: Eva herself ended
her days in squalor and drunken disgrace, while the records contain other
examples, like the young Khoi girl who was ‘respectably educated by
burghers’ but eventually hanged herself in a sheep-pen.104 Nevertheless,
by the end of that century, though they were never granted full burgher
status, there were fairly well-to-do baptized ‘Basters’ (half-castes) on the tax
rolls of the colony and participating in the Commandos against Khoisan
raiders as well as against European invaders.105
In accounting for the ultimate disappearance of the Khoisan as an
ethnic entity, their propensity for acculturation has thus to be taken into
account, a propensity which must be closely linked to their loosely knit
social organization. They literally acculturated themselves out of existence.
The significance of this is not simply that it gave rise to the Cape
Coloured community, but that many of the acculturated half-Khoi iden-
tified with the whites and passed into their ranks, so that their own group
was deprived of manpower and potential leadership. In many cases those
who ‘passed for white’ must have been the most successful and dynamic
individuals, in the eighteenth as in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Moreover, for those unwilling or unable either to resist or to assimilate,
there was another option—to escape beyond the confines of white settle-
ment. Thus many made their way north and east of the colony. Fragments
of the Goringhaiqua, the Corachouqua and possibly the Cochoqua fled,
for example, to the Orange River, where they formed the Koranna people
or mingled with the Tlhaping. In the second half of the eighteenth century
they were joined by other mixed groups, like the half-caste Adam Kok,
who fled to the Khamiesberg and built up a following of Grigriqua and
other groups before moving on to the Orange River.106 Those who fled
eastward mingled with still independent Khoi groups or the mixed
Xhosa-Khoi on the frontiers of Xhosa settlement.107 On the peripheries
l o a McCrone, Race Attitudes, 43 .
1 0 3 J. S. Marais, The Cape Coloured People, cc 1 and n .
104 McCrone , Race Attitudes, 35, 44 .
105 Spilhaus, South Africa in the Making, 129, 155, 157, 161, 178.
106 Oxford History, 68 . T h i s option appears to have been appreciated by Khoi leaders
like Gonnema as early as 1666, when it was rumoured that he ‘ intended to go far away
from us (the Dutch) into another country and never more to return’. Leibbrandt, Pricis
of Archives . . . Journal 1662-72, 185, 6 July 1666.
1 0 7 T h i s had, of course, continued over a very long period of t ime, but the accounts of
travellers like Beutler (1752) , Wikar (1778), Sparrman (1775-6) , Campbell (1813), etc.,
are full of references to mixed Khoi -San-Bantu speaking groups at all stages of inter-
mixture and acculturation.
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700000268
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 22 Oct 2021 at 01:53:46, subject to the Cambridge
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700000268
https://www.cambridge.org/core
78 SHULA MARKS
of the Bantu-speaking world, they constituted a kind of Voortrekker class,
bringing the first intimations of the destructive implications of the white
man’s presence and an increased political awareness.
The extent to which their presence shaped the responses of Bantu-
speaking peoples to later white expansion is difficult to document, but
their influence was clearly considerable and had many ramifications.
Thus, it was through their example, and in many cases as a result of their
raiding activities, that, on the one hand, many African chiefs determined
to acquire horses and guns and, on the other hand, that a number of chiefs
requested missionaries to settle among them. Amongst Southern Tswana
groups, such as the Tlhaping and the Tlharu, the Griqua and other mixed
groups prepared the way for white traders and missionaries. As early as
1801 there were Tswana who could speak Dutch, which they had learnt
from the Griqua.108 For Mzilikazi on die Highveld it was the resemblance
of the Voortrekkers to his enemies, Bergenaar and Griqua raiders, that
led him to wipe out the Voortrekker encampments, while Moshweshwe
in Basutoland received both his knowledge of firearms and his French
missionaries through Griqua intermediaries, though he wanted both,109
initially, to protect him from the mixed raiding communities of the Orange
River. As late as 1845 Captain Stretch on the Cape frontier ‘warned the
authorities that even Tembu and Ndlambi chiefs agreed that they must
“stand by the House of Gaika lest we be broken up as the Hottentots
were” \110
Yet the majority of the Khoisan were converted into the menials of the
white man, depressed socially, politically and economically. Though in
the more settled areas they remained the transport riders, guides, messen-
gers and, on occasion, trusted emissaries, and even in the interior some were
able to retain considerable independence as skilled ivory hunters, their
position on the farms in the remoter districts may well have been con-
siderably worse than that of the slaves of the west.111
In the barter economy of the interior, Khoi servants earned little more
than their keep, plus the occasional head of cattle or sheep and some cast-
off clothing. Though they were legally entitled to redress, the primitive
administrative and judicial machinery left servants at the mercy of their
masters, and there is little doubt that the relationship was not infrequently
violent.112 As we have seen, many could, and did, desert; Jager Afrikanner,
108 See, e.g. Spilhaus, South Africa in the Making, 286; I. Schapera (ed.), Apprentice-
ship at Kuruman: the Journals and letters of Robert and Mary Moffat 1820-1828 (London,
1951, 274; M. H. Lister (ed.), Journals of Andrew G. Bain (Van Riebeeck Society, 1949),
14-15, 21-2; G. M. Theal, Records of the Cape Colony (London, 1896), iv, Journal of
Truter and Somerville’s Journey to the Briqua, 101-2, 373-4.
10» Oxford History, 400, 404, 408, 411.
110 Cited Macmillan, Bantu, Boer and Briton, 272. See also evidence, A. Smith before
S. C. on Kafir Tribes, British Parliamentary Papers, 1851, §2074, p. 280.
111 Spilhaus, South Africa in the Making, passim.
112 Ibid. 121, 169. G. M. Theal, Belangrijke Historische Dokumenten, m (Cape Town,
1911), 216, 218-21, 243.
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700000268
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 22 Oct 2021 at 01:53:46, subject to the Cambridge
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700000268
https://www.cambridge.org/core
KHOISAN RESISTANCE TO THE DUTCH 79
who murdered his master after years of ill treatment, and formed his own
group of resisters along the Orange River, is another case in point.113
Others seem to have indulged in millenarian fantasies, like the two hundred
servants in Swellendam who were reported in 1788 to have burnt their
Dutch clothes and killed their white animals, prophesying the end of the
world and threatening to kill all whites, after which they would inherit
their goods.114 The alternative for many, however, was listlessness and
despair and an addiction to dacha, tobacco and alcohol, already noted by
Peter Kolbe in the first decade of the eighteenth century.115
Apart from the attempt by George Schmidt of the Moravian Brethren
to establish a mission amongst the Khoisan in 1737, which lasted only
five years, it was only at the very end of the century that mission work
got under way at the Cape. Thus, by the time the missionaries became
the champions of Khoisan rights, they were fighting against a settler
community which had entrenched itself over 150 years.116 Throughout
the period of Company rule there was no creation of an educated and
articulate Christian elite within the Khoisan community; nor was there
any equivalent in Holland of the British pressure groups of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries which could act in the interest of African rights.
Despite its limitations, from the vantage point of the late eighteenth
century rather than that of the twentieth, any assessment of Khoisan
resistance must have looked very different. Both Khoisan and Dutch had
had their social structure and economy profoundly changed as a result
of 150 years of contact, conflict and acculturation, and in many ways by
the end of the eighteenth century they were more evenly matched than
before or since. At the Cape itself, whites, with their metropolitan links,
were in a dominant position; in the interior, their position was by no
means as overwhelmingly superior as is often imagined. It was the coming
of the British, and their intervention in Cape affairs, which was to tilt
the balance of power irreversibly in favour of the white man.
Moreover, an examination of Khoisan responses to the Dutch certainly
does not seem to bear out some of the stereotypes generally held about
the relationship of social structure to responses to colonial rule. Professor
Ranger’s dictum that ‘resisting societies are not necessarily different in
structure, motive or atmosphere from co-operating ones’ is certainly
borne out; his rider that ‘the foremost among the societies engaged either
in resistance or in collaboration had more in common with one another
I1S J. H. Wellington, South West Africa and its Human Issues (Oxford, 1967), 152
114 C 471, Inkomende Briefen, 1121-1256, Reports of Landdrost of Swellendam and
evidence of witnesses, Oct. 1788. Unfortunately the evidence on what was termed at the
time the ‘Hottentot conspiracy’ are most unsatisfactory. Nevertheless the rumours and
evidence of some of the participants is most suggestive. The authorities believed that the
‘Hottentots’ had been ‘misled’ by two white deserters. One of them, ‘Jan Pierre’ whom
they addressed as ‘Onse Hewe Heer’, (our dear Lord) appears to have tried to play the
role of the Messiah.
115 P. Kolbe, The Present State of the Cape of Good Hope, 1, 210-14, 264, 267, 324, 326.
118 This is the subject of Macmillan’s The Cape Coloured Question.
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700000268
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 22 Oct 2021 at 01:53:46, subject to the Cambridge
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700000268
https://www.cambridge.org/core
80 SHULA MARKS
than with those small-scale societies that could neither resist nor exploit
colonial rule’ would seem to need modification.117 The complex range of
responses of the Khoisan to the Dutch seems to suggest that there are
few societies, however small-scale, whether one is referring simply to size
or to social organization, that have not responded to conquest by at times
collaborating, and at times resisting, though undoubtedly the nature of
both the accommodation and the resistance has in part to be related to
social structure. Khoisan social structure, moreover, perhaps because of
its very simplicity, showed a marked ability to adapt and change under
the pressures of colonial rule. In many ways, what is striking about
the Khoisan reactions to the Dutch are the similarities to the reactions
of other African peoples in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries rather
than the differences.
SUMMARY
The responses of the Khoisan peoples to the Dutch at the Cape of Good Hope
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have generally been dismissed
summarily by historians. This article attempts to place their reactions into the
broader framework of the receptivity of Late Stone Age society in South Africa
to cultural innovation, and suggests that the usual dichotomy drawn between the
rapid disintegration of the pastoral Khoi in the face of the Dutch settlers and the
fierce resistance of the San hunter-gatherers is an oversimplification. There was
little to distinguish cattleless Khoi from San, or San who had acquired cattle from
Khoi, and both processes were at work both during and before the Dutch period
in South Africa. The belief that the Khoi ‘willingly’ bartered away their cattle
for ‘mere baubles’ is challenged, and it is maintained that the violence which
punctuated every decade of the eighteenth century, and which culminated in the
so-called ‘Bushman Wars’, were in large measure the Khoisan response to their
prior dispossession by the Boers. On the other hand, the readiness of the Khoisan
to acculturate to both the Dutch and the Bantu-speaking intruders, their
relatively small population and loose social organization, meant that their ethnic
identity virtually disappeared. Nevertheless their responses were more complex
than is generally realized and resemble those of other colonized peoples. They
were also to have a profound influence on the attitudes towards whites of Bantu-
speakers on the Cape’s eastern and northern frontiers in the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries.
117 ‘African reactions to the imposition of colonial rule in East and Central Africa’ in
L. H. Gann and P. Duignan, Colonialism in Africa (Cambridge, 1969), 304.
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700000268
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSB Libraries, on 22 Oct 2021 at 01:53:46, subject to the Cambridge
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700000268
https://www.cambridge.org/core
The Role of Foreign Trade in the Rozvi Empire: A Reappraisal
Author(s): S. I. Mudenge
Source: The Journal of African History, Vol. 15, No. 3 (1974), pp. 373-391
Published by: Cambridge University Press
Stable URL:
http://www.jstor.org
/stable/180666 .
Accessed: 19/09/2011 19:36
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Cambridge University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The
Journal of African History.
http://www.jstor.org
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=cup
http://www.jstor.org/stable/180666?origin=JSTOR-pdf
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
journal of African History, xv, 3 (1974), pp. 373-39I 373
Printed in Great Britain
THE ROLE OF FOREIGN TRADE IN THE ROZV
I
EMPIRE: A REAPPRAISAL’
BY S. I. MUDENGE
THE question of the relationship between external trade and the growth of
political power in pre-colonial Africa has recently attracted an increasing
number of scholars.2 Among students in this field there has been a growing
tendency to assume, either implicitly or explicitly, that external trade
always led to the formation or enlargement of states in pre-colonial Africa
.
Shorn of qualifications, the ‘trade stimulus hypothesis’ may be boldly
summarized thus: trade allowed for a high degree of concentration of
wealth in the hands of one man, usually the chief; this was possible because
the chief always monopolized all external trade among his people; and this
highly concentrated wealth allowed for the development and continued
existence of more elaborate state systems than was previously possible.
Often this ‘trade stimulus hypothesis’ has been applied with some justifi-
cation. But lately some writers have tended to assume uncritically that
wherever external trade was present, it must have been a major source of
power. Indeed, in certain cases scholars have come dangerously close to
implying that external trade represented all the economic life in an African
society. Once the presence of external trade has been established, its
consequences are then assumed; analysis of its actual impact on the political
system and its relationship to internal production and consumption in
the given polity becomes unnecessary, and all effort is expended in explain-
ing the organization of trade routes and marketing and the types of goods
involved. The hypothesis itself becomes the explanation of the role of
external trade within the given polity. This runs the risk of turning the
theory into historical juju, in which the problems are supposed to vanish
when the faithful recite the necessary incantations.
In this paper, I will try to show how such a wholesale and uncritical
application of the above hypothesis to the study of one polity, the Rozvi
empire (c. I684-I833/4),3 has led to a serious distortion of the true picture
1 I wish to express my gratitude to Richard Gray and John Peterson for their valuable
comments on an earlier draft of this article. This paper was first read at the Institute of
African Studies, Fourah Bay College. Additional research for the paper was made possible
through a generous grant provided by the Humanities Research and Equipment Fund of
Fourah Bay College. The map reproduced here was made by A. A. J. Elba, carto-
graphic unit, Fourah Bay College.
2 Among the many works published in this field may be cited K. 0. Dike, Trade and
Politics in the Niger Delta (Oxford, 1956); G. I. Jones, The Trading States of the Oil Rivers
(London, I963); D. Birmingham, Trade and Conflict in Angola (Oxford, I966); more
recently R. Gray and D. Birmingham (eds.), Pre-Colonial African Trade: Essays on Trade
in Central and Eastern Africa before I900 (London, I970).
3 The Rozvi empire discussed here was founded by a man known in oral tradition as
Dombo, but referred to simply as Changamire in contemporary Portuguese documents.
374 S. I. MUDENGE
of that state. In their description of the basis of the power wielded by the
Rozvi Mambos (emperors) previous writers have tended to over-emphasize
the importance of external trade at the expense of the contribution of
internal factors. We have been presented with a picture of the ‘unwarlike
Rozwi’,4 presiding over such a loosely connected ‘tribal confederacy’ that
the Rozvi emperors could not even exact tribute from their subjects except
as a form of trade.5 Regarding the ‘religious and military bases of the
Mambo’s power’, one writer refers to ‘the slenderness of that power
politically.’6 Thus the picture is that of an empire where the coercive
powers of the emperors are judged to have been rather slender. The only
aspect of this empire that, thanks to the survival of contemporary Portu-
guese documents, most of these writers accept is the existence of a vigorous
external trade, mainly in gold. External trade was so vital to the Rozvi
Mambo’s position and influence that it was ‘strictly controlled and confined
by the Mambo or Changamire, who had a monopoly of gold, the main
export’.7 It was this control of trade which provided the wealth with which
the Rozvi Mambos could secure whatever influence they wielded over their
so-called subjects. Yet one writer even casts doubt on the possibility o
such influence by dismissing the very concept of a Rozvi ’empire’ and its
‘power and glory’ during the eighteenth century as a ‘myth’.8
Recent research allows us to question some aspects of this picture of
the Rozvi empire. In particular, the claim that external trade was the major
source of the influence wielded by the Rozvi Mambos now emerges as
being somewhat exaggerated. On the other hand, the roles of such internal
factors as military, religious and administrative organization are seen to
have been much more significant than we had hitherto been led to believe.
I
THE POLITICAL AND ADMINISTRATIVE ORGANIZATION OF
THE ROZVI EMPIRE
(i) Rozvi kingship
The Rozvi empire was ruled by a hereditary ruler with the title of
Mambo. Succession to the Rozvi throne was collateral, or perhaps more
precisely patrilineal adelphic, i.e. the kingship devolved from brother
For the argument that the name Rozvi and the Rozvi nation did not exist before Dombo’s
wars (I684-95) see S. I. Mudenge, ‘The Rozvi Empire and the Feira of Zumbo’ (un-
published Ph.D. thesis, London, 1972), 35-43.
4 R. Summers, Zimbabwe: a Rhodesian Mystery (Cape Town, I963), 96.
6 A. K. H. Weinrich, ‘Karanga History and the Mwari Cult’, Cultures et developpement,
II, 2 (I969-70), 394-6; N. Sutherland-Harris, ‘Trade and the Rozwi Mambo’, in Gray
and Birmingham, Pre-Colonial African Trade, 244, 246.
Sutherland-Harris, ‘Trade and the Rozwi Mambo’, 245.
Ibid. 243; see also A. Isaacman, Mozambique: the Africanization of a European
Institution: the Zambezi Prazos, I750-I902 (Madison, Wisconsin, 1972), 82.
8 H. H. Bhila, ‘The Manyika and the Portuguese 1575-I863’ (unpublished Ph.D.
thesis, London, 1I97I), 71.
THE ROLE OF FOREIGN TRADE IN THE ROZVI EMPIRE 375
to brother, eventually reverting first to a son of the eldest brother and then
to a son of the next brother and so on. But this was only the principle; in
practice other factors played their part. Support at court or in the kingdom
was equally important in determining who was to succeed. In I695-69
and again in I76810 we have contemporary Portuguese written sources
showing that sons could and did succeed their fathers. On the other hand,
as is to be expected, most of the traditional sources emphasize how faith-
fully the patrilineal adelphic principle was adhered to. This form of
succession can be most complex and often causes succession problems.”
This was certainly the case within the Munhumutapa empire in the
seventeenth as well as the eighteenth centuries; compared to the Mutapa
empire in the eighteenth century, which was plagued by succession diffi-
culties, the Rozvi empire appears to have been almost a paragon of stability
and orderliness.12 The only politically significant succession dispute in the
Rozvi empire known to have taken place was in I768.13
It would appear that the Rozvi were able to minimize the dangers of
succession wars to such an extent in part because of an institutional device
they created to reduce the known harmful effects of succession rivalries.
According to some Rozvi traditions, when a Mambo died and no successor
was immediately appointed, the head of one of the royal Rozvi clans with
the dynastic name of Tumbare would take over as regent until a Mambo
was elected.’4 The house of Tumbare, as we shall see below, used to provide
the highest general of all the Rozvi armies, who was also the Chief Collector
of tribute, an office approximating that of Chancellor of the Exchequer.
This post would appear to have been hereditary to the house of Tumbare
and in effect made Tumbare the second most powerful personage in the
empire after the Mambo himself. This constitutional mechanism allowed
the princes to haggle, plot and manoeuvre for the succession without
necessarily throwing the empire into a blood-bath. Above all, it meant that
the claimant who could secure Tumbare’s support had a very good chance
of succeeding to the throne.
9 Biblioteca da Ajuda Lisboa (B.A.L.), 51-VII-34, fl.sI, “Proposta que fizerao os mora-
dores dos Rios de Cuama ao Senhor V. Rey”, Senna, 27 June I698, Manuel Rebello.
10 Arquivo Hist6rico Ultramarino, avulsos de Mocambique, Caixa (A.H.V.AV. de Moq.
Cx.) 13 Tette, 20 July 1768, Inficio de Mello Alvim to Governor-General (G.G.).
11 See G. Kingsley Garbett, ‘Religious aspects of political succession among the valley
Korekore (N. Shona)’, in E. Stokes and R. Brown (eds.), The Zambesian Past (Manchester,
I966), 152-6. Garbett shows just how confusing the situation could become. See also
J. F. Holleman, ‘Some “Shona” Tribes of Southern Rhodesia’ in E. Colson and M.
Gluckman (eds.), Seven Tribes of British Central Africa (Manchester, 1951), 380-2.
12 E.g. between 1759 and 1766 no less than six Mutapas ruled. Each was in turn deposed.
From 1766 to i8o6 there were sporadic wars between the ruling Mutapas and pretenders
to their throne. It could also be argued that it was the seventeenth-century succession wars
within the Mutapa empire which, to a large extent, enabled the Portuguese prazo holders
to gain such a strangle-hold over the valley lands during that period.
13 A.H.U. AV. de Moc. Cx. I3, Tette, 20 July I768, Inacio de Mello Alvim to G.G.
14 E.g. S. Nenguwo, ‘Oral work among the Rozvi: a few notes’, in Conference of the
History of the Central African Peoples (Rhodes-Livingstone Institute for Social Research,
Lusaka, I963), 6.
376 S. I. MUDENGE
300E
Zumbo
Tete.
Sena’
I . -. . Bindura
MANGWENDE>L
MANYIKA1M’kt’
200S -<_
.
K.a MAHUNYJ
(Feira)
Manyanga. (I
*Dhlodhlo ‘I Sofala 20S *,0Bulawayo S
z
Modern Boundary of Rhodesia — 30 The Heart of Rozvi Empire
Miles Boundary of Rozvi Empire appr —
50 0 50 100 IS0
50o 0 S0 100 150 20
Kilometres
Although some scholars have suggested that the Rozvi rulers may have
had attributes of divine kingship, I have myself found little evidence to
support this.15 Constitutionally the Rozvi Mambo embodied the executive
and legislative as well as the judiciary powers within the empire. But in
practice he was assisted, at his court,16 by a Dare (Council) of magota
(Councillors).17 Represented in the Dare were such branches of the Rozvi
polity as the priesthood, the military leaders, and provincial governors as
well as some of the leading Rozvi imperial houses. Although the Mambo
would no doubt have had the last say on most issues, he nonetheless had
to try to carry his Dare with him. Some of the magota, e.g. the priesthood,
claim to have had the right and duty to advise, warn or reprimand a
15 Mudenge, ‘Rozvi Empire’, io6-8.
16 The Rozvi capital, according to tradition, was variously at Khami, Dhlo-dhlo and
Manyanga.
17 F. W. T. Posselt, Fact and Fiction (Bulawayo, I934), I57; Marodzi, ‘The Barozwi’,
Native Affairs Department Annual (NADA) (I924), 90.
THE ROLE OF FOREIGN TRADE IN THE ROZVI EMPIRE 377
Mambo who did not rule well. Many of the magota were hereditary. This
meant that their position did not depend solely on the whim of the Mambo.
All this points to the fact that although the Dare was primarily there to
advise the Mambo it was also, in part, a constitutional check on possible
excesses by the Mambo himself.
(ii) Rozvi military power and organization
Previous writers have greatly underestimated the military capacity of
the Rozvi.18 A study of contemporary sources suggests a very different
picture. According to one Portuguese document of I785, ‘The Brozes
[Rozvi] are feared even by the monhaes19 [vanyai], who after these Rozvi
are more daring than anybody else…. Because of their great prowess and
daring they [Rozvi] fight fiercely and furiously in battles.’20 And here is
another somewhat biased description of the Rozvi, coming from I789:
The immediate subjects of this chief [Changamire] are much devoted to him. . .
but they pass their whole lives in indolence of sensuality and the activities of
spoliation, hold agriculture and commerce in contempt, and, thinking themselves
a race superior to the rest of mankind, they consider work a degradation … six
or seven of these desperadoes, will … intimidate two or three hundred Africans
of other tribes.21
According to Abraham, the quotation ends thus: ‘Such are the freebooters
with whose aid Changamera has succeeded in making all his conquests
and compelled the entire population of several districts to quit their
habitations and fly to the northern side of the Zambezi.’22
Many more quotations could be given from the eighteenth-century
Portuguese sources, all of which corroborate the image of the Rozvi as a
fierce, powerful and warlike people. But before we can agree either with
the Portuguese account of Rozvi fighting power or with the more recent
notion of the ‘unwarlike’ Rozvi, we should look briefly at what is known of
the Rozvi military machine. From contemporary Portuguese sources we
learn that the Rozvi armies were organized into centuries like those of the
Romans.23 A century or company of soldiers was known as a missoca
(regiment).24 These missocas were under the command of cabos25 or field
18 Sutherland-Harris, ‘Trade and the Rozwi Mambo’, 245; R. Summers, Zimbabwe:
A Rhodesian Mystery (Cape Town, i965), 96; Bhila, ‘Manyika’, 7I.
19 These were the soldiers of the Mutapas.
20 A.H.U. AV. de Mo9. Cx. zz, Tette, ii June I785, Antonio Manoel de Mello e Castro
to Martinho de Mello e Castro, Secretary of State for Overseas.
21 J. J. N. de Andrade, ‘Descripcao de Estado em que ficavao os negocios da Capitania
de Mossambique nos fins de Novembro do anno de I789′, in Arquivo das coldnias (Lisbon,
I9I7), I, 95. Translation by D. P. Abraham, ‘The Monomotapa dynasty,’ NADA (I959),
75.
22 I have personally been unable to trace where this part of the quotation comes from.
23 J. J. N. de Andrade, ‘Descripcao’, 95.
24 A.H.U. AV. de Mo9. Cx. zz, Tette, i i June I785, Ant6nio Manoel de Mello e Castro
to Martinho de Mello e Castro.
25 F. de M. de Castro, Descripfpo dos Rios de Senna anno de I750 (Nova Goa, Imprensa
nacional, i86I), 32, para. 66.
378 S. I. MUDENGE
commanders. Above the cabos were the inhabezes26 (same rank as generals).
The inhabezes were themselves below Tumbare, the highest general. And
at the top was the Mambo himself who was the Commander-in-Chief.
Although it seems to have been customary for the Mambos to lead their
armies in person,27 we have oral and documentary evidence that this was
not always done.28
The Rozvi army had an impressive variety of weapons: bows and arrows,
daggers, assegais, shields, battle axes and cudgels.29 According to one
Portuguese source, the Rozvi fighters used the cudgel ‘with such deadly
accuracy that they can throw it from a long distance away and the blow is
almost always fatal’.30 They also possessed guns, and in the early nine-
teenth century there were four small cannons at the Mambo’s palace.3′
Although by the later nineteenth century the reputation of the Rozvi as a
people possessing guns reached as far south as the modern Transvaal,32
we have little evidence that guns were ever important weapons in the Rozvi
armies.33
On the battlefield, the Rozvi used a fighting formation which closely
resembled that of Shaka, the Zulu king. According to a Portuguese source
in I758, the Rozvi used to deploy their men as follows: a main body of
fighting men known as viatte would be in the middle, flanked by two horns
called mulomo acumba.34 In the nineteenth century Shaka was to use this
fighting formation with devastating effect. When the Rozvi squadrons
were in battle they are said to have been arranged in such a way that, while
one was engaging the enemy, another would be at its rear taking care of
the wounded, replenishing and animating the vanguard, as well as making
certain that none of those in front could retreat.35 It is also said that the
Rozvi favoured close combat, face to face in an open field.36 But it should
26 Ibid. 27 Posselt, Fact and Fiction, I47.
28 F. de M. de Castro, Descripp7o, 32-3, paras. 66-7; G. Fortune, ‘A Rozvi Text with
translation and notes’, NADA (I956), 83-4; D. M. Colley, ‘The Fate of the last Bashankwe
chief’, NADA (1927), 65-6.
29 A.H.U. AV. de Moc. Cx. 17, Anon., ‘DescripfAo Corografica do Reino de Manica
seus Custumes e Leis’; J. J. N. de Andrade, ‘Descripcao’, 95; A.H.U.AV. de Moc. Cx.
22, Tette, i i June 1785, A. M. de Mello e Castro to M. de Mello e Castro.
30 A.H.U. AV. de Mo. Cx. 22, Tette, i i June 1785, A. M. de Mello e Castro to M. de
Mello e Castro.
31 A.H.U. AV. de Moc. Maco 2I, I June I83I, Anon., ‘Acressentamento’ (annexe) to
the ‘Memoria sobre a doafAo do Territorio Bandire’.
32 T. Wangemann, Geschichte der Berliner Missionsgesellschaft, Bd. IV: Die Berliner
Mission im Bassutolande (Berlin, I877), 70.
33 See R. Gray, ‘Portuguese Musketeers on the Zambezi’; 37. Afr. Hist., XII, 4 (1971),
531-3; A. Atmore, J. M. Chirenje and S. I. Mudenge, ‘Firearms in South Central Africa’,
J. Afr. Hist. XII, 4 (1971), 55I-2.
3 I. C. Xavier, ‘Noticias dos Dominios Portugueses na Costa de Africa Oriental’, in
A. A. de Andrade (ed.), Relafres de Mofambique Setecentista (Agencia Geral do Ultramar,
Lisbon, I955), I45.
35 A. A. de Andrade, Rela_fes, I45; also A.H.U. AV. de Mop. Cx. 22, Tette, ii June
1785, A. M. de Mello e Castro to M. de Mello e Castro.
36 ‘Corografica’, as cited in n. 29; also A.H.U. AV. de Moc. Cx. 22, Tette, i June
I785, A. M. de Mello e Castro to M. de Mello e Castro.
THE ROLE OF FOREIGN TRADE IN THE ROZVI EMPIRE 379
not be thought that the Rozvi mode of fighting was inflexible: far from it.
Elsewhere it has been shown that flexibility and resourcefulness were an
integral part of Rozvi warfare.37 In I684 it was Dombo’s unconventional
tactics that enabled him to win the critical battle for Mahungwe. At any
rate that is how Fr. Conceigdo saw it when he wrote of Dombo’s victory
thus: ‘He was so wily and cunning that after being defeated by our arms,
he vanquished us with his strategems.’38
The Rozvi seem to have had a formalized mode of mobilizing their
forces. It is said that when the Mambo wished to summon his men of war
he would sound his gun (or was it one of his four cannons?) and then
Tumbare would beat his war drum known as Dittiwe.39 At the sound of
Dittiwe, criers would go out shouting ‘Chisadza Mhomwe [Muhomwe]’
(‘fill your bags with food’).40 The mapfumo, i.e. squadrons, would then
assemble at the court. When it comes to the training of the Rozvi armies
we know very little. The Portuguese sources are not very helpful on this
subject. For although they tell us of ‘military drill’ or ‘exercises’ as well as
‘archery training’, they never really explain what these involved. All we
are told is that the Rozvi military exercises were called pemberafoens and
these are said to have entailed ‘many leapings and multi-articulated move-
ments that they perform with their heads during battle or military exer-
cises.’4’ But pemberafoens-which comes from the Shona (pembera,
kupembera, to ululate)-entails singing, chanting, ululating and brandishing
of spears, and is not used for military training but as a morale rouser to
build self-confidence and intimidate the enemy. It may well be that fight-
ing skills were acquired largely through hunting.42
Before going into battle the Rozvi armies were always doctored. Tradi-
tions abound claiming that the Rozvi used supernatural powers against
their enemies. We are told that the Rozvi could change the colour of cattle,
summon bees to fight for them if need be, and send their enemies to sleep
by magic. They could make their warriors brave and/or bullet-proof or
impossible to pierce with an arrow or spear.43 Even Portuguese sources
remark on this reputation of the Rozvi. In I698 the Viceroy of India
wrote that the Portuguese soldiers-black and white-in the Rivers of
Sena believed that the then Rozvi Mambo had magic oil with which he
could kill anyone simply by touching the person with it. The Viceroy
implored the Portuguese king to send a new lot of soldiers from
37 Mudenge, ‘Rozvi Empire’, 74-90, II6.
38 A. da Conceicao, ‘Tratado dos Rios de Cuama (i696)’ in J. H. Cunha Rivara (ed.),
0 Chronista de Tissuary (Goa, I867), I05, para. io6.
39 Fortune, ‘Rozvi Text’, 78.
40 Posselt, Fact and Fiction, I56.
41 A.H.U. AV. de Moc. Cx. 22, Tette, II June I785, A. M. de Mello e Castro to M.
de Mello e Castro.
42 Mudenge, ‘Rozvi Empire’, I22-3.
43 Fortune, ‘Rozvi Text’, 8i, 83, 84; Colley, ‘Last Bashankwe Chief’, NADA (I927),
66; Conceicao, ‘Tratado dos Rios de Cuama’, io6, para. I IO; S. Muhlanga, ‘In the Early
Days’, NADA (I926), IO9.
380 S. I. MUDENGE
metropolitan Portugal who would not believe in such superstition.44 The
Portuguese in the Rivers of Sena had cause to fear Rozvi magic, because
in I693 after the great Rozvi Mambo, Dombo I, had slaughtered all the
Portuguese at Dambarare, he had two Dominican priests flayed and their
heads cut off and carried in front of his army. On that occasion, it is re-
ported, Dombo also disinterred the bones of some of the Portuguese and
had them crushed in order to prepare a powerful medicine for his soldiers.45
Fr. A. Conceigao insists that Dombo was ‘a most skilled wizard’.46 This
association of the Rozvi with the supernatural clearly gave their armies a
vast psychological advantage over their potential opponents.
Finally, we must consider the question of numbers. This is hard to
determine. But from Portuguese sources we can deduce that the Rozvi
armies were fairly large by the standards of the time. We find that in I684
immediately after Dombo had sustained heavy losses in his pyrrhic victory
against the Portuguese at Mahungwe, he still had enough men to face an
invasion from the emperor Mutapa Mukombwe. If we are to believe con-
temporary Portuguese evidence, on the latter occasion Dombo killed no
less than 5,000 men of Mutapa Mukombwe, as well as some of the latter’s
grandees and Portuguese allies.47 Again, in I743, when the Portuguese,
now reconciled to the domination of the Rozvi, were in trouble around
Tete and requested help from the Rozvi emperor, he sent, it is said, about
z,ooo fighters to help them. But when the 2,000 reached Zumbo, the
Portuguese authorities seem to have changed their minds, and so they
asked the Rozvi men of war to return to their home. Before the army
reached home it met some trading agents of the Portuguese traders of
Zumbo and decided to rob them of 500 pastas48 of gold. When this was
reported to the Mambo, the latter sent another army which is reported to
have annihilated the first 2,000 Rozvi who had originally been sent to help
the Portuguese.49 In I772 the Feira of Zumbo was blockaded by Ganiam-
baze, a Mutapa prince fighting for the Mutapa throne against prince
Changara. Again the Rozvi sent an army which relieved the Feira of
Zumbo.50 In I78o-I the Rozvi are said to have sent another army of about
3,000 men to help the Feira of Zumbo which was under pressure from one
prince Casiresire.51 Also in the I780s the Rozvi sent an army to the king-
dom of Manyika to ensure that the king of Manyika did not harass the
44 B. A. L., 51-VII-34, fl. 35, Goa, I2 December I698, Ant6nio Luis da Camara
Coutinho to king.
45 Concei-ao, ‘Tratado dos Rios de Cuama’, io6, paras. I09-IO.
46 Ibid. 105, para. I03.
47 B.A.L. 51-VII-34, fl. 50, Senna, 27 June I698, ‘Proposta que fizerao os Moradores
dos Rios de Cuama ao Senhor V. Rey’, Manoel Rebello; A.H.U. AV. de Mo. Cx. 2,
Senna, 24 July I685, Caetano de Mello de Castro to king.
48 A pasta was a weight of about I6j ounces.
49 F. de M. de Castro, Descripfao dos Rios de Senna, 32-3, paras. 66-7.
50 A.H.U. AV. de Mo. Cx. I4, Mo9ambique, I5 Aug. I773, Balthazar Manoel Pereira
do Lago.
51 Mudenge, ‘Rozvi Empire’, 275-8.
THE ROLE OF FOREIGN TRADE IN THE ROZVI EMPIRE 38I
Portuguese traders while the latter were building a fortress at Feira of
Manyika.52 Traditional sources also furnish other instances of the use of
the Rozvi forces.
Here we see not the ‘myth of power’53 or the ‘unwarlike Rozvi’,54 but a
well-organized and well-armed military force which during the eighteenth
century permitted the Rozvi Mambos to protect the Feira of Zumbo and
its trade route to Butwa; allowed the Rozvi rulers at least on one occasion
to keep peace between the Portuguese and the king of Manyika; and as
we shall presently see, enabled the Rozvi Mambos to levy tribute on their
subjects. In short, the army provided the Mambos with important diplo-
matic and political leverage which they used at times in order to indulge
in extra-territorial interventionist policies both north and south of the
Zambezi. In the words of one Governor-General of Mozambique it made
the Rozvi Mambo ‘the most powerful [ruler] of those interiors’,55 or, as
one secretary to the government of Mozambique says, it made the Mambo
‘the terror of the hinterland’.56 To assert that the military base of the Rozvi
Mambo’s power was politically slender, is to run against the available
evidence and to make the words lose all meaning.
(iii) Religion: Its Political Significance
That the functionaries of traditional Shona religion have historically
played, and continue to play, a politically significant role in Shona society
is a point few scholars would now challenge.57 Professor T. 0. Ranger has
convincingly shown that in the crisis created by the imposition of colonial
rule on the Africans of Southern Rhodesia in the late nineteenth century
it was the officers of the Mwari cult and the Mhondoro (spirit mediums)
who provided the grapevine-like network for the coordination of the revolt
of I896-7.58 And Richard Brown has pointed out that in the nineteenth
century Ndebele kingdom the Mwari cult co-operated with the Ndebele
rulers and acted as a valuable secret service in that kingdom.59 Going
back to the eighteenth-century Rozvi empire, some indications in oral
tradition allow us to postulate a somewhat similar politically active role
for the religious arm within the Rozvi empire.
52 ‘Corografica’, as cited in note 29; also Bhila, ‘Manyika’, 6o.
53 Bhila, ‘Manyika’, 7I.
54 Summers, Zimbabwe: a Rhodesian Mystery, 96.
55 A.H.U. AV. de Moq. Cx. I4, Mo9ambique, I5 Aug. I773, B.M.P. do Lago.
56 L. A. de Figueiredo, ‘Noticia do Continente de Mogambique e abreviada relagdo do
seu comercio’, in L. F. de Carvalho Dias (ed.), Fontes para a Historia, Geografia e Come’rcio
de Mofambique (Sec. XVIII), Anais, vol. ix, Tomo i (Junta de Investigacaes do Ultramar,
Lisbon, I954).
57 In the present guerrilla insurgence in north-eastern Rhodesia, for example, the
Mhondoro (spirit mediums) seem to be playing an important role on both sides in the battle
to win the support of the rural Africans.
58 T. 0. Ranger, Revolt in Southern Rhodesia I896-7 (London, I968).
69 R. Brown, ‘External Relations of the Ndebele Kingdom’, in L. Thompson (ed.),
African Societies in Southern Africa (London, I969), 268.
382 S. I. MUDENGE
First of all we are told that the priesthood was represented on the
Mambo’s council.60 This enabled the Mambo and his council to exploit
the religious authorities’ more discreet sources of information about
outlying provinces. Furthermore the priesthood is said to have been in-
volved in the investiture of some of the vassal rulers.6′ In this way the
priesthood may have helped to sweeten the political act of vassalage in-
volved in the investiture ceremony by hiding it behind the mystique and
sanctity of their office. And by being so closely associated with the Mambo,
religion became one more integrative factor within the empire. Yet we
would be in error if we were to conceive of the Mwari cult as having been
no more than a willing tool in the hands of the Rozvi rulers. Conflict between
the religious officers and the Rozvi Mambos appears to have been a perennial
feature of their relationship. This may have been so partly because the
priesthood claimed to have had the right and duty to advise and admonish
those Mambos who did not rule well.62 Thus the religious authorities may
well have been a constitutional watch-dog on a Mambo’s theoretically
absolute power. In a negative way, the importance of the religious authori-
ties as supporters of the Rozvi rulers is further revealed in the fact tha
virtually all the known Rozvi traditions account for the fall of their empire
as being a consequence of a rupture between the religious and political
leaders in the empire.63
(iv) Provincial Administration
The Rozvi rulers accepted the principle of heredity in the administration
of their provinces. This meant that many of the provincial chiefs were the
hereditary rulers of their regions. The only Rozvi Mambo who does not
seem to have cared about the principle of heredity was Dombo I, himself
a usurper. But on the whole his successors respected it. The question that
requires to be answered is, therefore, how the Rozvi were able to control
these hereditary local rulers.
The first way in which the Rozvi controlled these rulers was through the
investiture ceremony known as kugadza ishe (to invest a chief). According
to one source, ‘If the people chose a new chief without consulting their
overlord [the Rozvi Mambo], it was said in common parlance that they
had no chief, but the one selected or approved by the Warozvi was held to
be the true chief’.64 This view is supported by many other sources.65 The
process of choosing a new chief began at the local level where the practices
of that particular chiefdom would be observed. Once a candidate had been
locally chosen he either went in person to the Rozvi court to seek approval
60 E.g. Marodzi, ‘The Barozwi’, NADA (I92z4), 9O; Fortune, ‘Rozvi Text’, 8i-2.
61 Fortune, ‘Rozvi Text’, 8I-2. 62 Ibid.
63 E.g. Posselt, Fact and Fiction, I 58; A. M. Sebina, ‘The Makalaka’, African Studies,
VI, 2 (I947), 85-9I- 64 E. M. Lloyd, ‘Mbava’. NADA (I925), 62.
65 E.g. Fortune, ‘Rozvi Text’, 82; Posselt, Fact and Fiction, I55-6; Weinrich, ‘Karanga
History’, 395-6.
THE ROLE OF FOREIGN TRADE IN THE ROZVI EMPIRE 383
or sent a deputy to obtain the approval on his behalf. The Rozvi could
and did at times withhold approval. They could even bypass a duly elected
candidate and impose their own choice.66 But instances of this practice
seem to have been rare. The investiture of a new chief took place in his own
kingdom. It was performed by a representative of the Rozvi Mambo, who
handed the regalia, which included black and white calico as well as a sheep-
skin, to the new chief.67 Through the investiture ceremony the Rozvi
Mambo conferred legitimacy and authority on the vassal chiefs. But, most
important of all, by being invested by the Rozvi, a vassal chief proclaimed
his subservience to the latter. There is virtually no evidence to show that
before the I790S any vassal chief successfully challenged the Rozvi right
to invest subject rulers.
The other way in which the Rozvi Mambos controlled the loyalty of their
subjects was by the imposition and collection of an annual tribute (Mupeta
wamambo).68 Tribute collection had important political and economic
implications. Politically, the payment of tribute implied continued
allegiance of a vassal ruler to the Rozvi Mambos and refusal was taken as
indicating rebellion.
The chief tribute collector of the Rozvi empire was none other than the
Tumbare himself.69 That a man of Tumbare’s standing-the highest
general of the Rozvi armed forces and possible regent to the Rozvi empire-
should have been made responsible for tribute collection is a sign of the
importance attached to the function. According to one source, if Chikanga,
the king of Manyika, ever dared to stop paying tribute to the Rozvi
Mambo, he ‘without doubt, would suffer severe retribution’ and the Rozvi
Mambo would ‘bring Chikanga to his senses … because the said Changa-
mire and his soldiers are of a temperament so vain that they cannot put up
with defiance without seeking revenge and complete satisfaction’.70 Oral
sources confirm that any vassal chief who did not pay his tribute was
visited by Rozvi soldiers.71 Tribute was paid in cloth, beads, hoes, axes,
gold, ivory, skins, cattle, tobacco, foodstuffs and whatever else the various
regions could produce.72 Through this tribute the Rozvi Mambo acquired
vast quantities of wealth from his empire.
Finally, another way in which the Rozvi used to control their empire
was by the appointment of regional governors or representatives. This is
of such significance that it is most unfortunate that at present we know so
66 D. P. Abraham, ‘The Principality of Maungwe: Its History and Traditions’, NADA
(I95 i), 63.
67 Posselt, Fact and Fiction, 140; Lloyd, ‘Mbava’, 62-3; S. X. Botelho, Memoria
Estatistica sobre os Dominios Portuguezes na Africa Oriental (Lisbon, I833), I68.
68 Hist. Mss. Misc. IRU4/1 /i, Rukara account, National Archives, Salisbury.
69 ‘Corografica’, as cited in note 29. 70 Ibid.
71 Posselt, Fact and Fiction, I45; K. Robinson ‘A History of the Bikita District’, NADA
(‘957), 77.
72 Posselt, Fact and Fiction, I56; Robinson, ‘History of Bikita’, 8o; Nenguwo, ‘The
Rozvi: a few notes’, 6; Hist. Mss. Misc. /RU4/I/i, Rukara account; ‘Corografica’ as
cited in note 29; Weinrich, ‘Karanga History’, 396.
25 AH XV
384 S. I. MUDENGE
little about it. But we have enough evidence to establish the existence of
such officers. What we lack is precise knowledge of their functions. Dr D.
Beach has found oral sources claiming that a Rozvi house by the dynastic
name of Gwangwava used to settle quarrels among the Rozvi subject
chiefs in the present Charter District.73 In Mahungwe at the court of
Makoni the house of Tandi was permanently stationed as a representative
of the Rozvi Mambo.74 A similar role for the priestly house of Nerwande
may be postulated in Mangwende kingdom.75 Dr Weinrich claims that
her researches have shown that the Rozvi empire ‘was divided into pro-
vinces, and each province was administered by a royal agnate whom the
king appointed provincial governor’.76 Perhaps when Dr Weinrich
publishes her researches more fully we will be in a better position to assess
the true significance of these provincial governors. But even from the little
we know it is already clear that these governors were an important link in
the control of the Rozvi empire.77
II
EXTERNAL TRADE AND THE ECONOMIC BASIS OF
THE ROZVI EMPIRE
As we have already seen, previous writers have emphasized the importance
of external trade as the chief source of the economic power and political
influence wielded by the Rozvi rulers. They have also asserted that the
Rozvi Mambos exercised a strict monopoly on all external trade. But on
this point, too, the results of recent research have led to some modifications.
While it is true that the Rozvi Mambos issued decrees78 which governed
73 D. N. Beach, ‘The Rising in south-west Mashonaland I896-7’ (unpublished Ph.D.
thesis, University of London, I97I), 6i-2. 74 Ranger, Revolt, 289.
76 W. Edwards, ‘The Wanoe: a short historical sketch’, NADA (I926), 28; Abraham,
‘Chaminuka’, 43. 76 Weinrich, ‘Karanga History’, 396.
77 Mudenge, ‘Rozvi Empire’, I53-9.
78 One such decree forbade all non-Africans, Portuguese and Goanese, to enter Butwa
for the purposes of trade. Trade between the Rozvi and the Portuguese had to be carried
on through African intermediaries known as vashambadzi. The only place where non-
Africans were allowed to stay for trade in the Rozvi empire was at the Feira of Manyika,
where the Chikangas, the Rozvi vassal rulers of Manyika, kept a vigilant eye on their
activities. So strict were the rulers of Manyika with the Portuguese that on at least one
occasion the Rozvi had to intervene to restrain the ruling Chikanga’s harsh treatment of
the Portuguese at the Manyika Feira. But the reason why the Rozvi rulers forbade the
Portuguese to wander freely in their empire was not so much economic as political. As one
writer has so aptly remarked, the lesson of the seventeenth century in Zambezia was that
long spoons were needed to sup with the Portuguese. The Rozvi Mambos understood the
lesson only too well. As if to underline the fact that the ban on non-Africans was motivated
by political considerations and not by a desire to enforce a trade monopoly, any Rozvi
subject was free to trade at the Feira of Manyika whenever he chose to. Although trade
between the Portuguese at Zumbo and the Rozvi empire was carried on largely through the
vashambadzi, there is no evidence to suggest that the Rozvi rulers forbade their own
subjects to visit Zumbo for trade. The distance as well as the need to traverse foreign
lands and the inhospitable country of the Zambezi valley, rather than any decree of the
Rozvi rulers, probably discouraged visits by Rozvi subjects to Zumbo. And, in any case,
the regular visits by the vashambadzi made the journey to Zumbo unnecessary.
THE ROLE OF FOREIGN TRADE IN THE ROZVI EMPIRE 385
some aspects of external trade in their empire, they do not appear to have
restricted the whole trade to themselves. The whole case of the trade
monopoly of the Mambos has rested on two or three Portuguese documents.
One of these documents is a well-known general report in I750 by Francisco
de Mello de Castro.79 According to this report, the Rozvi rulers forbade
their subjects to trade in pure gold. They could only trade in the less
valuable (i.e. impure) gold. Elsewhere I have shown that the gold sent by
the Rozvi Mambos to the Feira of Zumbo during the eighteenth century
was invariably ‘ouro bruto’, i.e. impure gold.80 Thus the monopoly reported
by de Mello de Castro was not in fact about pure versus less valuable
(presumably meaning impure) gold: the monopoly, if that was what it
was, was about different grades of impure gold. Both the Mambos and their
subjects traded in impure gold. Even with the most up-to-date means of
state control, such a monopoly would have been meaningless, as it would
have been virtually impossible to enforce. The second document which
has been used to argue that the Rozvi Mambos had a monopoly of trade
is another general report, written in I758 by Ignacio Caetano Xavier,
which alleges that one chief Caroa, a vassal of the Rozvi Mambo, had
found a big gold nugget but was unwilling to give it to the Mambo.81
Caroa threw the nugget, tied to a buoy, into a river and from time to time
traded chipped pieces of the nugget to the traders of Zumbo (presumably
on the pretext that it was worthless gold!).
The third document used to show that the Rozvi Mambos had a mono-
poly of trade is a letter written by a captain of Zumbo in I769, on the basis
of evidence he received from the envoys of a Rozvi Mambo.82 Clearly
this is an important piece of evidence, and it is therefore necessary to quote
it exactly: ‘Furthermore the said Changamire had instructed them [his
envoys] to say that he had ordered three messocas of Munhais to go and
punish some of his bareiros for failing to report to him the discovery of
new bares.’ What the document establishes is that the Mambo was clearly
interested in knowing what new bares his bareiros had discovered. But who
were the Mambo’s bareiros? The word ‘bareiros’ comes from ‘bar’, which
in eighteenth-century Mozambique meant, among other things, a gold
mine or a gold mining settlement or region. North of the Zambezi the
bareiros were gold miners (African and Portuguese). We might thus sup-
pose that the bareiros of the Rozvi Mambo were his gold miners. But here
we are told that bareiros was an alternative term for ‘chefes’, i.e. chiefs.83
This implies that the bareiros were special chiefs who may well have been
specially connected with the Mambo’s gold mining. Beyond suggesting
that the Mambos may have had their own royal mines, perhaps in the
19 F. de M. de Castro, Descrippfo dos Rios de Senna, 33, para. 69.
80 Mudenge, ‘Rozvi Empire’, 206, 229, 385-9.
81 Xavier, ‘Noticias’, in A. A. de Andrade, Relaf5es, 171-2.
82 ‘Inventario do Fundo do Seculo XVIII’ in Mofambique Documentario Trimestral,
no. 84, 1955, doc. I65, pp. 90-7 Zumbo, I3 Mar. 1769, Manuel da Costa.
83 The document reads ‘regulos e bareiros ou chefes’.
386 S. I. MUDENGE
districts immediately surrounding their capitals, worked under the control of
some royal agents (bareiros), there is not much more we can safely deduce
from the above document. Certainly we would be stretching the evidence
if we postulated the existence of a strictly enforced monopoly of external
trade by the Rozvi Mambos on the basis of the above document alone. Yet
it is on the basis of two of the above documents that the Rozvi Mambo’s
strict ‘state control’ of gold trade has been largely based.
We can get a clearer picture of the problem if we look briefly at the
trade system between Zumbo and the Rozvi empire as it emerges from
Portuguese documents about Zumbo. African traders, known as vasham-
badzi, traded throughout the Rozvi empire. They were itinerant traders
who moved from village to village and chiefdom to chiefdom selling their
goods. There were no special market days or market places where trade
was conducted. There is certainly no evidence to support a view that all
trading may have been held at the court of the Rozvi Mambo.84 The nearest
we come to this possibility was in I803 when an attempt was made by the
Portuguese of Zumbo to introduce a new method by which the trade of
Butwa could conceivably have been controlled by the Rozvi Mambo’s
court. On this occasion, the Portuguese requested the then Mambo to
send one of his grandees to Zumbo, so that he could accompany the
Zumbo vashambadzi to and from Zumbo. The chief function of the
grandee was to ensure that the vashambadzi did not trade in the bares of
Butwa before they had presented themselves at the Mambo’s court:
where the said Changamira, in his presence, ought to entrust the said Mussam-
bazes85 with their pangana9oens86 to his respective bareiros, with the express
command that as soon as the bartering was over, a report about the fazendas87
and the Mussambazes should be made to him [Changamira] and together with
the same grandee they [the Mussambazes] should be sent back annually to this
villa so that they could give the accounts of the panganagoens in the presence of
the said grandee.88
The suggestion was never put into practice because in I804 Zumbo
(Mucariva) was destroyed. The above document has sometimes been used
to argue that the Rozvi Mambo had a monopoly of trade. But from other
Zumbo documents coming before i803 it is clear that trading operations
did not take place only at the Mambo’s court but all over the bares of Butwa.
These bares of Butwa were found virtually all over what is now Southern
Rhodesia, stretching from Bulawayo to Bindura and from the Sanyati to
the Save river. And the Zumbo vashambadzi traversed all that region,
bartering for gold from village to village without necessarily ever visiting
the Mambo’s court.89
84 Sutherland-Harris, ‘Trade and the Rozwi Mambo’, 258.
85 Same as Vashambadzi. 86 Term meaning trade goods or loads.
87 Word used by the Portuguese in the Zambezi valley for cloth or goods.
88 A.H.U. AV. de Moc. Cx. 42, Mucariva, 29 Jan. I803, Manoel Francisco do Rozario.
89 A.H.U. AV. de Moc. Cx. 23, Mossambique, 3 Dec. I786, Manoel de Mello e Castro
to M. de M. e Castro; A.H.U. AV. de Mo9. Cx. 37, 9 Oct. i8oo. Pedro Ant6nio Jose da
THE ROLE OF FOREIGN TRADE IN THE ROZVI EMPIRE 387
Perhaps one of the most revealing pieces of evidence against the view
that the Mambo had a monopoly of all trading operations, and especially
the gold trade, is provided by the fact that among the items in which vassal
chiefs paid tribute were gold, ivory, beads and cloth.90 To pay one’s
tribute in gold and ivory implies the possession of these items before pay-
ment. And payment in beads and cloth indicates an ability to engage in
foreign trade, since these were the chief returns from the external trade
in gold and ivory. A policy of total monopoly would have been difficult
and expensive to enforce, and was probably an inefficient means of getting
the gold. In a monopoly situation, the subject chiefs would have had little
incentive to dig for much gold. On the other hand, getting the gold
through tribute was less difficult and served a dual purpose-economic
and political. The Mambos had a reasonably good system of enforcing
payment of tribute by their vassals, but they would have needed a much
bigger bureaucratic machine than the one we have described above to have
had an enforceable and workable monopoly in external trade. Through
this system, the profits of external trade filtered through the Rozvi political
machinery from the bottom to the top. By allowing his subjects to trade,
the Mambo avoided rousing undue resentment, but through tribute
collection he benefited from that trade.
Now that we have cleared some of the impediments to a proper assess-
ment of the role of foreign trade in the Rozvi empire, we should try to
evaluate the contribution this made to the Mambo’s power base. There is
no doubt that Rozvi rulers greatly valued their trading links with the
Portuguese, especially those at Zumbo. Evidence for this has already
been seen in the fact that in I743, I772, and I78I the Rozvi sent powerful
armies to protect the Feira of Zumbo from its enemies.91 The Rozvi
Mambos also protected the vashambadzi against robbery while trading in
Butwa. This policy of the Rozvi prompted one governor-general of Mozam-
bique to write, ‘Changamira, the most powerful [chief] of those interiors,
is a man without many defects, except for his colour and paganism;
because [if he had many defects] it would not be easy to understand his
trading policy and the reason why he is able to make others obey him and
love the Portuguese’ (my emphasis).92 It is doubtful whether the Changa-
mire’s ‘saintliness’ was the sole reason for his conduct. Enlightened self-
interest seems to have been more important. From the Portuguese the
Rozvi received luxury goods, e.g. different varieties of beads, sombreiros,
sea shells, rosaries of fake coral, handkerchiefs, chinaware, brass bells,
scissors, candles, cloth of various colours and aguadente (‘fire water’, a
Cunha to D. Rodrigo de Sousa Coutinho; A.H.U. AV. de Moc. Cx. 21, Zumbo, 20 June
I784, C. de Sousa to Governor of the Rivers; See also Annais do Conselho Ultramarino,
parte nao official, Serie II, I86-7, ‘Mappa das minas conhecidas no Districto de Senna’,
Senna, 30 July I857, Izidoro Correia Pereira.
90 See note 72 above.
91 See notes 49-51.
‘2 A.H.U. AV. de Moq. Cx. I4, Mocambique, 15 Aug. 1773, B.M.P. do Lago.
388 S. I. MUDENGE
kind of brandy).93 These exotic goods no doubt made life at court more
colourful for their imperial majesties. But these were luxury goods which,
as the documents show, came in small quantities. At the time of the investi-
ture of a new chief, the Rozvi Mambos used to send black and white calico
as part of the regalia of the new chief. Clearly therefore imported cloth
played an important part in the Rozvi political system. But it can hardly
be said to have been vitally important for the survival of the Rozvi empire.
Besides the question of investiture, there is little else we have seen to
warrant even the suggestion that the wealth of the Rozvi kingdom was
based on external trade.94
It is also apparent that not all the luxury items consumed in the Rozvi
empire were obtained from trade with the Portuguese: some were internally
produced. From the few items archaeologists have been able to recover
since the destruction and pillaging of the stone ruins of Rhodesia around
the end of the nineteenth century, it has been deduced that the Karanga
craftsmen worked iron, copper, bronze and gold. They could draw wire,
make bangles, manufacture knives, razors, rings, bracelets, chains, earrings
and so on, using these metals. In addition, they carved various objects in
ivory and soapstone, and made beads from ostrich eggs and other shells.
Since well before the Portuguese ever came to eastern Africa, the Shona
have woven a highly prized cotton cloth known as machira.95 While it is
true that the Rozvi economy was a largely agricultural one, it would be an
error to assume that externally acquired luxury trade goods always have
the same effect on all forms of subsistence agricultural economies, irrespec-
tive of the precise nature of the mode of economic production attained
within the state in question. In the Rozvi kingdom, some of the external
luxury goods, like beads and cloth, had equally valuable internal substi-
tutes.
We may in fact conclude that agriculture and pastoralism, especially
the latter, appear to have been the real economic basis of the Rozvi
empire. The Shona people, as one seventeenth-century Portuguese writer
observed,
will not exert themselves to seek gold unless they are constrained by necessity
for want of clothes or provisions, which are not wanting in the land, for it abounds
with them, namely millet, some rice, many vegetables, large and small cattle and
many hens. The land abounds with rivers of good water, and the greater
number of the Africans are inclined to agricultural and pastoral pursuits in which
their riches consist [my emphasis].96
9 For the detailed examples of the goods the Rozvi used to receive see Mudenge, ‘The
Rozvi Empire’, 385-9.
94 Sutherland-Harris, ‘Trade and the Rozwi Mambo’, 264.
95 D. Randall-MacIver, Mediaeval Rhodesia (London, I906, reprinted I971), 45, 49,
58; K. R. Robinson, Khami Ruins (Cambridge, I959), I44-58; P. S. Garlake, Great
Zimbabwe (London, I 973), III -3 I.
96 A. Bocarro, ‘Decada’, in G. M. Theal (ed.), Records of South Eastern Africa (R.S.E.A.)
(Cape Town; reprinted I964), III, 355.
THE ROLE OF FOREIGN TRADE IN THE ROZVI EMPIRE 389
Comments on the economic importance as well as the number and size
of the cattle found in the kingdom of Butwa are scattered in Portuguese
documents from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth century. For
example, in I506 Diogo de Alcaqova wrote that in about I490 a ruler of
Butwa offered about 4,ooo hornless cows to the Munhumutapa97; and in
I569 Fr Monclaro informs us that the cattle of Butwa were ‘as big as the
large oxen of France’.98 But according to Fr Gomes, so big were these
Butwa cattle in the mid-seventeenth century that one had to stand when
milking them.99 The importance of cattle to the economy of Butwa was
underlined by Fr Joao dos Santos who, writing at the end of the sixteenth
century, claimed that the people of Butwa were less interested in digging
for gold because ‘they are much occupied with the breeding of cattle of
which there are great numbers in these lands’.100 A further indication of
the numbers of Butwa cattle is provided by the case of one mid-eighteenth
century mushambadzi from Zumbo who collected as many as 8oo head of
cattle from his trading activities in Butwa.101 Even in the early nineteenth
century Butwa cattle were still being sold at the Feira of Manyika to the
Portuguese.102 The Rozvi used their cattle at that period both as baggage
animals and for riding,103 in addition to using them for meat and as a
form of storing wealth. Cattle were useful to pay the bride present (rovora).
Above all, a man with many cattle could use them to increase his influence
by the system of kuronzera, in which a man gives some of his cattle for
safe keeping to another man. The person to whom the cattle have been
ronzerwa can use the cattle in virtually any way he wishes, except that he
cannot dispose of them without the owner’s consent. Because the owner
of the cattle can, if he wishes, take back his cattle, this gives him influence
over his ‘client’. It would appear that the first Rozvi Mambo, Dombo I,
himself remembered in Portuguese sources as a notable cattle baron,104
may have risen to power and founded the Rozvi empire on the strength of
his cattle-keeping activities and his ability to redistribute the cattle through
the kuronzera system.105
97 Diogo de Alcacova to King, Cochin, 20 Nov. 1506, in Theal, R.S.E.A. i, 64.
98 Fr. Monclaro, ‘Viagem q’fizerao os p.es da Companhia de Jesus com Franco Barretto
na conquista de Monomotapa no anno de 1569′, in Theal, R.S.E.A., III, 237 and 227.
“‘ E. Axelson (ed.), ‘Viagem que fez o Padre Ant.0 Gomes, da Companhia de Jesus ao
Imperio de de [sic] Manomotapa; e assistencia que fez nas ditas terras de. Alg’us annos’
[addressed to Padre Joao Marachi, S.J., Verc&-Salcete, z January 1648], Studia, III (I959),
’97.
100 J. Dos Santos ‘Ethiopia Oriental’, in Theal, R.S.E.A., VII, 274.
101 ‘Fundo do Sec. XVIII’, in Mopambique, no. 84 (I955), 90-7, doc. i65, Zumbo,
I3 Mar. I769, Manuel da Costa.
102 G. J. Liesegang, ‘Beitriige zur Geschichte des Reiches der Gaza Nguni im sudlichen
Mo:ambique, I 820-I 895′ (Ph.D. thesis, K6ln, I 967), 36.
103 ‘Acressentamento’, as cited in note 3I.
104 ‘Corografica’, as cited in note 29, Conceicao, ‘Tratados dos Rios de Cuama’, I05,
para. I03.
105 In this respect cattle may have played not a dissimilar role for Dombo I as they
were to do for Moshoeshoe I, who according to P. B. Sanders, gained his supremacy over
the other Sotho chiefs mainly because he possessed more cattle than they, and used the
390 S. I. MUDENGE
In conclusion I would like to stress that this article is not meant to be a
general attack on the importance of external trade (the so-called ‘trade
stimulus hypothesis’) in the rise and development of some pre-colonial
African states. It is a corrective of its uncritical application. Some of its
exponents do not always investigate the true nature and development of
the modes of internal economic production attained in each state under
investigation. They fail to appreciate the fact that the role and impact of
external trade are to a large extent determined and defined by the socio-
political and economic factors obtaining in each state. Instead they tend
to concentrate on the description of the types of goods traded, their
marketing and such other aspects of the organization of external trade.
They rarely analyse the actual impact of external trade on a particular state
under consideration. Such impact is often assumed a priori.
In the case of the Rozvi empire this approach has led to a distorted
picture of that polity. A closer examination of the Rozvi empire reveals
that most of the externally acquired luxury goods had equally valuable
internal substitutes. And, in any case, the socio-political significance of
such wealth does not appear to have been nearly as great as that of the
legendary cattle of Butwa. These cattle were the true savings banks and
insurance policies of the ordinary Rozvi, which the Rozvi rulers used
above all to distribute for safe-keeping to their subjects, who were then
entitled to the usufruct. In this way, cattle provided visible social, economic
and political bonds between the Rozvi rulers and their subjects.
The Rozvi empire was able to benefit from and enjoy the fruits of
external trade as well as to ensure the safe flow of that trade largely because
of its power, much of which was internally generated. Thus the Rozvi
example underlines the fact that if one is to make a meaningful assessment
of the impact of outside forces on any society, be it African or otherwise,
one must first of all look at the level of social, political and economic
development attained by that society before coming to any conclusion.
SUMMARY
Recent studies by the historians of pre-colonial Africa have tended to assume
that external trade has always led to the formation or enlargement of states, and
was crucial for the continued existence of these states. An example where an
uncritical application of the above ‘trade-stimulus hypothesis’ has led to some
distortion of reality has been in the study of the Rozvi empire in Southern
Rhodesia in the eighteenth century. Previous students of the Rozvi empire have
claimed that the latter was such a loosely connected tribal confederacy that its
internal power bases-given as military and religious-were politically so slender
that on their own they could not have sustained whatever power the Rozvi ruler
wielded. Instead, it is said that the main source of the power exercised by the
cattle through the Mafisa system (the Sotho equivalent of the Shona kuronzera) to increase
his influence. See P. B. Sanders, ‘Sekonyela and Moshweshwe; failure and success in the
aftermath of the Difaqane’, in Y. Afr. Hist. x, 3 (I969), 439-55.
THE ROLE OF FOREIGN TRADE IN THE ROZVI EMPIRE 39I
Rozvi Mambo came mainly from the latter’s ability to redistribute the profits of
external trade, especially that of the gold trade of which he is said to have had a
strictly enforced monopoly.
This paper tries to show that the claim that the Rozvi empire was based
mainly on foreign trade is not supportable on the basis of the evidence so far
advanced. To do this the paper challenges the view that the Mambo had a
monopoly of trade. It shows that this conclusion is arrived at through a mis-
understanding of the sources. In reality, the Rozvi rulers took part in external
trade and influenced it, but they did not possess a controlling monopoly. Rozvi
subjects were also free to take part in external trade, provided they obeyed the
Mambo’s decrees for regulating and restricting possible subversive activities by
foreign traders in the Rozvi empire. The picture of the Rozvi empire that emerges
from contemporary Portuguese records and oral evidence is that of a relatively
stable, virile and powerful polity which from time to time used to despatch
expeditionary forces to regions well beyond its territorial boundaries in order to
maintain law and order to protect Rozvi trade and political interests. The strength
of the Rozvi empire is seen to have come from internal rather than external fac-
tors. Cattle rather than external trade appear to have been the most important
economic power base of the Rozvi rulers.
- Article Contents
- Issue Table of Contents
p. 373
p. 374
p. 375
p. 376
p. 377
p. 378
p. 379
p. 380
p. 381
p. 382
p. 383
p. 384
p. 385
p. 386
p. 387
p. 388
p. 389
p. 390
p. 391
The Journal of African History, Vol. 15, No. 3 (1974), pp. 351-526
Front Matter
A Note on the Relative Importance of Slaves and Gold in West African Exports [pp. 351-356]
New Data on European Mortality in West Africa: The Dutch on the Gold Coast, 1719-1760 [pp. 357-371]
The Role of Foreign Trade in the Rozvi Empire: A Reappraisal [pp. 373-391]
The Lagos Consulate, 1851-1861: An Outline [pp. 393-416]
Fly and Elephant Parties: Political Polarization in Dahomey, 1840-1870 [pp. 417-432]
Initiatives and Objectives in Ethio-European Relations, 1827-1862 [pp. 433-444]
Alluvial Gold Mining and Trade in Nineteenth-Century South Central Africa [pp. 445-456]
Ethnography and Administration: A Study of Anglo-Tiv ‘Working Misunderstanding’ [pp. 457-477]
Review Article
Review: Great States Revisited [pp. 479-488]
Reviews
Review: An African Chronology [pp. 489-490]
Review: Sources of Yoruba History [pp. 490-491]
Review: Southern Africa: Another Lost Opportunity [pp. 491-493]
Review: A History of Botswana [pp. 493-495]
Review: The Lozi Kingdom [pp. 495-496]
Review: Slaving in the Sudan [pp. 497-498]
Review: Revolution in Senegambia [pp. 499-500]
Review: The Decline and Fall of Bornu [pp. 501-503]
Review: Russians in Ethiopia [pp. 503-506]
Review: Anthropology, History, and the Middle Congo [pp. 506-510]
Review: In Dike Territory [pp. 510-511]
Review: Emirs and Rebels [pp. 511-513]
Review: Pan-Africanism Reconsidered [pp. 513-515]
Review: In Full Sale [pp. 516-517]
Review: Nine Views of the Southern Sudan [pp. 517-518]
Review: The Bulletin of the Academie Royale des Sciences D’outre-Mer, 1971-1973 [pp. 519-520]
Shorter Notices
Review: untitled [p. 521]
Review: untitled [p. 522]
Review: untitled [pp. 522-523]
Review: untitled [p. 523]
Review: untitled [p. 524]
Review: untitled [pp. 524-525]
Review: untitled [pp. 525-526]
Back Matter
Professor Mhoze Chikowero, History 49 A, UCSB 2024
Lecture Two
Cheikh Anta Diop,
African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality?
Who was Cheikh Anta Diop?
Born in
1
923, Diop was one of greatest scholars to emerge in the African world in the 20th century. Diop was a leading historian, physicist, chemist, anthropologist, linguist, and Pan-African scholar-activist of Africa. He was also a keen political thinker and organizer who shaped the African world on the continent and the diaspora, leading to the rise of the Afrocentric school of thought, now synonymous with such names as Professor Kete Asante of Temple University, etc.
He utilized his command of these numerous disciplines to intervene in and reshape thinking about foundational questions regarding the history of Africa and the world—that is, the origins of human civilization.
His thesis
Utilizing
interdisciplinary methods, Diop uncovered new evidence and re-read ancient writings to posit with unprecedented and unimpeachable clarity the thesis that ancient Egypt—Kemet—is not only a Black African civilization, but also, in addition, that this was the origin of human civilization.
A second aspect of his thesis is that ancient Egypt is part and parcel of African ancient civilization, undivided. In his words: “The history of Africa will remain suspended in air and cannot be written correctly until African historians connect it with the history of Egypt.”
Writing in an age of comfortable imperialism—both political and intellectual, Diop’s work had a serious political implication. Thus wrote the leading scholar of Africa, John Henrik Clark:
“All African people, everywhere, are closer to a better understanding of their history and destiny because of the personality and work of Cheikh Anta Diop,” a scholar-activist dedicated to science in the interest of his people.
The story of a book
As with pathbreaking works by many other luminary scholars in a world infected by racist ideas, Eurocentrism, and epistemic and cognitive oppression, Diop struggled to find a publisher in the western world, where he started his intellectual journey. Other authors similarly impeded include Frantz Fanon, Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, Mhoze Chikowero, etc., why is this? Because ideas can change the world; they can destroy or empower a people. Diop’s ideas turned on the head ideas that formed a foundation of the European subjugation of Africa, their world, their humanity, and their foundational shaping of the world.
Why did the European world feel threatened by his ideas?
The world as presently constituted is a white man’s world—conceived, birthed and nurtured by the white man in his white image. The European man presents himself as the creator-god of the world. Everything in the world—in fact, the world itself, starts and ends with him. An African origin of human civilization thus upset his cart of apples—which is his cart of unearned power.
So both author and his ideas had to be discredited, silenced and suppressed, and the magnificence of a people’s achievements stolen, and credited to somebody else. This is what we call epistemic colonialism. The substance of the grand heist is evident in everyday deployment of this history—where Egypt is claimed as a white European civilization, outside of the geographical and intellectual part of Africa—in research by western scholars, in popular films, world history syllabi, and western popular imagination.
But for this grant intellectual theft of a people’s heritage, identity and pride, Diop would not have to write this book, restating the glory of African civilization.
Basil Davidson
, that honest British historian of Africa, observed the otherwise unnecessary truth:
“But isn’t Egypt… quite simply a part of Africa? The civilization of Pharaonic Egypt, arising sometime around 3500 B.C. and continuing at least until the Roman dispositions, has been explained to us as evolving either in or less total isolation from Africa or as a product of West Asian stimulus. On this deeply held view, the land of the Nile appears to have detached itself from the delta of the Mediterranean on a course veering broadly towards the coasts of Syria. And there it apparently remained, floating somewhere in the seas of the Levant, until Arab conquerors hauled it back to where it has since belonged.”
Q: Who is with Davidson here? How has Egypt been taught to you? What has been the place of Egypt in your education?
Fortunately, Cheikh Anta Diop has had good company—numerous African and non-African scholars who have sworn to find out and uphold the truth: Martin Bernal’s
Black Athena, etc.
Unfortunately, it is the dilemma of European myths passed as history that forced Diop to take forays into the depths of not only Egyptian history, but also the writings of European authors who were unencumbered by these prejudices, and repeatedly straddle the stretches of Southern African history to show to deaf ears that “the Nile River was the world’s first cultural highway, stretching four thousand miles into the body of Africa, bringing culture and people out of the heart of Africa who gave stimulus to Egypt and constantly renewed its energy,” thus linking it with the rise of ancient Ghana in the west.
Diop had to demonstrate that “history cannot be restricted to the limits of ethnic group, nation, or culture. Roman history is Greek, as well as Roman, and both Greek and Roman history are Egyptian history because the entire Mediterranean was civilized by Egypt; Egypt in turn borrowed from other parts of Africa, especially Ethiopia.”
Concerning the Mediterranean, which was already under Egyptian influence, Diop demonstrates that this was initially peaceful, coming into the African world through Greek scholars like Herodotus, one of many European students of Africa.
To understand the story of Egypt, it is important to understand what other Africans say about it. Ethiopians, as Herodotus wrote, said Egypt was one of their colonies, which was brought to them by the deity Osiris. Herodotus repeatedly referred to Egyptians as being dark-skinned people with wooly hair, with the same tint of skin as the Ethiopians.
By the time of Herodotus’ visit (484-425 B.C.), Egypt’s Golden Age was over, having suffered several invasions—many Kushitic invasions coming from within Africa in 751 B.C., and the Assyrian invasions from Western Asia (so-called Middle East), starting from 671 B.C. Yet in spite of these invasions, Egypt was still identifiably Black by the time of Herodotus’ visit.
And this is Gaston Maspero (1846-1916), summing up the view of the ancient writers in his
The Dawn of Civilization:
“By the almost unanimous testimony of ancient historians, the Egyptians belong to an African race which first settled in Ethiopia on the middle Nile, following the course of the river they gradually reached the sea.”
Yet, if Egypt is a dilemma in white historiography, it is
a created historiography, as John Henrik Clark points out. The gist of the dilemma is that most western historians falsely whitened Egypt. To do this, they had to ignore a trove of works by other western historians, such as Gerald Massey’s
Ancient Egypt,
The Light of the World (1907), and his
The Book of Beginnings, and
The Natural Genesis. Other writers with heads properly screwed on include A.H.L. Heeren (1833),
Politics, Intercourse, and Trade of the Carthaginians and Ethiopians, and Count C.F. Volney’s
The Ruins of Empires (1797).
Another author, E.A. Wallis Budge, states:
“The prehistoric native of Egypt, both in the old and new Stone Ages, was African, and there is every reason for saying that the earliest settlers came from the south.”
Budge adds: “There are many things in the manners and customs and religions of the historic Egyptians that suggest that the original home of their ancestors was in a country in the neighbourhood of Uganda and Punt.”
Another set of ancient scholars, Diodorus Siculus and Stephanus of Byzantium:
“The ancient Ethiopians, or at any rate the Black people of remote antiquity, were the earliest of all civilized peoples, … and the first civilized inhabitants of ancient Egypt were members of what is referred to as the Black race, who entered the country as emigrants from Ethiopia.”
Last citation, Volney:
“It was then, on the borders of the Upper Nile, among a Black race of men, that organized the complicated system of worship of the starts, considered in relation to the productions of the earth and the labors of agriculture; and this first worship, characterized by their adoration under their own forms and national attributes, was a simple proceeding of the human mind.”
These facts were a given when these white historians were writing, yet their more recent counterparts ignored these perspectives and invested lots of their energy into falsifying the historical interpretation of Egypt.
Numerous, more recent scholars have built on these observations, including Carter G. Woodson, W.E.B. Dubois, Willis N. Huggins, and Charles C. Seifort.
Diop illustrates with clarity the paradox of colonized knowledge production by highlighting the so-called
Hamitic hypothesis, which has the biblical Ham cursed, turned black and driven south to become the ancestor of the Black races—for what? For “seeing the nakedness of his father.” Yet, on the other hand, the same Ham is whitened whenever one seeks the origin of civilization, because there, in the south, he is inhabiting the first civilized country in the world. It must not belong to him.
Whence came the Egyptians?
We have established the southern origins of the Egyptians, who gradually moved north in response to their changing, drying environments, following the Nile—a life-giving watercourse. This was a movement that was adaptive, responding to the needs of the local environment. As the two desert locales on either side of the Nile limited what resources were available to them, habitation along the narrow, fertile valley required expert technique in irrigation and dam building, precise calculations to forecast the river’s inundations and their consequent implications on cultivation, planting and harvesting. It also entailed the invention of geometry to delimit the reach of the flood waters, and new ways of farming the long strips of land, leading to the innovation from the hand-held hoe to the ox-drawn plough. These inventions wouldn’t make sense in the land-locked interior. Scientific and technological invention moved in accord with the environment.
It was here, on the banks of a river that gifted life to the people, that Africans interpreted the behaviors of the land, the river, and the cosmos that the people developed complex systems of self-representation in the broad catalogue of deities that each aligned with their varied elements—from the capricious flood waters, the movement of stars, the sun, and their relationships with agricultural cycles. These representations were in the people’s own image, or in the images of their animal world, as seen in deities with heads of different animals. As in broader Africa, each deity held the people’s fate in a particular way. They were anu—vanhu (in the name still applied in Southern Africa)—people.
Here is Amélineu, attesting to these inventions after his reading of the
Book of the Dead and
Texts of the Pyramids:
“These Anu [humans]… were an agricultural people, raising cattle on a large scale along the Nile, shutting themselves up in walled cities for defensive purposes. To these people we can attribute, without fear of error, the most ancient Egyptian books,
The Book of the Dead and the
Texts of the Pyramids, consequently, all the myths or religious teachings. I would add almost all the philosophical systems then known and still called Egyptian. They evidently knew how to use
metals, at least elementary metals. They made the earliest attempts at
writing, for the whole Egyptian tradition attributes this art to Thoth, the great Hermes, an Anu like Osiris, who is called the Onian in Chapter XV of
The Book of the Dead and in
The Texts of the Pyramids. Certainly the people already knew the principal arts; it left proof of this in the tomb of Osiris, and in those sepulchers objects have been found bearing the unmistakable stamp of their origin—such as carved ivory, or the little head of a Nubian girl found in a tomb near that feline head—all documents published in the first volume of
Fouilles d’Abydos.”
This point needs no overemphasizing. But something about source materials needs pointing put.
Egyptians left us their thoughts on rock slabs, such as what historians have called Narmer’s Tablet, key in analyzing the story of the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt. Many of these writings were unearthed in the South, in the temples of Sudanic Kush/Meroe.
The south is not an unimportant outpost in the origination of human civilization in Egypt: it was the source, not just of the rich black soils that fertilized the valley for agriculture, but also an important abode for many of its deities, including Amon/Amun, Osiris and Isis. During the multiple times that Egypt was attacked by the people of the sea (Indo-Europeans and others from the north and west), it was Meroitic Sudan that would liberate and protect it, restoring the threatened monarchical system. The south is also a broad canvas for deciphering the wellspring of Egypt’s cultural constitution. The system of animal totems, circumcision, deification and ritual death of the king, etc, familiar in Egypt, form a core of the cultures of the south, all the way to South Africa. At various points of its weakness, Kush/Sudan provided rulers for Egypt. I must quote Diop here to demonstrate the value of the south to the life and survival of Egypt:
“Whenever the nation was threatened by an invasion of Whites from Asia or Europe via the Mediterranean, whenever such incursions disrupted national life, the political power migrated to the south, toward its ancestral habitat. Inevitably, salvation, in other words, the reconquest of political power, reunification, and national rebirth were achieved through the efforts of the legitimate Black dynasties indigenous to the south.”
This threat from the north manifested at various points through the millennia, including from the branded whites that some Pharaohs had developed a habit of pressing into their service laboring in the delta lands.
Such people were the only slave class in Egypt—often branded, and they sometimes were inducted to serve as mercenary soldiers defending the nation from the increasing rebellions against the monarchies or from across the seas. Often, such captives were trained and redeployed back to their homelands to govern as vassals in favor of Egypt. This created constant risk of infiltration, rebellion and invasion. “So it was as a prisoner of war, transformed into a slave, chained and branded, that the white man first entered Egyptian civilization,” writes Diop (p.213). This would become a key conduit for the successive invasions and eventual conquest of Egypt by the various hordes from the seas.
Egypt and the Peopling of Africa
We shall discuss, in subsequent lectures, the theme of
intra-African mobilities. But here, it is important to point out that many Africans from across the continent often point to ancient Egypt as their origin, while Egyptians pointed at local origins. Many Yoruba (west African), Dogon (west Africa), Bakuba (central Africa) and Karanga (Zimbabwe) legends of creation identify either Ethiopia or Egypt as their cradle. Indeed, Karanga means “children of the sun,” and their ritual
retso cloth is designed to represent the steps of the pyramids. The latter idea gives credence to the common cosmology that identifies an afterlife associated with divine deities and the life-giving force of the sun, stars and the moon. Diop traced a long catalogue of clan names and other, common names that ancient Egypt shares with the broad African world. In the pre-colonized African world, when a king dies, they were mummified and hidden in mountain caverns—ninga, the principal purpose of the pyramids in Egypt. Also, politically, Egypt belonged within the continent’s cultures with the monarchical system, which was often seen as divine.
Stepped retso cloth that Southern African hunters, healers and spirit mediums to commune with the cosmos.
This map is one way to read ancient Egypt in its proper African continental context. By following the river down south, against the current, you get to the wellsprings of the civilization. The historic role that Kush/Meroe played in buffering Egypt is what South Sudan is playing today in checking the constant pressures of southward Arab expansionism that is spawning genocides in Sudan.
Amun’s temple in Meroe:
Left: observation stones, and right: water tanks and baths at Amun’s temple, Meroe:
Figurines discovered at the Royal Bath, 3rd Century B.C. Pay attention to the hairstyles.
Concluding remarks
Diop’s work is foundational in setting straight the history of Egypt, Africa and the world. It deconstructs and corrects the deliberate ruination of African achievement, which ruins have held back Africans mentally as part of the manufactured inferiority complexes. It enables us to throw into the trash can the nonsensical notions that Africa needed a supposed civilizing european hand to develop, because development—driven by indigenous African ideas, has never been a foreign concept to Africa. The problem that we now have to grapple with becomes different—why, and how, did African
regress from this magnificence?
See you next week, but before then, please engage with the primary source (“Be a scribe”), and
The Lost Libraries of Timbuktu that I shared on Canvas. These materials are key to ground our theme more solidly. There is more material for those who would like to conduct their research on this subject. Just ask.
Best,
MC
1
image5
image1
image2
image3
image4
South African Archaeological Society
THE MAPUNGUBWE–GREAT ZIMBABWE RELATIONSHIP IN HISTORY
Author(s): MUNYARADZI MANYANGA and SHADRECK CHIRIKURE
Source: Goodwin Series , APRIL 2019, Vol. 12, TOWARDS A HISTORY OF ARCHAEOLOGY
FROM SOUTH AFRICA (APRIL 2019), pp. 72-84
Published by: South African Archaeological Society
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26643042
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
South African Archaeological Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and
extend access to Goodwin Series
This content downloaded from
72.194.25.31 on Mon, 04 Jan 2021 11:23:00 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26643042
72 South African Archaeological Society Goodwin Series 12: 72–84, 2019
THE MAPUNGUBWE–GREAT ZIMBABWE RELATIONSHIP IN
HISTORY: IMPLICATIONS FOR THE EVOLUTION OF STUDIES
OF SOCIO-POLITICAL COMPLEXITY IN SOUTHERN AFRICA
MUNYARADZI MANYANGA1 & SHADRECK CHIRIKURE2
1Archaeology Unit, History Department, University of Zimbabwe, Harare, Zimbabwe
E-mail: manyanga@gmail.com
2Department of Archaeology, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa
E-mail: shadreck.chirikure@uct.ac.za
ABSTRACT
This paper engages with the historiography of the relationship between
Mapungubwe (AD 1220–1290) and Great Zimbabwe (AD 1000–
1700), two examples of prominent centres of power in precolonial
southern Africa. Separated as the sites were by just over 300
kilometres, archaeologists have always sought to establish cultural
connections between them. From the discovery of Mapungubwe in
1931 until the late 1970s, it was interpreted as a lesser order settle-
ment under Great Zimbabwe. However, from the early 1980s,
Mapungubwe became the cradle of the Zimbabwe culture, with Great
Zimbabwe being a secondary offshoot from the former. Still, little
regard was accorded to potentially important sites occupying intersti-
tial spaces between Mapungubwe and Great Zimbabwe, while African
philosophies on landscape, territories and boundaries were never fully
incorporated into any paradigm. Consequently, this exclusionary
genesis of existing interpretations mandates that any new work must
critically engage with the historiography of the relationship between
Great Zimbabwe and Mapungubwe in order to transform and decolo-
nise the knowledge beyond the ‘business-as-usual’ approach typical of
traditional scholarship of this region.
Key words: Mapungubwe, Great Zimbabwe, genesis, historio-
graphy, African philosophies, decolonisation.
INTRODUCTION
The Berlin Congress of 1884/5, which crucially created the
borders that now separate many African countries, barely
considered any of the pre-existing cultural, economic and
political affiliations of the different African peoples when
demarcating boundaries for the new colonies. Often, borders
divided related peoples, while unrelated peoples found them-
selves within the borders of a new, single colony. The colonies
that fell under various European countries, such as Portugal
and Britain, had greater ties with the imperial centres of
Lisbon and London than with their African continental
relatives and neighbours. As an exclusively expatriate affair,
archaeology often saw the collaboration of archaeologists
working in colonies of the same power, and isolation between
archaeologists working in colonies of different powers.
Because Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and South Africa
were under British rule, archaeologists in these territories often
realised the necessity of crossing political boundaries in build-
ing interpretations. However, they just as often disregarded
neighbouring countries, such as Mozambique, which were
under the Portuguese.
By the beginning of the 20th century, the British had
numerous colonies in southern Africa: South Africa, Southern
Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), Northern Rhodesia (Zambia),
Nyasaland (Malawi), and Bechuanaland (Botswana) which
was a protectorate. The two Rhodesias, Nyasaland and South
Africa had a highly interconnected political and economic
history. Cecil John Rhodes, whose British South Africa Com-
pany obtained a royal charter to colonise lands north of
the Limpopo, was a powerful political figure in South Africa.
On learning about Great Zimbabwe, Rhodes was so enchanted
that symbols and artefacts from the site came to inspire
iconography at his Groote Schuur residence in Cape Town,
and among others, the Rhodes House at Oxford University.
Given this political importance, Great Zimbabwe and related
sites became a focal point for the development of Iron Age (AD
200 to 1900) archaeology in southern Africa.
Conditioned by the region’s political history, Iron Age
archaeology was until the 1930s, practised mostly by enthusi-
asts. However, the seeds of the professionalisation of the
discipline in British colonies had been sown. The first legisla-
tion in Southern Rhodesia was the Ancient Relics Act of 1902,
the same year that a museum was established in Bulawayo. In
South Africa, the first such Act was the Bushman Relics Protec-
tion Act (No. 22 of 1911). From then onwards, developments
in South African legislation influenced those in Southern
Rhodesia, and in Bechuanaland. The common trend, however,
was that the discipline of archaeology was to become fully
professionalised by the 1950s. Since museum administrations
were in modern towns, most sites that were recorded were
around these areas. Furthermore, because archaeology was a
European affair, white settler farmers commonly reported sites
to the museums. For example, the discovery of Mapungubwe
was led by local white farmers, resulting in an active search for
sites in the surrounding areas of South Africa and Southern
Rhodesia. Meanwhile, research was also done in and around
Great Zimbabwe, and in areas in proximity to the town of
Masvingo. Because sites such as Mapungubwe and Great
Zimbabwe had exciting material for those involved, they
quickly imagined connections, some of which became estab-
lished lore, and yet they never involved African communities
in verifying such connections.
By the 1960s and 1970s, Iron Age archaeology was fully
professionalised, but the problem of research coverage
remained a strong issue. Connections were made between
widely separated sites that were archaeologically better known
and that were deemed to be important, using a Western value
system. Since the early part of the 20th century, archaeologists
working in southern Africa have compared notes and, in
a number of instances, adopted similar perspectives in the
interpretation of the precolonial past of the region. From the
end of the 20th century to the present, common themes and
personalities have created a fused interpretation of the south-
ern African past.
Since the 1960s, the study of settled communities in south-
ern Africa elicited a common approach because the archaeol-
ogy was perceived as the work of related Bantu peoples, who
typically herded livestock, cultivated various domestic crops,
This content downloaded from
72.194.25.31 on Mon, 04 Jan 2021 11:23:00 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
South African Archaeological Society Goodwin Series 12: 72–84, 2019 73
manufactured iron and copper implements, lived together in
permanent villages, and made similar or related ceramics (see
Phillipson 2005; Huffman 2014). They are also thought to have
shared a common ideology with a typical belief system in a
higher God, reached through the intercession of ancestors.
Settlement location and settlement patterns were thought to
conform to a predetermined model that reflected their Bantu
roots. Many archaeologists working in southern Africa there-
fore look at the Later Iron Age sites in southern Africa as repre-
senting signatures of past people who shared a common
ideology (Fig. 1). Mapungubwe and Great Zimbabwe have
been subjected to such models, and are believed to have been
the work of Shona people, a linguistic group in modern Zimba-
bwe. The history of research on Mapungubwe and Great
Zimbabwe provides interesting reading, and some of the old
debates and perspectives have found their way into the current
debate on the origins of the Zimbabwe culture.
HISTORIOGRAPHY OF MAPUNGUBWE
The Mapungubwe Cultural Landscape is a significant site
because it is associated with the development of socio-political
complexity in southern Africa. The evolution of the state
at Mapungubwe was a gradual development, which began
during the 11th century to probably the 14th century, and
beyond (see Manyanga 2007). Mapungubwe Hill and its trea-
sure were well known to African communities who lived in the
area of the Shashe and Limpopo valley. It was regarded as a
sacred place by the local African people, and this kept the site
intact through a system of taboos and prohibitions associated
with its sacred status. Among the local African communities,
the site of Mapungubwe and its treasure remained a well-kept
secret as was required by tradition. Early prospecting on the
site and disclosure of its treasures is associated with one
François Bernard Rudolph Lotrie, whose activities ignited
rumours of a forbidden hill with gold (see Fouché 1937;
Tiley-Nel 2011). Reporting of the site to the outside world is
credited to the Van Graan family, local farmers and prospec-
tors, who in the early 1930s, coerced a local African inhabitant
to reveal the location and access to the much talked about ‘hill
of gold’. Fouché recounts the ordeal of the unknown young
African man:
The native, who was literally shivering with fright and had to
be forcibly detained, at last pointed out the secret stairway to
the top (Fouché 1937: 1).
After that, the site became victim to prospectors, looters,
and antiquarianism (Meyer 1998; Carruthers 2006). The leaders
among these was the Van Graan family, father and son, who
reported some of the outstanding archaeology of Mapungub-
we Hill, but notably failed to declare everything they found.
Systematic research at Mapungubwe is associated with the
work of Leo Fouché (1880–1949), who conducted various
expeditions between 1933 and 1940 (see Fouché 1937; Meyer
2006). His work was complemented by that of Clarence van
Riet Lowe, Neville Jones, and ceramic specialist John Schofield.
From then on, the government of the Union of South Africa
(1910–1948) began to take a keen interest in the archaeological
work at Mapungubwe and regarded it “[…] as a matter of
FIG. 1. Zimbabwe and Khami phase sites, some of which are mentioned in the text.
This content downloaded from
72.194.25.31 on Mon, 04 Jan 2021 11:23:00 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
national interest” (Fouche 1937: 6). It became a government
project funded under the civil service, where it was supposed
to help create a sense of national identity for the emergent
South African nation (see Carruthers 2006; Shepherd 2002).
The Union government then set up a committee to drive
research, and entered an agreement with the University of
Pretoria to spearhead the research at Mapungubwe. While the
government was intent on having a say about the knowledge
and narratives generated by Mapungubwe, the researchers
were keen to address what they considered the research ques-
tion of the time: the antiquity and nature of the ancient ruins
period in southern Africa (see Fouché 1937; Galloway 1937;
Jones 1937; Schofield 1937). Interestingly, this early research
always had a regional scope as it intended to compare
Mapungubwe with ruins north of the Limpopo. Jones’ (1937)
analysis of artefacts, structures and features demonstrated the
Bantu character of the site and its close affinities with Great
Zimbabwe. Schofield’s (1937) analysis of ceramics revealed
close links with the Zimbabwe ceramics, from which he
concluded that Mapungubwe was an outpost of Shona culture
but with a fusion of Sotho culture (Schofield 1937: 54). The
ethnographic work by Lestrade (1937) saw connections
between the African communities in the Shashe–Limpopo
basin, such as Shona, Venda, Sotho, Lea, Kalanga, and Thwa-
mamba, as having connections with Mapungubwe. Galloway
(1937) struck a different note when his analysis of the skeletal
remains erroneously ascribed them to non-Bantu people. The
ideas of Fouché and some of his colleagues proved too progres-
sive for the time and it is not surprising that he was subse-
quently hounded out of his job with the growth of Afrikaner
nationalism, culminating in institutionalised apartheid policies
after 1948.
Guy Gardner continued with research at Mapungubwe
and K2 from 1935 to 1940, and produced the delayed
Mapungubwe Volume II publication in 1963. He carried out
large-scale excavations which resulted in the recovery of
graves, large quantities of artefacts, and information about
climates in the past. His interpretation of the site changed over
the period, and he finally regarded K2 and Mapungubwe as
having been occupied by the Khoe who were later overrun by
the Bantu (Gardner 1963: 60). The University of Pretoria contin-
ued with research at Mapungubwe until recently. The south-
ern terrace at Mapungubwe was excavated by Sentker and
Coertze in 1953 and 1954 (Meyer 1998; Tiley-Nel 2011). Excava-
tions were carried out by Hannes Eloff and Andries Meyer
(see Meyer 1998) with a view to establishing stratigraphic
sequences at the site. The stratigraphic analysis was comple-
mented by the use of radiocarbon dating. The most recent
excavations were conservation related (see Nienaber & Hutton
2003), and these have added to the understanding of the
material sequences at Mapungubwe and Bambandyanalo (K2).
Today, the Mapungubwe Collection consists of a vast array of
material culture excavated over the past 84 years. However, the
Mapungubwe material is highly fragmented and is housed at
various repositories in South Africa (see Tiley-Nel 2011). Never-
theless, the analysis of these materials has yielded valuable
information on subsistence, technology, crafts, trade, and past
environments.
Through these years of research, Mapungubwe was inves-
tigated and interpreted with little input from local communi-
ties. The idea that these communities were descendants of the
builders of Mapungubwe, whose knowledge could be utilised
in the interpretation of the site and its material culture, was
not unknown (see Lestrade 1937). Nevertheless, their role was
relegated to providing labour during excavations and conser-
vation work (Fig. 2). Throughout the colonial and apartheid
period, local communities became increasingly alienated from
their heritage (see Chirikure et al. 2010). The post-apartheid era
saw local and descendent communities galvanise themselves,
and today they are actively involved in activities at Mapun-
gubwe. In 2007, representatives of the Vhangona, Remba and
Venda made a successful claim for the return of human remains
that had been recovered from Mapungubwe and K2, removed,
and for years kept in museums and university laboratories.
These remains were reburied in the Mapungubwe Cultural
Landscape (see Nienaber et al. 2008; Nel 2011; Schoeman &
74 South African Archaeological Society Goodwin Series 12: 72–84, 2019
FIG. 2. African labourers working on the excavations at Mapungubwe Hill in 1939. (Photograph courtesy of Mapungubwe Archive, University of Pretoria
Museums.)
This content downloaded from
72.194.25.31 on Mon, 04 Jan 2021 11:23:00 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
South African Archaeological Society Goodwin Series 12: 72–84, 2019 75
Pikirayi 2011; Pikirayi 2016). Pikirayi (2016) observed that com-
munities were not merely asking for restitution and reburial,
but were now demanding socially relevant archaeology, and
their own participation in knowledge production. Such
demands were also expressed during a recently held commu-
nity workshop (29 August–3 September 2017) at Mapungubwe,
organised by SANParks.
HISTORIOGRAPHY OF GREAT ZIMBABWE
Great Zimbabwe is a Wold Heritage Site, acclaimed for its
unique artistic and architectural achievements. It represents
the remains of a Shona civilisation that flourished between the
11th and 17th centuries. The site consists of the Hill Complex,
the Great Enclosure, and the Valley Enclosures (see Fig. 3).
During the 16th century, the Portuguese on the east coast of
Africa made reference to it as an important economic and politi-
cal centre. At the time of European contact at the end of the 19th
century, Great Zimbabwe was well known to the local inhabit-
ants who, by that time, only utilised it for religious purposes
(see Matenga 2012). The control of the site was so important to
the local chiefs that they saw its custodianship worth quarrel-
ling over (see Burke 1969; Fontein 2006). Probably the earliest
European to reach Great Zimbabwe was Jan Adam Renders, a
German-American hunter and trader who lived at Great
Zimbabwe and established a trading post there in 1868. The
best known description of Great Zimbabwe was by German
geologist Carl Gottlieb Mauch in 1871. Using the prevailing
myth and fable of his time, Mauch opined that Great Zimba-
bwe had been built at the instruction of the Queen of Sheba
(Burke 1969). The involvement of Renders and Mauch at Great
Zimbabwe has been linked with the collection of several
artefacts – and inevitably also theft – as suggested in Mauch’s
diaries (see Matenga 2012). In 1891, Cecil John Rhodes commis-
sioned British archaeologist James Theodore Bent to carry out
archaeological investigations at Great Zimbabwe. These inves-
tigations were meant to prove that Great Zimbabwe had
Semitic connections. Indeed, Bent was happy to oblige and
echoed Rhodes’ thinking that Great Zimbabwe was not built by
FIG. 3. Plan of Great Zimbabwe showing the various constituent enclosures (after Chirikure, Pollard, et al. 2013).
This content downloaded from
72.194.25.31 on Mon, 04 Jan 2021 11:23:00 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
local Africans. In 1892, the antiquarian John Willoughby carried
out surveys and excavations at Great Zimbabwe. He is credited
with producing some of the earliest plans of the Great Enclo-
sure, and carried out total excavations in the Valley Enclosures,
close to where the site museum is now located.
Great Zimbabwe continued to attract many non-profes-
sional – and unprofessional – hands; between 1902 and 1904,
Richard N. Hall carried out what he thought was a ‘clean-up’
operation of the monument, clearing it of what he thought was
the dirt and debris of the local African occupation. His work is
famed for destroying much of the archaeological deposit at
Great Zimbabwe. His rationale for removing the top layers at
Great Zimbabwe was motivated by the belief that they consti-
tuted a local African occupation associated with Bantu degen-
eracy (Hall 1905). By any standards, Hall’s work was unaccept-
able and illogical as it was also characterised by ruthless
plundering. More reputable work began with that of David
Randall-MacIver in 1905. He recovered a quantity of material in
datable contexts, identifying in the process datable oriental
imports, from which he concluded that Great Zimbabwe was
mediaeval in date and of an indigenous workmanship
(Randall-MacIver 1906). He excavated in both the Hill Complex
and the Great Enclosure, and speculated that the various ruins
at Great Zimbabwe could be of different dates. He opened
seven test trenches in the Hill Complex’s Western Enclosure
which yielded finds that further confirmed the indigenous
workmanship of the sites.
Following Randall-MacIver’s efforts, professional research
at Great Zimbabwe only appeared 25 years later, with the work
of Gertrude Caton-Thompson. By the time of her excavations
in 1929, much of the Hill Complex and the Great Enclosure had
been ravaged by earlier treasure seekers, looters and antiquari-
ans. She focused her attention on the Maund Ruins in the
valley, on the ridge above the Renders Ruin, and she also
opened a tunnel underneath the conical tower in the Great
Enclosure. Her work resulted in the general chronological
frame that continues to define the origins and development of
Great Zimbabwe. Using beads and Chinese porcelain, Caton-
Thompson (1931) suggested that the earlier foundations
are dated to the 8th and 9th century, while the walling and
the main occupation was a 13th-century development. She
described Great Zimbabwe as of “Bantu origin and of a
mediaeval date […]” and suggested its mystery lay in the “[…]
pulsating heart of native Africa” (Caton-Thompson 1931: 199).
Critics of Caton-Thompson’s work were quick to dismiss the
chronology and the interpretation as speculation owing to the
lack of secure dates (Chirikure, Pollard et al. 2013).
Attempts to establish secure stratigraphic relationships,
ceramic typologies and architectural styles are associated with
the work of the Historical Monuments Commission of the then
Southern Rhodesia which, in 1958, sent Roger Summers, Keith
Robinson and Anthony Whitty to conduct further work at
Great Zimbabwe. Excavations were conducted in the Western
Enclosure which exposed a series of house floors; while the
excavations in the Great Enclosure revealed a series of
distinctly coloured and textured clays, allowing for the differ-
ent stages of construction to be identified (Robinson et al. 1961).
Their work resulted in a five-phase occupation of the site that
suggested the site had been occupied by Shona people from
the 11th century until the 19th century (Summers et al. 1961;
Chirikure & Pikirayi 2008; Chirikure et al. 2012).
Since the work of the Historical Monuments Commission
in the 1960s and until recently, archaeological research at Great
Zimbabwe has been isolated and fragmented (Collett et al.
1992; Chipunza 1994). The post-independence era has focused
more on the conservation of the stone walling and dhaka struc-
tures (see Ndoro 2005; Chirikure & Pikirayi 2008). While a great
deal of literature was generated on Great Zimbabwe, the
papers were mostly reviews, reanalyses and reinterpretations
of museum collections, dates, generally from the rich Great
Zimbabwe archive (see Huffman & Vogel 1991; Chirikure &
Pikirayi 2008; Huffman 2011; Chirikure, Pollard et al. 2013;
Chirikure, Manyanga et al. 2013; Chirikure, Moultrie et al. 2017).
Recently, there has been a growing renewed interest in archae-
ological research at Great Zimbabwe (Pikirayi et al. 2016;
Chirikure, Bandama et al. 2017; Chirikure, Moultrie et al. 2017).
Just as at Mapungubwe, local communities had a perma-
nent presence at the excavations, but only as labourers (Fig. 2).
The initial efforts at studying Great Zimbabwe were resisted by
the local communities who were more than uncomfortable
with the theft of material from the site (see Bent 1896; Burke
1969). It took Carl Mauch a week just to access the site, and then
the Nemamwa svikiro (senior spirit medium at Great Zimba-
bwe) refused to entertain Mauch’s request for information
(Matenga 2012: 66). A systematic process of alienation of the
local communities was then implemented by the colonial
government, which saw the traditional custodians and
lineages that lived around Great Zimbabwe being moved away
(Pwiti & Ndoro 1999; Ndoro 2005). After that, ‘archaeological’
science could be exercised without the nagging presence of
recalcitrant local communities. The general approach by the
colonial archaeologists was that the local communities were
not useful in any interpretations, as Great Zimbabwe was erro-
neously seen as a long-lost Phoenician civilisation. The work of
antiquarians and settler colonial ideology never commanded a
following among the local communities, who instead kept their
own narratives about Great Zimbabwe and related sites. They
continued to view Great Zimbabwe as their shrine, and not as a
monument (see Ndoro 2005). The local lineages continued to
identify with important landmarks in the cultural landscape
such as their old burial grounds, farming and hunting areas,
and many other places that directly linked with the past and
had associations with Great Zimbabwe (see Fontein 2006, 2015;
Sinamai 2017). Old, unresolved issues of alienation and access
to the site continue to dominate the interaction between the
legal custodian (National Museums and Monuments of Zimba-
bwe) and the traditional custodians (local communities). The
current policy of co-opting local communities is tolerated but
is not really accepted. Traditional leaders are very emphatic in
their declaration that they are not stakeholders but owners of
the site (Chief Fortune Charumbira, quoted in Macheka 2016).
The local communities’ involvement in the archaeological
science has been peripheral, with their being ‘content’ (for
now) with dealing with issues of tradition (see Sinamai 2017)
and the re-enactment of a 19th century Shona way of life at the
Shona Village. Historians have been hesitant to engage with
Great Zimbabwe, its history, and local communities, on a
technicality. The mediaeval date for Great Zimbabwe is consid-
ered too old for oral traditions to be reliable, and known Portu-
guese documents are not specific to the site. More recently,
however, we are beginning see increased efforts by anthropol-
ogists and heritage managers in making connections between
Great Zimbabwe, its surroundings, and the local communities
(see Fontein 2006; 2015; Macheka 2016; Sinamai 2017).
DISCUSSION: MAPUNGUBWE-GREAT ZIMBABWE
HISTORIOGRAPHICAL COMPARISONS
The historiography of Mapungubwe and Great Zimbabwe
shares many things in common. The sites are the most recog-
nisable Iron Age sites in southern Africa. However, Great
76 South African Archaeological Society Goodwin Series 12: 72–84, 2019
This content downloaded from
72.194.25.31 on Mon, 04 Jan 2021 11:23:00 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
South African Archaeological Society Goodwin Series 12: 72–84, 2019 77
Zimbabwe stands out because of the majestic stone walling, not
paralleled anywhere else, and making it one of the most
impressive archaeological remains in the world. Mapun-
gubwe, on the other hand, while lacking the impressive wall-
ing tradition, still occupies a critical place in the development of
socio-political complexity, and has been popularised as the
place where the Zimbabwe culture originated (see Huffman
2000). This defines the Mapungubwe-Great Zimbabwe debate
which, in the past 80 years, has seen opinions shift variously
between Mapungubwe and Great Zimbabwe as the centre of
the origins of the Zimbabwe culture.
Since its popularisation in the Western world by Mauch in
the late 19th century, Great Zimbabwe was the first to attract
early research, beginning with the work of Bent (1896), Hall and
Neal (1902), Randall-MacIver (1906), Caton-Thompson (1931).
Formal archaeological work at Mapungubwe began between
1933 and 1940 (Fouché 1937; Gardner 1963). The lure of Great
Zimbabwe and the research that had been completed in the
then Southern Rhodesia strongly influenced the early work at
Mapungubwe. We see repeatedly the excavations at Mapun-
gubwe making reference to the materials recovered at Great
Zimbabwe, and related sites (see Fouché 1937; Gardner 1963).
Extensive Iron Age research in Southern Rhodesia provided a
platform for comparative research and a useful reference point
for South African scholars. The result is that studies of Zimba-
bwe exerted undue influence on the archaeology of its south-
ern neighbour. Often, early scholars working on the southern
African Iron Age did not see a distinction between the archaeol-
ogy of Southern Rhodesia and South Africa.
Between 1933 and 1935, the Mapungubwe expedition
team led by Leo Fouché depended on comparative material
from Southern Rhodesia in their study of the Mapungubwe
material. This comparative material was provided by Dr and
Mrs L.C. Thompson of the National Museum of Southern Rho-
desia. Fieldwork from 1933 to 1935 was directed by Rev. Neville
Jones of Southern Rhodesia. Mr R. Pearson who had worked
with the gold objects at Zimbabwe, was tasked with studying
the gold objects at Mapungubwe. One also sees a persistent
reference to work in Zimbabwe, especially that of Caton-
Thompson (1931) and Schofield (1937). Caton-Thompson pro-
vided the much-needed brainstorming on the Mapungubwe
finds, and was in regular correspondence with Fouché
throughout the expedition. It appears that the researchers
at Mapungubwe were well acquainted with the Zimbabwe
finds, and always saw resemblances between the materials at
Mapungubwe and Great Zimbabwe (Fouché 1937: 2). The
similarities in the material culture of the two sites excited the
researchers who were convinced that the undisturbed context
at Mapungubwe would help solve the riddle of Great Zimba-
bwe which, by that stage, had already been ransacked by
treasure hunters (Fig. 4). In spite of this, the Southern Rhode-
sian presence at Mapungubwe during Fouché’s expedition
was significant if not overbearing.
Mapungubwe and Great Zimbabwe are regarded as Shona
civilisations. It was Schofield (1937) who first equated the
pottery from Mapungubwe with that of the Shona. The lack of
absolute methods of dating the materials created havoc among
the early research, and determining the sequence of the two
sites on the basis of ceramics, imports and gold objects, was
indeed problematic. Fouché (1937) thus concluded that:
[…] the question naturally arises as to which of the two sites,
Zimbabwe or Mapungubwe, was occupied first by these
makers of fine pottery. From the presence of the gold objects,
which are a strong link with Rhodesia and from which they
certainly came, there can be no doubt that the Shona people
came across the Limpopo subsequent to their having estab-
FIG. 4. Vandalised deposits in the Western Enclosure at Great Zimbabwe showing in excess of 2 m of cultural deposit that was cleared; in contrast, Mapungubwe
was seen as providing a more secure deposit. (Photograph: Posselt 1908; courtesy of NMMZ, Great Zimbabwe Conservation Centre Archive.)
This content downloaded from
72.194.25.31 on Mon, 04 Jan 2021 11:23:00 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
lished themselves at Zimbabwe, and possibly at the end of
their occupation (Fouché 1937: 27).
Regular correspondence between Fouché, Caton-
Thompson, and Schofield emphasised the close similarity of
the ceramics at Great Zimbabwe and Mapungubwe. The
involvement of Rhodesian archaeologists in the work at
Mapungubwe in the 1930s resulted in strong parallels being
established between the Zimbabwe sites and those in South
Africa. Researchers were obviously then quick to note that
comparative material had been identified at Great Zimbabwe
and related sites. Schofield (1937) is even more assertive in
making this connection:
From this we can say without hesitation that the class M1 ware
at Mapungubwe is indistinguishable from class B ware at
Zimbabwe […] (Schofield 1937: 42)
Dissenting voices were already present during the early
years of research. In the 1930s, scholars like Van Riet Lowe
(1936), Beck (1937) and Caton-Thompson (1939), were noting
some differences in the material culture of Mapungubwe and
Great Zimbabwe (see Chirikure, Pollard et al. 2013). Later,
Robinson’s (1959, 1965) work in western Zimbabwe empha-
sised the connection between Leopard’s Kopje and Khami
period sites (Robinson 1965). A reanalysis of the material
culture by Chirikure, Pollard et al. (2013) reveals that Khami
ceramics and beads have closer affinities with those from
Woolandale and Mapungubwe, especially some beakers from
Khami which show a strong resemblance to those from
Mapungubwe and other Leopard’s Kopje sites.
A major research question in the 1970s was to establish the
sequence of the various farming community settlements that
had been recorded and excavated in southern Africa. The
distinction between the Leopard’s Kopje and the Zimbabwe
culture (see Garlake 1970, 1976; Huffman 1972) preoccupied
many of the debates. Garlake (1976: 223) regarded the two
traditions as having grown and declined together, while
Huffman (1972: 356) considered Woolandale, Mapungubwe,
and Zimbabwe Phase III/IV as contemporaries. However,
there was an acknowledgement that Leopard’s Kopje and
Zimbabwe had indistinguishable ceramics, and that the two
traditions may have shared more than a common origin
(Huffman 1974; Garlake 1976). The position was that Great
Zimbabwe was seen as the earliest site and the origin of the
Zimbabwe culture (see Huffman 1972: 355). Garlake (1976) is
more assertive on the connection between Leopard’s Kopje
and Khami. He ascribed the terrace building typical of Khami
and Rozvi capitals as deriving from the earlier Leopard’s Kopje
retaining walls (Garlake 1976: 226). Similar ideas have been
echoed in Botswana, associated with the work of Van Waarden
(2011, 2012). The focus thus continued to shift from Mapun-
gubwe to Great Zimbabwe, and then to Khami in western
Zimbabwe. Southern Africa’s early civilisations of Mapun-
gubwe and Great Zimbabwe were seen as a result of migratory
movements (Garlake 1982: 2). Invariably, studies have been
obsessed with origins (see Huffman 1972, 1974, 2000, 2011,
2015a, b; Chirikure et al. 2014; Chirikure & Pikirayi 2015). Often,
attributing origins to southern Africa’s early states has been
based on inadequate archaeological evidence and in some
instances, advanced by political motives.
The idea that Mapungubwe is a Shona civilisation was
propagated out of these observations on ceramics and other
material affinities with Great Zimbabwe. For a long time
Mapungubwe was seen as an outpost of a Shona culture with a
demonstrated contact with Great Zimbabwe, especially during
the latter ’s nascent phase. In the absence of secure dating,
the connection between Mapungubwe and Great Zimbabwe
remained speculative. The radiocarbon revolution brought
clarity to the debate, and both Mapungubwe and Great Zimba-
bwe have since been securely dated (see Huffman & Vogel
1991; Meyer 2000; Chirikure et al. 2012). Building on the work of
Summers et al. (1961), Great Zimbabwe’s chronology has been
placed into a five-phase occupational sequence beginning with
Period I (AD 100–300), followed by Period II (AD 300–1085),
Period III (AD 1085–1450), Period IV (AD 1450–1833), and
finally, Period V (AD 1833–1900) (see Robinson 1961; Summers
et al. 1961; Chirikure, Manyanga et al. 2013). Summers et al.
(1961) suggest that Great Zimbabwe was continuously occu-
pied and used by Shona people from the 11th to the late 19th
centuries AD, and the recent occupation of Great Zimbabwe by
Shona people is well supported in the archival record (see
Fig. 5)
A number of radiocarbon dates obtained in the early 1980s
(see Hall & Vogel 1980; Eloff & Meyer 1981; Huffman 1982)
demonstrated that the main occupation at Mapungubwe Hill
pre-dates that of the main building in stone at Great Zimba-
bwe. An upsurge of research on the Iron Age of southern
Africa, together with improved methods of dating, changed
the narratives on the origins of the Zimbabwe culture. By 1982,
Mapungubwe was confirmed as a major centre demonstrating
evidence of a hierarchical society, with specialists and commu-
nities that engaged in extensive trade with the east coast of
Africa (Sinclair 1987; Huffman 1996). Mapungubwe was now
affirmed as the origin of the Zimbabwe culture (see Huffman
1982). Further refinement of the dating at Great Zimbabwe and
Mapungubwe (see Huffman & Vogel 1991; Vogel 2000) also
swung the pendulum in favour of Mapungubwe as the origin
of the Zimbabwe culture. Mapungubwe is thought to have
been abandoned in AD 1290 owing to climate change, when
the Mapungubwe elites are thought to have migrated to Great
Zimbabwe where they enforced the spatial template on the
nascent state of Great Zimbabwe (see Huffman 2000, 2009).
The response north of the Limpopo was swift, with the
suggestion that the impact of climate change, if any, did not
affect the entire Limpopo valley (see Manyanga et al. 2000;
Manyanga 2001, 2007, 2018) as some areas in the Limpopo
valley provided opportunities to cope with the deteriorating
environmental conditions. Further archaeological work
reinforces the idea that the post-AD 1290 period in the Shashe-
Limpopo basin saw successful agro-pastoral societies. The
2000s also saw researchers of the Shashe-Limpopo basin
engaged with the climatic reconstructions and coping mecha-
nisms (Holmgren et al. 2003; Ekblom 2004; Holmgren & Öberg
2006; Ekblom et al. 2012). These studies all emphasise that
seasonal and annual variability was a consistent feature in
southern Africa’s palaeoenvironments (see Manyanga 2018).
Smith (2005) makes use of isotopic studies and demonstrates
that the climate in the post-AD 1290 period was wetter than
now although variable, and was therefore able to support
agro-pastoral societies. Schoeman (2006) and Murimbika
(2006) highlight rainmaking activities as a strategy to mitigate
the effects of recurrent droughts and famine. Huffman (2009)
makes use of archaeology and ethnography to pinpoint
evidence for drought mitigation during the Iron Age.
The popularisation of Mapungubwe as the origin of the
Zimbabwe culture relegated such centres as Mapela (see
Garlake 1968) to second-order settlements that were occupied
by a few elites (Huffman 1982:145). This is in contrast to previ-
ous interpretations that regarded Mapela as a major state
centre (Fig. 6), with its massive investment in stone walling yet
unsurpassed at many sites in southern Africa (see Garlake 1968;
78 South African Archaeological Society Goodwin Series 12: 72–84, 2019
This content downloaded from
72.194.25.31 on Mon, 04 Jan 2021 11:23:00 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
South African Archaeological Society Goodwin Series 12: 72–84, 2019 79
Beach 1994; Chirikure et al. 2014; Chirikure et al. 2016). Huffman
(1982) suggests the possibility that at Mapungubwe’s peak,
Great Zimbabwe was only a second-order settlement to
Mapungubwe. Power and economic success only came to
Great Zimbabwe with the abandonment of Mapungubwe in
AD 1290 (see Huffman 1996, 2000, 2007). The explanation
suggests that after the decline of Great Zimbabwe, Khami
(in western Zimbabwe) and Mutapa (northern Zimbabwe)
became the new centres of power.
A linear model for the origin and development of the
Zimbabwe culture has been suggested where the sites of
Mapungubwe (1100–1290), Great Zimbabwe (1200–1450),
Khami (1450–1800), and Mutapa (1450–1800) are thought to
have grown, developed, and declined coevally (see Chirikure,
Pollard et al. 2013). Recently, this has been questioned, and a
model suggesting multiple origins of the Zimbabwe culture
and an earlier development date has been put forward (see
Chirikure, Pollard et al. 2013; Chirikure et al. 2016). Evidence
from Mapela suggests that it was a major centre, probably four
times the size of Mapungubwe Hill (Fig. 7). The site exhibits
characteristics of a hierarchical society, with evidence of eco-
nomic diversification, population agglomeration, and external
trade. These developments occurred 200 years earlier than
Mapungubwe, prompting Chirikure et al. (2014) to consider it a
possible origin of the Zimbabwe culture. In response, Huffman
(2014) insists on the temporal primacy of Mapungubwe and
the Shashe-Limpopo valley in initiating the process to socio-
political complexity, and ascribes Mapela to a Woolandale
polity.
Early South African scholarship saw the need for collabora-
tion and transnational research in archaeology. Fouché (1937:
176) regarded joint research on the Later Iron Age between the
then Southern Rhodesia and South Africa as an absolute neces-
sity, and viewed the modern political boundaries as an impedi-
ment to archaeological investigations. Fouché’s habit of
integrating scholars from Southern Rhodesia into his expedi-
tion has already been noted, and his disdain for the political
boundaries is captured in the following quotation:
It was very tantalising to stand on the summit of Mapun-
gubwe and look at certain hills in Rhodesia across the nearby
border, knowing that these hills, in native eyes, were like
Mapungubwe, forbidden places, where the rash intruder
would be struck dead by lightning. To be prevented by an
imaginary line from examining these places, in order to deter-
mine whether the trail picked up at Mapungubwe led through
them to the north – that was more than tantalising – it was
downright maddening! (Fouché 1937: 178)
Subsequent work at Mapungubwe by Gardner (1963: 67)
also advocated harmonious and close archaeological coopera-
tion between Southern Rhodesia and South Africa. At some
point, the demand to make connections between the sites
north and south of the Limpopo was overwhelming for archae-
ologists, and any account which treated the sites in the differ-
ent countries as separate were proving difficult to sustain:
Zimbabwe keeps on being called to mind, and I am continu-
ally being pestered to explain the relationship of the Rhode-
sian sites to ours. (Gardner 1963: 84)
FIG. 5. Chief Mugabe’s village on the Acropolis at Great Zimbabwe in 1890, evidence that Great Zimbabwe was occupied by Shona people in the 19th century.
(Photograph: courtesy of NMMZ, Great Zimbabwe Conservation Centre Archive.)
This content downloaded from
72.194.25.31 on Mon, 04 Jan 2021 11:23:00 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Over the years, it is clear that archaeologists and related
professionals north and south of the Limpopo have tended to
‘look over the border’ in search of comparative material. Field
visits and comparing notes has been a common feature since
the 2000s. In the recent past, a number of Zimbabwean scholars
have moved south of the Limpopo to teach in South African
universities. However, they continue to initiate research on the
Zimbabwe culture in both South Africa and Zimbabwe.
A comparable interpretive model was extended to present
day central and eastern Botswana, where Iron Age archaeolog-
ical research has been carried out as an extension of work that
was initiated in South Africa and Zimbabwe. Research has
followed a widely held view that social developments in
central and eastern Botswana were inspired or originated from
the Shashe-Limpopo confluence area. This development is
thought to have been triggered by the arrival of Leopard’s
Kopje people in the Shashe-Limpopo basin during the 10th
century AD. This resulted in the displacement of hitherto
Zhizo elites and most of their people westwards into modern
day Botswana (see Huffman 2005, 2007b; Denbow et al. 2008;
Du Piesanie 2008). Elite or chiefly settlements such as Lose (see
Kiyaga-Mulindwa 1990), Toutswemogala (Denbow 1984) and
Bosutswe (Denbow et al. 2008) are all thought to have a
Mapungubwe influence in their later development. It is only
recently that scholarship in Botswana started discounting the
influence of the people of the Mapungubwe Cultural Land-
scape on socio-political complexity in central and eastern
Botswana. Calabrese (2000, 2005, 2007) questions the wholesale
displacement of Zhizo people from the Limpopo valley on the
basis of the presence of Zhizo-related Leokwe settlements that
are contemporary with K2. Towards the Kalahari margins, in
the Bosutswe region, Klehm (2013: 4) strongly asserts that com-
plexity “[…] arose from local actors and out of localised con-
texts”. This is a major paradigm shift that departs from the
traditional approach which has always looked at complexity in
central Botswana as having direct connections with events in
the Shashe-Limpopo confluence area.
In northeastern Botswana, the presence of stone walled
settlements like Vhumba, Domboshava, Majande, and Mothudi
were for many years seen as an extension of the Zimbabwe
culture into Botswana (see Beach 1980; Robinson 1985;
Mudenge 1988; Tlou & Campbell 1997; Pikirayi 2001). These
studies make reference to the precolonial state of Butua, whose
extent straddled the modern boundary of Zimbabwe and
Botswana. Once more, these developments were articulated
within the Mapungubwe-Great Zimbabwe origins debate.
In recent years, Van Waarden (1987, 1989, 2011, 2012) ques-
tions the Mapungubwe-Great Zimbabwe connection in under-
standing the stone walled settlements in northeastern
Botswana. Instead, she suggests a local development of Khami
with possible roots in Woolandale (Van Waarden 2011, 2012;
Chirikure et al. 2012). Mothulatshipi and Thabeng’s (2015)
80 South African Archaeological Society Goodwin Series 12: 72–84, 2019
FIG. 6. Early political centres in southern Africa during the second millennium AD (adapted from Beach 1984): Mapela was regarded as a major political centre, an
idea reinforced by recent archaeological studies.
This content downloaded from
72.194.25.31 on Mon, 04 Jan 2021 11:23:00 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
South African Archaeological Society Goodwin Series 12: 72–84, 2019 81
research at Leshongwane (Mothudi) suggests a local and early
development of stone building traditions in eastern Botswana,
and is part of the growing dissatisfaction with the linear model
that views the Zimbabwe culture as originating from
Mapungubwe. The recent emphasis on local actors and local-
ised contexts in articulating the development of socio-political
complexity in central and eastern Botswana is a clear departure
from the previous interpretations that have always looked at
these developments as an appendage or extension of develop-
ments in South Africa or Zimbabwe.
Any history of South African Iron Age archaeology will
be incomplete without a reference to its northern neighbours.
The polarised opinions, cooperation, and exchange of human
resources and expertise have enriched the later prehistory of
southern Africa. This has provided the much needed brain-
storming and has kept the debate on the development of the
Zimbabwe culture going. However, Zimbabwean archaeology
is navigating a new direction in interpreting the Zimbabwe
culture (see Chirikure, Manyanga et al. 2013). The current inter-
pretive frameworks use models rooted in African philosophical
traditions and knowledge systems (see Beach 1998; Chirikure
& Pikirayi 2008; Manyanga et al. 2010; Chirikure et al. 2012;
Pwiti et al. 2013). Generally, post-independence Zimbabwean
archaeology has embraced the use of non-Western knowledge
on how landscapes and their material world are perceived, in
navigating the past. These knowledge systems include indige-
nous perceptions of economy, power and political succession
(Pwiti 1991; Beach 1998; Chirikure & Pikirayi 2008); archaeolog-
ical sites and identity, subsistence and livelihoods (Garlake
1982; Thorp 1995; Manyanga 2007); and symbolism and the use
of space (Huffman 1984, 1996, 2011; Chirikure & Pikirayi 2008).
Possibly the most encouraging trend from this perspective
is that there is an implied acknowledgement in most of the
academic debates that Mapungubwe and Great Zimbabwe are
Shona civilisations, and that appropriate models should there-
fore derive from Shona customs and practices. A similar
approach can be used to understand precolonial developments
in central and eastern Botswana, where scholars are advocat-
ing for local influences in the development of complexity.
While archaeologists in recent years have had divided
opinions over the origins of the Zimbabwe culture, politicians
have seen opportunities to use Mapungubwe and Great
Zimbabwe as rallying points for regional integration among
southern African nations. In South Africa, Mapungubwe is
an important heritage site and a symbol of a nation which is
relevant to various ethnicities in South Africa. The Twamamba,
Lea, Ngona, Venda, Sotho, Tswana, Pedi, Afrikaners and the
Khoe-San people see connections with the site and the cultural
landscape (see MISTRA 2010). The designation of Mapun-
gubwe as a Shona civilisation connects the site with the linguis-
tic majority of Zimbabwe. Recent African governments, with
their thrust for the idea of an African renaissance, regard
Mapungubwe as an African civilisation and as a heritage
symbol that cements African solidarity and unity. Today, the
Mapungubwe Cultural Landscape forms part of a transfrontier
park, the Greater Mapungubwe Transfrontier Conservation
Area, a zone symbolising freedom of movement across physi-
cal boundaries and barrier created by colonialism. These ideas
build from an 80-year-old history of research in South Africa
and its neighbours, where archaeologists have advocated for
multidisciplinary, collaborative and trans-boundary research
in southern Africa.
FIG. 7. Mapela Main Hill settlement in the Shashe Valley: recently, the site has been the focus of divergence in opinion regarding its position in the origins of the
Zimbabwe culture.
This content downloaded from
72.194.25.31 on Mon, 04 Jan 2021 11:23:00 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
82 South African Archaeological Society Goodwin Series 12: 72–84, 2019
It has been demonstrated by many scholars that the archae-
ology of southern African nations cuts across the modern
political boundaries and that trans-boundary research is an
imperative (see Manyanga 2007; Mothulatshipi 2009). Tangen-
tially, it may be worth noting that the theme of the 2014 PAA
conference held in South Africa was ‘African Archaeology with-
out Frontiers’ (Esterhuysen et al. 2016). This is so because the
modern boundaries separate related communities who share a
common past, language, belief systems, norms and values. The
Iron Age archaeology of northern South Africa has been
connected with developments associated with socio-political
complexity in central and eastern Botswana, the Zimbabwean
plateau and Mozambique’s coastal plains. Since the 1930s,
archaeology in South Africa and its neighbours have advocated
that any understanding of these developments must be based
on observations from the broader region that cuts across politi-
cal and institutional boundaries. The historiography of the
Mapungubwe-Great Zimbabwe debates demonstrates how
connected South African archaeology has been with its neigh-
bours.
CONCLUSION
Since the early part of the 20th century, archaeologists
working in the southern regions of Zimbabwe and those in
northern South Africa have compared notes, and in certain
cases adopted similar perspectives in the interpretation of the
precolonial past of the region. Common themes and personali-
ties since the 1930s to the present have created a fused interpre-
tation of the past in southern Africa. The history of research on
Mapungubwe and Great Zimbabwe presents some interesting
reading, while some of the debates and perspectives have
found their way into the current debates on the origins of the
Zimbabwe culture. It is an accepted truth that the existing
interpretations of the Zimbabwe culture were built on models
that excluded and continue to exclude local communities in
knowledge production. There is a need for archaeologists to
reflect seriously on the historiography of the Mapungubwe-
Great Zimbabwe debate if Iron Age archaeology in southern
Africa is to transform. Calls to rethink the Mapungubwe-Great
Zimbabwe debate are growing. Telling results have already
been achieved and there is growing optimism that the new
perspectives in Zimbabwean archaeology will take the
Mapungubwe-Great Zimbabwe debate to new heights and
fresh understandings.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This paper was initially developed during a fellowship
from the American Council of Learned Societies’ African
Humanities Programme, with financial support from the
Carnegie Foundation. Further financial support from the
National Research Foundation of South Africa and the Univer-
sity of Cape Town is acknowledged with sincere gratitude. We
also thank the two anonymous reviewers for their comments.
REFERENCES
Beach, D.N. 1980. The Shona and Zimbabwe 900–1850: an Outline of Shona
History. Gwelo: Mambo Press.
Beach, D.N. 1984. Zimbabwe Before 1900. Gweru: Mambo Press.
Beach, D.N. 1998. Cognitive archaeology and the imaginary history of
Great Zimbabwe. Current Anthropology 39: 47–72.
Beach, D., Bourdillon, M.F.C., Denbow, J., Hall, M., Lane, P. & Pikirayi, I.
1997. Review feature: Snakes and Crocodiles: Power and symbolism
in Ancient Zimbabwe, by Thomas N. Huffman. South African Archaeo-
logical Bulletin 52(166): 125–138.
Beck, H.C. 1937. The beads of the Mapungubwe District. In: Fouché, L.
(ed.) Mapungubwe: Ancient Bantu Civilisation on the Limpopo: 104–113.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bent, J.T. 1896. The Ruined Cities of Mashonaland: Being a Record of Excava-
tion and Exploration in 1891. London: Longmans Green & Co.
Burke, E.E. (ed.) 1969. The Journals of Carl Mauch, 1869–72. Salisbury:
National Archives of Rhodesia.
Calabrese, J.A. 2000. Interregional interaction in southern Africa: Zhizo
and Leopard’s Kopje relations in northern South Africa, south west-
ern Zimbabwe and eastern Botswana, AD 1000 to 1200. African
Archaeological Review 17(4): 183–210.
Calabrese, J.A. 2005. Ethnicity, class, and polity: the emergence of social
and political complexity in the Shashi-Limpopo Valley of southern
Africa, AD 900 to 1300. Unpublished PhD thesis. Johannesburg: Uni-
versity of the Witwatersrand.
Calabrese, J.A. 2007. The Emergence of Social and Political Complexity in the
Shashi-Limpopo Valley of Southern Africa, AD 900 to 1300: Ethnicity,
Class, and Polity. Oxford: Archaeopress.
Carruthers, J. 2006. Mapungubwe: an historical and contemporary
analysis of a World Heritage cultural landscape. Koedoe 49(1): 1–13.
Caton-Thompson, G. 1931. The Zimbabwe Culture: Ruins and Reactions.
Oxford: Clarendon.
Caton-Thompson, G. 1939. Mapungubwe. Antiquity 13(51): 324–334.
Chipunza, K.T. 1994. A Diachronic Analysis of the Architecture of the Hill
Complex at Great Zimbabwe. Uppsala: Societa Archaeologica Uppsa-
liensis.
Chirikure, S., Bandama, F., House, M., Moffett, A., Mukwende, T. &
Pollard, M. 2016. Decisive evidence for multidirectional evolution of
sociopolitical complexity in southern Africa. African Archaeological
Review 33(1): 75–95.
Chirikure, S., Bandama, F., Chipunza, K., Mahachi, G., Matenga, E.,
Mupira, P. & Ndoro, W. 2017. Seen but not told: re-mapping Great
Zimbabwe using archival data, satellite imagery and geographical
information systems. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 24(2):
489–513.
Chirikure, S., Manyanga, M., Ndoro, W. & Pwiti, G. 2010. Unfulfilled
promises? Heritage management and community participation at
some of Africa’s cultural heritage sites. International Journal of Heritage
Studies 16(1–2): 30–44.
Chirikure, S., Manyanga, M. & Pollard, A.M. 2012. When science alone is
not enough: radiocarbon timescales, history, ethnography and elite set-
tlements in southern Africa. Journal of Social Archaeology 12(3): 356–379.
Chirikure, S., Manyanga, M., Pikirayi, I. & Pollard, M. 2013. New path-
ways of socio-political complexity in southern Africa. African Archaeo-
logical Review 30(4): 339–366.
Chirikure, S., Manyanga, M., Pollard, A.M., Bandama, F., Mahachi, G. &
Pikirayi, I. 2014. Zimbabwe culture before Mapungubwe: new evi-
dence from Mapela Hill, south-western Zimbabwe. PLOS ONE 9(10):
e111224.
Chirikure, S., Moultrie, T., Bandama, F., Dandara, C. & Manyanga, M.
2017. What was the population of Great Zimbabwe (CE 1000 ± 1800)?
PLOS ONE 12(6): e0178335.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0178335
Chirikure, S. & Pikirayi, I. 2008. Inside and outside the dry stone walls:
revisiting the material culture of Great Zimbabwe. Antiquity 82:
976–993.
Chirikure, S., Pollard, A.M., Manyanga, M. & Bandama, F. 2013. A
Bayesian chronology of Great Zimbabwe: re-threading the sequence
of a vandalized monument. Antiquity 87(337): 854–872.
Collett, D.P., Vines, E.G. & Hughes, G. 1992. The chronology of the
valley enclosures: implications for the interpretation of Great Zimba-
bwe. African Archaeological Review 10: 139–161.
Denbow, J. 1984. Cows and kings: a spatial and economic analysis of a
hierarchical settlement system in eastern Botswana. In: Hall, M.,
Avery, G., Avery, D., Wilson, M. & Humphreys, A. (eds) Frontiers:
Southern African Archaeology Today: 24–39. Oxford: British Archaeo-
logical Reports.
Denbow, J., Smith, J., Ndobochani, N.M., Atwood, K., & Miller, D. 2008.
Archaeological excavations at Bosutswe, Botswana: cultural chronol-
ogy, paleoecology and economy. Journal of Archaeological Science 35
(2): 459–480.
Du Piesanie, J. 2008. Understanding the socio-political status of
Leokwe society during the Middle Iron Age in the Shashe-Limpopo
Basin through a landscape approach. Unpublished MA dissertation.
Johannesburg: University of Witwatersrand.
Ekblom, A. 2004. Changing Landscapes and Environmental History of
Chibuene Southern Mozambique, AD 500–Present. Uppsala: Depart-
ment of Archaeology and Ancient History.
This content downloaded from
72.194.25.31 on Mon, 04 Jan 2021 11:23:00 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
South African Archaeological Society Goodwin Series 12: 72–84, 2019 83
Ekblom, A., Gillson, L., Holmgren, K., Risberg, J., & Chidoub, Z. 2012.
Rainfall variability and vegetation dynamics of the lower Limpopo
Valley, Southern Africa, 500 CE to present. Palaeogeography, Palaeo-
climatology, Palaeoecology 363–634: 69–78.
Eloff, J.F. & Meyer, A. 1981. The Greefswald sites. In: Voigt, E. (ed.)
Guide to Archaeological Sites in the Northern and Eastern Transvaal: 7–22.
Pretoria: Transvaal Museum.
Esterhuysen, A., Sievers, C. & Sadr, K. (eds) 2016. African Archaeology
without Frontiers: Papers from the 2014 Pan African Archaeological Con-
gress. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.
Fontein, J. 2006. The Silence of Great Zimbabwe: Contested Landscapes and
the Power of Heritage. London: UCL Press.
Fontein, J. 2015, Remaking Mutirikwi: Landscape, Water and Belonging in
Southern Zimbabwe. Suffolk: James Currey.
Fouché, L. (ed.) 1937. Mapungubwe: Ancient Bantu Civilisation on the
Limpopo. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Galloway, A. 1937. The skeletal remains of Mapungubwe. In: Fouche, L.
(ed.) Mapungubwe: Ancient Bantu Civilisation on the Limpopo: 127–174.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gardner, G.A. 1955. Mapungubwe 1935–1940. South African Archaeologi-
cal Bulletin 10(39): 73–77.
Gardner, G.A. 1963. Mapungubwe, Vol. II. Pretoria: Van Schaik.
Garlake, P.S. 1970. Rhodesian ruins – a preliminary assessment of their
styles and chronology. Journal of African History 11: 495–513.
Garlake, P.S. 1976. Great Zimbabwe – an appraisal. In: Abebe, B.,
Chavaillon, J. & Sutton, J.E.G. (eds) Proceedings of the PanAfrican Con-
gress of Prehistory and Quaternary Studies VIIth Session: 221–226: Addis
Ababa: Ministry of Culture.
Garlake, P.S .1982. Prehistory and ideology in Zimbabwe. Africa 52(3):
1–19.
Garlake, P.S. 1968. Test excavations at Mapela Hill, near the Shashe
River, Rhodesia. Arnoldia 34(3): 1–29.
Hall, M. & Vogel, J.C. 1980. Some recent radiocarbon dates from south-
ern Africa. Journal of African History 21: 431–455.
Hall, R.N. & Neal, W.G. 1902. The Ancient Ruins of Rhodesia. London:
Methuen.
Hall, R.N. 1905. Great Zimbabwe. London: Thames and Hudson.
Holmgren, K., Lee-Thorp, J.A., Cooper, G.J., Lundblad, K., Partridge,
T.C., Scott, L., Sithaldeen, R., Talma, A.S. & Tyson, P.D. 2003. Persistent
millennial-scale climate variability over the past 25,000 years in
southern Africa. Quaternary Science Reviews 22: 2311–2326.
Holmgren, K. & Öberg, H. 2006. Climate change in southern and east-
ern Africa during the past millennium and its implication for soci-
etal development. Environment, Development and Sustainability 8:
185–196.
Huffman, T.N. 1972. The rise and fall of Zimbabwe. Journal of African
History 13(3): 353–366.
Huffman, T.N. 1974. The Leopard’s Kopje Tradition (No. 6). Salisbury:
Trustees of the National Museums and Monuments of Rhodesia.
Huffman, T.N. 1982. Archaeology and ethnohistory of the African Iron
Age. Annual Review of Anthropology 11: 133–150.
Huffman, T.N. 1996. Snakes and Crocodiles: Power and Symbolism in
Ancient Zimbabwe. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press.
Huffman, T.N. 2000. Mapungubwe and the origins of the Zimbabwe
Culture. South African Archaeological Society Goodwin Series 8: 14–29.
Huffman, T.N. 2005. Mapungubwe: Ancient African Civilization on the
Limpopo. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.
Huffman, T.N. 2007a. Handbook to the Iron Age: the Archaeology of
Pre-colonial Farming Societies in Southern Africa. Scottsville: University
of KwaZulu-Natal Press.
Huffman, T.N. 2007b. Leokwe and K2: ethnic stratification during the
Middle Iron Age in southern Africa. Journal of African Archaeology 5(2):
163–188.
Huffman, T.N. 2009a. Mapungubwe and Great Zimbabwe: the origin
and spread of social complexity in southern Africa. Journal of Anthro-
pological Archaeology 28: 37–54.
Huffman, T.N. 2009b. A cultural proxy for drought: ritual burning in
the Iron Age of southern Africa. Journal of Archaeological Science 36:
991–1005.
Huffman, T.N. 2011. Debating Great Zimbabwe. South African Archaeo-
logical Bulletin 66(193): 27–40.
Huffman, T. 2014. Fifty years of Iron Age research: a personal odyssey.
South African Archaeological Bulletin 69(200): 213–218.
Huffman, T.N. 2015a. Social complexity in southern Africa. African
Archaeological Review 32(1): 71–91.
Huffman, T.N. 2015b. Mapela, Mapungubwe and the origins of states in
southern Africa. South African Archaeological Bulletin 70(201): 15–27.
Huffman, T.N. & Vogel, J.C. 1991. The chronology of Great Zimbabwe.
South African Archaeological Bulletin 46: 61–70.
Jones, N. 1937. The 1934 Expedition. In: Fouche, L. (ed.) Mapungubwe:
Ancient Bantu Civilisation on the Limpopo: 9–28. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Kim, N. & Kusimba, C. 2008. Pathways to social complexity and political
centralisation in the southern Zambezian region. African Archaeologi-
cal Review 25: 131–152.
Kiyaga-Mulindwa, D. 1990. Excavations at Lose enclosure, central Bot-
swana. In: Sinclair, P.J.J. & Pwiti, G. (eds) Urban Origins in Eastern
Africa. Proceedings of the 1990 Workshop, Harare and Great Zimbabwe,
Paper no. 6. Stockholm: Central Board of National Antiquities.
Klehm, C.E. 2013. Regional dynamics and local dialectics in Iron Age
Botswana: case studies from the hinterland in the Bosutswe region.
Unpublished DPhil thesis. Texas: Faculty of the Graduate School,
University of Texas, Austin.
Lestrade, G.P. 1937. Report of certain ethnological investigations in
connection with the archaeological discoveries at Mapungubwe. In:
Fouché, L. (ed.) Mapungubwe: Ancient Bantu Civilisation on the
Limpopo: 119–124. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Macheka, M.T. 2016. Great Zimbabwe World Heritage Site and sustain-
able development. Journal of Cultural Heritage Management and Sus-
tainable Development 6 (3): 226–237.
Manyanga, M. 2001. Choices and Constraints: Animal Resource Exploita-
tion in South Eastern Zimbabwe. Uppsala: Societa Archaeologica
Uppsaliensis.
Manyanga, M. 2007. Resilient Landscapes: Socio-environmental Dynamics
in the Shashi-Limpopo Basin, Southern Zimbabwe c. AD 800 to the present.
Studies in Global Archaeology 11. Uppsala: Department of Archaeology
and Ancient History.
Manyanga, M. 2018. Dynamics of survival and Resilience: the Shashi-
Limpopo Lowveld. In: Ekblom, A., Isendahl, C. & Lindholm, K. (eds)
The Resilience of Heritage: Cultivating a Future of the Past: 183–206.
Uppsala: Department of Archaeology and Ancient History.
Manyanga, M., Pikirayi, I. & Ndoro, W. 2000. Coping with dryland
environments: preliminary results from Mapungubwe and Zimba-
bwe phase sites in the Mateke Hills, south-eastern Zimbabwe. South
African Archaeological Society Goodwin Series 8: 69–77.
Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection (MISTRA) 2010. Mapun-
gubwe: a Living Legacy. Johannesburg: MISTRA.
Matenga, E. 2012. The Soapstone Birds of Great Zimbabwe: Archaeological
Heritage, Religion and Politics in Postcolonial Zimbabwe and the Return of
Cultural Property (Studies in Global Archaeology 16). Uppsala: Depart-
ment of Archaeology and Ancient History.
Meyer, A. 1998. The Archaeological Sites of Greefswald: Stratigraphy and
Chronology of the Sites and a History of Investigation. Pretoria: University
of Pretoria.
Meyer, A. 2000. K2 and Mapungubwe. South African Archaeological Soci-
ety Goodwin Series 8: 4–13.
Mothulatshipi, S. 2009. Landscape archaeology of the later farming
communities of the Shashe-Limpopo Basin, eastern Botswana: land
use diversity and human behaviour. Unpublished PhD thesis. Edin-
burgh: University of Edinburgh.
Mothulatshipi, S.M. & Thabeng, L.O. 2015. The archaeology of
Leshongwane site in eastern Botswana. Botswana Notes and Records
45: 126–137.
Mudenge, S.I. 1988. A Political History of Munhumutapa. Harare: Zimba-
bwe Publishing House.
Murimbika, M.T. 2006. Sacred powers and rituals of transformation: an
ethnoarchaeological study of rainmaking rituals and agricultural
productivity during the evolution of the Mapungubwe State, AD
1000 to AD 1300. Unpublished PhD thesis. Johannesburg: University
of the Witwatersrand.
Nienaber, W.C. & Hutton, M. 2006. The 2003 Mapungubwe stabilisation
project. Conducted as phase II of the Mapungubwe Cultural Land-
scape Rehabilitation Project by Business Enterprises at University of
Pretoria Pty (Ltd) for South African Heritage Resources Agency.
Unpublished report.
Ndoro, W. 2005. The Preservation of Great Zimbabwe: Your Monument Our
Shrine. Rome: ICCROM.
Nienaber,W.C., Keough, N., Steyn, M. & Meiring, J.H. 2008. Reburial of
the Mapungubwe human remains: an overview of process and pro-
cedure. South African Archaeological Bulletin 63(188): 164–169.
This content downloaded from
72.194.25.31 on Mon, 04 Jan 2021 11:23:00 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Phillipson, D.W. 2005. African Archaeology (3rd edition). Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Pikirayi, I. 2001. The Zimbabwe Culture: Origins and Decline in Southern
Zambesian States in Southern Africa. Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press.
Pikirayi, I. 2016. Archaeology, local knowledge and tradition: the quest
for relevant approaches to the study and use of the past in southern
Africa. In: Schmidt, P. & Pikirayi, I. (eds) Community Archaeology and
Heritage in Africa: Decolonizing Practice: 112–135. London: Routledge.
Pikirayi, I. & Chirikure, S. 2011. Debating Great Zimbabwe. Azania:
Archaeological Research in Africa 46(2): 221–231.
Pikirayi, I., Sulas, F., Musindo, T., Chimwanda, A., Chikumbirike, J.,
Mtetwa, E., Nxumalo, B. & Sagiya, M. 2016. Great Zimbabwe’s water.
Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Water 3(2): 195–210.
Pwiti, G. 1991. Trade and economies in southern Africa: the archaeolog-
ical evidence. Zambezia 18: 119–129.
Pwiti, G. 1996. Peasants, chiefs and kings: a model of the development
of cultural complexity in northern Zimbabwe. Zambezia 23: 31–52.
Pwiti, G., Kapumha, R. & Ndoro, W. 2013. The stone building cultures
of southern Africa. In: Manyanga, M. & Katsamudanga, K. (eds)
Zimbabwean Archaeology in the Post-Independence Era: 175–198. Harare:
SAPES Trust.
Pwiti, G. & Ndoro, W. 1999. The legacy of colonialism: perceptions of
the cultural heritage in southern Africa with special reference to
Zimbabwe. African Archaeological Review 16: 143–153.
Randall-MacIver, D. 1906. Medieval Rhodesia. London: Macmillan.
Robinson, K.R. 1959. Khami Ruins. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Robinson, K.R. 1961. Excavations on the Acropolis Hill. Occasional
Papers of the National Museums of Rhodesia, 3(23A): 159–192.
Robinson, K.R. 1965. The Leopard’s Kopje culture: a preliminary report
on recent work. Arnoldia 25: 1–7.
Robinson, K.R. 1985. Dated Iron Age sites from the upper Umguza
Valley 1982: their possible implications. South African Archaeological
Bulletin 40(141): 17–38.
Schoeman, M.H. 2006. Clouding power? Rain-control, space, land-
scapes and ideology in Shashe-Limpopo state formation. Unpub-
lished PhD thesis. Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand.
Schoeman, M.H. & Pikirayi, I. 2011. Repatriating more than Mapun-
gubwe human remains: archaeological material culture, a shared
future and an artificially divided past. Journal of Contemporary African
Studies 29 (4): 389–403.
Schofield, J.F. 1937. The pottery of the Mapungubwe District. In:
Fouché, L. (ed.) Mapungubwe: Ancient Bantu Civilisation on the
Limpopo: 119–124. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Shepherd, N. 2002. The politics of archaeology in Africa. Annual Review
of Anthropology 31: 189–209.
Sinamai, A. 2017. Myths as metaphors: understanding narratives in
sustaining sacred landscapes in Zimbabwe and Australia. In:
Manyanga, M. & Chirikure, S. (eds) Archives, Objects, Places and Land-
scapes: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Decolonised Zimbabwean Pasts:
399–419. Bamenda: Langaa Research & Publishing CIG.
Sinclair, P.J.J. 1987. Space, Time and Social Formation: a Territorial Approach
to the Archaeology and Anthropology of Zimbabwe and Mozambique c.
0–1700 AD. Uppsala: Societas Archaeologica Upsaliensis.
Smith, J.M. 2005. Climate change and agropastoral sustainability in the
Shashe-Limpopo River Basin from CE 900. Unpublished PhD thesis.
Johannesburg: University of Witwatersrand.
Summers, R. 1961. Excavations in the Great Enclosure. In: Summers, R.,
Robinson, K. & Whitty, A. (eds) Zimbabwe Excavations (Occasional
Papers 3: 23A): 236–288. Salisbury: National Museums of Southern
Rhodesia.
Summers, R., Robinson. K. & Whitty, A. (eds) 1961. Zimbabwe excava-
tions (Occasional Papers 3: 23A). Salisbury: National Museums of
Southern Rhodesia.
Summers, R. & Whitty, A. 1961. The development of the Great Enclosure.
In: Summers, R., Robinson, K. & Whitty, A. (eds) Zimbabwe Excava-
tions (Occasional Papers 3: 23A): 306–325. Salisbury: National Mu-
seums of Southern Rhodesia.
Thorp, C.R. 1995. Kings, Commoners and Cattle at Zimbabwe Tradition
Sites. Museum Memoir (New Series) 1. Harare: National Museums and
Monuments of Zimbabwe.
Tiley-Nel, S. (ed.) 2011. Mapungubwe Remembered: Contributions to
Mapungubwe by the University of Pretoria. Johannesburg: Chris van
Rensburg Publications.
Tlou, T. & Campbell, A. 1997. History of Botswana (2nd edition). Gabo-
rone: Macmillan.
Van Riet Lowe, C. 1936. Mapungubwe. First report on excavations in
the northern Transvaal. Antiquity 10 (39): 282–291.
Van Waarden, C. 1987. Matanga, a Late Zimbabwe cattle post. South
African Archaeological Bulletin 42: 107–124.
Van Waarden, C. 1988. Oral History of the Bakalanga of Botswana. Occa-
sional Paper No. 2. Gaborone: Botswana Society.
Van Waarden, C. 1989. The granaries of Vumba: structural interpretation
of a Khami period commoner site. Journal of Anthropological Archaeol-
ogy 8: 131–157.
Van Waarden, C. 1998. The Later Iron Age. In: Lane, P., Reid, A. &
Segobye, A. (eds) Ditswa Mmung: the Archaeology of Botswana: 115–160.
Gaborone: Pula Press and the Botswana Society.
Van Waarden, C. 2011. The origin of the Zimbabwe Tradition walling.
Zimbabwean Prehistory 29: 54–77.
Van Waarden, C. 2012. Butua and the End of an Era: the Effect of the Collapse
of the Kalanga State on Ordinary Citizens: an Analysis of Behaviour under
Stress. Oxford: Archaeopress.
Vogel, J.C. 2000. Radiocarbon dating of the of the Iron Age sequence in
the Limpopo valley. South African Archaeological Society Goodwin Series
8: 51–57.
Whitty, A. 1961. Architectural style at Zimbabwe, In: Summers, R.,
Robinson, K. &. Whitty, A. (eds) Zimbabwe Excavations (Occasional
Papers 3: 23A): 289–305. Salisbury: National Museums of Southern
Rhodesia.
Willoughby, J. 1893. A Narrative of Further Excavations at Zimbabwe.
London: George Philip & Son.
84 South African Archaeological Society Goodwin Series 12: 72–84, 2019
This content downloaded from
72.194.25.31 on Mon, 04 Jan 2021 11:23:00 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Expert paper writers are just a few clicks away
Place an order in 3 easy steps. Takes less than 5 mins.