A CAVE – AND A SIEGE

In the late 1990s, I was a postgraduate student in archaeology at Wits University. An important part of studying archaeology is making field trips to visit sites where archaeologists are busy working, or where they have previously worked. Together with other students, I visited the Makapan Valley, near the town of Mokopane (formerly called Potgietersrus) in the Limpopo Province. It is well known as a place where fossils of human ancestors more than two million years old have been found.

One of the sites in the valley that our lecturers took us to was a cave known as Historic Cave. (It is also known as Makapansgat, or the cave of Gaxasha, or the cave of Gwasha.) The name Historic Cave refers to the historic siege of the Kekana section of the Ndebele people by Boer commandos in 1854. I was vaguely aware of this historical event because I knew that Afrikaner nationalist historians had written accounts of the siege and the events leading up to it. But I knew very little about what they had written. To find out why this story was important for them, I began reading the literature on the subject.

I learnt that, in the 1840s and early 1850s, Boer settlers from the Cape were trying to occupy the region that they called the Transvaal. They raided Ndebele cattle, and frequently seized young people as forced labourers. In 1854, sections of the Ndebele people took a stand to fight back against threats to their independence. Forces of the Kekana and Langa sections attacked and killed parties of Boer traders, hunters and their families that crossed into their territory in the Mokopane area. Knowing that other Boer settlers in the area would take revenge, many Langa people then retreated to a settlement on a hill where they could defend themselves. For their part, a number of Kekana people decided to take refuge in a deep cave in the Makapan Valley.

Two commandos of Boers tracked the Kekana down, and tried unsuccessfully to storm the cave. After one of their number, Piet Potgieter, was shot dead, the Boer leaders decided to besiege the cave. They blocked up all the entrances, and placed parties of armed men to shoot anyone who tried to escape.

Amanda Esterhuysen, Karim Sadr and Chrissie Sievers

African archaeology in the twenty-first century is challenged to transcend not only national and linguistic boundaries that separate scholars and researchers, but also disciplinary boundaries between archaeology and the many other fields of study that can enrich our understanding of the past, as well as the artificial boundaries within archaeology itself, such as those drawn between the study of different ‘ages’ that should not be understood in isolation. These and other issues are among the topics addressed in this edited collection of papers drawn from the proceedings of the landmark 2014 PanAfrican Archaeological Association of Prehistory and Related Studies Congress. Held in Johannesburg nearly seven decades after the conference planned for 1951 was relocated to Algiers for ideological reasons following the National Party's rise to power in South Africa, the 2014 meeting marked a historic return to the southern tip of the continent and provided an opportunity for professional African archaeologists to showcase the value of archaeology and related disciplines in foregrounding African cultural values and historical achievements.

The first PanAfrican Congress for Prehistory and Related Studies was, according to Mary Leakey, ‘very much Louis's brainchild’ (1984: 91). Louis Leakey conceived of the conference in 1944 and solicited support from colleagues in South Africa, England and later France. In his memoirs he reflected that he felt strongly that the ‘moment was most opportune to inaugurate a pan-African congress of prehistory’ (1974: 193). It was an exciting time in history, full of the promise of change, and Leakey would no doubt have been aware of the political momentousness of the pan-African movement that held its fifth congress in Manchester, England, immediately after the war. Many key African leaders attended this congress, and there was a strong feeling among Africans and people of African descent that liberation, freedom and pan-Africanism were ‘idea[s] whose time had come’ (Abrahams 1947: 11). Leakey would also have taken cognisance of the formation of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation in 1946. The organisation specifically promoted the role that science could play in promoting peace and security and it provided a platform for scientists to dispel the biological myth of race and to question racism.

The last 500 years represents one of the most formative periods of our past, while being, in many senses, the least known. This was a time when, in a jagged and uneven fashion, some of the key cultural contours and categories of modern identities of the sub-continent came into being. It was also a period of enormous internal economic invention and political experimentation in a context where the expanded mercantile force of Europe started to press upon southern African shores and its hinterlands. This suggests that cultural mixing, interaction and change was more a feature of southern Africa in the last 500 years than the standard view of cultural homogeneity and fixity allows.

While a number of notable archaeological studies have focused on this period of South Africa's past, they have been few and far between, and most archaeological energies have been vested in earlier phases of human activity, historically distant from the immediate identities of the present. At the same time, however, the study of African oral traditions and pre-colonial history in southern Africa has in many areas stalled over the last 25 years. We are thus confronted with the irony of an absence of attention to this critical period in the evolution of southern African societies and identities, at the very moment when the notion of an African Renaissance and its archaeological antecedents is being celebrated.

In 2006 researchers from different disciplines (archaeology, history, social anthropology) and institutions (museums and universities) in southern Africa formed a group and began to take steps to fill in this gap and produce a fine-grained understanding of the last 500 years. Initially, the group called themselves the ‘500 Year Research Group’ (FYRG). This was based on the perception that the form and function of a research group, as defined by university and government institutions, offered the best way to formalise and develop the project. After much consultation, it became apparent that a research group would not allow the broad institutional and international membership that the group deemed necessary. Thus, in order to facilitate broader participation and membership, the name was changed to the ‘500 Year Initiative’ (FYI).

The post-Second World War period witnessed tumultuous change in South Africa. Some of this arose in the realm of palaeontological research. In 1942 Broom had recognised at least part of the antiquity of the Cradle hominids and formations. In 1946, with the support of Smuts, he published his Transvaal Museum memoir which finally convinced the world that Africa represented the birthplace of humankind. In 1947 he exposed the most important hominid specimen to be found since the Taung skull, the fossil hominid that became known as ‘Mrs Ples’. South Africa, in palaeontological terms, was on the crest of a wave. Public and official recognition followed, but was soon brought to a precipitate end as both Afrikaner and African nationalism flexed their muscles and came into collision. In 1948 Afrikaner nationalists swept to power; their National Party would stay in office as the country's controlling political force for the next forty-six years. They came armed with the programme of apartheid or full-scale racial separation. Whereas the inter-war generation of South African politicians had subscribed to a policy of a common white South Africanism, which Smuts in particular sought to anchor in the achievements of a white South African science, the Nationalists narrowed their angle of vision to focus on an Afrikaner ‘volk’ or nation whom they promoted as God's chosen race. Apartheid looked for intellectual credentials elsewhere – in eugenics, in intelligence testing, but above all in what Loubser (1987) and Dubow (1992) term ‘the Apartheid Bible’.Afrikaner theologians and intellectuals ransacked the Old and New Testaments to provide an ideological rationalisation for racial separation and white supremacy. At the core of the argument that emerged, as Dubow shows, is the notion of God as ‘Hammabdil’, the Great Divider, separating light from dark, Heaven from Earth, men from women, nation from nation. The core text of this new theology was that section of the Old Testament that describes the Tower of Babel. Here God intervenes to disperse the builders of the Tower who wish to create a single nation, by causing them to speak mutually incomprehensible languages. On a different continent and in a different context, Afrikaner nationalists were now repeating this act and observing God's will (Dubow 1992). From this point on, science and public political discourse proceeded on two divergent paths.