Usually, from where I live, I have a clear view of Robben Island lying peaceably off towards the horizon, flecked at its base by tiny whitecapped waves of the cold Atlantic. This evening, towards the end of August 2021, it looks as if someone has thrown a thick ridged blanket of cloud over the island and none of it is visible. All the time I have lived here, I have been able to see it whenever I have looked out of my study window, causing me to reflect on the men who were imprisoned there and the women who travelled – sometimes in vain – to see them. It has been a constant reference point, a metonym for our story of suffering. Former inmate Ahmed Kathrada apparently wanted us to believe that it also stands for the decisive defeat of the ‘forces of evil’ responsible by the humanity and wisdom of his comrades.

One of the sites of a workshop Tanja Sakota describes and analyses in this wonderful book is Constitution Hill, which similarly tries to round off a history of incarceration and torment with the crowning glory of the Constitution and what the media nowadays like to dub the ‘apex court’, built on the site of the notorious old prison complex. Not that I would like to be seen as at all casting aspersions on either the Constitution or the institutions designed to protect it. I think I am of the same mind as people like lawyer and scholarwriter Tembeka Ngcukaitobi, who believe that the Constitution is only the beginning and the journey is far from done. Through her workshopping exercises, Sakota develops the notion of Con Hill as a counter-monument, which dodges definitive resolutions and trouble-free redemption. The short films made by her workshop participants, highlighted by Sakota for the purposes of this book, show that Con Hill may be haunted by the spirits that have not yet been fetched home and still seem to reach impotently for barbed-wire parcels of sky above the prison yard. By paying close attention, through the making and interpreting of their films, the workshop delegates have heard the anguish, long after the last prisoner has departed, continuing to emanate from the very walls of the cells.

‘LET'S ASK THE OLD PEOPLE’

Recently many students and scholars in South Africa have demanded that universities should teach more history courses on the times before colonialism. People often assume that writing the history of these times simply means collecting oral accounts of the past from older people and putting them into written form. Individuals might say something like, ‘My grandmother/grandfather tells us wonderful stories about the long-ago past that have been handed down for generations. Why don't we record the best stories we can find from older people and then write them up as history?’

Stories about the past told by knowledgeable people can often teach us ways of looking at history that we will not find in written sources. We can learn about the lives of ordinary people, and not just the doings of kings and political leaders and great warriors. We can learn something about the lives of people who were treated as outsiders in their societies, and not just about the heroes. We can learn about the lives of women, and not just of men. Possibly we can learn something about the lives of non-binary people − that is, people who choose not to be defined according to the gender identities which they were given at birth. We can learn about family histories. And we can get a sense of the importance of stories about the past in helping to give people an idea of their own place in the world.

Think back to Nomalanga Mkhize's story told in chapter 2. Remember that she tells how, when she was a schoolgirl, her main sources of family history were the stories told by her father. Why was this family history important to her? She was excited to find out that one of her ancestors was a close associate of the Zulu king Shaka. This gave her a sense that she and her family belonged in history, and that history belonged to them. This discovery was something that she did not get from school history.

Very often you will not find this kind of history in books. That is why it is important to ‘ask the old people’. But, as is the case for all historical sources, we have to think carefully about what older people have to say about the past.

Sekibakiba (Sekiba) Lekgoathi grew up in the late 1960s and early 1970s near what is now the town of Mokopane in Limpopo Province, looking after his family's cattle and goats. Fast-forward some 40 years, and in 2011 he became an associate professor of history at Wits University. In 2015, he became head of the Department of History at Wits. By this time, he was also an authority on the life and work of the noted ethnologist Dr Nicolaas van Warmelo (1904−1989).

Professor Lekgoathi's interests overlap with our own interests in the archive of the past before colonial times. We thought it would be a good idea to have a conversation with him about his life and about Van Warmelo's work. The three of us had long discussions at Wits University on 20 September 2017 and 21 February 2018.

To begin with, we talked about Professor Lekgoathi's career in some detail. Against this background, we moved on to discuss how he had encountered Van Warmelo's writings, published and unpublished. In this chapter, we first give an account of what Professor Lekgoathi told us about his life. Much of the story, especially the earlier part, is given verbatim − that is, in his own words. For other parts of the story, we summarise what he told us. In the second section of the chapter, we give a mostly verbatim account of what he told us about his engagement with Van Warmelo's work. At several points we have inserted our own explanatory notes.

PART 1: FROM HERDBOY TO HISTORY PROFESSOR

Sekibakiba Lekgoathi was born in 1966 on a white-owned farm near the town then called Potgietersrus (now Mokopane). He was the eldest of seven children, and grew up using both Northern Sotho (Sepedi) and Northern Ndebele as home languages. His family, headed by his paternal grandfather, lived as tenants on the farm, with the right to keep cattle and goats. In exchange, the grandfather worked on the farm. By the 1960s, the South African government was forcing tenants on farms in many parts of the country to reduce the numbers of livestock that they kept.

HISTORY WITHOUT SOCIAL INTELLIGENCE

In this chapter, we discuss why different groups of people in southern Africa have different ideas about what happened in the past before colonial times, and why these ideas are often strongly contested. If we turn back to Nomalanga Mkhize's article in chapter 2, we see that her comments indicate that there are few opportunities for deep conversations about the past in South Africa's schools, and in its universities. To be fair, it is often difficult to have these conversations in classrooms. But Mkhize feels strongly that the kind of history she was taught at school in KwaZulu-Natal in the mid-1990s had nothing to say to her. It was distant, dead; it taught her nothing at all of what was going on in the world around her. This was in sharp contrast to what she told us about her father's history lessons and how excited they made her feel.

She writes that parts of the education that she received at her school were excellent. But when she looks back, she thinks about how she and her classmates were being prepared to be members of an elite. It is a group of people, she says, who have ‘very little social literacy, and who display contempt for the idea of social intelligence’. She is referring to the kind of education that aims to teach students to be ‘cultured’, but in many ways prevents them from gaining the knowledge and skills needed to make meaningful connections with the world in which they live.

Mkhize was at school when the reform of apartheid-era curricula was only just beginning. Twenty years later, the school history curriculum, at least, draws much more of its content from recent work written by academic historians and archaeologists. But Mkhize's words also point to the more recent calls for the ‘decolonisation’ of university education and the teaching of more ‘precolonial’ history. It is clear that one of the feelings behind the student protest movement that took off in South Africa in 2015 is a deep-seated dislike of the university education that students are getting. This education may be very good on some levels, but many students seem to feel that there is little connection between what they learn in the university classroom and their own lives.

A BOOK, AND ITS CHANGES OF SHAPE

This book is the product of several years of interaction between the contributing authors and the editors. During this period, it has changed shape several times. At first, we very much wanted to challenge common stereotypes about southern Africa's past before colonial times. (We have written about some of these stereotypes in chapter 3.) We wanted to show that they were based on narrow and misleading ‘colonial’ ways of looking at historical source materials. But our discussions always led us back to the same questions. What actually are the available sources of evidence on this period of history? Where do these sources come from? Who made them, and when, where and why? Why have some sources survived into the present, and others not? What is the nature of the archive on southern Africa's past before colonial times?

So we found ourselves moving on to the idea that we would explore how the archive of the past before colonial times was made, as well as warning our readers about watching out for stereotypes. We started by inviting several scholars to write about well-known books that they and other academics, as well as people outside the university, would consult to find out about history before colonial times. Each chapter in our book would be written by a scholar with a good knowledge of the subject. We asked them to write in a way that non-specialists would enjoy reading.

As our project got under way, and as we talked to our contributors and read what they had written, we came to feel that the book was too narrowly focused. The term ‘archive’ does not refer only to old books about the past. There are many other kinds of archive. So we asked more scholars to contribute chapters that broadened the book's focus. We encouraged them to write in personal terms about how they had discovered a particular archive, and the intellectual journeys they had made in working with it. We wanted to give readers a sense of how challenging it is to do one's own archival research, and also how rewarding it can be. We also hoped that, instead of simply telling readers why certain stereotypes were misleading, we could stimulate their own critical thinking about how to interpret texts on times past.

FOREGROUNDING THE ARCHIVE

This book is concerned with the times before the establishment of European colonial rule in southern Africa. Colonial rule began in the south-western Cape in the 1650s and gradually extended eastwards and northwards. It reached the areas that are now northern Limpopo Province and Zimbabwe in the 1890s. The focus of the book is on exploring a range of materials that historians and others have used as sources for finding out about the history of African societies before these dates.

When we first started thinking about this book, our aim was mainly to challenge and displace what we saw as common stereotypes and misconceptions about southern Africa's history before colonial times. As we began to investigate where these stereotypes came from, we thought more and more about the question of where historians find their source materials. We shifted our focus to thinking about the sources for histories of the past before the establishment of colonial rule. What are these sources, and where do we find them? The chapters in this book tackle these questions from a number of different angles.

Records of the past in all societies are always incomplete. Researchers who specialise in studying the past have to work with what traces or remains of the past they can find. Historians and other scholars who specialise in researching the history of southern Africa before colonial times have learnt to identify traces of the past in certain ideas, physical materials and social practices that exist in the present.

For a start, oral accounts of the past told by knowledgeable people today can be useful sources. Then there are many oral accounts of the past told by Africans in colonial times and recorded in different written forms. These include unpublished documents, newspaper articles, history books, novels and plays that we can still find in libraries today. Other kinds of written material also come to mind. Here we think of books written by travellers in the past who visited African societies, and unpublished letters and reports written by missionaries and officials who worked in, or visited, African societies.