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History, historians, and historiography of central southern Africa in the last five hundred years

Research Project
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01.02.2022
 - 31.01.2028

In the interior of southern Africa, on the Highveld, human societies thrived for millennia. They lived on the high plains, lush with summer rains, amidts the broken mountain massifs, covered in snow, in the dry wooded savanna, and in the vast void of the desert. Of them, we know very little. This project finally brings their history in the last five centuries into light. It does so with an approach that is based on an innovative take on African sources and African historians, integrated with archaeology, travel accounts, geography, linguistics, other 'traditional' sources, and a critical understanding of colonial and ethnographic archives. The societies of the Highveld left faint traces of their existence. They had no writing. Only few lived in houses made of durable materials. They painted caves, engraved rocks, worked metals, sculpted wood and stone, shaped clay, hunted, harvested, and reared cattle. They travelled and traded, both locally and with regions far away, bringing foreign goods with them. They lived in small roaming bands or large states, and many different organisations in between. They praised their ancestors, spoke about them, remembered them. Yet, even something as simple as naming these societies now appears to scholars as a shaky illusion. Previous denominations are insufficient and misleading. Periodisation is difficult. Chronology is impossible. This project aims at changing that. After decades of exquisite scholarly deconstruction of the colonial understanding of African history, it is time to look anew at those traces and to write a history for Africa's 21st century. It is impossible to understand and write African history without reading African historians. The project is based on a series of important archival discoveries of transcribed 'oral traditions', among which were located a number of little-known African historians, writing between the 1850s and the 1960s. They were all descendants of several ruling families of various precolonial states of the Highveld. They were trained authors that dedicated themselves and their intellect to the acts of looking back, carrying over, making sense, looking forward, combining orality and writing. The collection and analysis of their papers allow for a much richer, thicker, and deeper reading of current archaeological research and of older travel accounts and colonial sources. The archives and papers of these African historians include manuscripts in Sesotho, Setswana, in several scarcely known vernacular dialects, in English, and French, by themselves and by colonial officers and missionaries. These archival collections are in Lesotho, South Africa, and the United Kingdom. In addition to conventional scientific production, the research project aims at reconnecting with the families and communities of these African historians, cooperating and sharing with them the results of the research. This should include the edition of the unpublished manuscripts of their ancestors.

Publications

Morelli, Ettore (2024) ‘Seetsele Modiri Molema: Historian of the Barolong, 1891–1965’, Afriques [Preprint]. Available at: https://doi.org/10.4000/afriques.4788.

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URLs

Morelli, Ettore (2022) ‘“A Bushman Cannot Rule”: Power, Movement, and Freedom in the Family of Moletsane. Central Southern Africa, 1849 and 1967’, Africa. Rivista semestrale di studi e ricerche, 4(2), pp. 89–118. Available at: https://doi.org/10.23744/4764.

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Members (1)

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Ettore Morelli

Principal Investigator