Five Hundred Years Rediscovered

Five Hundred Years Rediscovered PDF Author: Natalie Swanepoel
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1776142284
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
In the age of the African Renaissance, southern Africa has needed to reinterpret the past in fresh and more appropriate ways. The last 500 years represent a strikingly unexplored and misrepresented period which remains disfigured by colonial/apartheid assumptions, most notably in the way that African societies are depicted as fixed, passive, isolated, un-enterprising and unenlightened. This period is one the most formative in relation to southern Africa’s past while remaining, in many ways, the least known. Key cultural contours of the sub-continent took shape, while in a jagged and uneven fashion some of the features of modern identities emerged. Enormous internal economic innovation and political experimentation was taking place at the same time as expanding European mercantile forces started to press upon southern African shores and its hinterlands. This suggests that interaction, flux and mixing were a strong feature of the period, rather than the homogeneity and fixity proposed in standard historical and archaeological writings. Five Hundred Years Rediscovered represents the first step, taken by a group of archaeologists and historians, to collectively reframe, revitalise and re-examine the last 500 years. By integrating research and developing trans-frontier research networks, the group hopes to challenge thinking about the region’s expanding internal and colonial frontiers, and to broaden current perceptions about southern Africa’s colonial past.

Five Hundred Years Rediscovered

Five Hundred Years Rediscovered PDF Author: Natalie Swanepoel
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1776142284
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296

Get Book

Book Description
In the age of the African Renaissance, southern Africa has needed to reinterpret the past in fresh and more appropriate ways. The last 500 years represent a strikingly unexplored and misrepresented period which remains disfigured by colonial/apartheid assumptions, most notably in the way that African societies are depicted as fixed, passive, isolated, un-enterprising and unenlightened. This period is one the most formative in relation to southern Africa’s past while remaining, in many ways, the least known. Key cultural contours of the sub-continent took shape, while in a jagged and uneven fashion some of the features of modern identities emerged. Enormous internal economic innovation and political experimentation was taking place at the same time as expanding European mercantile forces started to press upon southern African shores and its hinterlands. This suggests that interaction, flux and mixing were a strong feature of the period, rather than the homogeneity and fixity proposed in standard historical and archaeological writings. Five Hundred Years Rediscovered represents the first step, taken by a group of archaeologists and historians, to collectively reframe, revitalise and re-examine the last 500 years. By integrating research and developing trans-frontier research networks, the group hopes to challenge thinking about the region’s expanding internal and colonial frontiers, and to broaden current perceptions about southern Africa’s colonial past.

Five Hundred Years Rediscovered

Five Hundred Years Rediscovered PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781868146352
Category : Africa, Southern
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description


The Zulu-Boer War 1837–1840

The Zulu-Boer War 1837–1840 PDF Author: Michał Leśniewski
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004449582
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
This book offers an account of this understudied conflict dating from the early stage of European colonialism in Africa, and unpacks the complex regional relationships between different communities in the first half of 19th century.

Forgotten World

Forgotten World PDF Author: Tim Maggs
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1776140400
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
If you drive through Mpumalanga with an eye on the landscape flashing by, you may see, near the sides of the road and further away on the hills above and in the valleys below, fragments of building in stone as well as sections of stone-walling breaking the grass cover. Endless stone circles, set in bewildering mazes and linked by long stone passages, cover the landscape stretching from Ohrigstad to Carolina, connecting over 10 000 square kilometres of the escarpment into a complex web of stone-walled homesteads, terraced fields and linking roads. Oral traditions recorded in the early twentieth century named the area Bokoni - the country of the Koni people. Few South Africans or visitors to the country know much about these settlements, and why today they are deserted and largely ignored. A long tradition of archaeological work which might provide some of the answers remains cloistered in universities and the knowledge vacuum has been filled by a variety of exotic explanations - invoking ancient settlers from India or even visitors from outer space - that share a common assumption that Africans were too primitive to have created such elaborate stone structures. Forgotten World defies the usual stereotypes about backward African farming methods and shows that these settlements were at their peak between 1500 and 1820, that they housed a substantial population, organised vast amounts of labour for infrastructural development, and displayed extraordinary levels of agricultural innovation and productivity. The Koni were part of a trading system linked to the coast of Mozambique and the wider world of Indian Ocean trade beyond. Forgotten World tells the story of Bokoni through rigorous historical and archaeological research, and lavishly illustrates it with stunning photographic images.

The Oxford Handbook of African Archaeology

The Oxford Handbook of African Archaeology PDF Author: Peter Mitchell
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199569886
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1077

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Book Description
This Handbook provides a comprehensive synthesis of African archaeology, covering the entirety of the continent's past from the beginnings of human evolution to the archaeological legacy of European colonialism. It includes a mixture of key methodological and theoretical issues and debates and situates the subject's contemporary practice.

A History of Water: Series III, Volume 3

A History of Water: Series III, Volume 3 PDF Author: Terje Tvedt
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 178673138X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 592

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Book Description
Major changes in policy and management , across the entire agricultural production chain, will be needed to ensure the best use of available water resources in meeting growing demands for food and other agricultural products. This new volume in the successful History of Water Series focuses on the African continent to address this key issue. Humanity has its roots in Africa and many of our food systems developed there. All types of agricultural production are present and the sheer size of the continent offers wide ecological variation from extreme desert to dense rainforest. Drawing together leading international contributors from a wide variety of disciplines Water and Food offers new insights into the evolution of food systems, from early hunter gatherers to the global challenges of the modern world.

India Rediscovered

India Rediscovered PDF Author: Mahesh Vikram Singh
Publisher: Northern Book Centre
ISBN: 9788172112097
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
India Rediscovered in not just another title. India always needed to be rediscovered for the future making of the nation. It needed to be rediscovered in the context of interplay of its inherent spirit and changing material conditions althrough the past. It needed to be rediscovered in the cycles of rise and fall, revival and rejuvenation of all its civilizational and cultural ethos. It needed to be rediscovered for a better understanding of the causes of a number of misgivings and misconceptions with a view to find a more positive and rational path of its rebuilding and finally it needed to be rediscovered to listen to the call of the age. Salient Features: • The book falls in the line of some exceptional writings on India’s past to its present in a surveying manner and style. • Analyses the direction of Indian history on the basis of the inter-relationship of spirit and matter with regard to general will of the people. • Evaluates the progress of civilization and culture, state and society in India in terms of maximum and total efficiency during different eras of Indian history which is altogether a new vision of looking at India’s past. • Very well studded with references and an exhaustive theme-index at the end for the benefit of readers and researchers with a view to open new vistas of research in the field and hence a big contribution to the knowledge.

To Swim with Crocodiles

To Swim with Crocodiles PDF Author: Jill E Kelly
Publisher: MSU Press
ISBN: 1628953322
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
To Swim with Crocodiles: Land, Violence, and Belonging in South Africa, 1800–1996 offers a fresh perspective on the history of rural politics in South Africa, from the rise of the Zulu kingdom to the civil war at the dawn of democracy in KwaZulu-Natal. The book shows how Africans in the Table Mountain region drew on the cultural inheritance of ukukhonza—a practice of affiliation that binds together chiefs and subjects—to seek social and physical security in times of war and upheaval. Grounded in a rich combination of archival sources and oral interviews, this book examines relations within and between chiefdoms to bring wider concerns of African studies into focus, including land, violence, chieftaincy, ethnic and nationalist politics, and development. Colonial indirect rule, segregation, and apartheid attempted to fix formerly fluid polities into territorial “tribes” and ethnic identities, but the Zulu practice of ukukhonza maintained its flexibility and endured. By exploring what Zulu men and women knew about and how they remembered ukukhonza, Kelly reveals how Africans envisioned and defined relationships with the land, their chiefs, and their neighbors as white minority rule transformed the countryside and local institutions of governance.

The Politics of Heritage in Africa

The Politics of Heritage in Africa PDF Author: Derek R. Peterson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316241173
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
Heritage work has had a uniquely wide currency in Africa's politics. Secure within the pages of books, encoded in legal statutes, encased in glass display cases and enacted in the panoply of court ritual, the artefacts produced by the heritage domain have become a resource for government administration, a library for traditionalists and a marketable source of value for cultural entrepreneurs. The Politics of Heritage in Africa draws together disparate fields of study - history, archaeology, linguistics, the performing arts and cinema - to show how the lifeways of the past were made into capital, a store of authentic knowledge that political and cultural entrepreneurs could draw from. This book shows African heritage to be a mode of political organisation, a means by which the relics of the past are shored up, reconstructed and revalued as commodities, as tradition, as morality or as patrimony.

The Creation of the Zulu Kingdom, 1815–1828

The Creation of the Zulu Kingdom, 1815–1828 PDF Author: Elizabeth A. Eldredge
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107075327
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 421

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Book Description
This scholarly account traces the emergence of the Zulu Kingdom in South Africa in the early nineteenth century, under the rule of the ambitious and iconic King Shaka. In contrast to recent literary analyses of myths of Shaka, this book uses the richness of Zulu oral traditions and a comprehensive body of written sources to provide a compelling narrative and analysis of the events and people of the era of Shaka's rule. The oral traditions portray Shaka as rewarding courage and loyalty and punishing failure; as ordering the targeted killing of his own subjects, both warriors and civilians, to ensure compliance to his rule; and as arrogant and shrewd, but kind to the poor and mentally disabled. The rich and diverse oral traditions, transmitted from generation to generation, reveal the important roles and fates of men and women, royal and subject, from the perspectives of those who experienced Shaka's rule and the dramatic emergence of the Zulu Kingdom.