Table of Contents

• Editorial: Professor Gloria Emeagwali and Professor Olusegun Sogunro

• Critical Tributes to Leonard Thompson: Michael Blanker, Collin Berrill, Tavvia Jefferson and Terrance Griffin

 Editorial

This Critical Tribute to Leonard Thompson was inspired by the 2014 edition of A History of South Africa - revised and updated by Lynne Berat of Yale University. South African historiography has been characterized by a poverty of concepts, whereby terms such as “chiefdom,”  “hut,” “primitive,” “band” and other terminologies from colonial anthropology often poison the mind of the reader and inhibit serious intellectual discourse. Questionable terminologies merge with an overall Eurocentric tendency to pathologize climate, soil, culture, people and just about every aspect of African existence. So how does the 2014 revised edition of Thompson’s A History of South Africa transcend the above trends? These illuminating commentaries by Michael Blanker, Colin Berrill, Tavvia Jefferson and Terrance Griffin provide some interesting insights. This critical tribute to Leonard Thompson arose from panel discussions at Central Connecticut State University and would hopefully influence future editions of Thompson’s pioneering text. The discussions should also draw attention to some areas in need of urgent revision with respect to South African historiography.

Professor Gloria Emeagwali
Chief Editor
AfricaUpdate

“Mapungubwe and the Colonial Legacy in South African History:  Reflections on Thompson’s A History of South Africa”
Michael Blanker

Colonial racism has long distorted the historiography of South Africa. This has certainly changed with the anti-apartheid movement and the fall of the apartheid regime. Still, the influence of colonial ideology remains with the continuation of a real, though perhaps more subtle misrepresentation of South Africa’s past. Current discussions of the civilization of Mapungubwe illustrate this.

Mapungubwe was a complex society south of the Limpopo River during the 13^th century. It was clearly an advanced civilization, and was likely the cultural source of the later, more acknowledged society at Great Zimbabwe - which has had its own history falsified by colonial racism. Despite this pivotal role in the development of civilization in southern Africa, Mapungubwe remains profoundly under-recognized.

Racism was common in mainstream Western scholarship on Mapungubwe throughout the 20^th century. In 1938 for example, The Scientific Monthly dismissed even the possibility that Mapungubwe could have been built by southern Africans.¹ Although this explicit racism has diminished in 21^st century scholarly work on Mapungubwe, the influence of colonial perspectives and assumptions are still embedded in popular academic discussions on South Africa’s pre-colonial history. One example is A History of South Africa by Leonard Thompson, which has been revised and updated in 2014 by Lynn Berat.²

Thompson’s A History of South Africa

Thompson’s work is justifiably appreciated for its discussion of the entirety of South African history. As Donald Will has pointed out, Western histories of South Africa before Thompson often began with 1652 and the arrival of the Dutch, while Thompson instead addresses the pre-colonial history of South Africa as well.³  Iain Smith illustrates this, explaining that Thompson produced “the first major history of the area to stress the role of the majority African population in the country’s past.”⁴ Brian Willan agrees, noting that Thompson’s focus is “on the experiences of the black inhabitants of the region rather than those of the white minority.”⁵ Included in this focus, according to Will, is Thompson’s commitment to showing how southern Africans defended their societies and cultures from what Thompson labels the white invaders: “Thompson demonstrates how the Africans resisted every step of the way.”⁶ It is also important to note that Thompson rejects the use of the culturally biased concept of tribalism in discussions of pre-colonial history in southern Africa.⁷

Despite these alleged essential contributions, however, Thompson’s work continues to express historical distortions because he presents pre-colonial South African history as devoid of civilization. He recognizes the hunter-gatherers and early farmers of the southern part of the continent, but severely underestimates the social complexity of the region in the period before the arrival of Europeans. First, there is a preoccupation with the physical characteristics of pre-European southern Africans, especially their skin color. For instance, in describing the early inhabitants of southern Africa, he notes that they were “small people with light brown or olive skins.”⁸ When he discusses the first farmers he suggests they had “dark brown skin and robust physiques.”⁹ In addition he quotes, without comment, a 19^th century English traveler’s description of native southern Africans as “innocent” and as possessing small features that constituted an “amusing novelty.”¹⁰ Although describing someone’s physical attributes is not racist, it is not clear what significance these people’s skin tones or supposed innocence have for a historical examination, and his discussion may unintentionally reflect colonial preoccupations.

Thompson on Mapungubwe

Thompson’s primary weakness on South Africa’s pre-colonial history is that he does not discuss nor even mention Mapungubwe. This omission is all the more significant since Mapungubwe falls within the geographic region Thompson defines as historical South Africa. In numerous places throughout the first chapter, he defines the northern boundary of South Africa as the Limpopo River, which thus delineates Mapungubwe as historically South African. It is true that much of the archeological evidence on Mapungubwe has only emerged since the fall of apartheid, so Thompson’s earlier editions may have partially reflected the limits of contemporary archeology. But the Third edition (2001) and certainly the fourth edition in 2014 were published after abundant research on the achievements and complexity of Mapungubwe had become available. It is therefore a historical inaccuracy to neglect discussion of South Africa’s earliest complex civilization. Indeed Jacob Tropp, reviewing the Third Edition in 2001 already identified this weakness, stating, “Chapter 1 on the history of Africans prior to European settlement… does not incorporate any scholarship more recent than the later 1980s.”¹³  The fourth edition has not moved beyond this position

Civilization at Mapungubwe

The archeological scholarship of the last twenty-five years has in fact fully demonstrated that Mapungubwe was a complex and sophisticated society, integrated into world trade and meriting the label of civilization. As early as 1991, Basil Davidson stressed that states with social complexity far beyond chiefdoms were developing in southern Africa. “(In) Mapungubwe Culture… along the southern bank of the Limpopo, in what is now the northern Transvaal, Shona people established themselves after about AD 1000 and built a series of Iron Age polities… working finely in cast and beaten gold… and burying their kings with a wealth of golden ornament.” Davidson additionally emphasized that Mapungubwe was not unique. “And the same state-forming process, in one degree or another, went on right across South Africa as far as its southernmost seaboard.”¹⁴ T. N. Huffman, writing in 1992 in the UNESCO General History of Africa, concurred with Davidson’s assessment. Huffman identifies many of the characteristics typically associated with civilizations as being present at Mapungubwe before the 13th century: explicit social hierarchy, the manufacture of gold and cotton, stone architecture organized to distinguish social class, centralized political authority and integration into world trade networks.¹⁵ Here, clearly, was a civilization.

Writing a decade later, Graham Connah echoes the conclusions concerning social complexity at Mapungubwe. “In conjunction with a number of associated sites, it also seems likely that Mapungubwe became one of the earliest identified states in the area.”¹⁶  Connah too is struck by the sophistication of the gold and textile industries. “The gold-covered rhinoceros figure and other objects found in twelfth-century burials at Mapungubwe are a sad reminder of the objects that must have been lost to looters… The presence of spinning would presumably suggest that weaving was also taking place and we could assume that textile manufacture was of some significance.”¹⁷  John Iliffe, writing in 2007, makes explicit that Mapungubwe was no ‘chiefdom’, arguing that by 1220 a hierarchy of sufficient wealth, complexity and centralized authority had developed to suggest “a political state no longer subject to the repeated segmentation that had restricted the scale of previous chiefdoms.”¹⁸

Mapungubwe and Indian Ocean Trade

In addition to minimizing the social complexity in pre-colonial South Africa, Thompson also asserts the region was cut off from global connections and world trade networks before the arrival of Europeans. “Although Southern Africa is at the end of the Eurasian-African landmass, it was an isolated region before humanity’s technological advances of the past few centuries.”¹⁹ Thompson maintains that southern Africa was isolated, without any cultural exchange between South Africa and the wider world.²⁰ However, archeology and scholarship over the last twenty-five years have successfully challenged this contention as well.

Recent Scholarship on Mapungubwe

In 2007, Huffman produced a major work focused on the pre-colonial archeology of southern Africa.²⁶ He examines additional areas of social development at Mapungubwe. First, he suggests that the social complexity and economic advancements at Mapungubwe by the 13th century were partially driven by a dramatic population increase, with perhaps a tripling of inhabitants since the 9th century.²⁷ Huffman further argues that the wealth derived from this increased population and from long distance trade led to intensified social inequality and a corresponding development of a bureaucratic class.²⁸ Finally, Huffman speculates that the relationship between Mapungubwe and the later civilization of Great Zimbabwe was a direct one. Although he does not suggest that the people of Mapungubwe moved to and created Great Zimbabwe, Huffman contends that the society and culture of Great Zimbabwe were directly inherited from Mapungubwe. “The successor to Mapungubwe was Great Zimbabwe.”²⁹ David Killick has additionally argued that metallurgy was present in southern Africa by the 4th century,³⁰ while Duncan Miller has presented evidence for metal casting, especially of copper and tin, at Mapungubwe in the 13th century.³¹

Writing in 2009, Iris Berger summarizes the conclusions to be drawn about the civilization at Mapungubwe from the last two and a half decades of archeological research. “In the mid-1990s, archeologists working in the northeast corner of South Africa… began to excavate a stone wall and royal grave site, one of more than five hundred hilltop stone remains scattered along the Limpopo River basin. Their discoveries… revealed relics of southern Africa’s earliest centralized states, whose leaders based their power and wealth on international Indian Ocean trading networks that connected them with the Middle East and India.”³² Undoubtedly, Mapungubwe was a southern African civilization that pre-dated European arrival by hundreds of years.

Conclusion

Thompson’s work is not alone among general academic histories of South Africa in under-recognizing Mapungubwe. Robert Ross, in A Concise History of South Africa, does mention Mapungubwe and he labels it a state. But he strongly underestimates its importance, granting it only a sentence as he indirectly describes it as small and as headed by a chief.³³ These omissions concerning Mapungubwe may be the result of an ongoing, subtler form of colonial assumptions and biases: the vacant land myth.

Western universities and public education no longer express the explicit racism that was common 50 years ago. But academia still exists among elites within American, European and South African social orders based on privilege generated through colonialism. To appreciate the poetry or art of previously colonized peoples is no longer seen as an ideological threat to socially advantaged Western elites. But to accept that pre-colonial peoples had civilizations implies their descendants have a deeper historical claim to the land and wealth that has been expropriated by Western colonialism than depicting them as hunter-gatherers would. If the land was vacant, or at least vacant of complex, highly populated societies, Western nations have a less challenged claim to the wealth, privilege and social development they have gained through colonialism and imperialism. This misrepresentation of pre-colonial history is not limited to South Africa, however. An established U. S. history textbook currently common in American public high schools presents the native North American civilizations of the Anasazi, Hopewell, Mississippians and others in three sentences in a thousand page work.³⁴ Like in South African history, the pre-colonial civilizations of Native Americans have been minimized, and the triumphalist narrative of U.S. Western expansion remains less challenged because of it. Acknowledgement of pre-colonial civilizations on the other hand, whether in the United States or in South Africa, means granting that world historical outcomes other than Western ascendency were possible. This recognition makes historically justifying Western privilege intellectually untenable. It is therefore hoped that in future editions of A History of South Africa these distortions will be recognized and an appropriate discussion of the complex and accomplished civilization of Mapungubwe will be included.

Notes

“Leonard Thompson and Pre-Colonial Southern Africa: A Critique of Eurocentric Narratives”
Collin Berrill

Leonard Thompson’s A History of South Africa was written with a fuller historiography of South Africa in mind than just the modern Apartheid and post-Apartheid eras. It explores the cultural, political, military, and economic aspects of the region from the ancient and pre-colonial eras up through the 21^st century. In his pursuit of such a broad scope of history, Thompson makes both mistakes and impressive strokes, when examining the societies of southern Africa. Both the good and bad of his historiography can be seen, within the first four chapters of his book, which discusses the pre-colonial era up to the turn of the 20^th century and British domination of the region. This period, roughly outlined by the author, from the ancient era up to approximately 1910, will be the focus of this discussion, since it encompasses much of the best and worst that Thompson has to offer about South Africa. Within the context of this time and place, Thompson struggles most with outdated Eurocentric viewpoints; his own vague, inaccurate language about indigenous political traditions; and a series of startling omissions that hamstring some of his later arguments. It will also be relevant to briefly visit and refer to one of Thompson’s contemporaries, John Omer-Cooper, who in the process of writing History of Southern Africa also creates several familiar pitfalls of Eurocentric voice and language. Despite this,  however,   the authors do excel at elucidating the complex political chafing in colonial South Africa, eventually giving broader, global context to events, and generally providing deeper explanations for population movements – including immigration, forced or otherwise. The issues to be discussed here are meant as an examination of how such errors arise, particularly in histories of South Africa and why their impact on the tone and direction of the entire narrative is relevant.

In order to determine where Thompson hurts and helps himself, it is best to analyze the beginning of his narrative in Chapter 1 in his focus on ancient and pre-colonial southern Africa. His discussion of this era presents itself as troublesome almost immediately. The expansive, influential kingdoms of Thulamela and Mapungubwe are absent - and part of the narrative rides on the story of Portuguese explorers discovering a supposedly “isolated”¹ society - of course, from whom they were isolated is not mentioned. As Thompson attempts to introduce the reader to more of South Africa’s roots, he gets himself into even more trouble; terms like the undefined “chiefdoms” and Dutch slurs for the indigenous peoples are thrown around with reckless abandon, even after he confesses the derogatory nature of such epithets.² Rather than providing a wealth of insight on these countries and kingdoms, the author gives the idea that South Africans did not even have international trade routes.³ Archeological evidence available to the author at the time of writing, points to conclusions that are antithetical to those of the author, such as the discovery of ancient Chinese porcelain shards in South Africa. These kinds of omissions take away from Thompson’s basic narrative arc and historiography.  (It should be noted that more archeological discoveries have come about recently).  The care with which Omer-Cooper treats his discussion of San artistic achievements throws Thompson’s struggles with the pre-colonial period into light and illustrates an important theme of this critique -  that without a fully fleshed out, nuanced understanding of the early peoples of southern Africa, the efficacy of the later narrative – meant to build on precedent and create a strong historiographic link between past and present – is diminished and ideas such as cultural lineage and history are more difficult to portray.⁴ In point of fact, Omer-Cooper drives this point home in his reference to San rock art. Thompson’s parochial treatment of southern African artistic achievements leaves the reader and scholar with a false sense of the rock paintings’ craftsmanship, rather than appreciation and understanding of what they represent.

With a failure to engage with indigenous sources and perspectives on the significance of San art, Thompson launches into one of the book’s only considerations on the topic, and a poor one at that, saying, “When European arrived in Southern Africa, they found that the pastoralists were not as adept in music and rock painting and engraving as the hunter-gatherers.”⁵ The issue here represents a recurring theme of Thompson’s pre-colonial discussions, which almost completely give way to European narratives without the due consideration owed to indigenous sources. This begs the question of whether or not the reader of history is being asked to always assume European superiority and rightness of opinion, even when these western sources are dealing with an entirely new paradigm of artistic expression in a culturally distant society they are unfamiliar with. The extreme deference towards Eurocentric sources creates an undercurrent of undue bias (even in a discipline which recognizes bias as a necessary part of critical inquiry) in which imperialist letters, memoirs, edicts, and speeches are taken with little to no accompanying commentary to delimit the authority that they should hold in building an argumentative point.

Eurocentric narratives of history do not exist solely in the realm of historical inquiry either, as Omer-Cooper and Thompson both struggle to find an appropriate paradigm for the development of southern African civilizations and end up with the problematic phrasings of “stone age” and “iron age”- which do not responsibly reflect material and cultural achievements. To envision southern African societies on a Eurocentric timeline which demands specific mineral/material advancement is to feed into the toxic narrative of backwardness or primitiveness which has been foisted upon colonized peoples by the apologists of imperialism and European supremacy. Omer-Cooper in particular entertains these definitions in his section on “Iron Age Peoples,” failing to take the change in these societies on their own terms.⁶

Throughout the following three chapters, similar problems abound for Thompson, especially in his considerations of European-African conflict. This is perhaps most glaring in chapters 2 and 3, in which the author contradicts himself while offering up two erroneous historical theories. These chapters deal largely with Dutch (and some British) invasions of the lands belonging to Khoisan and Xhosa peoples. While indigenous resistance receives a few token references, the narrative offered in this book is largely one of trekboer commandos rolling over helpless and frankly ineffectual Africans who laid down without much of a fight.⁷ Then, in chapter 3, during Thompson’s discussion of the Mfecane, the Europeans suddenly disappear; as if by some magic trick, the nations (Great Britain and the Netherlands) which have been the primary vehicles of advancing Thompson’s story are conspicuously absent from the section titled, “The Zulu Kingdom and the Mfecane”.⁸ Within the following 7 pages where the events of the Mfecane are dissected, only a singular oblique reference to the Dutch or English can be anywhere found, in this case right at the beginning, with their role in the crisis quickly swept aside in the line, “This transformation [migrations leading to a population shift north of Cape Colony] was in essence an internal process within the mixed farming society in southeastern Africa.”⁹ Should the reader of this book really take this assumption at face value, that population growth of native peoples alone were responsible for brewing tensions, and not the least bit a result of European land-grabbing?

Thompson continues by placing the blame squarely on the shoulders of population density, a famine in the region north of Cape Colony, and Shaka Zulu himself.¹⁰ While this argument could be made soundly by relying on the proper evidence, Thompson’s refusal to even mention the European factor in the same breath as the Mfecane comes across as misleading and dishonest. While it is not the author’s responsibility to report every popular interpretation of a historical event, the complete exclusion of the European element in the Mfecane indicates a clearer refusal to engage this period from all possible angles. This is also the springboard which Thompson uses to condemn Shaka, implying an unjustified militarism on the King’s part, despite the fact that the region was being squeezed tightly by continued, violent Dutch incursions northward and implicitly continuing a theme of non-recognition for native resistance; here he implies that Shaka was an instigator and the exception in a supposedly peaceful region, further solidifying the King’s blame in the crisis.¹¹ Although the finer points of his argument deserve another discussion, Omer-Cooper apparently follows a similar train of thought as Thompson, and also does not address European encroachment and the effects of land-stealing, which forced many indigenous peoples to move out of the Cape and to the east and north towards Kwazulu-Natal.

These chapters are not without their good moments. Thompson reels in much of his more racist language in chapter 2 and provides great detail on Dutch enslavement of the Khoikhoi and the awful conditions of bondage, including rape and lack of legal protections for these individuals. On this same thread, the “coloured” population is recognized by the author as being descendants of Khoi women raped by Dutch slaveholders. ¹² An aside here for Omer-Cooper is again required.  Omer-Cooper writes of Cape slavery: “As white men long outnumbered white women in the colony, sexual relationships between persons of different race were very common. Three-quarters of the children born to slave women at the Cape up to 1671 were of mixed descent.”¹³ As a strict recitation of racial demographics, this passage is acceptable, but Omer-Cooper comes dangerously close to turning the rape of enslaved women into the more innocuous “sexual relations” which, lacking a specific negative connotation, threatens to erase the crimes committed against these indigenous people by their captors, and to completely destroy the contextual narrative of  mixed-race persons in South Africa – where rape as a systemic racial, gendered, and politically motivated crime takes place it must be explicated recognized as such and not substituted for gentler, inaccurate phrasing.

In chapter 2, Thompson disregards and does not make use of any African oral or historical traditions and instead takes quotes solely from Europeans, leading to a considerably one-sided narrative. This story continues into chapter 3 and the formalizing of Dutch and British control over the Cape Region. Here, apart from his shortcomings about the Mfecane, the author manages to capture the political dynamics at play well. The British pushing the Boers northward and eastward into conflict with groups like the Xhosa is explained thoroughly and with an eye to all involved parties and factors.

Chapter 4 of A History of South Africa deals primarily with the “mineral revolution” in the Boer Republics of Orange Free State and Transvaal and the fallout from European imperialist conflicts. This is where Thompson shines most brightly and is most illuminating about the origins of modern South Africa. He adequately discusses the rise of Germany, its rivalry with Britain, and the scramble for Africa – overall, a part of the narrative which successfully brings a global context to regional politics.¹⁴ Britain’s desire to maintain global supremacy in industrial capacity and propensity to quarrel with the Boers over mineral deposits is of paramount concern in the region in the late 19^th century and so requires a finer examination of European rivalry, specifically. That said, the author also pays a good deal of attention to the indigenous Africans, who would be placed in dangerous mining sites, suffered casualties in the wars, and continued to try and slough off the colonial European elites. Thompson also mentions the influx of South Asians brought from overseas and who still leave a significant demographic mark on areas like KwaZulu-Natal today.¹⁵ Errors in these chapters are minimal repetitions of those mentioned previously, but this part of the narrative arc is treated to an exceptionally high quality discussion by Thompson, who captures the nuances of questions concerning mineral resources, and land rights that intersect European and African claimants,  and illustrates where indigenous people fell in this equation.¹⁶

Thompson has his ups and downs across this text, and so it is important to keep in mind that even with the Berat revision in 2014, few issues plaguing histories of South Africa are appropriately reconsidered or addressed, such as a dismissal of indigenous sources and archaeology; racially-biased and inaccurate language; and a failure to engage these regions outside the scope of Western political and cultural traditions and imperialism. Here also, a point of redemption for Thompson is necessary: the first edition of A History of South Africa was written and published prior to or at least very near to archeological discoveries at the Blombos Cave on the southern coast and more extensive research at Mapungubwe in the north,  and so Thompson could only be expected to give the ancient history its proper due with the information available to him -nonetheless, this does not justify the total absence of recognition for the existence of such ancient and pre-colonial kingdoms in chapter 1.

It is more surprising that the fourth edition in particular still lacks an addendum on these new clues to the historical context of pre-colonial polities and societies.

In writing this book, Leonard Thompson deserves recognition for what amounts to, in the full course of the narrative, an incisive, thoughtful appraisal of South Africa in the 20^th and 21^st centuries. In addition, his pre-colonial history is not one so fraught with error as to have his entire argument compromised. The problems of racially-charged language and inaccurate, unfitting descriptions of African political and social traditions are clearly so embedded within the discipline that even a scholar of Thompson’s stature has fallen prey to it. As expressed above, John Omer-Cooper, another luminary of historical research in the region, was himself not immune to the same problems as Thompson. A larger argument about potentially flawed academic research on South Africa far exceeds the scope of a critique of these chapters, but it is a relevant discussion in which A History of South Africa should be mentioned. Recognizing and addressing these issues and how they might be redressed, if necessary, is important for scholars like Berat to take on.

Notes