Scholars have long sought to trace the movements of herder communities arriving in southern Africa during the late Holocene. Existing models propose various routes, generally involving migration from the north through central southern Africa, as well as to the west coast before turning south. The former route passes through the middle Limpopo Valley, where herders are thought to have lived in the last two millennia. However, this possibility has not yet been fully assessed archaeologically. This paper reviews and synthesizes available data from Later Stone Age contexts, both excavated and analysed surface assemblages, to evaluate whether there is evidence for a herder presence in the region between the final centuries BC and the early 2nd millennium AD. It considers rock art, faunal, ceramic, stone tool and settlement patterns to identify variations in the Later Stone Age sequence that might signal the arrival or movement of herders through the valley. Although some regional differences are evident, their significance and whether they reflect distinct cultural groups remains uncertain. Identifying herders is not straightforward and is further complicated by how we construct cultural identities around archaeological markers, frameworks that may not reflect how people in the past understood or expressed their own identities. This paper additionally contributes to better understanding social and subsistence dynamics present in the middle Limpopo Valley during the late Holocene when several social, political and economic transformations were taking place.
The oral history of Zulu-speaking farmers in the Mnweni Valley, recorded in 2009-2011, in the northern Maloti-Drakensberg Mountains, South Africa, documents interactions with and sightings of San in the late 19(th )and early 20(th )centuries. This paper summarizes the oral history evidence for a San occupation of the Mnweni Valley from 1870 to 1930 and reconstructs the events that led to the demise of the San in the northern Drakensberg. This demonstrates that the disappearance of San from the northern Maloti-Drakensberg was more recent than previously thought. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of a 20(th)-century San presence in the Mnweni Valley for archaeological and historical research in the Maloti-Drakensberg.
In the Kalahari San ethnographies of the 20(th) century, the kaross has often been associated with adult women and their work as mothers and gatherers. From around the 1970s the large skin cloak, made from the full skin of a big game antelope, was noticed to be of significance in many South African rock paintings that are associated with the Southern San of the past. The kaross has since become a point of reference in interpretations of imagery associated with shamanic experiences evoked by trance and altered states of consciousness as well as the possible representations of communal initiation rites of young hunters. In this paper we discuss a set of images from a rock shelter in the Western Cape that we suggest are renderings of the latter and we support the argument by outlining the cultural complexity and various uses of the kaross within traditional San hunter-gatherer communities. The kaross, understood to overcome the apparent separation between male and female spheres in ritual and daily life, imbued many meanings to different people-a realization that should be of consequence also when we aim to interpret its presence on the rock face.
During the conflict between the Boers and the British at Port Natal in 1842, a group of women played a significant and heroic role far beyond the prescribed roles of women in the Victorian era. The concept of Victorian military heroism is discussed to provide a context for the further discussion of this incident. Regrettably, the actions of the women of the Mazeppa are only very rarely recalled in social memory, in traditions, and in texts, but not on memorials. This is contrasted with the memorialisation of women in Afrikaner mythology, as expressed at the Voortrekker Monument. The social memory of colonial Natal and the dominant historical narratives favoured heroic male figures, particularly in this instance, the male settler Dick King (his Zulu companion Ndongeni kaKoki was included in the memorialisation as a contested afterthought). However, the heroism of the women who sailed the little schooner Mazeppa out of the Bay of Natal, under heavy Boer fire, north to the Mozambique Channel in search of a British warship to come to the aid of their menfolk, has been largely ignored. Their voyage was unsuccessful, but this paper surmises that even if they had been successful, their contribution would have been memorialised in a manner subsidiary to that of the male 'heroic' figures aboard the ship.
The corpus of southern African Later Stone Age (LSA) rock art (or San/Bushman/huntergatherer art) follows broad conventions across the subcontinent. San/Bushman ethnography is used to identify recurrent themes and metaphors, such as hunting, dance, powerful animals, death and transformation. In certain cases, however, painted subjects receive scant mention in the ethnography. Is it possible to identify these without misunderstanding their implicit meanings? Paintings of reticulate forms in the Kouga Mountains of the Eastern Cape reawaken this debate in southern African rock art research. Although it is less secure to infer practices and items of material culture based almost entirely on their depiction in rock art, it is argued here that some inferences are safer than others. The reticulate forms and their overall painted context comprise a narrative based on hunting practices that involve the use of nets in which to capture animals. However, the paintings are not illustrations of hunting techniques: they are informed by the same tropes and concerns that have been detected in southern African LSA rock art more generally. It is to be expected that depictions of other subjects and practices not mentioned in any ethnographic records will embody a wealth of associations.
