Living on Edge: New Perspectives on Anxiety, Refuge and Colonialism in Southern Africa

Abstract

Archaeologies of colonialism have have called for exploring the culturally dynamic entanglements of people and objects while acknowledging the violence that accompanied these entanglements. Heeding these calls requires attention to how the state and state power were materialised, particularly in settler colonies where state apparatuses advanced unevenly, insidiously, and clumsily. Here, I explore how the (mis)understandings and (mis)apprehensions of people and places that accompanied the halting expansion of colonial frontiers were materialised. Focusing on southern Africa's Highveld and Maloti-Drakensberg Mountains, I offer anxiety as a framework for conceiving of colonialisms as epistemic encounters: processes of 'making sense' of new people, things, and places based on material practices, empirical experience, and desire. Through a narrative of the nineteenth-century Maloti-Drakensberg told with archival, archaeological, and ethnographic materials, I re-visit a longstanding trope of southern African archaeology and historiography: refugia from social distress. I argue that refuge can be taken as a sense-making practice rather than as reaction to stress. I close with thoughts on what an anxiety framework can offer the still-developing field of African historical archaeology.

Finding Archaeology in 2017: What Is Archaeology and Why Are We Doing It? Why Should We Be Doing It?

“…Wright () uses multiple methodologies to consider both the local and the global in understanding North American Woodland societies, while a host of scholars present case studies in a new handbook of archaeology and globalization (Hodos and Geurds ). King () looks at the complications of colonial frontiers in southern Africa, while Trabert (), in a case study from the American Great Plains, discusses how even indirect, down‐the‐line, or peripheral effects of colonial situations can profoundly impact lives. An edited volume on colonialism through the lens of bioarchaeology seeks to connect individual life experiences to the realities of global cultural interactions (Murphy, Klaus, and Larsen 2017).…”

In praise of outlaws

“…Perceptions and misperceptions of outlaws affected colonist and colonized, albeit in different ways. We should further exercise caution before subscribing to an overextended conception of the state's power, especially in settler colonies (King 2017b). While representatives of the colonial state in Africa were empowered to regulate and punish native bodies, they also acted out of anxiety, uncertainty and flawed efforts to characterize ‘normal’ African cultures and behaviours – often through material, physical, linguistic and locative traits.…”

“…This raiding appears in historical literature as the impetus for defensive refugia and agglomeration just described: different modes of coping with the increased threat to security that raiding represented. The material impression left on historical observers, then, was one of dense village life offering a measure of security against raids but subject to disruption as people fell back upon temporary hilltop sites for greater safety (King 2017b).…”

“…They used rock shelters and steep-sided mountains as fall-back positions after raids, as places to store food and supplies, and for longer periods of dwelling. Settlements like Bolepeletsa (an example of a mountaintop site), occupied throughout the 19th century, were geared towards expediency: walls for huts and kraals were dry-walled and repaired with undressed stone, the few avenues of ingress onto the hilltop were easily blocked with defensive walling, and the only local water sources were naturally occurring cupules in the hill's sandstone bedrock (King 2017b). Moorosi's BaPhuthi were well aware of the difficulties that colonial police and military faced in pursuing cattle raiders into the Maloti–Drakensberg, and used landscape features like inaccessible hilltops to their advantage (King and Challis 2017).…”

“…The remaining participants fought on the mountain for other reasons, perhaps drawn by anti-colonialist or anti-royalist sentiment or by Moorosi's cult of personality (Austen 1879b; 1879c; 1880). What insights we have into the long-term workings of Moorosi's polity suggest that his chiefdom was capable of incorporating people from an array of sociocultural backgrounds (including ‘Bushmen’ raiders), as attested to in genealogies and oral histories (King 2017b). Concerning ‘Bushmen’ raiders, archaeological scholarship has highlighted how raids could foster cohesion through shared practices: planning and executing manoeuvres, caring for and hiding livestock, producing rock art.…”