The ‘Interior World’ of the Nineteenth-Century Maloti-Drakensberg Mountains

Abstract

Over the last four decades archaeological and historical research has the Maloti-Drakensberg Mountains as a refuge for Bushmen as the nineteenth-century colonial frontier constricted their lifeways and movements. Recent research has expanded on this characterisation of mountains-as-refugia, focusing on ethnically heterogeneous raiding bands (including San) forging new cultural identities in this marginal context. Here, we propose another view of the Maloti-Drakensberg: a dynamic political theatre in which polities that engaged in illicit activities like raiding set the terms of colonial encounters. We employ the concept of landscape friction to re-cast the environmentally marginal Maloti-Drakensberg as a region that fostered the growth of heterodox cultural, subsistence, and political behaviours. We introduce historical, rock art, and 'dirt' archaeological evidence and synthesise earlier research to illustrate the significance of the Maloti-Drakensberg during the colonial period. We offer a revised southeast-African colonial landscape and directions for future research.

The Archaeology of Missions: Afterword

“…Lifeways are here described as 'the combination of beliefs, customs, economies and actions that together constitute ways of doing things and thinking about doing things in the past'. 17 Not all of these aspects of life can be reconstructed on the basis of the material remains that archaeologists have encountered. Hard as it always is to be certain what someone else (or indeed oneself) believes, whatever that may mean, it is much more difficult and uncertain when the evidence is totally non-verbal.…”

In praise of outlaws

“…Amidst this choreography, the Maloti–Drakensberg mountains in the south-eastern subcontinent emerged as an ‘interior world’ for those people wishing to keep themselves at the edges of the colonial stage, although the mountains were certainly influenced by the events described above. From at least the 1820s until the late 1870s, this rugged and somewhat inhospitable environment saw influxes of people designated as socially marginal (freebooters, raiders, runaways), but whose misbehaviours became decidedly commonplace in the mountains among people who engaged in broadly similar sorts of movements, raids and efforts to evade authorities’ notice (King and Challis 2017).…”

“…The area around Wittebergen had, for roughly three hundred years, served as a crossroads for people of diverse cultural backgrounds (including agropastoralist chiefdoms) raiding cattle and leading more mobile, less-settled lifeways; a fact literally immaterial to Wittebergen's administration. Contouring to the landscape's aridity, mobility had enabled these people to exploit a variety of ecological niches, and participate in cattle raids that escalated throughout the 18th and 19th centuries (King and Challis 2017). When people accustomed to practising these strategies opted not to settle in Wittebergen, they became squatters – by dint of continuing their accustomed movements through Wittebergen's landscape (King forthcoming).…”

Cattle, raiding and disorder in Southern African history

“…This was particularly emphasized when cattle raiding was deployed as a strategy for resistance, as in the late eighteenth-century Cape where Khoi/San raids protested against European expansion and exploitation of African children by European farmers (Adhikari 2010; Marks 1972; Newton-King 1999: 9, 61–2; Penn 2005: 201–10) and the terms Soaqua and Sonqua were used to denote ‘raiding Bushmen’ (Parkington 1984); I return to this theme of resistance below. Further east in the Maloti-Drakensberg Mountains, ‘Bushman’ and ‘raider’ became almost interchangeable labels (Challis 2012; King and Challis forthcoming).…”

“…2013; Snow 2011: 50–1; cf. Hoff 1997), particularly within the dynamic cultural frontier of the Maloti-Drakensberg within the last few centuries (Mitchell 2009; King and Challis forthcoming). The location of cattle-oriented beliefs in such a system has yet to be explored in any detail but would provide a valuable contribution to this debate.…”