Peter Limb

“No People Can Be Expected to Be Loyal under Such Difficulties”: Ambiguities and Identities of Early African National Congress Leaders in South Africa

Abstract This paper examines the identities of early leaders of the African National Congress (ANC) at a time when British influences still prevailed in South Africa. African attitudes to the “British World” reveal complex identities that also reflected political and cultural variations according to race, class and region. Relations between ANC leaders and the African “elite” and between the elite and subaltern strata were not straightforward. A careful reading of the discourses in and around Congress points to contradictory attitudes to things British and to ambiguous identities that lingered and contributed to the mix of social and national ideas and identities that influence contemporary South Africa.

Digital dilemmas and solutions

The impact of a globalising information economy Libraries, digitisation and change Changing strategies: winning the information game Applying digital technologies User perspectives Managing change Resolving ethical and legal dilemmas and problems.

‘The Future is in the Hands of the Workers’: a history of FOSATU

what the authors describe as the ‘future potential’ of memory. For this lens and ambition, the project should be applauded. As a whole, the compilation succeeds in raising more theoretical and ethnographic questions than could ever be addressed by any single work; the authors thereby advance a future research agenda on historical memory in Africa. How will social scientists incorporate individual memories of the ‘good old days’ of colonialism into analyses on identity politics and cultural traditions? Do humanists have a responsibility to consider the local reception, potential manipulation, and social consequences of their historical research? How do political invocations of the past constrain possibilities for the future? Such questions can breed healthy debates across disciplines and multi-sited fields, both from within Africa and beyond.

Sol Plaatje Reconsidered: Rethinking Plaatje's Attitudes to Class, Nation, Gender, and Empire 1

Sol Plaatje was the fiercely proud offspring of literate, independent peasant farmers in the Free State. His greatest grief was to see the thriving South African peasantry destroyed, dispossessed of their own land, crops and herds by the evil Land Acts of the new Union Government, condemned to wander the country as sharecroppers, migrant labourers, proletarians or domestic servants in the new mining and industrial towns. Sol Plaatje lived by the written word. He was a teacher ... a messenger ... a court interpreter ... journalist, a founder of newspapers .... He was the first black South African novelist ...Plaatje lived and died at the crucial intersection of South Africa’s history, where a cowardly imperial government created an overtly racist constitution, and handed the reins of power to the forces of reaction and oppression. He experienced dispossession. He fought against it. He foretold the bleak future of repression and resistance through which generations more were condemned to pass until liberation day. (Kader Asmal, Minister of Education, International Literacy Day, 8 Sept. 1999, National Assembly)

African Studies Bibliography: A State-of-the-Art Review

Old Problems Regular readers of Africa Bibliography may recall that, in an article for the 2001 volume, bookseller Paul Wilson mused that the personal libraries of renowned Africanists Basil Davidson, and Roland Oliver and Suzanne Miers, really should go back to Africa notwithstanding the lack of secure repositories and funds, a way of accomplishing this for which, alas, he saw ‘no established procedure’. Since then, however, his wish has been granted in relation to another collection, that of Bernth Lindfors, whose wonderful arsenal of African literature has made its way back to Africa, to Pietermaritzburg, with a little help from corporate friends in South Africa. Much earlier still, in 1991, the then editor of Africa Bibliography, Chris Allen, wrote in these pages that African Studies bibliography suffered from both inadequate bibliographic control and lack of ‘computerization’. Here, too, things have changed, largely for the better, though many old problems remain. It is the current complexities and future possibilities of this situation that this article concentrates on. But, before discussing the state-of-the-art of Africana bibliography, it is germane to recall the main problems that confront this endeavour. A basic problem inhibiting better knowledge of, and access to, relevant information about Africa is the ongoing and well-known crisis of African publishing. That is not to say that little is being published in Africa. Indeed a great deal of very good material is regularly published, but the viability of publishers continues to be threatened by general resource shortages, instability, poorly developed distribution, and domination of markets by transnational publishers with little interest in areas such as African language imprints. The effective reach of new technologies within the continent has also been limited, cramping the visibility of African publishers and writers. A further problem, pointed out by John McIlwaine (also writing in these pages, in 2001) has been the variable quality of some printed bibliographies. In addition, even if there is no ‘book famine’ in African studies in the North, one might nowadays talk of a ‘bibliography famine’. Hans Zell points to a general decline in the number of published bibliographies on Africa. Although the annual ‘New Africana Reference Works’ section of African Book Publishing Record does provide regular updates of new bibliographies and reference works, it does not do so at the sort of depth possible in book-length works. Behind this phenomenon are both market and technology trends. Zell notes the irony that, ‘although there are now more and more colleges and universities offering some kind of programme or courses on Africa, many libraries at these institutions are not funded enough to acquire the essential reference works that they need, much less monographs’.

Southern African Liberation Struggles 1960–1994: Contemporaneous Documents

The Hashim Mbita Project’s Southern African Liberation Struggles 1960–1994, finally published, is, states the publisher, ‘the most comprehensive historical record of the liberation struggles in southern Africa’, with 5394 pages in nine volumes. In 2004, the Southern African Development Community (SADC) agreed on the Project – named after the last Executive Secretary of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) African Liberation Committee, Lieutenant General Hashim Mbita – to research liberation movements in the Frontline states, plus ‘extension countries’, and publish the results. Generous funding was provided by some SADC states. Launched at aworkshop in 2005, it aimed to present African perspectives, published in Africa, by Africans, for Africans. As Mbita explains in the foreword, ‘It was agreed that indigenous African scholars and researchers from each country should do the research, thereby asserting the ownership, independence and integrity of the initiative’ (vol. 1, p. ix). This overall aim has been upheld, though overseas authors contribute to the two volumes on international solidarity. Small teams of scholars from each country involved – Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe – steered the research with overall editorship from Arnold Temu, distinguished historian of Tanzania, and Joel Tembe, a leading archivist and historian of Mozambique, with Mbita as patron. The 2005 workshop mandated that the outcome ‘should not be one sided and should not exclude from the record individuals or groups [that] may have played roles, whether positive or negative’ (vol. 1, p. ix). Editors were aware that though monumental in scale, such a project could never be comprehensive. Volumes 1 to 5 focus on liberation struggles and wars in Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Namibia, and South Africa. To this are added volumes 6 to 7 (part 2) on the frontline states of Botswana, Tanzania and Zambia, and ‘extension countries’ of Lesotho, Malawi and Swaziland. Volumes 8 to 9 treat solidarity from other parts of Africa, East Asia, Canada, the United States, Cuba and Caribbean, German Democratic Republic, Nordic countries, Western Europe, the Soviet Union, Commonwealth, Non-Aligned Movement (India, and to a much lesser extent Yugoslavia, Indonesia and Sri Lanka), Organisation of African Unity and United Nations. The meaning of ‘Contemporaneous Documents’ in the title is unclear, as primary sources are not reproduced. What the set comprises are analytical chapters together with interviews. The final version appeared in 2015, the date of the preface by chief editor Temu, though technically the text was ‘released’ on 17 August 2014 at the Victoria Falls Summit of SADC Heads of State.

Colonial Survey and Native Landscapes in Rural South Africa, 1850–1913: The Politics of Divided Space in the Cape and Transvaal

lines. Bahru Zewde suggests that “Emperor Haile Sellassie redrew the political boundaries of the provinces in a manner that was a kind of a compromise between the many small districts of pre-1935 and the mega ethno-linguistic categories of the Italian Occupation period” (191), introducing a policy of cultural assimilation and a pan-Ethiopian identity based on the Amharic language. Although the policy played an important role in the post-Occupation years, the conflict between regional and ethnic identities and a pan-Ethiopian one re-emerged in the late 1960s with the question taken up by students both at home in Ethiopia and abroad, who ultimately adopted a multinational revolutionary front. The author concludes that “The cumulative effect of this unrelenting opposition was the eruption of the 1974 revolution, even if that event could not be attributed entirely to the student movement” (263), thereby presenting readers with a convincingly complex story, told from different angles, without a conclusive ending. In sum, Bahru Zewde skilfully touches on and revisits throughout the book contemporary examples of student opposition linked to the so-called Arab Spring of 2011‒2012. In this way, he makes the questions that emerge from his research on Ethiopian history – why did student protests in some parts of the world develop into cultural movements while in other parts they became politicized and radicalized revolutions – both pertinent today and an important contribution to interdisciplinary and intercultural studies.

The Empire Writes Back: African Challenges to the Brutish (South African) Empire in the Early 20th Century

This paper examines African critical views on empires in the early 20th century. Historians regard modern African challenges to empire and the settler state in South(ern) Africa as a post-Second World War phenomenon; before then, entrenched empire loyalism among black elites held sway. I argue that while loyalism remained influential, black intellectuals and political leaders, from the earliest articulation of African nationalism, began to critique European and South African empires qua empire just as they first began to synchronise their forces across the terrain of a South African state aggressively developing imperial ambitions. In this counter-discourse, Africans adapted, inverted and subverted polite imperial discourse in their press, speeches and praise poetry that eulogised past African empires and criticised, even condemned, Boer and British imperialism. British Empire, South African empire, African empire; all this requires a re-figuring of how historians conceive African response to empire.

Overview of the 24th Biennial Conference of the Southern African Historical Society, University of Botswana, Gaborone, 27–29 June 2013

This was truly a landmark conference not just because it was the first time the Southern African Historical Society (SAHS) met outside the borders of South Africa, but also because of the rich and varied range of papers presented. The last time I did this overview was in 2001, when the Society previously gathered on Tswana lands, at Mafikeng. It was a smallish gathering then so it is a measure of the promising future of historical studies in the region to see so many present this time, many from neighbouring countries such as Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi. All thanks go to our very hospitable and gracious University of Botswana (UB) hosts and hard-working organising team. Fred Morton, our indefatigable co-organiser, somehow still had time to give a fascinating paper on the last morning, in which he spoke of the nineteenthcentury trade in dikobo or skins. The new and impressive Setswana dictionary had just made it to the conference book display and I noted the variant meanings of dikobo, such as skin, coat, even blanket. Stephen Voltz informed me that one application of the latter meaning is sex (‘between the blankets’). And so, for the last session of a long conference this was my roundabout way of saying we had a lost coat for someone to claim. Now I want to ‘go between the blankets’ of the papers presented but before I do so, a brief refection on the keynote speeches. Framing the conference theme ‘All for One, One for All? Leveraging National Interests with Regional Visions in Southern Africa’, Jane Carruthers gave a timely reminder of the need to transcend a purely (or perhaps a particular) national focus. The transnational approach certainly offers insights. There is of course a seamy side to the transnational. Transnational corporations today function as the battleships of globalised capitalism; witness the treatment of the Greece by supra-national entities, and Jane drew attention to

Islamic Africa: A Select, Annotated Webography

In this brief essay and webography, I indicate ways to pursue the themes of Islamic Africa on the Web. Digital and online libraries about Islam and West Africa, and more broadly about the history and culture of predominantly Islamic parts of Africa, have been steadily growing in the last few years. To assist readers of Islamic Africa to appreciate the span of these rapidly expanding resources and their depth and usefulness, and hopefully to make use of them in learning or researching Islam in Africa, I present this select survey of digital resources.