Faculty of Humanities
School of Basic Social Sciences
Department of Historical and Heritage Studies
Selected Highlights from Research Findings
The research of the past decade on the colonial writings about the Bahananwa of present-day Limpopo was concluded with the publication of the book The 'Malaboch' Books: Kgalusi in the 'Civilization of the written word.’ This study looks into the making of historical knowledge through written texts and publications. The focus is on the colonial subjugation of the Bahananwa of Kgalusi Mmaleboho in a war against the Boers in 1894. During the course of the 20th century, two diaries – one by an Anglican priest (Colin Rae) and one by a German missionary (Christoph Sonntag) – came to play an extraordinary role in the way Malaboch and his people would be represented in what Roland Barthes referred to as the “civilisation of the written word.” Attention is paid to the diary as a source for historical research, and the extent to which – especially in published form – its aspirations, also as a literary genre, affect its possible meanings for successive generations of readers. Reviewers described the book as “important as a case study of how to apply the insights historians have derived from the ‘literary turn’ in their discipline”, as “an incisive and masterful historical and literary analysis” and “an interesting and fresh excursion into intellectual history.”
Contact person: Prof L Kriel.
A research project has been jointly coordinated over the past three years in conjunction with Prof Brian Raftopoulos, Director of Research and Advocacy at the Solidarity Peace Trust in Cape Town, that resulted in the publication of the book Becoming Zimbabwe. It is aimed at reinterpreting Zimbabwe’s historical past and reevaluating the country’s historiography. The study interrogates the idea of national belonging and citizenship and the nature of the state in Zimbabwe in historical perspective in the context of the country’s evolving political economy and geopolitical and regional contexts. The study challenges the notion that a singular political party or social group has the right to dictate the terms for understanding and narrating the past to the exclusion of the other social groupings in society and to challenge the contrived exclusive versions of the country’s past in what has, sometimes, been referred to as “patriotic history”. It seeks to demonstrate the plural nature of understandings of the past, mainly because this has a fundamental bearing on the politics of the present. This collaborative research and writing undertaking harnessed the efforts of several leading Zimbabwean historians and was supported by the Ford Foundation and the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation in Cape Town. Becoming Zimbabwe not only makes an important contribution to Zimbabwean historiography, but also speaks to the complexity and controversies that characterise that country’s experiences.
Contact person: Prof AS Mlambo.
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