Southern African Humanities

Oral history and the 19th- and early 20th-century San occupation of the Mnweni Valley, northern Maloti-Drakensberg

Gary Warrick — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0200

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 19th and early 20th 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 20th-century San presence in the Mnweni Valley for archaeological and historical research in the Maloti-Drakensberg.

Assessing the archaeological visibility of late Holocene herders in the middle Limpopo Valley: a regional synthesis

Tim Forssman — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0200

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.

In the cover of the kaross: the initiation of San hunter-gatherers and the role of dressing the part, with examples from rock paintings in the Western Cape, South Africa

Vibeke Maria Viestad, Renée Rust — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0200

In the Kalahari San ethnographies of the 20th 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.