Outlaws, Anxiety, and Disorder in Southern Africa: Material Histories of the Maloti-Drakensberg

by Rachel King

Overview

This book explores how objects, landscapes, and architecture were at the heart of how people imagined outlaws and disorder in colonial southern Africa. Drawing on evidence from several disciplines, it chronicles how cattle raiders were created, pursued, and controlled, and how modern scholarship strives to reconstruct pasts of disruption and deviance. Through a series of vignettes, Rachel King uses excavated material, rock art, archival texts, and object collections to explore different facets of how disorderly figures were shaped through impressions of places and material culture as much as actual transgression. Addressing themes from mobility to wilderness, historiography to violence, resistance to development, King details the world that raiders made over the last two centuries in southern Africa while also critiquing scholars’ tools for describing this world. Offering inter-disciplinary perspectives on the past in Africa’s southernmost mountains, this book grapples with conceptsrelevant to those interested in rule-breakers and rule-makers, both in Africa and the wider world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030184148
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	07/01/2019
Series:	Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies
Edition description:	1st ed. 2019
Pages:	285
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Rachel King is Lecturer in Cultural Heritage Studies at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, UK. She holds degrees in archaeology from Stanford University, US, and the University of Oxford, UK, and has held a Smuts Research Fellowship in African Studies at the University of Cambridge, UK, and a Claude Leon Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. Her work has been published in Africa, Archaeological Dialogues, History and Anthropology and the Journal of African History, among other journals.

Table of Contents

1 Introduction: The slow regard of unruly things.- 2 ‘Waste-howling wilderness’: The Maloti-Drakensberg as unruly landscape.- 3 ‘Were they half civilized?’ Knowledge and reminiscence in the Maloti-Drakensberg.- 4 Unsettled encounters; Or, if walls Could Speak about.- 5 ‘Appetite comes with eating’: Of raiding and wrongdoing.- 6 Persist, resist: Rebellion in Slow-Motion.- 7 Things of the nation: Disorderly heritage.- 8 Conclusion.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Rachel King is one of those rare archaeologists who understands that scholars who use archives and material traces have to pay attention to the epistemologies - archaeological and other - that produced those archives and traces as “sources.” They have to do as much work in finding out how the sources were produced as they do using the sources to think about events in the past. King does both things with flair and the results are dramatic. Unpicking the entrenched “habits of thinking” that idealise settlements as monuments to success and present sedentism as progress, King’ study brings the intelligences mobilised by Moorosi and the BaPhuthi of the Maloti-Drakensberg into view. King’s recasting of mobility in the landscape as a political advantage, and the result of strategy, breathes fresh conceptual life into the tired lineaments of the Mfecane debate.”? (Carolyn Hamilton, University of Cape Town, South Africa)

“This archaeologically informed analysis of the politics of place, identity and being in the Malotsi-Drakensberg during the nineteenth century breaks new analytical and theoretical ground on what it means for individuals and groups to be classed as ‘outlaws’. Drawing on diverse conceptualisations of anxiety, affect, dwelling and materiality, King explores and deconstructs colonial constructs of unruly behaviour, highlighting the agency and dynamism of communities living on the boundaries of the emerging colonial state, and the effectiveness of their strategies of resistance. Her book offers a fresh perspective on the history of British-Malotsi relations and their material manifestations in the archaeological record, alongside a wealth of stimulating insights of wider comparative significance and resonance.” (Paul Lane, University of Cambridge, UK)