Historians who specialise in researching early history have learnt to use a wide range of materials from the past as source materials. What are these materials? Where can we find them? Who made them? When? Why? What are the problems with using them? The essays in 'Archives of Times Past: Conversations about South Africa’s Deep History' explore particular sources of evidence on southern Africa’s time before the colonial era. Edited by Cynthia Kros, John Wright, Mbongiseni Buthelezi and Helen Ludlow, these essays are by well-known historians, archaeologists and researchers engaging these questions from a range of perspectives and in illuminating ways. Written from personal experience, they capture how these specialists encountered their archives of knowledge beyond the textbook.
The article below is based on Mandy Esterhuysen’s chapter ‘Digging Historic Cave: An Archaeological and Historical Quest’ in Archives of Times Past: Conversations about South Africa’s Deep History, edited by Cynthia Kros, John Wright, Mbongiseni Buthelezi and Helen Ludlow (Wits University Press, 2022): 199-210. Published by Wits University Press, January 2022. Click here for full details.
It was a story that roused archaeology student Amanda Esterhuysen’s interest. In 1854, in the course of increasing hostilities between Boer settlers from the Cape trying to occupy what would become the Transvaal and its African inhabitants, members of the Kekana section of the Ndebele people were besieged by forces led by Marthinus Pretorius. The commandos blocked all the entrances to a cave in which the Kekana had taken refuge and prevented anybody from escaping. Pretorius later announced...
