Finding
What dos Santos was recording were not, as he thought, instances of literal anthropophagy, but locally idiomatic ways of representing abuses of power and wealth in a context of destabilising change.
Paper
Editorial
Abstract
The articles in this issue range from the Zambesi valley in the late sixteenth century to the townships of KwaZulu-Natal today. Despite the issue’s broad historical and geographical compass, the contributors evince a common attention to the production and semantics of their sources. They do this in variously addressing how African voices were incorporated in an early Portuguese text’s references to cannibalism; how the formation of white and black children was debated in the late-nineteenth century Cape and Natal; how perceptions and representations of rural landscapes and urban burial sites in South Africa have changed over time; and how idioms of rule, struggle and solidarity have been understood and engaged in Malawi, Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa. The three articles in the first themed section draw on sources that depicted people and societies in peril: southeast and east African communities at the mercy of ‘Muzimba cannibals’ in the 1580s and 1590s; children of destitute whites from the 1870s to the 1890s at risk of ‘degenerating’ and thereby undermining the future of the Cape’s settler order; and ‘oppressed kraal girls’ in Natal in the same era seeking to evade traditional African marriages. Eric Allina begins with a rereading of Ethiopia Oriental, a work published in 1609 and written by the Portuguese priest João dos Santos about his residence in Mozambique at the close of the preceding century. Much cited in histories of this period and region – particularly those focusing on state formation, trade, and European–African interaction – dos Santos’s text also contains extensive references to cannibalism which scholars have either ignored in embarrassment or explained away as missionary myth-making or Eurocentric othering of Africans. Drawing inspiration from comparative historical and anthropological perspectives, Allina urges us ‘to take dos Santos’s accounts of cannibalism more seriously’ because they embodied ‘a vernacular expression of African beliefs and ideas about political power’. What dos Santos was recording were not, as he thought, instances of literal anthropophagy, but locally idiomatic ways of representing abuses of power and wealth in a context of destabilising change. If Allina eloquently demonstrates that, in sources like Ethiopia Oriental, apparently European pronouncements may unwittingly be significantly inflected by African concepts, Sarah Duff argues that middle-class Europeans in the late nineteenth-century Cape were only too fearful that, unless they acted urgently, rising generations of whites would succumb to the ‘backwardness’ of their ‘African’ surroundings. Duff discerns in the periodicals, official reports, and parliamentary proceedings of these decades a growing conviction that whiteness should be synonymous with respectability and ‘productive’ citizenship. Census data, however, recorded increasing numbers of white poor both in the rural interior, where white children commonly laboured on their families’ farms, and in urban slums, where white children played or worked alongside black children instead of going to school or being brought up to be ‘useful’ future adults. Duff documents the measures proposed and implemented to enable the state to remove children from ‘failing’ poorer white families and place them in educational and cognate facilities that increased the likelihood that in the next generation class and race would be more closely aligned.
Authors
Keith Shear
Journal
Journal of Southern African Studies