Currently the concept of the Middle Stone Age (MSA) denotes the period between c. 300 and 25 ka. It is a phase marked by prepared core reduction methods used to knap predetermined flakes and blades that are occasionally retouched into various types of tools. Denticulates, notches, and scrapers occur regularly, and bifacial and unifacial points and backed geometrics are sometimes linked to time-restricted regional patterns, especially for the Still Bay and Howiesons Poort technocomplexes. An uneven geographical representation of data and insufficient dating resolution preclude a coherent consensus chrono-culture stratigraphic framework for the southern African region, the area south of the Kunene and Zambezi Rivers encompassing the modern political entities of Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, southern Mozambique, Swaziland (eSwatini), Lesotho, and South Africa. Therefore many assemblages are described in relation to the marine isotope stages and local industries. Perhaps the most radical development in MSA research during the 20th century relates to the characterization of culture and behavior. In the formation years, when mostly surface collections of stone tools, organized into industries and variants were available, MSA “cultures” of the region were seen as the product of waves of immigrants that entered dark Africa from Europe, in increasingly “advanced” forms. In the latter part of the 20th century, the prevailing Eurocentric paradigm suggested that it was only with the Upper Paleolithic–like Later Stone Age that “modern” culture developed in southern Africa. Although Eurocentric thinking prevails, “modernity” is now linked to the MSA especially after 100 ka. Fluctuating complexity in behavior may relate to various degrees of social interaction within dynamic landscapes. Paleoenvironmental data is growing and, combined with cutting-edge geoarchaeological and digital methods, allow a deeper understanding of past habitats and ecological contexts. Studies on the MSA from southern Africa are expanding rapidly. This growth would be most productive and ethical if research is integrated with African socio-political realities, engaging with decoloniality and inclusivity.
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Southern African Middle Stone Age
Sarah Wurz
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Southern African Liberation Movements in Nkrumah’s Ghana
Matteo Grilli
The first sub-Saharan colony to obtain independence in 1957, Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana offered shelter and aid to liberation movements from all over the continent. Between 1957 and 1966, hundreds of political activists, refugees, and leaders were hosted in the country. The Ghanaian government offered them financial and political assistance and also provided military training for those involved in armed struggles. As one of the key figures of pan-Africanism, Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972) actively campaigned for African unity while supporting the independence struggles of African liberation movements. A crucial goal for Nkrumah’s government was to influence African nationalist parties ideologically in order to create a coalition of pan-Africanist movements through which to give birth to the United States of Africa. This political work served to spread Nkrumaism, the ideology crafted by Nkrumah with the aid of the Trinidadian pan-Africanist George Padmore (1903–1959), from Ghana to the rest of the continent.
Nkrumah considered the assistance to Southern African liberation movements crucial, especially when, after 1960, the front of African liberation shifted increasingly toward the south. Activists and political refugees from Angola, Mozambique, Nyasaland (Malawi), Northern Rhodesia (Zambia), Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), Swaziland (eSwatini), Basutoland (Lesotho), Bechuanaland (Botswana), South West Africa (Namibia), and South Africa visited and resided in Ghana between 1957 and 1966, using Accra as one of their headquarters for their independence struggles. There, many liberation movements could intermingle, create synergies, exchange ideas, and absorb the knowledge that Ghana could offer. The impact of Nkrumah’s influence was often profound and, even if no liberation movement defined itself as Nkrumaist, many adopted and adapted solutions taken from Nkrumah’s Ghana.
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History of UNITA in Angola
Justin Pearce
The National Union for the Total Independence of Angola União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola (UNITA) was the last of three movements to take up arms against Portuguese colonial rule in Angola, when Jonas Savimbi led a breakaway in 1966 from the longer-established National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA). Confined to the territory’s peripheries, its impact was limited, and a pact made in 1973 with the colonial army would later sully its reputation. Once the 1974 Portuguese revolution permitted civilian mobilization, UNITA drew upon nationalist sentiment that emerged from the mission schools of the Central Highlands to establish a skilled cadre within the movement.
As independence approached in 1975, FNLA, UNITA, and the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA) competed for control. UNITA was bolstered by South African military support until 1976, but as the MPLA gained control of the state, UNITA switched to a strategy of guerrilla warfare. Renewed South African support in the 1980s helped sustain UNITA, by that time based in its “bush capital,” Jamba, where it was able to realize its ambitions to rule, albeit within limited territory. Throughout this period, UNITA depended on a monopoly of force in much of rural Angola, a social contract that involved provision of public goods, and the promulgation of an ideology that positioned UNITA as the representative of the Angolan nation with state-like prerogatives and responsibilities.
Following a peace settlement, UNITA contested the 1992 elections expecting victory. As the MPLA was declared the victor, UNITA remobilized its forces and consolidated control over much of the interior. Following a further failed attempt at a settlement in the mid-1990s, government counterinsurgency at the end of the decade undermined UNITA’s rural support. Savimbi’s death in 2002 prompted UNITA’s surviving generals to accept peace on the government’s terms. UNITA faced difficulty in establishing itself as a civilian party in a political space dominated by the MPLA. During the 2010s it achieved a gradual increase in electoral support by reactivating its networks in the Central Highlands and finding common cause with popular grievances in Luanda.
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Samora Moisés Machel, 1933–1986
Colin Darch
Samora Moisés Machel was born in 1933 in Portuguese-ruled colonial Mozambique and trained as a nursing auxiliary. He joined the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (Mozambique Liberation Front, or Frelimo) soon after its foundation in 1962. After military training in Algeria, he quickly became commander of the group’s armed forces, and when Eduardo Mondlane, Frelimo’s first leader, was assassinated in 1969, he was appointed president the following year. A talented but authoritarian politico-military strategist, he improved discipline within Frelimo and led it in the negotiations for unconditional independence that followed the April 25, 1974, coup in Portugal. At independence on June 25, 1975, he became the first president of the People’s Republic of Mozambique, a one-party state dedicated to radical social transformation. Machel was a convinced Marxist, which he attributed to his experience of racism and discrimination under Portuguese rule, and in February 1977, Frelimo officially became a Marxist-Leninist vanguard party. In the immediate post-independence period, Frelimo launched broad educational and health programs while attempting to shepherd the rural population into large “communal villages” where production could be organized along cooperative lines and social services provided at scale. However, the liberation war in neighboring Rhodesia, along Mozambique’s long western flank, destabilized these programs, especially after the Rhodesians set up and supported a domestic rebel movement, the Mozambique National Resistance (the MNR or Renamo), which carried out sabotage operations in the late 1970s. After Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980, South Africa adopted Renamo, which began gradually to develop support based on local resentment of government policy. The war dragged on and even intensified throughout the early 1980s, despite the signing by Mozambique and South Africa in 1984 of the Nkomati Accord, supposedly ushering in an era of good neighborliness. The conflict imposed crippling costs on Mozambique’s economy and society. In October 1986, Machel died in an air disaster at Mbuzini. Machel was a man of sharp intelligence and a gifted and persuasive orator, who as president was nevertheless intolerant of opposition. In 1994, several years after his death, the Frelimo government negotiated a pluralist dispensation with Renamo, having by that time effectively abandoned its socialist project.
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Ceramics and Archaeology in Southern Africa
Per Ditlef Fredriksen
Pottery has been part of daily life in southern Africa for the last two millennia. The frequent occurrence at settlement sites and its resistance to decay makes pottery the most common proxy for past food-producing communities (farmers and livestock herders), who made containers for cooking, serving, and storing foods and liquids. Provided that pots and sherds have enough diagnostic features to indicate décor patterns and vessel shape, trained eyes can get an instant and literally cost-free peek into past movement and interaction. Various material sciences offer high-precision dating and insights into less visible characteristics, and ethnographic insights are helpful for understanding more intangible aspects, such as the organization of production, pots’ roles in social practices and belief systems, and the transmission of knowledge and skills through apprenticeship. Potting has been a highly gendered activity, and attention to social identity is instrumental in widening the range of lenses through which archaeologists view past material culture. In this manner, by focusing on skilled craft networks dominated by women, ceramic research can provide a critical corrective alternative to more traditional top-down narratives that trace the evolution and interaction of (male) elites.
However, the European and North American legacy of archaeological classification in southern Africa cannot be overlooked. Ceramic classification may still unwillingly project a Western-centered understanding of the human condition, mobility, and social change. While unacceptable labels that refer to outmoded notions of tribalism have long been replaced by more neutral terms, this does not mean that ceramics provide archaeology with a neutral “tracking device.” A continual key challenge for practitioners in southern Africa is to situate ceramic analysis within a wider thematic and disciplinary nexus in order to construct convincing deep time narratives while also exploring new pathways to insights that can give voices to otherwise silent or subaltern members of past societies.
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Veterinary History in Southern Africa
Wesley Mwatwara
Southern Africa’s veterinary history underwent different epochs ranging from pre-colonial to colonial and post-colonial stages. Changes within the Southern African livestock economies were informed by changing animal-human relations over time that characterized such phases as pastoralism; the rise of more sedentary livelihoods; the rise of colonial economies that depended on livestock for transport, draught power, and the creation of beef industries; and finally, the sustenance of such colonial structures in post-colonial settings punctuated by economic collapse and political volatility. Despite a potpourri of post-colonial administrative systems and a variety of colonial experiences ranging from settler colonies and peasant-agricultural colonies to concession company colonies, the trajectory of veterinary history in post-colonial Southern Africa is generally uniform. Veterinary sources are scarce for the pre-colonial period, and when they become relatively abundant in the colonial and post-colonial periods, there is a general bias toward biomedical approaches rather than African livestock regimes. In historiography, the trajectory has generally followed that of African history, from colonial history to Africanist historiography and, finally, revisionist and environmental discourses. Each of these analytical approaches has its own intrinsic weaknesses, yet in their various ways they have contributed to and enriched conversations around veterinary issues in Southern Africa.
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History of Malawi
Joey Power
The boundaries of Malawi in the early 21st century are rooted in European imperial expansion of the late 19th century and the establishment of the British Central African Protectorate (1891–1907) and, later, the Nyasaland (1907–1964) Protectorate. In 1953, Nyasaland was merged with Northern and Southern Rhodesia to constitute the Central African Federation. African opposition to this led to violent disturbances in 1953 and 1959. A state of emergency was declared in March of 1959 and the Nyasaland African Congress (NAC), the largest African political party in the protectorate, was banned and many of its leaders detained. The NAC was replaced by the Malawi Congress Party (MCP) during the state of emergency. The state of emergency ended in June of 1960 and party leader Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda led the MCP to a territorial election victory in 1961. Vows to end the “stupid federation” were realized in 1963 with the secession of Nyasaland from it. Nyasaland became the independent state of Malawi in July 1964 under an MCP-majority government.
Within months of independence, the government and party unity were rocked by a “cabinet crisis” in which key ministers differed with Dr. Banda over foreign policy and domestic politics. Many key leaders resigned or were dismissed and thereafter left the country. This initiated a thirty-year period of autocratic rule that only ended in the early 1990s as a result of internal protest and international financial pressure. A 1993 referendum prompted a return to multiparty governance, and the 1994 elections led to the ouster of the MCP/Banda regime. Since then, Malawi has maintained a multiparty political structure, albeit with enduring challenges wrought by colonial and autocratic legacies.
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Liberation Movement Camps in Southern Africa
Christian A. Williams
From 1960 to 1990, tens of thousands of people fled Southern Africa’s white minority regimes for exile in neighboring, decolonized countries. Although some of these exiles were scattered across the globe, the vast majority remained in Southern Africa, residing in camps administered by liberation movements representing their countries of origin until their eventual repatriation. It follows that liberation movement camps differed from what in the early 21st century is commonly thought of as “refugee camps”—camps administered by a host nation and/or transnational humanitarian agency on behalf of a community of people whom the United Nations and the international community recognize as “refugees.” At the same time, they were not strictly “military camps,” for even camps designed to train and deploy guerrilla soldiers in wars of national liberation often accommodated children, women, older adults, and others with no military training seeking refuge with a liberation movement. Rather, liberation movement camps were hybrid spaces that defy labels commonly used to categorize camps globally in the early 21st century. And they have cast a long shadow, shaping nationalisms and international relations that span Southern Africa and mark a unique, regional history.
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The Bantu Expansion
Koen Bostoen
The Bantu Expansion stands for the concurrent dispersal of Bantu languages and Bantu-speaking people from an ancestral homeland situated in the Grassfields region in the borderland between current-day Nigeria and Cameroon. During their initial migration across most of Central, Eastern, and Southern Africa, which took place between approximately 5,000 and 1,500 years ago, Bantu speech communities not only introduced new languages in the areas where they immigrated but also new lifestyles, in which initially technological innovations such as pottery making and the use of large stone tools played an important role as did subsequently also farming and metallurgy. Wherever early Bantu speakers started to develop a sedentary way of life, they left an archaeologically visible culture. Once settled, Bantu-speaking newcomers strongly interacted with autochthonous hunter-gatherers, as is still visible in the gene pool and/or the languages of certain present-day Bantu speech communities. The driving forces behind what is the principal linguistic, cultural, and demographic process in Late Holocene Africa are still a matter of debate, but it is increasingly accepted that the climate-induced destruction of the rainforest in West Central Africa around 2,500 years ago gave a boost to the Bantu Expansion.
