Heritage and Fossils of the Karoo

The end of apartheid in South Africa initiated a period of intense analysis of historical and contemporary questions of identity. In the Cape, people who had been classified as “coloured” or “other coloured”began to reclaim their precolonial identities. This process has been made difficult by wide-scale language death during the twentieth century and the accompanying…

Smallpox was a significant shaper of life histories for indigenous South African peoples during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was responsible for the demise of entire social structures and even entire communities of peoples. Survival of smallpox affords the individual natural immunity for the remainder of his or her life. The virus is undetectable…

The childhood impulse to keep a diary must be very common: many intelligent children, once they are literate, hit on the idea of keeping an account of their daily experiences. Few seem to sustain the effort of keeping a regular record for long; fewer are sufficiently witty, observant and lively to warrant publication, and still…

As Andrew bank has pointed out recently, the major challenge to the study of environmental history in southern Africa is determining historical indigenous uses, knowledge and adaptation of and to the environment. As he describes it, “the silence (in environmental history) s African knowledge.