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The lack of studies on George McCall Theal is all the more regrettable in that we still largely make use of the categories he created, as well as the historical periods he delineated in the late 19th century, in a first attempt at a South African national history. This paper analyses the place created by Theal for a very particular period, African mediaeval history. This period was depicted as an intermediate stage between static prehistory and the beginnings of history marked, according to him, by the arrival of Europeans – starting with the Portuguese. The idea of an African mediaeval history was suggested to Theal not only by Karl Mauch’s rediscovery of Great Zimbabwe in 1871, but also, and above all, by his reading of innumerable Portuguese sources on the region from the late 15th century onwards. He eventually published these sources in Records of South-Eastern Africa, nine volumes printed between 1896 and 1905. Although the southern African mediaeval period was not Theal’s greatest success, occupying a chapter here and there in his monumental history of South Africa – itself extending over 11 volumes and revised several times – it allows us to understand his way of working, and in particular, how he made the disciplines converse. In following Theal’s amendments to his mediaeval history over more than a decade, this paper unpacks the complementary and hierarchical relationships between the different African documentary regimes at the turn of the 20th century. It identifies a growing empowerment in archaeology, particularly in comparison with philology and archival work. The mobilisation and displacement of the concept of ruins, in crystallising the tensions between the material and textual registers, provides the best standpoint for understanding this empowerment of archaeology.

Cuba and Africa, 1959-1994 goes beyond the military interventions that decisively shaped African political history. Each chapter presents a case study- from Algeria to Angola, to Equatorial Guinea to the Congo, and shows the multiplicity of African-Cuban relations - humanitarian and medical, scientific and educational, cultural and artistic.

Cuba was a key participant in the struggle for the independence of African countries during the Cold War and the defi nitive ousting of colonialism from the continent. Beyond the military interventions that played a decisive role in shaping African political history, there were many-sided engagements between the island and the continent.Cuba and Africa, 1959-1994 is the story of tens of thousands of individuals who crossed the Atlantic as doctors, scientists, soldiers, students and artists. Each chapter presents a case study – from Algeria to Angola, from Equatorial Guinea to South Africa – and shows how much of the encounter between Cuba and Africa took place in nonmilitaristic fields: humanitarian and medical, scientific and educational, cultural and artistic.The historical experience and the legacies documented in this book speak to the major ideologies that shaped the colonial and postcolonial world, including internationalism, developmentalism and South–South cooperation.Approaching African–Cuban relations from a multiplicity of angles, this collection will appeal to an equally wide range of readers, from scholars in black Atlantic studies to cultural theorists and general readers with an interest in contemporary African history.

On 12 October 2015, a round table gathering at the University of the Witwatersrand brought archaeologists and historians together for the first time to write a history of archaeology from South Africa. The meeting took place on the eve of the first rumblings of the student movement that would come to be called FeesMustFall. In a way, it was the last conference to take place in South Africa without concern for possible disruption by students, and without concern for the question that such disruption poses to all scientific meetings in the country: how to decolonise the knowledge produced by the university? Everyone agrees that the issue of decolonisation is highly relevant to archaeology as a whole, and particularly on continents such as Africa or the Americas (Shepherd 2002a,b; Haber and Gnecco 2007; Tantalean and Aguilar 2012; Haber 2014; Pikirayi 2015; Monton-Subias and Hernando 2017). Decolonisation becomes all the more pressing when, for example, it relates to the very practice of excavations (Schmidt 2009; Lane 2011; Schmidt and Pikirayi 2016; Manyanga and Chirikure, this volume; among others). Even if the intellectual demands of the young SouthAfrican generation did not burst into the lecture hall that day, it is clear that the majority, if not the entirety, of the speakers were, manifestly or tacitly, already asking such a question. The chapters assembled in this volume of the Goodwin Series aim to respond by suggesting a few methodological and other avenues. The historians, archaeologists, and 'social scientists' who have contributed to this collection perceive the need to go back over more than a century of the eventful history of archaeology in the south of the continent. South African archaeology has seen some major changes since the advent of democracy. A particularly visible result has been the internationalisation of certain areas of research. The discussion on human complexity in the Middle Stone Age provides a good example (Wadley 2014). Some of the most downloaded research papers from journals devoted to human evolution, prehistory and archaeology include southern African research on modern human origins (Marean et al. 2004; Henshilwood et al. 2004, 2009; Mackay and Welz 2008;Mourre et al. 2010;Wadley et al. 2011; Wilkins et al. 2012; Texier et al. 2013; among many other examples). Some have argued that this internationalisation stems from the discovery of new chronological methodologies (Thackeray 1992; Wadley 2014), which permit a better understanding of the deep past and the 'complexity' of Homo sapiens in Africa. However, the antiquity of Homo sapiens in Africa was proposed some decades ago (see Vogel and Beaumont 1972; Beaumont et al. 1978; Rightmire 1979), and the real internationalisation seems to have been stimulated, at least in part, by the political changes that took place in South Africa during the early 1990s. Another example of significant change in South African archaeology over the last two decades has been the impact of contract archaeology (Esterhuysen 2009, 2012; Ndlovu 2014), as it has been in the rest of the world since the 1970s.

Exploring the extent to which the control over the materiality of writing has shaped the numerous and complex processes of cultural exchange from the 16th century onwards, this book introduces the specifities of written culture anchored in colonial contexts.