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Archives of Times Past: Conversations about South Africa's Deep History explores particular sources of evidence on southern Africa's time before the colonial era. It gathers recent ideas about archives and archiving from scholars in southern Africa and elsewhere, focusing on the question: 'How do we know, or think we know, what happened in the times before European colonialism?' 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 by well-known historians, archaeologists and researchers engage these questions from a range of perspectives and in illuminating ways. Written from personal experience, they capture how these experts encountered their archives of knowledge beyond the textbook. The book aims to make us think critically about where ideas about the time before the colonial era originate. It encourages us to think about why people in South Africa often refer to this 'deep history' when arguing about public affairs in the present. The essays are written at a time when public discussion about the history of southern Africa before the colonial era is taking place more openly than at any other time in the last hundred years. They will appeal to students, academics, educationists, teachers, archivists, and heritage, museum practitioners and the general public. Archives of Times Past explores particular sources of evidence on southern Africa's time before the colonial era. It gathers recent ideas about archives and archiving from scholars in southern Africa and elsewhere, focusing on the question: 'How do we know, or think we know, what happened in the times before European colonialism?' The essays by well-known historians, archaeologists and researchers engage these questions from a range of perspectives and in illuminating ways. Written from personal experience, they capture how these experts encountered their archives of knowledge beyond the textbook. The essays are written at a time when public discussion about the history of southern Africa before the colonial era is taking place more openly than at any other time in the last hundred years They will appeal to students, academics, educationists, teachers, archivists, and heritage, museum practitioners and the general public.

Carl Adolf Hoffmann is counted among the most prolific 19th- and 20th-century authors employed by the Berlin Missionary Society in the former Transvaal, South Africa, home to the Berlin Mission Church’s northern-Sotho/Sepedi-speaking synods. Hoffmann attempted to record African history and cultural practices with a view to preserving them for posterity by rendering orally performed knowledge into written and printed text. His efforts coincided with the German Romantic project to capture folklore and folktales. In this article, I look into ink and paper as media in the communication network of the Berlin Mission, and address the extent to which image and text were employed to replicate for a German audience the missionary–ethnographer’s experience of African oral performance ‘in the field’. Taking into consideration the scenography accomplished through book design, typography, page layout and illustrations, I ask to what extent it might be useful to approach the ink-on-paper recordings of African narratives as performative spaces in their own right. The scholarly articles and illustrated books that resulted from missionary Carl Hoffmann’s ‘long conversation’ with a number of interlocutors – especially from the Woodbush/Mamabolo region – are now dated media, printed in dated type, arrested in a lapsed socio-political paradigm. Although openly accessible in the digitised Hoffmann Collection of Cultural Knowledge, significant ‘decoding’ is required to render them meaningful for 21st-century audiences. In this investigation, I attempt to configure what it was that missionary Hoffmann attempted to capture, how it was represented within a German print-cultural network, and what this may imply for South African selfunderstandings today.

INTO THE REALM OF PAPER AND INKWhen I enrolled for an honours degree at the University of Pretoria in 1994, I had to choose between history and literature as my area of specialisation. History won the day, but I was not sad about it. Both literature and history are ‘story subjects’, after all. I thought that the library, my comfort zone, would remain my laboratory. I had no intention of doing fieldwork. The mere thought of finding my way on a map, or interpreting sites and settlements, was a bit too much for this rather shy and impractical 21-year-old. The idea of interviewing people in person was even scarier.Yet I was curious about the past. The year 1994 was when Nelson Mandela became president. The possibilities of getting beyond apartheid ways of thinking looked so promising. I wanted to find out what life was like before 1948 and, further back, before segregation. And then way back: before the British conquered the Boers, and before the Boers conquered the African people in the northern part of the old Transvaal Republic, the area now known as Limpopo Province. In the 1970s, historians such as Peter Delius and Philip Bonner had explored the history of the Pedi kingdom and the Swazi kingdom respectively. They used mainly documentary sources, but they also researched accounts of the past as told to them by knowledgeable people whom they interviewed.The books which Delius and Bonner had written were used by our lecturers to teach the history of African societies in southern Africa. A number of anthropologists had written studies of people's ‘customs’ in northern kingdoms such as those of the Lobedu, the Venda and others. A handful of archaeologists had also done research into the earlier history of these regions. But no one had explored this history in any depth. It was Professor Johan Bergh, the supervisor of my history honours essay, who first pointed me towards exploring documentary sources in this field.In the region that is now Limpopo Province, many of the earliest documents were written by missionaries. For my honours essay, I compared the diaries of an Anglican clergyman and a Berlin missionary who had observed the Transvaal Boers’ military campaign against the Hananwa kingdom in 1894.

By the end of the twentieth century, most descendants of the Berlin missionaries in South Africa had become integrated into Afrikaans-speaking white society to the extent that they could \"pass\" as Afrikaners, many of them also self-identifying as such. The complex undertones of German-South African identity become apparent when looking into early twentieth century projects run by missionaries and their sons with the aim of ingratiating themselves with the Afrikaner establishment as \"twin souls\" - German-Afrikaners. This article makes use of Afrikaans and German popular magazines, and German-South African works of fiction (short stories as well as novels), not in the first instance for their literary quality, but rather for the extent to which these media served as performative spaces in which German-South African men could act out their various social roles and contemplate the convergence between different identities assumed for different occasions. Particular attention is paid to the \"backstage\" of female domesticity, and how the construction of the ideal German Hausfrau continued to anchor male \"occasionalism\" well into the twentieth century, until this sublimated figure became too problematic when seen in the context of other local possibilities, often embodied by Afrikaner women.

This study explores the possibilities of extracting biographies of 'ordinary Africans', especially women, from the epistolary networks of a transcontinental Lutheran community of readers. Due to the enthusiastic efforts of a number of German deaconesses, women from British colonial Africa whose narrations might otherwise not have been recorded, participated in conversations with women in Nazi, and thereafter West as well as East Germany. Mission evidence supports the argument that in colonial Africa religion opened up one of the few spaces for African and European women to collaborate in an otherwise segregated society. While the network was initiated in the name of their common faith and sustained with German church funding (and British colonial infrastructure), the content of the letters was far from restricted to religious matters. The article contends that these epistles reflected an awareness amongst rural female African participants of their position in a much larger geopolitical space - and even a world church. Thus the label 'ordinary' refers to the status of the African women writers in their local communities and church congregations rather than their horizons of expectation. Their fragmentary biographies or life-histories, from both colonial Tanganyika and the Transvaal, need to be viewed within the context of their interaction with their German facilitators and the members of the female Christian reading community in Europe - who were the intended audience envisaged by the African women narrators.

In Ethnography from the Mission Field: The Hoffmann Collection of Cultural Knowledge Joubert et al. offer a translated and annotated edition of the 24 ethnographic articles by Missionary Carl Hoffmann and his local interlocutors between the years 1913 and 1958.