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Mpumalanga: history and heritage

2008; Association of College and Research Libraries; Volume: 45; Issue: 10 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5860/choice.45-5722

1943-5975

John Pinfold,

Legal Issues in South Africa

Mpumalanga: history and heritage; edited by Peter Delius. Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2007. xxi, 522pp. ISBN 978-1-86914-121-9. R425. One of the most significant decisions of the first post- Apartheid government in South Africa was to redraw the provincial boundaries. Amongst the new political entities to appear on the map was Mpumalanga, place where the sun rises, which covers much of what used to be known as the Eastern Transvaal. This never attracted as much scholarly interest from historians as other areas, such as the Cape, and this book represents the first serious attempt to bring together the fruits of much recent research and produce an inclusive history of the area from the very beginning up until the advent of democracy in 1994. The span of this book is very wide indeed, with the opening chapter going back 3,500,000 millennia to some of the oldest rocks in the world which lie within modern day Mpumalanga's boundaries. Each chapter, by an acknowledged expert in the field, covers a particular theme or topic. These include geology, archaeology, rock art, the traditions of early human settlement, frontier conflicts in the nineteenth century, the role of Africans in the South African War of 1899-1902, nature conservation and natural resources management from the 1870s onwards (particularly appropriate for the history of a province which includes the Kruger National Park), economic enterprise and exploitation in the twentieth century, land struggles and the politics of resistance during the Apartheid era. This approach, whilst broadly chronological, never allows the narrative to become too bogged down in details of chronology or genealogy, but keeps the reader's mind focussed on the key themes. The result is a lively account, which is never didactic, but which raises important questions of historical interpretation. Many of the contributors engage with the nature of the evidence available, and make a conscious effort to draw on the reservoir of indigenous knowledge that lies within existing communities, as well as the written record, which, they recognise, is skewed towards the history of one section of the community and can therefore, at best, present only a partial view of the past. To take one very simple example, in his chapter on the South African War Bernard Mbenga notes that the former Apartheid government devoted considerable resources to keeping the knowledge and memory of the concentration camps alive, yet chose to ignore the many camps where Africans were interned in far worse conditions than those inflicted on the Afrikaners; the sites of many of the African camps lie within Mpumalanga, yet have been neglected and forgotten. Each chapter is fully referenced and has its own extensive bibliography. The book is also sumptuously illustrated, with many of the pictures in colour. These have been carefully chosen to illustrate the themes in the text, and tiiey unquestionably enhance, in different ways, each of the chapters. To compare the photograph on page twenty of an overpowering and brutalist 1970s monument to the Boer combatants who died in the Battle of Bergendal to that on page 463 which shows the monument to Samora Machel is to see that memorialisation has moved on both in subject matter and in style - the pipes in the latter are like organ pipes, and the wind which moves through them creates a disturbing sound of mourning - yet neither seem wholly satisfactory. …