Supposedly Fictitious Pre-Colonial Kingdoms Your History Teacher Never Told You About

[Leopolds Ghost]

Most well-meaning liberals (and especially conservatives) argue that neocolonialism is bad because the europeans came in, all supermen, and created entire empires and administrative units from scratch in Africa and Latin America.

They reject the notion that these countries existed as administrative units before the Europeans arrived and "took them over", only to set up a new boss and a new tribute and taxation system on the bones of the old.

They reject the notion that Africa and the Americas had a pre-colonial political history complete with boundaries (which are never shown on Western historical textbook maps) and intricate feudal administrative systems centered on intensive agriculture.

The name of the Aztec Empire was (get this) Mexico.

After the valley of Mexico where it was located.

"Aztlan" was merely the name of the (mythical) Aztec homeland in the American southwest. The Aztecs were barbarians from the north who appropriated, and refined, the bloodthirsty practices of the "civilized" Toltec rulers.

The central plaza of Mexico City is the Zocalo, built by the Aztecs as the town square of Tenochtitlan, the biggest city in the valley of Mexico, surrounded by a shallow lake which was (sadly, and unfortunately for the health of today's Mexicans) later filled in...

the foundation stones of the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan are visible at the corners of the Governors Palace.

The public parks, canals, and gardens in the old part of Mexico which survive today, were built by the Aztecs.

That being said, the Aztecs were murderous assholes (much more so than the Mayans) but not as murderous as the Spaniards.

Cortez would have never conqured the valley of Mexico were it not for the assistance of hundreds of thousands of Native tribesmen who were displeased with the murderous regime.

Peru -- Inca (capital -- Cuzco, modern-day pop. 320,000)

As for Peru, the Inca Empire was, of course, the most technically sophisticated empire in Latin America, spanning an area larger than Peru. Its subjects spoke Quechua, and they still do today. The Inca capital, Cuzco, is a historic monument which remains one of the largest cities of Peru. The ancient city of Cuzco is much more intact than Tenochtitlan which, due to the extensive remains of human sacrifice on a mass scale, the ceremonial core of Tenochtitlan was demolished and rebuilt to form Mexico City, with the stones of the pyramids being used to build the Governors Palace and Cathedral of Mexico. This is something that "white" (aka Castilian) Mexicans, who are an affluent minority, don't often like to discuss. The old fortress and city of Cuzco, however, is still intact and the population of the region remains almost entirely Indian (Aymara/Quechua, i.e. Inca).

One of the reasons the mountain roads in Peru are traditionally so well-built by the Incas is that the Inca system of contract labor was passed down to modern-day Peru, in which the laborers are recruited from nearby villages, impressed into service as a duty to the state, and wages are paid partially in coca (which the workers traditionally chew, as it is addictive and keeps them alert and active). This system is not as exploitative as it sounds because (a) the cash portion of their wages is often their only source of cash for these remote villages, and the jobs created take people away from groups like Shining Path guerrillas, who also pay wages in coca, and (b) the workers tend to rebel and go on strike if coca leaf is not provided.

Peru and nearby areas of the old Inca empire are the only places where coca is legal in unrefined form, and Peru and Bolivia maintain a large coca leaf export business to the United States, mostly to the Coca-Cola company. The cocaine is extracted and sold to the US Government in large quantities for legitimate medical use.

The processesd leaf, with a minor amount of cocaine, is a main ingredient in Coca-Cola, along with the (West African) kola nut, which is the traditonal African equivalent of espresso, i.e. a delicacy which signifies high social status and is chewed in the afternoon and evening for the caffiene in order to stimulate conversation and appetite.

Khat, the weed chewed in Somalia and Yemen, serves a similar purpose. US Forces improbably blamed khat (whose active ingredient is an addictive drug similar to caffiene) for keeping Somali soldiers alert and "bloodthirsty".

In Peru, coca leaf is chewed in a similar fashion & purpose, although it is much more addictive than caffiene. (Alcohol, Tobacco and Heroin are the most addictive and harmful commonly-used drugs, with cocaine a very-distant second or third. The primary social ills associated with cocaine, including the very existence of concentrated free-base or "crack" cocaine, stem directly from the existence of a profitable black market created by US policy. Meanwhile, Peru exports millions of tons to the US gov't and Coca-Cola, while powder cocaine, the drug of choice for Manhattan's wealthy global elite, is a less-restricted substance than marijuana because it has recognized medical applications.)

When Pizzarro's men came to Peru, the Jesuits tried to persuade the Inca to convert to Catholicism on the basis that the Inca religion was in fact very similar to the doctrine of the Trinity and the communion of the saints, a common Jesuit argument in favor of syncretistic Catholicism. Turning the tables, the Inca tried to persuade the Jesuits to convert to the Inca religion, arguing that Jesus was, in fact, an Inca and the Virgin Mary was the goddess Pachamama. The last Inca set up a capital in exile in the remote eastern regions which was only recently rediscovered, and an Inca resistance movement survived for decades in isolated mountain redoubts.

When he was surrounded and defeated by Pizzarro, the last Inca sent out a message to his subjects via courier (many of which were secretly arming and supplying the Incan resistance) telling them to "convert to Catholicism, but remain true to the old ways in private".

This is the same approach taken by many Jews and Muslims in Spain during the Spanish Inquisition. As a result, entire villages converted to Judaism after the death of Franco.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Peruvian Indians (who are the substantial majority of the population, with non-Spanish Asians and Europeans making up the bulk of the major non-Native population) continue to make pilgrimages to the sacred lake and Inca temples of lake Titicaca.

Almost every Inca shrine was mysteriously rechristened as a Catholic shrine or church after the Spanish conquest, and many are still used today. (Unlike in Mesoamerica, Inca temples had more in common with what Westerners would be familiar with as an ancient shrine or house of worship, complete with a holy of holies and relics.)

Africa --

Did you know that allegedly "fictitious", "fractious" and "tribal" African nations such as Burkina Faso, Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Somaliland (which the US doesn't even recognize as a state) are actually pre-existing kingdoms with a hundreds-year-old history that your history teacher failed to mention when he lied to you and claimed the western powers "created" these areas?

Burkina Faso -- Mossi kingdom

Capital of Burkina Faso: Ouagadougou
Capital of Mossi kingdom: Ouagadougou (founded XIV century)

The French never actually conqured Burkina Faso (which they
called "Upper Volta". They merely signed a peace agreement making
the Mossi Emperor an official protectorate of France, whereupon the Mossi and subject tribes added their forces to the French armies.

Rwanda -- Kingdom of Rwanda (500-800 years old)

Capital of Rwanda (pre-colonial): Kigali
Capital of Rwanda (post-colonial): Kigali

The King of Rwanda remained the head of state until several years after independence, when he was deposed and fled to the US with several loyal man-servants. His heir returned to Rwanda in the late 1990s.

Hutu and Tutsi "tribes" -- wa-hutu and wa-tutsi (Not tribes; official class/caste distinctions of the Rwandan pre-colonial state. wahutu = farmers; watutsi=ranchers, considered to be long-ago nomadic tribesmen from the north and hence superior warriors and wealthier. Like WASP vs. Irish.) The language of the people of Rwanda (Hutu and Tutsi alike) has always been (get this) Kinyarwanda (meaning "the language of Rwanda"). The native people of Rwanda, the pygmy Twa, were accorded special rights as inheritors of the land. Rwanda was never formally invaded, the Belgians made it a protectorate under the king of Rwanda.

The Belgians and French, following the lead of contemporary Western ideas about Africans being "tribal", pitted the Tutsi and Hutu social classes, which were feudal in nature, against each other. These efforts were initiated under Nazi rule, using similar techniques to the Holocaust (identity papers, "scientific" race theory, etc.) which persisted for decades, thanks to the migration of Vichy French and Belgian fascist sympathizers into the French and Belgian colonial office in the post-war period. When Rwanda and Burundi were made independent, the educated local bureaucracies were reserved for Tutsi only. After the Tutsi king was deposed in a class-based Hutu uprising (massacre) shortly after independence, the French and Belgians abruptly switched sides in order to maintain de-facto military and economic control over Rwanda and Burundi for the following three decades.

In 1994, French and Belgian troops insisted on preventing the UN from intervening in the genocide and the French, who like most Americans continue to refuse to acknowledge that an organized genocide was occurring, explicitly maintained ties to the Hutu government.

When the Tutsi rebels under Paul Kagame (based in exile in Ankole, Uganda, which had also sheltered Yoweri Museveni) conquered Kigali and stopped the genocide, French troops paratrooped in to cover the tracks of the fleeing Hutu militias and attempted to dictate a cease-fire which would preserve Hutu power in the mountainous west (where the genocide was still on-going.) This allowed the perpetrators of the genocide to escape into neighboring Congo, where they continued to massacre ethnic Tutsis for another 2 years on the other side of Lake Kivu, prompting Museveni (Uganda) and Kagame (Rwanda) to undertake a joint invasion of the vast nation of Congo (Zaire) which resulted in the end of notorious US-backed Zairean/Congolese dictator Mobutu and the apprehension of the Hutu militia leaders who were arraigned by world tribunal. It also resulted in a Congolese uprising in which the Uganda/Rwanda/Tutsi backed president, Laurent Kabila, was briefly elected and advocated a "United States of Africa" before being deposed as 5 other African nations invaded to defend their "interests" in the vast and weak Congolese state. In the course of the Congolese civil war, 2 million people have been killed, all stemming from 2 events: US overthrow of the socialist, pro-independence Congolese prime minister Lumumba and installation of the murderous dictator Mobutu, and French intervention in the 1994 Rwandan genocide on behalf of the genocidal Hutu government, allowing them to flee into Congo and continue the genocide there, resulting in the joint Ugandan/Rwandan invasion.

Note that the US has never actually backed Yoweri Museveni (the Ugandan leader who ended US-backed Milton Obote's reign of terror in the Bugandan heartland, who also restored some semblance of democracy and instituted Uganda's successful AIDS-prevention program) or his ally Paul Kagame (the Tutsi leader who ended the Rwandan genocide, whose invasion -- backed only by Uganda -- is studied in military textbooks, who instituted the truth and reconciliation commissions, and who deposed the US-backed Mobutu for sheltering the perpetrators of the genocide in eastern Congo.)

The exiled Hutu militia leaders continued to apply Neo-Nazi rhetoric in massacring various local groups in the Eastern Congo (on the border of Rwanda) who were deemed to have "Hamitic" or "Tutsi blood", as opposed to the "pure" "Hutu" or "Bantu" blood. These categories were invented by European race-theorists under Belgian rule. As the Congolese civil war ground on into 2 million deaths and 7 nations in conflict thanks to those French paratroopers, exiled Hutu war criminals and generals from the deposed Rwandan genocidal military regime spread throughout the Congo, backing or attacking various local leaders on the basis of "Tutsi influence", and the concept of "Hutu" and "Tutsi" became extended into paranoid, trans-continental fantasies of a shadowy, foreign, ethnically homogeneous ruling elite which the interahamwe claimed were controlling the governments of the Congo and all surrounding nations behind-the-scenes. Sound familiar?

For more information on the French, Belgian and US contribution to the human disaster / widely-ignored ongoing genocide in the Congo, rent the movie "Lumumba", about Mobutu's rise to power (similar to the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran) --

-- and the book "Leopold's Ghost" about how the Congo was created out of a small, ancient Portuguese-allied slaving state on the coast known as Kongo (whose capital was modern-day Kinshasa, but extended only for a few miles inland from the coast) into a giant personal fiefdom, personal rubber plantation and absolute slave state of King Leopold of Belgium, thanks to the efforts of American journalist and adventurer Stanley, who popularized the idea of the Congo Free State, an "independent african homeland" entrusted by the European colonial powers to the "protection" of the weak and ineffectual Belgian king in order to "educate and uplift" its inhabitants (primarily by means of cutting off body parts of any Congolese tribesman who did not meet the rubber quota.)

Burundi -- Kingom of Burundi (see Rwanda.)

Burundi was Rwanda's sister kingdom to the South, founded around
the same time i.e. 600-800 years ago. It was made a protectorate
of Belgium, like Rwanda.

Uganda -- Buganda

Pre-colonial Capital: Mengo (Kinshasa)
pop. hundreds of thousands, founded in 16th century.

Post-colonial Capital: Kinshasa (British garrison suburb of Mengo)

One of the most prosperous, and populous kingdoms in Africa. Uganda and Rwanda are among the most intensively farmed areas in the world, and have been since before the Europeans got there. The British never invaded Buganda, whose capital, Mengo, aka Kampala (Hill of Impalas) was established in the 1600s as the capital city and home to hundreds of thousands of people, including Muslims and two competing Christian factions of Catholics vs. Protestants, before the British arrived.

Instead, it was made a protectorate. In return, to mollify the Bugandans, the British put Buganda and its capital in administrative authority over the adjacent (just as large) kingdoms of Bunyoro (capital city: Masindi) and Ankole (capital city: Mbarare) (a Tutsi-affiliated kingdom, home of Ankole cattle) the three of which which were annexed to form present-day Uganda.

The tribal royal capital of Mengo Hill (aka Buganda) was annexed to the British garrison in nearby suburb of Kampala. Idi Amin and his murderous, US supported successor, Dr. Milton Obote PhD, were both western-educated northerners who had risen thru the colonial ranks and brutally oppressed the people of the heavily populated Bugandan heartland.

The old metropolis of Kinshasa sits at the center of the fertile plain of the Buganda province/kingdom, known as the "Triangle of Death" for when Idi Amin and the US-funded Dr. Milton Obote massacred hundreds of thousands of Bugandans (mostly children) in an effort to prevent the current president, Yoweri Museveni, from taking power.

Both Idi Amin and Dr. Obote were western-trained and educated administrative/military leaders from the old colonial system from the desert far north of Uganda, who were picked by the British as part of their "divide and rule" strategy towards neocolonialism, since they had no ties to the traditional Bugandan society and imported all the people around them from a small group of British-trained military cadres, all of whom were from the far north and non-Bugandan.

This allowed them to repress and murder the peoples of Buganda and Ankole provinces (the traditional kingdoms around Lake Victoria) without compunction, often (as in the case of Dr. Obote) out of a Platonic compulsion for "education", order and the dissolusion of ethnic and national identities (Buganda, Bunyoro, Ankole) in service to the State (which was of course, entirely staffed by British-trained compatriots from Amin's/Obote's home village in the isolated north.)

We have seen this pattern in other Platonic dictatorships imposed by the US / Britain in an effort to break down and "civilize" ethnically diverse nations (or rather, divide and rule, using the leader of a small minority ethnic group in order to ensure group solidarity and allow the rest of the population to be seen as an enemy, with the US, Britain or France as the main benefactor keeping their regimes afloat.)

This is why the concept that places like Uganda and Iraq are an ahistorical fiction, superimposed by whites on a pre-existing Hobbesian landscape of chaos and barbarism, is so important to our foreign policy.

The idea that "tribes" or "sects" are, in fact, national groups with self-determination, or even the notion that they should be accorded sovereign status like the Native Americans in the US, eludes them.

Zimbabwe -- Before Cecil Rhodes named it after himself, this was coterminous with the kingdom of Matabele, ("land of the Ndebele") whose capital, Bulawayo, is the second-largest city in Zimbabwe today. Originally known as Mashona (Shona-land), it was conquered and invaded by the Zulu military state (KwaZulu) before seceding from KwaZulu in the 1800s. The Ndebele government was modeled after the Zulu state and fought against the British after signing a protectorate agreement with Cecil Rhodes to allow white settlers to mine in the sovereign territory under Lobengula, last king of Matabele.

The chameleon and the fly: (wikiquote) "Did you ever see a chameleon catch a fly? The chameleon gets behind the fly and remains motionless for some time, then he advances very slowly and gently, first putting forward one leg and then the other. At last, when well within reach, he darts his tongue and the fly disappears. England is the chameleon and I am that fly." — Lobengula

KwaZulu -- the Zulu military state. Capital: Ulundi.

Under Apartheid, Afrikaners called themselves a "white tribe" native to Africa, having preceded the British by 100 years, and set themselves and the Zulu up as mutually exclusive "black tribes" each in their own separate areas (with of course the whites getting the good land.)

This system of "homelands" which was overthrown by Nelson Mandela, was markedly similar to (and partly modeled after) the traditional US policy toward Native American nations, which continue to be recognized as sovereign entities with nominal tribal rulers who are subject to federal authority. But of course neither the US nor Israel has ever been considered an apartheid state.

After the fall of Apartheid, the Zulu state was incorporated into the large province of KwaZulu/Natal, an area roughly the size of Switzerland which is mostly run by the (Zulu) Inkatha Freedom Party which is associated with the Zulu royal house.

The descendants of the invading Zulu kingdom, which conquered a large chunk of South Africa in the early-1800's, have political power in today's South African republics of Kwazulu-Natal.

As discussed by Jared Diamond, the boundaries of the Zulu and Xhosa inhabited areas were divided from the white inhabited areas because of climactic differences -- the (invading) Afrikaners, who considered themselves to be a "white tribe", could not farm in Zulu areas, whereas the (invading) Bantu tribes (Zulu/Xhosa) could not farm in Afrikaner areas, due to the differing staple crops imported by each, so both lands were worthless to the other.

The native Hottentots, an advanced and peaceful people related to Bushmen, lived in the temperate winter-wheat areas of the Cape and were therefore (much like Native Americans) totally displaced or wiped out by Afrikaners who had better weapons and had a use for the land.

The Zulus conquered Natal and Xhosaland and their influence spread from Zimbabwe south to Natal shortly before the British arrived. The Zulus managed to hold off the invading British militarily, as did the country of Ethiopia which Italy invaded twice.

Much like the Mongol military state, the "capital" of the Zulu kingdom moved from place to place as the Zulus conqured surrounding areas from Natal in South Africa to Mashona in Zimbabwe (Shona-land, the majority ethnicity of Zimbabwe). The Zulu occupiers of Mashona/Zimbabwe rebelled against central authority and set up their own kingdom and the Zulu rebels became known as the Ndebele, which formed the basis for modern day Zimbabwe after Cecil Rhodes conqured it. The Shona became subjects of the Ndebele Zulu state.

Ulundi, the final capital of King Cetshwayo of the Zulu heartland in Natal, became the capital of KwaZulu/Natal at various times under recent South African rule. It remains the capital of the semi-autonomous Zulu kingdom which is represented by the Inkatha Party in South African legislature.

[papau]

1. WOW - great post Thanks for posting! :-)

:-)

[msongs]

2. a lot of this stuff is taught in schools. you musta had backwards teachers nt

[unpossibles]

4. I would guess most of the schools in this country do not teach these things

or at least did not when I was in school, which was not that long ago.

[Bucky]

64. You would guess wrong.

Most of what's covered in the OP is also covered in the curriculum mandates for high school World History courses issued by the state of Texas--hardly the most progressive of states where education is concerned. The broader culture outside the classroom doesn't pay much attention to pre-Columbian nations or the great African trading empires, but in the classroom we do.

[Jeff In Milwaukee]

6. I agree...

Interesting post, but nothing that I didn't already know by the eighth grade.

[Leopolds Ghost]

16. You were in eighth grade in 1994-1996?

I hate to break it to you but most of this stuff is only taught by leftist professors in AP class or 400-level African History courses. And they almost invariably neglect to view African pre-colonial history in anything other than anthropological terms, citing confusing standards of evidence (apparently, oral history is OK for Herodotus, but not OK for Africans, and hence they can bbe said to literally have no history.) It should be taught at the high school level, or whatver level the history of miniscule German principalities is taught at. Instead, it is not taught at all.

[Jeff In Milwaukee]

27. Mr. Giddings in 7th Grade Social Studies...

Went over most of the pre-Columbian stuff. The rest I read about because he made it interesting to me.

And seventh grade was...um...quite some time ago.

[Leopolds Ghost]

30. The pre-Columbian stuff is actually not as big a focus -- the situation in the Lakes Region

(of Africa) Is more recent and came to a head in the mid-1990s

(when I was in college)

And directly depends on knowledge of that region's pre-colonial history to understand what is going on there.

The pre-Columbian stuff I added to the beginning of my note just as filler. It is stuff that everyone should know -- if the teachers who posted snotty replies downthread are any indication, they either teach AP African History or they didn't bother to read past the Mexican / Peruvian stuff.

(And I am sure they go into extensive detail with their students about Incan religion and Peruvian coca exports to the US. Hell, when Apocalypto came out you had dozens of people here and on other blogs going on about how they "refused to defend" the "murderous" and "extinct" Mayan civilization -- making no distinctions between the Aztec, ancient Maya, and contemporary Maya who US death squads were murdering not too long ago. We're talking basic stuff like not knowing the Maya still exist, or the difference between Aztec and Maya (Persian and Arab, etc.). I am sure the people making such comments, all had WONDERFUL Social Studies teachers, and I just bet they could afford to go to these WONDERFUL schools where so many DUers claim to have taught at or attended.)

[Marrah_G]

36. I went to a great public school system

My daughter has had fantastic liberal history teachers and going into her senior HS year she wants to become a history teacher herself.

If you want to insist none of us grew up knowing any of this then fine, whether or not you believe us makes zero difference in my life.

[Leopolds Ghost]

40. If you want to insist most Americans have / can afford a great public school like you can, fine.

Your insistence that you "plan to avoid areas like Ohio and Kentucky" does not lend much credence to your view that most Americans are as lucky as your daughter.

Since you obviously know a fair amount about pre-colonial African history (and I don't claim to be any great expert, just using the OP to rattle off the basic stuff most schools REFUSE to teach for political / cultural chauvinism reasons) --

I can only assume that your public school system has AP African History, with both a precolonial and postcolonial segment.

Was your daughter's history teacher a strict evidentiary type? I.e. someone who adheres to the majority scholarly opinion that pre-written history is not verifiable and hence not history at all? Or was he/she a postmodern, Marxian sociological type tho insisted, as many do, that the pre-Euroiean history is purely a matter of cultural and economic anthropology and hence the political structures and oral history of feudal societies are interchangeable and irrelevant? If you look up most texts they will list pre-European contact under "Pre-History" almost invariably. How does that jibe with people wanting to become a historian?

My contention is that it shouldn't be AP. Precolonial Asian, Latin and African history should be REQUIRED electives in high school.

Students should not be able to get out of these so-called "non-western" courses by selecting "Classical Western Civ" or "American" (which should also be pre-requisites.)

Did your daughter's school teach how US / UK / Belgian policy in Congo and Uganda and Rwanda was a mistake, and why? And the historical origins of so-called ethnic strife in the Great Lakes Region of Africa? (odd... it is never called ethnic strife when it is England vs. Scotland.)

Because, you see, that's still a controversial topic. Wikipedia refuses to label Andrew Jackson a murderer and refuses to blame anyone for the Trail of Tears, a well-documented instance of genocide/ethnic cleansing on a mass scale here in the US. Did they do a day to discuss that, or the 2 million deaths in Congo? Did the school point out how France and Belgium sheltered the genocidal 1994 Rwandan gov't? Or did they say something vague and inadequate like "many people died on both sides of this ethnic conflict and the Western powers failed to stop them crazy Africans from killin' each other?"

[Jeff In Milwaukee]

47. Did you get up on the wrong side of the bed this morning?

You seem hell-bent on picking a fight with somebody about something.

Life's to friggin' short. Chill.

[Leopolds Ghost]

54. OK, I wasn't trying to edumacate, if people know all this stuff that's perfect.

But folks shouldn't insist that pre-European history is common knowledge in schools. Folks should agree they were lucky to go to a school where this was taught -- I was lucky enough to go to a very good school system where we learned very little about non-Western anything -- in the 90's.

Even at the college level, pre-colonial history is often described as pre-history (i.e. unattested, anthropology, no real history to speak of) and Western classicists have written reams of paper arguing that it is unimportant to college curriculum.

The main point I meant to address was much simpler than it came off as:

1. Many "post colonial" countries in the Third World actually have a recorded oral history as ethnic/political entities dating back centuries. The Western powers merely formalized the existing borders and set up exploitative economic arrangements to benefit and finance the growth of the European heartland, many of which are on-going.

This is almost never discussed. Even Mexico is almost never discussed for what it is, i.e. a settled empire which the Spaniards merely expanded, and the Spaniards merely replaced the Aztecs in a role as imperial overlord.

Instead, the myth of nations made up out of whole cloth implies that countries like Iraq or Uganda were a Hobbesian nightmare with no functioning constituent parts that preexist colonisation.

2. Most schools don't teach pre-colonial history as such, period. Many educators believe it is mere anthropology if there is no written record. If your school did teach it as history (and not as anthropology), you're one of a lucky few.

The higher you go (AP, advanced-level-only "non-Western history" classes) the more and more focus there is on anthropology, sociology, gender relations, etc. Actual history is downplayed unless there is written (European) attestation.

[Marrah_G]

49. I am sure there are plenty of things the teacher didn't have time to cover.

They did cover the Congo, Uganda and Rwanda and my daughter wrote a paper on Rwanda. They had speakers who had escaped from Rwanda and Sierra Leone come to the school and speak to the kids at the HS. My daughters Choir Director chooses music from all different cultures and languages for concerts.

Her teachers are mostly liberal Dems, perhaps in other places teachers are republicans or less educated.

I am simply sharing with you how it is here in New England. As far as my lack of desire to visit much of this country, including KY and OH, that stems from a large vocal portion of people who desire to force their social and religious views down my throat.

And I agree with you. I would like to see longer school days, less curriculum based solely to prepare for state testing, and a far more indepth education about the past, present and future of the earth and it's inhabitants. My kids don't get a good education because we are rich, they get a good education because they have some pretty awesome teachers who are not afraid to speak their mind.

It's a pretty anti-war, anti-bush, diverse and GBLT friendly school system.

It's a shame other places aren't more like it.

I live here in this very high cost of living area because I want to make sure they do have a good education. I'm barely scraping by, but at least I will never have to worry about our science classes going to the creationists.

[Leopolds Ghost]

57. Marrah, you're definitely lucky to have teachers who are focusing on stuff like this.

It is the sort of thing I think should be done elsewhere.

I went to some progressive schools but they were still fairly conservative when it came to focusing on Western Classical history (which is good) at the expense of other areas (not so good). So, no visitors from Rwanda, despite the fact that the deposed King of Rwanda lived in my town along with a lot of other Rwandan and central African refugees, including one of my mom's co-workers. :-(

Although I did have a fun Social Studies teacher once... we did create our own colonial-era currency market in the classroom once.

[Marrah_G]

58. Yup I am lucky

Wow with the former King living there it's surprising it wasn't taught.

[Marrah_G]

70. I don't think it was consciously done

It just fits in the area I live in. My town (and state) has alot of immigrants from all over the world who came to school in Boston and decided to stay. Add to that that our mayor is a married gay man (and...this boggles the mind.. a republican, by party not action)

I think it is the relative norm in eastern mass to have liberal schools with liberal teachers. They mirror the majority of the people, which I think happens everywhere.

[ellisonz]

73. You do know that the New England states consistently rank high...

...on just about every school survey I've seen both in terms of testing and pupil spending. Your anecdotal argument does not disprove the basic premise of the OP, that many, if not the vast majority of schools, and especially when combined w/Hollywood, do a very poor job of teaching history in general, much less anything about non-"Americans" that isn't stereotypical. Just because it's in the text book doesn't it's actually taught in these days of testing and especially if there are not advanced placement courses. Last time I checked AP European History and AP US History courses vastly outnumbered AP World History.

[Marrah_G]

74. And I realize other places might not teach the same way

Especially after reading this thread. I stand by the fact that it is not our experience here and that I am surprised (sort of) that other places are SO far behind. I am happy to live where I do. I think the OP and I share alot of views on how things should be.

[knitter4democracy]

110. Just because people are stupid doesn't mean they weren't taught.

I used to teach AP English, and I constantly ran into stuff I knew they'd been taught that the students always maintained they didn't know. It's infuriating. I ran into it in college, too. Our prof would cover all of this, and when it came time for the exam, students would cry that it had never been covered and how could they possibly keep all these tribes straight.

[knitter4democracy]

109. I was going to say--

Those maps were in my textbooks, and I learned that stuff in high school and college. We learned of the League of Five Nations, the tribes here in Michigan and their lands, and shifting territories of various Plains Tribes. My background on Africa is a bit weaker, but I knew most of what you posted from school.

[unpossibles]

3. great post. similar things happened in North America

I still hear people claim that North American nations had no agriculture, no culture, were bloodthirsty savages, etc. The dehumanization and subordination of non-European cultures is what allows people to accept genocide and slavery.

[moose65]

10. How bout this?

How many times have you heard the "New World" referred to as a "vast wilderness" or "empty wilderness"? That's just another way of dehumanizing Native cultures, by implying that the Europeans settled empty land. We continue to lie to ourselves about our own history. I went to see the "Lost Colony" last week in Manteo, and even though they try to be sympathetic to the natives, they still portray them as roaming, primitive people who needed the Europeans to save them. The struggle continues...

[mainegreen]

13. Disease actually did a pretty good job of emptying out Native Americans from the Mississippi area.

That area actually was pretty empty compared to the population count there before disease came through.

Just saying.
:shrug:

[Leopolds Ghost]

25. Kentucky was emptied out by disease in the mid-1700s according to reports.

Keep in mind that the Mississippi delta proper (from south of St. Louis to New Orleans) was a vast and trackless cypress swamp before it was drained by large-scale, plantation owners for vast tracts of cotton. So there wasn't much room for settlement in the Delta beyond the river itself.

That is why those areas are utterly flat and the slave population outnumbered the slaveowners by a considerable margin, because it started out as all swamp and ended up as all plantations. My relatives are from the delta region.

[ellisonz]

75. Plymouth was built on top of an abandoned village (5-10 yrs, disease).

[moose65]

79. Disease did it all over the place

Maybe that's where we get the "empty wilderness" myth. It's also something that is downplayed in history books and in our collective consciousness. Everyone knows what the Black Death was; no one knows that the American plague was much worse, sometimes killing over 95% of the population of certain Indian villages. That's one reason why the Europeans were able to settle that "empty wilderness": the Natives had already cleared the fields.

[Marrah_G]

55. I would see empty wilderness as wrong

but not vast wilderness. It was indeed a vast wilderness, filled with people that lived in harmony with that wilderness.

[Marrah_G]

11. I've never heard anyone say anything like that

Outside of old movies

[unpossibles]

18. try growing up in Ohio or Kentucky

and keep in mind that I'm sure schools have changed, but 25-30 years ago it was the common myth, and sadly I heard someone say it last week.

[Marrah_G]

29. I avoid those places

Perhaps that is why...........

[unpossibles]

46. well, to be fair, no we're not all rubes here

far from it, as there are a lot of very cool and progressive folks here even if we're sometimes surrounded by conservobots. Personally, I think it's a lot braver to speak out and be liberal here than in places where it's the norm.

[Marrah_G]

51. I know you aren't

I know some terrific Wiccan folks in OH and I used to travel there often. Yes you are braver. I just don't find myself wanting to travel to alot of places in the US anymore.

It's this feeling of fragmentation, like the divide is just getting to wide.

[leftchick]

116. The truth about CHEROKEE INDIANS.....

CHEROKEE INDIANS. The Cherokees call themselves Ani-Yunwiya, the "Principal People." They were indeed one of the principal Indian nations of the southeastern United States until pressure from advancing Europeans forced their westward migration. They were a settled agricultural people whose ancestral lands covered much of the southern Appalachian highlands, an area that included parts of Virginia, Tennessee, North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama. The Cherokees' Iroquoian language and migration legends suggest that the tribe originated to the north of their traditional homeland. Cherokee society reflected an elaborate social, political, and ceremonial structure. Their basic political unit was the town, which consisted of all the people who used a single ceremonial center. Within each town, a council, dominated by older men, handled political affairs. Individual towns sent representatives to regional councils to discuss policy for the corporate group, especially issues of diplomacy or warfare. Towns typically included thirty to forty households clustered around a central townhouse that was used as a meeting place. Houses were square or rectangular huts constructed of locked poles, weatherproofed with wattle and daub plaster, and roofed with bark. Cherokee society was organized into clans, or kin groups. The clans were matrilineal, and marriage within the clan was prohibited. There were seven major Cherokee clans, each identified by a particular animal totem. A variety of clans was represented in each community and performed significant social, legal, and political functions.


http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/CC/bmc51_print.html

[Larkspur]

5. The Iroquois was a confederacy and was one of the models our Founding Fathers used

to help create our democracy. The Cherokee were intrigued with Western European cultural aspects, like our musical instruments. The Cherokee could have lived along side the colonists peacefully if the colonists anti-native prejudice and greed for land didn't push the Cherokee to attack them.

There is not doubt that the colonists and US Government broke treaties with Native Americans and that is the cause of most wars with the Indians.

[Leopolds Ghost]

14. There are some excellent books on "The Trail of Tears" which discuss the history

The actual politcal and economic history of the Chrokee, Creek and Seminole tribes of the Sounhern US, including some of the heroic exploits that occured when they resisted the death-march to Oklahoma.

The Cherokee considered themselves a formal European-style nation, with a tribal traditionally democratic system of government, system of writing, and many Cherokee owned farmland under US law, as did the Mohawk. There are many, many records of speeches and decisions passed down by the Cherokee and Iroquois chiefs.

Many Cherokee owned slaves or mills, and considered themselves joint citizens of the southern US. And when Cherokee-owned slaves in Oklahoma were set free, some considered themselves to be Cherokee (until a recent ruling by the pro-Republican Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma that black Cherokee could no longer be considered Cherokee!!!)

The Creek Indians battled Andrew Jackson extensively, and the last independent chief of the Creek indians was reduced to a fighting band of less than ten men who were militarily resisting the death-march, of whom only the chief himself survived (by leaping into a chasm on horseback while being pursued by US troops.)

As you know, the Cherokee, ever convinced of the rule of law, took Andrew Jackson to the Supreme Court, and won, but Jackson proceeded to round up and deport/kill all Indians east of the Mississippi, saying "The Chief Justice has made his decision -- now let him enforce it."

Which makes me wonder why anyone think Bush or Nixon was worse.

The Seminoles retreated into the swamps where they sheltered and repatriated (as Seminole tribesmen) thousands of escaped slaves for decades. The Seminoles consider themselves to be the only sovereign and independent Native tribe that has never been defeated militarily by the US.

[nealmhughes]

82. The entire Chickasaw and Cherokee fiasco was rooted in the "Wild West" atmosphere of the 20s and 30s

in Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia and West Tennessee. There was a very, very complicated tribal/mixed nationality/European relationship between the people there. Many were basicly "semi-European," with little First Nations cultural attachment, others could not speak English. Besides the lure of the cotton lands, the whole thing came to a head over the Georgia Gold Rush, where the US treaty obligations were ignored and Cherokee tribal lands over run by gold rushers.
Jackson tried to impose order, i.e., obedience to the GA state militia and unofficial militias there in gold country, but the national orders were ignored.
Rather than risk civil war, which was possible, after the Nullification Crisis in SC, he chose to allow a few "Vichy Cherokees" soi-disant "chiefs" to sign new treaties, giving them trans-Mississippi lands in exchange for leaving the SE.
To stay in the SE, they had to apply for a land grant under US law and lose tribal status, which meant pay taxes and lose communal land. Most chose not to do this and left for Arkansas and Oklahoma. Some fled to the Smokey Mountains, where the Eastern Band of Cherokees now are near the town of Cherokee, NC. The US Army "assisted them" down the Tennessee River and then overland from Decatur, Alabama to Waterloo, AL to avoid the Muscle Shoals. There are first hand accounts of the misery of the people there in the city of Florence with their stock, children, elderly, and plows and seed, slaves, etc. tramping into city to rest for the final 20 miles to Waterloo and high water to go onto the Tennesee boats once again, and then, overland again across the Mississippi. . .The white population fealt great pity and sorrow upon witnessing their removal through town. Especially when they invited them to the Presbyterian Church only to find that they had Presbyterian ministers with them of their own. . .
Jackson, personally had a very schizophrenic view of the Indians: both as noble fighters and honorable men and also as savages. . . He and his wife Rachel actually unofficially adopted a Cherokee boy, renamed A. Jackson, Jr. when Jackson found him as an orphan.
Basicly, it was a combination of racism, lust for certain wealth thru King Cotton and Gold, followed by treacherous self-appointed leaders and an intransient USSC and Jackson's ability to ignore the Court's decision.
The Chickasaw was a similar tale; and the Creek/Seminole more straight forward: they were defeated by the US in war and taken away or ran away to the swamps.
Actually when the Tennesssee Valley was settled in the late 18th Century/start of the 19th, the land was largely unpopulated, used as hunting grounds, after a huge 12 year war between the Shawnee and the Cherokee, which ran the Shawnee to the Ohio Valley and leaving the Cherokee in charge of what is now North Alabama and Middle Tennessee. The Chickasaw lands were in NW Alabama and NE MS and Western Tennessee, although their "Old Fields" were in the vicinity of what is now the suburbs of the city of Huntsville, Alabama. The Creeks were further south in Alabama and in GA.
The SE was a very, very complicated mixture of tribes of both European and First Nations origin, along with African kidnap victims' descendents.

[1monster]

21. The Cherokee and the Choctaw tribes were betrayed by Andrew Jackson...

Simplified version:

The Cherokee had a false treaty shoved down their throats and then were forced on the death march (Trail of Tears) to what is now Oklahoma.

The Choctaw were farmers who had their own lands. They were supposed to be treated as any white farm owners, however, corrupt, land greedy BIA agents cheated them out of their farms and they, too, were force marched to west of the Mississippi.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Removal

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
See also: Trail of Tears
Indian Removal was a nineteenth century official policy of the government, , of the United States that sought to relocate American Indian (or "Native American") tribes living east of the Mississippi River to lands west of the river who resisted civilization or needed time to adapt. In the decades following the American Revolution, the rapidly increasing population of the United States resulted in numerous treaties in which lands were purchased from Native Americans. The land was to be cleared for white ocupancy between the Appalachians and the Mississippi for cotton, grain, immigration, canals, railroads, and new cities. Eventually, the U.S. government began encouraging Indian tribes to sell their land by offering them land in the West, outside the boundaries of the then-existing U.S. states, where the tribes could resettle. This process was accelerated with the passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which provided funds for President Andrew Jackson to conduct land-exchange ("removal") treaties. An estimated 100,000 American Indians eventually relocated in the West as a result of this policy, most of them emigrating during the 1830s, settling in what was known as the, "Indian territory" or the present state of Oklahoma.<1>

Contrary to some modern misconceptions (and misrepresentations<2>), the Removal Act did not order the forced removal of any Native Americans, nor did President Jackson ever publicly advocate forced removal of any who wished to remain.<3> In theory, emigration was supposed to be voluntary, and many American Indians chose to remain in the East. In practice, however, the Jackson administration put great pressure on tribal leaders to sign removal treaties. This pressure created bitter divisions within American Indian nations, as different tribal leaders advocated different responses to the question of removal. Sometimes, U.S. government officials ignored tribal leaders who resisted signing removal treaties and dealt with those who favored removal. The Treaty of New Echota, for example, was signed by a faction of prominent Cherokee leaders, but not by the elected tribal leadership. The terms of the treaty were enforced by President Martin Van Buren. The result was the deaths of an estimated 4,000 Cherokees (mostly from disease) on the Trail of Tears; the most famous removal, resisting Cherokees driven west to Oklahoma. The Choctaw tribe also suffered greatly from disease during removal. The Cherokees took the most extensive steps towards white ways as they had black slaves, farms, and lumber mills.

[Leopolds Ghost]

32. What an incredibly racist wiki entry. Who wrote it?

"Indian Removal" is substituted for the "controversial" term "Trail of Tears."

This is like if Wiki put The Civil War under "War of Northern Agression" (see also: Civil War).

Or "Jewish Removal from Germany, The (see also: "Holocaust".)

Then you have this huge enormous defense of Andrew Jackson, mass murderer (with NO MENTION of the supreme court ruling that NULLIFIED the law this article purports to defend BEFORE it went into effect):

Contrary to some modern misconceptions (and misrepresentations), the Removal Act did not order the forced removal of any Native Americans, nor did President Jackson ever publicly advocate forced removal of any who wished to remain. (...) The result was the deaths of an estimated 4,000 Cherokees (mostly from disease) on the Trail of Tears; the most famous removal, resisting Cherokees driven west to Oklahoma. The Choctaw tribe also suffered greatly from disease during removal (but they aren't as important because they weren't civilized, as the aricle explicitly states that only uncivilized Indians wrre displaced, thank god! so no further info given.)

[ellisonz]

76. Presto.

http://www.nativevillage.org/Messages%20from%20the%20People/helen_hunt_jackson.htm
http://www.amazon.com/Century-Dishonor-Sketch-Governments-Dealings/dp/0806127260/ref=sr_1_3/103-5788078-0055033?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1182288149&sr=8-3

[Leopolds Ghost]

45. There was a very interesting article in... (Smithsonian?) about Pequot rural/urban areas.

Basically the article presented evidence that the Pequot were in fact a settled tribe who moved up and down the Connecticut river seasonally, like the Egyptians once did. The entire valley was under Native cultivation (this was during and after the nearby Pilgrim settlement) and the whole valley was basically a giant string of villages. When one field lay fallow, each village would pick up and move up or down the valley to summer digs, or winter digs, each of which were basically permanent settlements. The author called it a unique urban/rural lifestyle. The settlements were like small towns in the US, with farm fields in between the long houses. Because the plots were so small (the Indians not having beasts of burden) the settlements were all close together, and within a few minutes' walk, so it was really all one gigantic settled area like you have in parts of Asia where you have 1000s of little farm-lets and overall areas like these are more densely settled than your average US subdivision. Not isolated like modern US farms where every house is 1000 acres apart.

[LeftishBrit]

7. Great post!

Interestingly, I attended a rather old-fashioned English girls' school in the mid/late 1970s, and we did learn in some detail about the Aztecs and Incas, though not about the other groups discussed in your post.

[muriel_volestrangler]

61. Judging by the replies, everyone learnt about the Aztec and Incan empires

I can't think why the OP thinks we didn't.

Not so many people learn much about the pre-colonial kingdoms in Africa, I think, but when I learnt history, there were huge gaps - large amounts of Europe were left out, despite them being next door to me, and I think China consisted of "Marco Polo went there; they invented paper and gunpowder". And it's not as if I learnt anything about the British empire in Africa either - in the history I was taught, the British empire consisted of Wolfe capturing Quebec, India, and the American War of Independence.

[Leopolds Ghost]

66. I just threw in the Aztec and Incan Empires because they were of interest to the subject at hand

Which is the continuity of "national" entities regardless of colonization.

The African history is a better example because they usually focus on the colonization itself.

For instance, I could have pointed out that Lesotho and Swaziland were the only two South African kingdoms that the British never bothered to invade, so they remained separate entities, like Lichtenstein or Bhutan; but it might have been beside the point, since they are quite obviously continuous, having never been actually invaded.

Medieval European History is actually a good example. It is not as widely taught as it used to be, and it concerns a period of history when Europe was about as technologically and socially advanced as pre-colonial Africa.

There are many parallels between European feudalism and the feudal societies of the Great Lakes region of Africa.

Feudalism and pre-scientific European history is no longer considered relevant either, precisely because America has absolutely nothing in common with the days when single wealthy individuals controlled vast chunks of real estate thanks to government military and trade concessions, the only non-governmental civic organizations were state-sponsored churches, and everyone else was enslaved by debt.

[ellisonz]

8. A few notes on the Conquest of Peru...

I'm too lazy to paraphrase a college research paper I did last winter at the end of finals (all nighter), suffice to say that the standard narrative of Francisco Pizzaro capturing Atahualpa, demand and recieve gold, end of story, really misrepresents the actual course of events that was the "Conquest of the Incas:"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_battle_of_Cuzco
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diego_Almagro#Return_to_Peru
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzalo_Pizarro#Last_years
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupac_Amaru

[Leopolds Ghost]

44. Not to mention Pizzarro got whacked before the last Inca ruler...

And they complain about Pirates 3 being a glorification of piracy.

[Marrah_G]

9. I must have had different teachers

I was never taught that there weren't civilizations and governments outside Europe and Asia before they were conquered. We learned about many different kingdoms and governments.

[Richard D]

12. Two things

1. If you like this stuff read a book titled 1491. A very well written history of the Americas before Columbus.

2. Coca leaf is not all that addictive. Probably a bit more than coffee and a whole lot less than nicotine. Vastly less than cocaine.

[AwakeAtLast]

53. Anthony Bourdain chewed it when he visited Peru

Part of his "No Reservations" show on the Travel Channel.

He said that the people chewed it to help combat altitude sickness. He tried to keep from it, I'm guessing because he is a former addict, but in the end I think he was ailing and followed the custom.

I would venture to say that it eases something like a "caffeine headache".

I will look up 1491, BTW. Sounds very interesting!

[Richard D]

69. When you're in the Andes

Chewing coca leafs when in the andes is very common. I've seen many people do it for weeks at a time and then cold turkey with not even a little withdrawal.

Got me up a mountain once when I just couldn't go any further.

[Coventina]

15. I teach most of this stuff in my classes.

:shrug:

[enlightenment]

20. As do I - and with a bit more coherency.

No offense, but oversimplification doesn't improve knowledge all that much, either.

[Leopolds Ghost]

24. I am sure your students appreciate the snottiness

I suppose by "oversimplification" you mean you devote two days / two primary source texts to the pre-colonial history of each African / Latin nation, two days and at least one in-depth reading PER nation?

I am unfamiliar with a public (or private) high school that discusses pre-colonial history AS SUCH, AT ALL.

Rather, it is taught as PRE-HISTORY, or at best, anthropology.

Furthermore, most of the courses I've taken in the subject, much of the scholarly literature is written from a strict Marxist / postmodern leftist sociological perspective.

[enlightenment]

77. I teach at the college level

and since you were not specific as to the level at which this information is "not taught" in your original post, I felt I could respond.

That said, your unfamiliarity with what public or private high schools teach cannot stand as proof that they do not teach pre-colonial history AS SUCH, AT ALL. It simply means that you are unfamiliar with what they may teach. Until you can offer proof that there are no high schools that teach this topic in a fashion that might meet your stringent standards, you are offering nothing more than a not particularly well-informed opinion.

Furthermore, while I am delighted that you have taken courses in the subject, your ability to identify several theoretical positions does not make you an expert. If you are an expert, please share your no doubt impressive vita with us and give us the full benefit of your knowledge.

In the meantime, if you try checking your ego at the door you might find that others are less likely to respond with vitriol. When you go on the attack, and assume that no one appreciates the topic, has ever thought what you are thinking,or has the ability to comprehend the topic you leave yourself open to criticism.

[Leopolds Ghost]

83. Apparently you feel only experts can talk about the subject, oh well.

Which is strange because you just spoke at length that this information is common knowledge.

I had an African History prof with a similar attitude -- I asked her what she thought about a general-interest book on the subject I had read some years earlier -- for the sake of being particularly well-written -- NOT ACADEMICALLY VALID, she snarled at me!

And chided me that "if you want to be taken seriously you would not rely on general-interest books as a source of knowledge, only peer-reviewed texts."

that naturally enough take into account the varied perspectives of women, Marx, etc. etc. etc. etc. Pomo "world history" profs who only care about sociology and anthropology.

[HamdenRice]

17. I really, really appreciate your effort and motives, but

unfortunately, most of what you wrote about southern African history is a quite garbled. The Ndebele kingdom was an offshoot of the Zulu kingdom, so Mashona-land was not conquered by the Zulu, but by the Ndebele, and the Ndebele in Zimbabwe did not secede from the Zulu kingdom. In other words, the Ndebele had been independent from the Zulu for some time when they moved north into Zimbabwe to conquer the Shona. Incidentally, the difference between "Matabele" and "Ndebele" is not that they mean different things: it's that "Ndebele" is what the Ndebele called themselves in their own language; "Matabele" is what the Sotho, Tswana, Pedi and Shona called the Ndebele, because their languages uses the prefix "Ma" for the plural of certain kinds of people.

19th century southern African history is a really complicated story, the driving forces of which are the still somewhat inexplicable explosive expansion of the Zulu kingdom in the late 1700s and early 1800s, and the expansion into the interior of the British and Afrikaners from the Cape Colony into the Free State/Lesotho, Transvaal and KwaZulu-Natal.

But the overall point, that there were large well organized kingdoms in southern Africa is correct. For example when white people first reached the Tswana at Ditlakong, they realized that the Tswana city was bigger than Cape Town. They also found a flourishing industry in iron and copper mining, and Livingstone commented that the Tswana steel knives were as good as those produced back in England.

Also, if Jared Diamond has argued that African and Afrikaner areas were divided by climate and what each group could farm, then he is just plain wrong. Please give me the cite because I've been meaning to read what he had to say about Africa. Is that in Guns, Germs & Steel? The argument that Africans and Afrikaners were adapted to farm in different areas was an apartheid era fiction used to justify pushing black people off the fertile land they had farmed for thousands of years.

[Leopolds Ghost]

19. How is Zulu expansion inexplicable? Like the Mongols and Brits, they invented an effective & deadly

means of conquest, using arms, organization and tactics, much like the Spartans transformed themselves into a military state. Such tactics do not go wanting for other peoples to invade.

[HamdenRice]

26. It's not the "how"; it's the "why"

Most of the professional historiography of South Africa does express a certain amount of puzzlement about the Zulu expansion. For example, why did this small, obscure chiefdom absorb neighboring chiefdoms to turn themselves into the "Zulu" kingdom? Why did they then go on to make such aggressive war?

Most other kingdoms in southern Africa had the capacity to make war, but limited war to pretty symbolic conflict -- for example, elaborate costumed displays and spear throwing at a distance, or competitive cattle stealing. (In fact, the founding king of the Sotho of the early 1800s, Moshoeshoe, who is a much more "typical" southern African king, got his name for being a great cattle thief as a young man. "Moshoeshoe" which is pronounced moo-shway-shway, is a word that sounds like its meaning, ie, the sound of a man having his beard shaved, and by stealing cattle so prodigiously, Moshoeshoe was said to "shaved" the beards of older chiefs.)

Wealth in pre-colonial Africa was cattle, and war was almost entirely about cattle theft. If you are suggesting that they suddenly had the means to be militarily dominant then I would imagine they would steal everyone's cattle. But they went so much further, killing tens or hundreds of thousands of people without even occupying their territory. If you assume it is in the nature of people to kill others, I suppose it makes sense; but there really was no precedent for that kind of murderous war at the time in the region.

The Zulu wars set off a truly catastrophic series of migrations and secondary wars that devastated southern Africa, just in time to make it easy for the Boers to enter the Free State and Transvaal. Some have argued that the Zulu had reached some kind of environmental crisis that led them to expand. Others focused on Shaka himself, who clearly had an extremely, extremely unusual personality for a southern African king.

But no matter what the military innovations of Shaka and the Zulu were, within the professional historiography, the "why" of Zulu expansionism remains a hotly debated mystery.

[Leopolds Ghost]

28. I think people have the inherent capacity for evil & peace is best preserved thru inertia.

Times of innovation or change invariably correspond with conflict and
barbaric killing on a mass scale. It seems to be a human temptation.

[AngryAmish]

98. I think it is explicable via racism/tribalism

Throughout human history there have been many examples where people think that they are "chosen" by god or gods to rule over other people. Submit or die. Stories in the Bible, Mongols, Rome, etc.

The why is inexplicable to peace loving folks like us.

The Mongols are a great example. They were horse theives. Why did they then take over most of the Earth? Well they had a racist system where the lowest Mongol was better than the highest non-Mongol. I suspect that the Zulu were similar racists/tribalists.

[JHB]

22. Guns, Germs, and Steel is the book, but...

...what was stated on the OP doesn't quite jibe with what I remember reading in GGS. Admittedly, it's been a few years so I could be wrong, but IIRC Diamond was talking about pre-European population migrations in southern Africa.

[Leopolds Ghost]

23. The Ndebele were a Zulu off-shoot. As far as Jared Diamond goes

Jared Diamond's argument is simple and it is the thesis for his entire (MacArthur prize-winning) book Guns, Germs and Steel.

If you disagree with the notion that the Afrikaners and the Zulu had different staple crops, which grow well in different areas, take it up with Jared Diamond.

The Hottentots hunted and lived in sparsely populated winter-wheat areas. The reason they were overrun by white farmers from the south and not black African farmers from the north is that the veldt was a desert to crops imported from Bantu inhabited areas. Meanwhile, areas like KwaZulu-Natal were not colonized by white civilians because they are suited to sorghum, not winter wheat.

If the Xhosa or Hottentot had had Mesopotamian winter wheat, they would have turned South Africa into a huge, intensively farmed bread basket with cities centuries ago, just like Ndebele, and central South Africa would've been a purely subject population like India with a tiny white minority.

That is Jared Diamond's thesis. He also cites numerous other case studies, including especially the temperate highlands of New Zealand, a zone of intensive agriculture, high population, little or no government, and little outside influence because only certain crops can grow there.

[HamdenRice]

33. Looks like Diamond got southern Africa wrong -- I'll take a look

I suppose that's a risk when a generalist tries to incorporate a lot of regional history into a grand thesis. One can't really say that the Afrikaners and Africans grew different crops after the early 1800s, because the Afrikaners in general, preferred to be landlords and cattle ranchers, not crop farmers. Where ever there were African communities, the Afrikaners could thrive by imposing themselves on them, levying rents and tribute. And in fact, the Afrikaners did take lots of land from the Zulus and establish themselves there once Zulu military power was crushed.

The Nedebele story is complicated. The founder, Mzilikazi, was a general in the Zulu army. He was sent into what became Mozambique on a raid, and decided not to return. He migrated west into what became the Transvaal and established himself as king of the Transvaal Ndebele, a somewhat mysterious group because they appear to be of ancient Nguni origins but west of the Drakensburg (all other Nguni groups, such as the Xhosa and Zulu were east of the Drakensburg). That's when Mzilikazi's kingdom began to be called Ndebele. Mzilikazi conquered several Tswana groups in what is now the western Transvaal and set up a kingdom that lasted a decade and incorporated many young Tswana warriors. Mzilikazi was defeated and pushed out of the Transvaal by a coalition force of Afrikaners and Tswana chiefs, and it was at that point that he headed north to Zimbabwe. By this point, because there were relatively few "Zulus" as a proportion constituting the Ndebele, and because the Zulu was a definite, centralized kingdom based elsewhere, it is not correct to say the Zulu conquered Mashonaland.

During the 19th and early 20th century, Africans were pushed into reserves that became "homelands." In the Transvaal, the main criteria was that the reserve areas had lower rainfall and were areas where the tsetse fly was prevalent which killed horses and cattle. The colonial governments would routinely justify this by saying that Africans preferred those areas. Of course they didn't. I can understand that if Diamond read government reports or popular white South African histories he might believe that Africans' agriculture were particularly adapted to certain areas, but among specialists on South African history, this is not considered to be true. The fact that the BaSotho were fantastically successful farmers in what became the Free State, and that the Xhosa out farmed whites in the eastern Cape, both growing maize, the same thing that Europeans were growing, shows that all racial groups were extremely adaptable when it came to choosing and growing crops.

As for the "Hottentots" they weren't particularly advanced or peaceful compared to other communities. Actually they were the Khoikhoi (Hottentot was a derogatory European label), and they were exclusively cattle herders, not farmers like the Bantu-speaking Xhosa, Zulu, Sotho, Tswana, Pedi, and Shangaan, and they were concentrated around the western Cape which did become the grain and wheat growing region. While the Bantu-speakers mastered mining and metallurgy, the Khoikhoi did not. I think the main explanation for the collapse of the Khoikhoi is disease: Bantu-speakers had much resistance to European diseases than the Khoikhoi, and several small pox epidemics in the western Cape destroyed the Khoi.

When the Boers moved out of Cape Town, they focused first on pure cattle ranching (in the Karoo), and by the time of the Great Trek, whites and blacks outside of the western Cape were overwhelmingly focused on maize (American corn) as the main crop.

Btw, the "veld" is not a dessert. I think you are referring to the Karoo, an arid area that surrounds the western Cape, and that prevented the southern most Bantu-speakers, the Xhosa, from moving into the western Cape. "Veld" simply refers to various types of terrain. By the late 1800s, in the interior, whites preferred "high veld" (something like Iowa prarie) and pushed blacks into the "low veld" or savannah.

I don't think that Diamond understands the history of the region. It did not take winter wheat for Africans to support large populations. As I mentioned, the Tswana created many large towns and villages based on their own crops and later maize. In other words, he is assuming a counter factual -- that there was not a bread basket in the interior supporting large populations.

[Leopolds Ghost]

37. Thanks for the clarification.

Jared Diamond's contention was that the winter wheat areas were unsuited to native crops, i.e. they were "a desert to native crops" in the same sense that the High Plains of North Dakota were considered "a desert" before we figured out how to turn them into a (wheat region) breadbasket. The native plains tribes did not have wheat. The fact that the Xhosa, once they had access to maize, were able to compete with Afrikaners on the same terrain actually supports Diamond's contention.

As for the Hottentot/Khoi, Diamond's central thesis was that these areas were largely given over to nomadic herding, and had not been overrun by Bantu farmers, precisely because there was no winter wheat available as there would be from similar latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere.

Obviously, once European and American crops arrived (again, part of Diamond's thesis) everything changed, resulting in mass expansions of both the black and Afrikaner population.

This undoubtedly had an effect on the Zulu expansion, just as similar forces allowed/compelled the Sioux to become horse-mounted, invading Plains-men well in avance of the US conquest. Or the Visigoths and Vandals circumscribed the Mediterranean. It all comes down to populations bumping up against each other, new crops, climactic change allowing the population to grow, and resistance to disease.

Still, I defer to your obvious experienced knowledge on the subject.

[HamdenRice]

52. Strangest interpretation of the Zulu expansion: It never happened

That's a bit of an overstatement, but in the late 80s an historian, Julian Cobbing, went back to the original sources. He found that most of the sourcing for the idea that the Zulus went on a conquest rampage that set in motion famines, migrations and secondary wars -- the mfecane -- was based on the work of a somewhat racist colonial historian of the early 1900s named George McCall Theal.

Cobbing then discovered that contrary to what almost every professional historian had believed up until then, the Atlantic slave trade had affected South Africa. It had always been assumed that it came down the west coast as far as Angola and then skipped the already colonized Cape and picked up again in Mozambique. Cobbing and later others found extensive slave raiding from Europeans at the Cape up into not yet colonized Free State and Transvaal, a big slave trade from the Portuguese settlement at Delagoa Bay into the Transvaal. He proposed that the devastation in the interior of South Africa that missionaries and explorers found between 1790 and 1830 was caused as much by British, Dutch and Portuguese slave raiding as by Zulu expansion, and that the Zulu kingdom may have been a defensive kingdom trying to prevent the effects of slavers.

The consensus has swung back to significant Zulu agency, but despite a century of professional work on the area, it remains surpisingly murky.

Anyway, it's a great topic but difficult to generalize about given the state of research.

[Leopolds Ghost]

59. It kind of sounds like what happened in the Great Plains w/ the Sioux expansion

In advance of when the US came in.

My feeling as regards oral accounts is that where there's smoke, there's fire. We may not know all the details but we have an idea what the assumptions were at the time.

[AngryAmish]

97. I always though slaving on the west coast was mostly an Arab thing

This is something i readily asmit I don't know much about.

[HamdenRice]

108. Arabs helped start the W. African slave trade

but it was generally not the seaborne trade. It was the trade across the Sahara to North Africa. It is sometimes theorized that when the Europeans arrived in ships in the 1500s and 1600s seeking slaves, the infrastructure had been created by the Arab slave trade. Some historians believe that the trans-Saharan slave trade carried on by Arabs was almost as big as the trans-Atlantic trade carried on by Europeans. Internally, it was local African kingdoms that were neither Arab nor Europeans that launched the wars and raids that captured the slaves.

In East Africa, the Portuguese carried on a seaborne slave trade from Mozambique, while Arabs carried on a seaborne trade up the east coast, giving rise to the Swahili culture (mixed Arab and African). Eventually the Portuguese evicted the Arabs from many of their east coast ports.

[struggle4progress]

78. Uh, the buffalo grass of the Dakota high plains once supported herds of buffalo

which were a useful food source to earlier inhabitants of the region.

Such herds were systematically slaughtered in the nineteenth century as part of a general program to clear the land completely.

Your claim -- that this was useless desert, made useful only by the conquerers -- simply isn't true.

[Leopolds Ghost]

84. I'm using "desert" in the old-fashioned sense of the word

The pioneers did not consider it to be arable land,
hence the commonly-applied term "desert" applied
to the High Plains in the mid-19c.

If a group of people isn't farming the right crops in an area, it won't grow anything and it will be used only for herding.

Of course, it became arable for a brief period when we killed all the buffalo and ploughed all that buffalo grass into the soil. The breadbasket was created thanks to mechanized farming practices and mass subsidies for immigrants to move there. Now it is slowly becoming less arable due to drought, overcultivation, and overreliance on fertilizers. The High Plains have been slowly emptying out of people since the Dust Bowl era.

[struggle4progress]

93. The so-called "pioneers" did not want the Western lands for only a few years --

that is, from the time of the later Fort Laramie treaty until the wholesale abrogation of the treaty.

It serves particular ideological purposes to call the land desert or to describe it simply as unarable. The Lakota had at one time lived well as cyclic migrant hunter-gathers, using that territory part-time, and in various Fort Laramie treaties they negotiated promises of this as an independent country, with guarantees of a set amount of arable land, to be provided from beyond the originally-set boundaries whenever necessary. But ultimately, despite original ratification, the treaties were set aside by Congress.

[DavidDvorkin]

68. Drakensberg, not Drakensburg

Berg, mountain. Burg, town. It's a mountain range, which the Afrikaners thought resembled a dragon.

[WinkyDink]

31. Guess what? High schools can't cover every. bit. of. world. history.

That's why there are actual History Departments in UNIVERSITIES.

Like, how many Great Books did you read in your h.s. English classes? As many as ever have been written? Dramas? How about Greek tragedies? Philosophy? Law?

Jeez. And you never even mentioned the "Return of Quetzalcoatl" on the very day that Cortez landed. THAT was the basis for the Spanish Conquest of Mexico.
http://muweb.millersville.edu/~columbus/papers/quay.html

And your claim of what "liberals reject" is, shall we say, complete balderdash.

[Leopolds Ghost]

34. Cut out the Classics, then. The other teachers on this thread are criticising me for not giving them

A ---ing dissertation.

** Quetzalcoatl theory highly disputed. Cortez won because he had
GUNS, HORSES and 100,000 highly-pissed off Mexicans on his side.
And he still almost was wiped out in the Aztec capital.

** Great Books belong in HS. Classics belong in University.

** Why? Because we waste too much time indoctrinating students
about (vague, poorly defined) "Western Values" that we supposedly
inherited directly from the Abncient Greeks when, in fact,
WASP civilization has little in common with the Ancient Greeks.

** "Every. Damn. Bit. of world history" is NEVER construed to include
precolonial / prewritten history of ANY non-Western country.
The so-called "birth of civilization" in the Mediterranean
is always taken to be the exception. Why teach kids about
Agamemnon and not Lobengula? Hmmm?

[HamdenRice]

35. Your overall point is right. Best experience ever was teaching "World History"

I was freelancing in grad school where I was studying African history. I was hired as an adjunct at an urban college to teach "World History" and for the first time had to put together what I knew about the histories of the various regions.

I don't think students really can understand European history and the discovery of the Americas without understanding the history of Africa and China. For example, that the Portuguese discovered how to sail further and further west (giving Europeans the ability to sail to the Americas) because they were trying to get around the bulge of West Africa, to get to the Mali and Ghana gold fields. Or that the hajj of Mana Musa, king of Mali, spread so much gold across North Africa, that it led to inflation and the knowledge among Europeans that the source of gold was West Africa. So American discovery was an outgrowth of the attempt to get to both Asia and Africa.

As for the criticism you've received in this thread, it's just that when you make a plea for the inclusion of historical knowledge of other regions, it's important to get the overall picture and even the details right. I wasn't criticizing you for not including more, but for including some things that were not right.

[Leopolds Ghost]

42. I appreciate your thoughts. Actually, therewasn't that many people being snotty.

I am just thin-skinned. I'm not an expert and I just intended this post to rattle off some examples of subjects that your average senior in high school should at least be made privy to, whether or not they are on the fast track.

I didn't mean it to be some kind of expose, and ironically on the one hand you got some people saying:

"Please, enough with the grade-school version. I was taught all this stuff in school, and far more accurately, what school did You go to?"

And then you have other people saying (if not here, then elsewhere, the wiki Trail of Tears article is a prime example)

"Please, this is all a bunch of revisionist BS, which should not be taught. The standard script history of European colonization is straightforward and accurate. Everything before that is pre-history and unattested and we know they didn't leave anything of interest behind anyhow."

Of course, little more did the Anglo-Saxons or the Bronze-Age Greeks, but they don't mention that.

[Tigress DEM]

38. So teach the positive things in grade school, the tough stuff in high school & college.

I think there is more to world history than just the facts, although they are VERY required and I appreciate your post.

My thought is that teaching children history should begin to be about a big general discussion of how even though we are different everyone has some things in common.

Truthful discussions, of course, but remember then just as today there are good people in all these places just doing their best to make a life for themselves and then the various types of power struggles and solutions we have learned from historical mistakes, hopefully.

[Leopolds Ghost]

41. I hear you n/t

[hedgehog]

39. Idi Amin and Henry Tudor: compare and contrast

I have a rather different view of British history given my Irish background. If you want to talk about a bunch of bloodthirsty, vicious murderers and theives.....

LOL - my mother-in-law is always researching her family background trying to connect herself to British nobility. One of her collateral relatives was in Ireland in the same area as My Great-Great-Grandfather about the time Grandpa left. In other words, her family stole my family's land! So much for nobility!

[Leopolds Ghost]

43. She's a mother-in-law, what do you expect? LOL

Be happy she didn't have you beheaded for failing to produce an heir in a timely fashion. ;-)

[Bluerthanblue]

48. wow- alot to digest, and very good

information-

There is also "Norembega"- to consider. My son's school studied this last year. We live in NE- and it is very relevant and little discussed history.

Can't find a good link- but here's something at least:

http://www.answers.com/topic/norembega

Thanks for a great Post- i'm saving this for my son to read-

edited- for a somewhat better link- but still pretty poor-
There must be info about this somewhere

http://www.americantruths.com/catalogue/norumbega.html

[BlooInBloo]

50. Guns, Germs, and Steel should be required reading for high-schoolers....

... Except they, and their teachers aren't bright enough for it.

[WinkyDink]

86. Speak for yourself. I taught high school, albeit British Lit., but I also

have an abiding love of world history.

[Leopolds Ghost]

87. The "get this" was intended to be condescending towards modernist historians who

Believe that countries like Zimbabwe, Burkina Faso, Uganda, Mexico and Peru are essentially modern creations,

that are not mappable upon pre-colonial political units.

It is equivalent to the assertion that various Middle Eastern states are similarly fictitious.

We get to say this because it simultaneously makes us feel superior to our colonialist ancestors who allegedly performed these superhuman acts of memory erasure upon their conquered subjects, and yet allows us to believe that these people hjave no pre-colonial history that is relevant or continuous to the present day.

Hence, the notion that we must keep Iraq intact, for instance, or the Sudan for that matter.

[Godhumor]

56. We teach most of this in NY

I taught Global Studies I this year, which covers history until the early 1700s, and most of the info you have on this list was presented to students in one form or another.

African kingdoms before European contact and the devastation after Europeans came is taught as its own unit, including the rise of the major Western African Kingdoms, some of the smaller but advanced areas like Benin, the Trans-Saharan trade of gold and salt, Mansa Musa's great Hajj and showing the wealth of Mali, Timbuktu as a cultural center, and some of the great African migrations through history. Moreover, the last half of the unit deals with just how quickly these kingdoms fell apart after Europeans started raiding them, the creation of the triangle trade, and the establishment of permanent settlements along coastal lands.

In the Western Hemisphere we covered the Aztec, Inca, and Maya in-depth including a study on the advanced state of their science, math, building technology, and understanding of human physiology. Again, the primary purpose was to show that these societies were well advanced before European arrival and the utter decimation that explorers brought with them upon arriving in the New World. This included a study of the encomienda system, the betrayals of the native people by various explorers, and the Columbian Exchange, which introduced a lot of diseases into western hemisphere civilizations.

Now, our final exam is a state-wide exam, so the questions are not necessarily in-depth, but this year there was a map question on the Inca asking students to identify the borders of their empire, a major map showing the various Saharan trade routes and how they connected Africa to the Middle East, and a document based question (essay) that included a detailed look at the Columbian Exchange.

I can not guarantee that the information you presented is being taught in every high school in the country, but it is required in many places. Moreover, I have never seen Asian, African, or Mesoamerican civilizations presented only as pre-history. I'm sorry that your opinion on the state of public education is so low, but, out of the 3 states I've taught in, Eurocentric teaching is being replaced by a much more global view.

[hedgehog]

60. This is a big improvement over what I had in New York 30 years ago,

which is a tribute to the fact that the old system that wasn't so hing up on standardized tests that curriculum could actually be developed and modified.

[ComerPerro]

62. You fucking nailed it with this line here:

The idea that "tribes" or "sects" are, in fact, national groups with self-determination, or even the notion that they should be accorded sovereign status like the Native Americans in the US, eludes them.

That's exactly it. We don't see their system as "vaild" until it has been Westernized. That's the arrogance of it all. Until they have a society like ours, they are savages. Human nature, really.

[moose65]

80. I think even the word itself is dehumanizing

Calling a group a "tribe" is just another way to reinforce that they're primitive and pitiful without Western civilization! Of course, people in the British Isles lived in tribes, too, but we call them "Clans" don't we? LOL.

[Bucky]

63. Sorry, but the "Stuff Your History Teacher Never Told You About" line is bullshit

I'm a world history teacher. We cover classic and medieval African kingdoms and trading empires extensively (they played a very important role in world commerce back when the Indian Ocean was the hub of world civilization rather than the North Atlatic was in the last century and the Pacific is destined to be in this century). We also cover the pre-Columbian American empires, the multiple layers of central Asian empires, and the technological advances of numerous Chinese dynasties.

World history today covers much much more than Western Civ and I think I personally do a pretty good job giving my kids a global perspective.

[treestar]

65. Wow, thanks, this is great to know

The schools I went to in the 60s and 70s never covered history except for post Columbia America. In my high school, one could take "English History." But I was in college before I learned about anywhere else.

[struggle4progress]

67. Your discussion of apartheid South Africa is entirely misleading

In an effort to provide mining labor, hut-taxes had already been imposed in the nineteenth century to drive the earlier inhabitants from their land.

By the time of the Second World War, land tenures reflected a complicated history including seizures by conquest and the struggle between English and Afrikaaner for political dominance.

Despite some Jim-Crow traditions, already in place at the time Gandhi lived there at the beginning of the last century, South Africa had a number of long-established racially diverse communities, as in Capetown (for example).

However, the Afrikaaner Nationalists were Nazi sympathesizers during the War, using a "triskelion" symbol modeled after the swastika, and in coming to power after the war they embarked upon a drastic re-segregation, that systematically stripped nonwhites of citizen-rights and land-holdings by force.

Thus, large numbers of communities were evicted with little notice by armed troops, a fact which was too common for anyone to ignore by the 1960s.

The underlying ideology was simply that people would be reclassified according to an elaborate racial scheme, and that the majority population would be resettled in supposedly independent ancestral homelands (the "bantustans"), entering South Africa only as laborers under an elaborate controlled pass system.

Despite this "homeland" mythology, the scheme actually involved deporting large numbers of people to starve in poor regions, in which many of these people had never lived, and that never had nor could support large populations.

Associated with this ideology, there was an extremely involved collection of stereotypes (alleged as "fact" about these supposed "tribal groups"), some of which you reproduce in your post: for example, the claim that these folk could never lived in the rich but conquered agricultural regions because the crops they wanted to eat would not grow in those climates.

One could, during the anti-apartheid struggle, reliably identify pro-apartheid South Africans after hearing or reading just a few sentences of their sentences, without needing to encounter explicitly racist statements, because they were invariably interested in detailed tribal classifications and supposed tribal beliefs and customs.

In reality, of course, many traditional modes of self-identification had vanished with the relocations and urbanizations associated with dispossession from land and increasing incorporation into modern urban cash economies.

The defeat of this "homeland" scheme, of course, was critical: had most of the majority population been deported to these wastelands, which were then to be declared "independent," the anti-apartheid movement would have suffered a major setback.

Only in the case of Kwazulu did the Afrikaaners make significant progress towards construction of one of these mythic "homelands," and they succeeded in that case only by offering significant inducements to Inkatha and it's leader Buthelezi. By accepting funds from the Afrikaaner government to support the establishment of Kwazulu as a homeland, Inkatha thus became the only significant majority population organization to support the apartheid government's "homeland" scheme. Whatever the boundaries of Zulu territory were once, the Afrikaaners choose the boundaries of Kwazulu and chose its "royal leader."

Similarly, the boundaries of the adjacent Zimbabwe reflect no ancient kingdom but are the boundaries of the former Rhodesia, which were established by Rhode's conquest and subsequent colonial-era agreements.

[Leopolds Ghost]

85. Translation: you are a modernist who believe black South Africans have no history and should

"overcome their archaic ethnic classifications."

I am not amused by your calling me a supporter of Apartheid.

I stopped reading after the part where you declared that
there was no such thing as Matabeleland, or as you put it
"some ancient kingdom".

Your modernist attitude that Black Africans have no history,
that Zimbabweans have no national history pre-colonization,
and that the very existence of pre-20c. KwaZulu is an apartheid fiction
is outrageous.

and only proves my point in the OP that most historians are
modernists or postmodernists who reject the very idea of
pre-colonial political divisions as "unattested pre-history."

There have been reams of sociological texts documenting the
failure of your "reformist" attitude and demonstrating that
"supposed tribal groups" were not conveniently destroyed to
make way for your Marxian sociological utopia (or whatever
it is you're trying to sell by declaring me a fascist for
recognizing the relevance of pre-colonial history.)

Then you have the claim that there are no attested "facts"
about these supposed "tribal groups" -- you see the existence
of pre-colonisation African nations as pure unattested pre-history
of no relevance to the modern day.

Moreover, you mistook my entire OP for a post about the
20th centuiry. The entire post was about pre-colonization era,
the 18th and 19th century.

In other words, you are asserting that the pre-existence of
political units (KwaZulu, Matabele, Mossi) that correspond
with contemporary political regions is a fiction.

This is equivalent to saying that modern-day Lithuania bears no relation to the kingdom of the same name, and that anyone who claims to have an ethnic history as a Lithuanian is a conservative reactionary.

[HamdenRice]

88. You both have some things right and some things wrong

It's a really complicated story and both of you have drawn "facts" and arguments from progressive histories, excessively structuralist progressive/Marxist histories and even apartheid-infected histories.

The story of how southern Africa's kingdoms arose is still somewhat puzzling and controversial among professional historians. But neither are they simply creations of apartheid.

The reason you are both right and wrong is that there were well organized political entities across modern South Africa and Zimbabwe. They did not, however, correspond to the kingdoms that arose in the late 1700s and early 1800s which form the basis for "ethnic" identification in South Africa today.

For example, in the late 1700s, the Tswana appeared to early white explorers to be a series of city-states who labelled themselves by the totem of the lineage of the chief/king. Today the Tswana think of themselves as an ethnic group (BaTswana) divided among a series of sub-nations or "clans", such as the Barôlông, Bakwêna, Bangwaketse, Bamangwato, Batawana, Batlôkwa, and Bakgatla.

But in the late 1700s, if you wandered into a town under a Bakgatla chief, he would have identified his town more specifically, eg, BaKgatla ba ga Kgafela -- the Bakgatla "they of" a specific place and/or chief. They might have alliances with other towns and even send difficult court cases for appeal to other chiefs, but they were basically independent.

British explorers and missionaries asked these chiefs, "what the are the people of the next town like," and they would respond, "Ba BaTswana" -- they are the same as us. Soon, the British explorers were reporting in Cape Town of the "Great Bechuana (Batswana) Nation" that stretched all the way to the Limpopo. In the 19th century, the various groups fought each other, but when they saw the threat posed by the Boers, the big chiefs got together and actually consciously decided to stop fighting each other, adopt the national identity of BaTswana, and create a common front against the Boers, which laid the basis for British protection for the Bechuanaland Protectorate (which became modern Botswana).

So is BaTswana an ethnic group? Nation? Fiction? It's all of them and none of them. As late as 1900, BaTswana people in the rural Transvaal acknowledged allegiance to both the Tswana and the king of Lesotho. They thought of themselves as both, and didn't see those identities as incompatible. Segregation hardened their identity as Tswana, but did not create it.

All the big kingdoms of South Africa that became the basis for apartheid -- the Swazi, Sotho, Pedi, Tswana, and Xhosa and were created in the late 1700s and early 1900s as defensive kingdoms as a response to white frontier wars, except the Zulu which was offensive. All of them resulted from a charismatic king rallying smaller polities together under threat of colonization. The Zulu were cobbled together from a number of small chiefdoms. The Xhosa were cobbled together from the Bhaca, Bomvana, Mfengu, Mpondo, Mpondomise, Xesibe, and Thembu.

So there were pre-colonial polities; they just weren't the polities we know today. That doesn't mean that they were creations of apartheid; nor does it mean they existed before colonization. Also, the people of the homelands were not all dumped into the areas with which they had no familiarity at all. Almost all the homelands were the last areas to be conquered by whites or remained unconquered and received some kind of recognization from Britain or the Boers. That's why despite the odiousness of apartheid, all the homelands, as geographic, not political, entities, had some ideological credibility among black South Africans. The majority of each ethnic group, however, farmed, worked or lived outside these reserves. The dumping occurred when people who were identified as part of the particular kingdom or ethnic group were rounded up within "white" South Africa and dumped into the reserves.

[struggle4progress]

91. I did not claim there was no sophisticated pre-colonial organization.

I objected to the repetition of the bantustan-as-homeland ideology that played a critical propaganda role in the Nationalist Party's multi-decade program of stripping rights and property from twentieth-century South Africans in order to reduce them to the role of "guest workers," who could be expected to work cheaply and docilely, being deportable to impoverished regions at the slightest pretext.

Confronted with a system like apartheid, it is reasonable to carefully distinguish between the actual material objectives of the system, the violence required to impose and maintain out the system, and the mythologies necessary to support it.

The Nationalist Party, of course, found it useful to claim that its apartheid agenda would merely restore a pre-existing state-of-affairs, from which South Africa had somehow accidently strayed, and that the violence accompanying this was irregular and accidental. But in fact, the violence was real, constant, widespread, and well-documented: the relocations-at-gunpoint and the dismantling of multicultural communities in South Africa are still within living memory, as are the bannings, tortures, and extrajudicial executions. In that context, structural analysis provided an extremely important technique for unmasking the motives underlying the system.

Botswana and Lesotho, of course, were never part of the Union of South Africa. Simply glancing at a map should make clear to anyone the difference between a country like Botswana (say) and a bantustan like Kwazulu or Bophuthatswana, comprising a collection of isolated fragments with all the valuable land stripped out. During the apartheid era, I knew quite a number of South Africans, and not one of them believed such bantustans had "some ideological credibility."

http://upload.wikimedia.org.nyud.net:8090/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fa/Southafricanhomelandsmap.png/493px-Southafricanhomelandsmap.png

[HamdenRice]

94. Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland share many historical characteristics

Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland share many historical characteristics of the homelands. I lived in South Africa for two years during the late 80s. My first visit, on a human rights inquiry, was 1986, and I returned to live there doing research in the late 80s, and visited several times during the transition, and made a research trip concerning land issue. I realize it was politically correct to deny the homelands any legitimacy overseas, but among regular black South Africans internally, the homelands had much more geographic and historical legitimacy than was understood overseas. That's why several homelands became "liberated territory." First, KaNgwane (the Swazi homeland) allowed the United Democratic Front (de facto, the legal, internal wing of the ANC) to operate and field candidates for the homeland government, and as a result, KaNgwane had a UDF Parliamentary majority. Brig. Gen. Bantu Holomisa overthrew the homelands government of Transkei in 1987 and allowed the ANC's military wing to operate there. During the transition, the SACP (South African Communist Party) cadres tried to overthrow the Ciskei government with disastrous results, causing the Bisho massacre. In short, the homelands governments were important.

Lesotho, Botswana and Swaziland had histories that were indeed a lot like the homelands. In the 19th century, the borders of South Africa were poorly defined and whites had tenuous control over areas that had in tact African polities. The homelands and Lesotho, Botswana and Swaziland were treated almost identically -- as reserves and protectorates that were too difficult or expensive to completely conquer. There was a lot of debate about whether the final borders would include LBS, but the African nationalists and British humanitarians prevented their incorporation into South Africa.

Just as Lesotho is the rump of Moshoeshoe's Sotho Kingdom and Swaziland was the rump of Mabuza's Swazi kingdom, the BaPedi homeland, Lebowa, was the remnant of Sekukuni's BaPedi kingdom -- a kingdom that put up some of the fiercest resistance to colonization in the Transvaal. You can think of the homelands in the 19th century this way: If the Germans had invaded France in 1940 but were unable to conquer Paris and its surroundings, signed a truce, and created a reservation for the French which it ruled indirectly. That's really what the homelands were. Over the 20th century, the colonial authorities took more and more control, but people remembered the origins of each reserve.

Each homeland resulted from some form of resistance against colonialism, and that's why they had territorial legitimacy, even if the leadership eventually chosen by Pretoria did not. The Paramount Chief of the Tswana Territorial Authority (which became Bophutatswana), Tidimane Pilane, was replaced with Pretoria's help by Lucas Mangope in the early 1970s. By the late 1980s, Chief Pilane was elected head of the UDF-affiliated Congress of Traditional Leaders of South Africa (Contrelesa).

After passage of the 1936 Native Land and Trust Act, the government began trying to "consolidate" the black population into the homelands, by expropriating their land and transferring the populations to the reserves. Btw, it wasn't the army that did this; it was the police. Also, it isn't technically correct to say all the valuable land was "stripped out." In the 19th century, the Boers and British did in many places push kingdoms and chiefdoms into less fertile areas as the basis for the reserves. But the reserves also had a great deal of fertile land. The real problem was that the forced removals after the 1930s led to terrible environmental degradation of the reserves. For example, in the 1950s, the apartheid government carried out an environmental survey of the Sotho homeland, QwaQwa and determined it could support about 10,000 people, but its population increased quickly to 20,000, and by the 1980s was 250,000. Similarly, Ciskei was more of a rural slum than an agricultural area.

Structuralism is very useful for understanding historical processes, but it is most useful when it sticks to the facts as well.

[struggle4progress]

95. Your modern history is sloppy. Although a number of small so-called "reserves"

existed before the Second World War, the Nationalist Party government began creating the "homelands" somewhere around 1960.

If the history of the original "reserves" rather resembles the history of the "Indian reservations" in North America, the "homeland" scheme was a nasty mid-twentieth-century twist, typically grouping together a number of noncontiguous reserves as new administrative units and declaring that the new units would become independent countries.

These "homelands" comprised less than 15% of the South African's land, and under the Nationalist Party program more than 75% of South Africans were involuntarily stripped of their citizenship and redefined to be citizens of these "homelands." To say, as you do, that the real problem was that the ... terrible environmental degradation of the reserves is rather like lamenting the hunger and typhus at a Nazi concentration camp: almost all the land, and almost all of the land with any sort of potential, had been reserved for the Afrikaaner population, and the relocation to

The South Africans who believed this scheme had ideological legitimacy were few, due to several widely-known situations like the following:

In 1976, when Ciskei's neighbor Transkei became the first "independent" homeland, the borders of Transkei, which had long existed as an administrative unit, were altered to incorporate several previously declared "white" areas into the new "state." Amongst these were the districts of Glen Grey and Herschel, in western Transkei. The inhabitants were given the choice of joining Transkei in its new status, or moving to land in the Hewu area west and south of Queenstown, in what is now northern Ciskei but what was then still part of South Africa, where they were promised good farming land, cattle, implements, and an infrastructure of schools and clinics. On the strength of those promises, and in distrust of the new independence of Transkei, approximately 50,000 people uprooted themselves, to find that they were allocated a tract of bare, exposed land, with nothing but tents to live in and no facilities. This was the "temporary camp" of Thornhill, which still exists today, 15 years later. Nothing has been done to improve conditions by the South African authorities, and the community was deprived of its South African citizenship in 1981, when the area became part of the newly declared "independent" Ciskei.

Thornhill has been described by the Surplus Peoples Project, a South African non-governmental organization, as "one of the worst cases of resettlement ever." The Grahamstown Rural Committee described the area in a newsletter in 1983:

The Hewu area is an undeclared disaster area. The drought is an ever-present feature. There are no crops and the ground-cover is gone. The area is hopelessly overgrazed...It is bleak and terrible labour bureau country, a rural dormitory. As for the Thornhill camp, where tens of thousands still hang on, this desolate, dead tract of land, far from everywhere, dry, all the bushes gone, is the worst possible base for survival, let alone any development. It is hard to see how people can keep alive, or to know how many have died here.

Over the years, many of the displaced have been resettled in marginally better conditions on farms in the area, under the various chiefs who had moved with them from Herschel. But a group of approximately 12,000, known as Group 4, remain in the Thornhill camp. Group 4 moved without a chief, the result being victimization by the Ciskei government for not operating through the system of tribal authority and for refusing to accept the authority of a new chief imposed upon them by the Ciskei government. As a consequence, it has been subjected to constant intimidation, ranging from police raids and assaults, the imposition of extraordinary taxes and suspension of pensions which is the only income for many of the inhabitants of the area, to the interruption, for weeks at a time, of water supply to the few taps serving the settlement.

http://www.hrw.org/reports/1991/southafrica3/#17

Calling the United Democratic Front (UDF) the "political arm" of the African Nationalist Congress (ANC) is misleading. The ANC was a political organization from the time it was founded in 1912. The 1955 Freedom Charter was the essential document that described the ANC anti-apartheid agenda, and not all the organizations belonging to the UDF subscribed to the Freedom Charter. The ANC established a militant wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), following the Sharpeville massacre in 1961.

Like other bantustan military figures, Holomisa had been trained in counter-insurgency by the government's South African Defense Force (SADF). His brief relationship with the ANC began only after the Nationalist Party government lifted the long ban on the ANC in 1990.

Your discussion of Bisho in 1990 is also inaccurate. Sebe was not overthrown by South African Communist Party plotters in March 1990 but by yet another protege of the SADF, Gqozo of the Ciskei Defense Forces. Gqozo rather promptly asked the SADF to help him maintain order; the role of the SADF in Bisho massacre seems clear from Truth and Reconciliation Commission meetings.

[HamdenRice]

96. My history is not "sloppy" but yours is counter-factual

I should probably say that I went to South Africa in the late 1980s and joined a UDF-affiliated organzation and carried out research on the land issue, so I think I'm in a pretty good position to judge whether the UDF was considered the internal, legal wing of the ANC. As an African American in apartheid era South Africa, my friends and colleagues were very open and honest about what their affiliations were. Of course they couldn't say that publicly, but that is what it was. The UDF started as a coalition of civic organizations to boycott the 1983 tricameral constitution and elections, but quickly became basically the internal, tolerated ANC.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=1147525&mesg_id=1151650

Saying the homelands began in the 1960s is playing semantics. Each had been a reserve for a long time before they were re-christened homelands, some for over a century. For example, Transkei became a reserve in the early 1800s. The Tswana areas that became Bophutatswana arose because enterprising Tswana chiefs began buying back the land from which they were dispossessed as early as the 1870s. Lebowa was the result of BaPedi resistance against the Boers and British and the end of the war waged by king Sekhukhune in 1876. You have an extremely simplistic notion of how the homelands came into existence. They have been contested and fought over for a very long time.

You seem also not to have any grasp of what actually happened with the homelands after the 1960s as well. South Africa did not denationalize 75% of the population. Only 4 of the homelands opted for spurious "independence," Transkei, Ciskei, Bophutatswana and Venda, while the other homelands, including KwaZulu and Lebowa, refused to take indepdence, preventing the denationalization of the majority of black South Africans. You can get a sense of the proportion of South Africans who actually were denationalized by looking at this chart:

http://content.cdlib.org/xtf/view?docId=ft0489n6d5&doc.view=content&chunk.id=d0e869&toc.depth=1&anchor.id=0&brand=eschol

You also seem not to be able to grasp the distinction I am making by saying the homelands had geographic legitimacy but not political legitimacy. In other words, the homelands became the subject of political struggles, and people generally thought of them as places that were the result of successful resistance in the 19th century that were being manipulated and corrupted in the twentieth century.

Since you seem fond of maps, you might go back and look at the map you cited. Do you notice that the homelands are entirely surrounded by South Africa? Do you also notice that Lesotho is entirely surrounded by South Africa, and that Swaziland is almost entirely surrounded by South Africa? Do you notice that if you take account of the fact that Namibia was under South African control from the first World War, that Botswana was entirely surrounded by South African controlled territory? All of these areas were the result of military, political and diplomatic struggle to carve out territory that would not be under direct Boer control.

You also seem to have no knowledge whatsoever about the Bisho massacre and the attempted overthrow of the Ciskei government in 1992 -- the attempt to overthrow Gqozo, not Sebe. Google is your friend, as is Wiki, when you need to acquire at least a rudimentary knowledge of events. It occurred when Ronnie Kasrils, an SACP leader, foolishly decided to impliement the idea of the "Leipzig option" during a mass demonstration in Ciskei's capital -- ie storming the Ciskei government offices the way east Germans stormed government offices there a few years earlier. Rather than being overthrown, the Ciskei government opened fire killing dozens of marchers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisho_massacre

It seems you need a really basic text on South African history. Start with the Oxford History of South Africa by Wilson and Thompson. On the origins of the various reserves and their similiarity to Lesotho, Botswana and Swaziland, you might take a look at The House of Phalo: The History of the Xhosa People in the Days of Their Independence (J.B. Peires); The Land Belongs to Us: The Pedi Polity, The Boers and the British in the Nineteenth Century Transvaal (Peter Delius); Kings, Commoners and Concessionaires: The Evolution and Dissolution of the Nineteenth Century Swazy State (Philip Bonner). For a first hand account of what it was like to grow up in the Tswana reserve in the early 20th century (which you seem to be claiming didn't exist) see Naboth Mokgatle, Autobiography of an Unknown South African.

Try reading some real history in order to get some accurate information.

[struggle4progress]

99. Let me see if I have this straight. You claim to have trotted off to South Africa

as a nonwhite in 1986. Once there, you claim to have "joined a UDF-affiliated organization," describing the UDF as the "legal wing of the ANC."

This is a charming story. It seems to have completely escaped your notice, that during the period under discussion the South African security apparatus viewed UDF members as enemies of the state, which resulted in regular arrests and murders. A number of UDF leaders were charged with treason in several well-known trials, beginning in 1985.

One might expect a visitor of ordinary caution, intelligence and perspecuity to notice something like this going on, but to believe your story I must accept that you visited the country repeatedly without ever realizing that UDF members were being incarcerated and killed and that the state ultimately banned the organization.

Here's a little snip from testimony before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, in which one of the former Nationalist Party government's "security" men explains the attitude that the government adopted with respect to the UDF membership:

ON RESUMPTION: 17TH MARCH 2000 - DAY 5

~snip~ MR KHANOVITZ: Do you have any idea how many members the United Democratic Front had?

MR VAN ZYL: No.

MR KHANOVITZ: So how ...(intervention)

MR VAN ZYL: Hundreds of thousands, probably a few million.

MR KHANOVITZ: Were they all legitimate targets?

MR VAN ZYL: I think they were all targets or they could all have been targets for the CCB but not necessarily a target to eliminate. They were classified. If it was a person who was attached to a banned organisation, an organisation at that stage that had limits then usually you would be classified as the enemy of the State. ~snip~

http://www.doj.gov.za/trc/amntrans/2000/200317ct.htm

The history of the period demonstrates the point clearly:

1985 10 February ~snip~ UDF offices are raided countrywide and over one hundred arrested and its leaders charged together with the previous sixteen Pietermaritzburg treason trialists. ~snip~

1985 April ~snip~ Popo Molefe, Patrick ‘Terror' Lekota and Moses Chikane key leaders of the UDF are arrested and charged under the prevailing security laws along with twenty others in the Delmas treason trial. ~snip~

1985 July ~snip~ The ‘Cradock Four', Mathew Goniwe, Fort Calata, Sicelo Mhlawuli and Sparrow Mkhonto are found murdered. 136 known UDF officials are detained. ~snip~

1985 August ~snip~ Victoria Mxenge, member of the UDF and lawyer for the Pietermaritzburg Treason Trialists is murdered. ~snip~

1986 12 June National State of Emergency is declared and hundreds of anti-apartheid activists are arrested. ~snip~

1986 8 October UDF declared an affected organization. ~snip~

1987 16 March The International Commission of Jurists states in its report that children are being tortured by the security forces. ~snip~

1987 27 April UDF Womens' Congress is launched under conditions of secrecy in Cape Town. ~snip~

1987 26 July Prominent anti-apartheid activists are arrested. Amongst them is Azaar Cachalia, national treasurer of the UDF. ~snip~

1988 24 February Activities of the UDF and seventeen other anti-apartheid organizations are banned ~snip~

1988 18 November UDF officials, Popo Molefe, Patrick Lekota as well as South African Council of Churches member, Tom Manthatha and others in the Delmas trial are convicted of treason. ~snip~

1990 2 February At the opening of parliament, FW De Klerk unbans the ANC, SACP and PAC. He also announces the lifting of restrictions on the UDF ~snip~ http://www.sahistory.org.za/pages/chronology/special-chrono/governance/udf.htm

[HamdenRice]

103. There's no gentle way to break this to you, but

you basically don't seem to know what you are talking about, and seem woefully ignorant of modern South African history.

Where to start?

As I mentioned in the cross-cited post, I first went to SA on a human rights mission for a few weeks in 1986. I didn't live there until 1988. Btw, I was well aware of the arrest and detention of UDF leadership. For one thing, we were monitoring the crackdown from the US. I was also well aware on a personal level because I first met Patrick "Terror" Lekota at his treason trial at Delmas. As a consultant to an American organization involved in promoting human rights, I was an attendee at a meeting that was set up with the treason trial defendants through Bishop Desmond Tutu, and we drove out to Delmas to view trial procedures. Because it was a religious holiday, Bishop Tutu was able to go into their cells with us in tow and give an Anglican mass to the defendants. That was when I met "Terror." Incidentally, his nickname, "Terror," had nothing to do with "terrorism"; it was because as a young man, he was a "terror" on the soccer field. So of course I was well aware that UDF leadership was imprisoned and many were being killed.

But as your own cited information points out, there were hundreds of thousands -- more likely millions -- of people in UDF affiliated organizations. Perhaps you don't know what the UDF was. It was not a membership organization like the ANC. It was a coalition of civic, religious, educational and labor organizations. That's why I use the term, "UDF-affiliated." There were hundreds of Americans and Europeans in South Africa working for UDF-affiliated organizations, and it was not particularly dangerous because we weren't leadership or even particularly important to the government. If, for example, you joined the South African Council of Churches Justice and Reconciliation Network, you were in a UDF affiliated organization. If you worked for the Centre for Applied Legal Studies, you were in a UDF-affiliated organization. If you did volunteer work or research for the Congress of South African Trade Unions, you were in a UDF-affiliated organization. If you worked for the Transvaal Rural Action Committee, you were in a UDF-affiliated organization. There was no UDF as such, except for the leadership; there were UDF affiliated organizations. The vast majority of UDF leaders who were detained or abducted and killed worked either in the leadership of the organization itself or for particular kinds of UDF-affiliated organizations -- namely township civic associations.

Your insane strawman argument that I would not "notice" what was going on is a pretty pathetic rhetorical strategy. Those of us who were there knew the limited risks we were taking but were committed to human rights or whatever our particular specialties were. That's how activists were back then -- we didn't just diddle at keyboards and blogs and think we were being activists. My friends and classmates in the US who were similarly committed went to the Philippines during the anti-Marcos civil war, to Liberia, to El Salvador and Nicaragua. Maybe that's hard for you to believe, but that's the way it was.

Maybe you wouldn't have gone to South Africa in the 1980s. That's your prerogative. But surely you can't be saying you don't believe anyone else took those risks for their principles. It's one thing not to be brave enough to do such a thing; it's entirely another not to be able to imagine anyone who is.

[HamdenRice]

111. On edit (editing period expired)

In case I did not make it clear, the thrust of the above post is that the vast majority of UDF-affiliated organizations were legal, were carrying out legal work, and were not subjected to the kind of harrassment and repression that was directed at the UDF proper. Sometimes they were suppressed, but not as often as the UDF proper.

The genius of the UDF structure was that even when it was suppressed, the constituent organizations remained largely in tact -- a lesson they movement had learned from the suppression of the ANC in the 1960s.

[struggle4progress]

100. "1970 - The Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act strips blacks of South African citizenship."

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/africa/land/ct_safrica.html

This is the standard interpretation of the Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act, and because this interpretation exactly matches what the Nationalist Party government said at the time it intended to do, the interpretation has made its way without difficulty into ordinary reference sources like Encyclopaedia Brittanica, as you can easily verify. So your claim that "South Africa did not denationalize 75% of the population" seems at least odd.

[HamdenRice]

104. Maybe you don't believe it, but facts are facts

Here in the reality based community, we recognize that only Transkei, Bophutatswana, Ciskei and Venda accepted independence. That's why they were called the TBCV states. Count them: four. But there were ten homelands. That means six did not take independence.

It was the intention of the apartheid government to strip all black South Africans of their citizenship, but they failed -- ironically because of the behavior of the leadership of the homelands that were supposed to be their puppets. That's why despite his murderous resistance to the ANC and the constitutional process, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, leader of Kwa-Zulu, was able to maintain some credibility with Zulu traditionalists in the 1980s -- because he had gummed up the works, preventing the denationalization of Kwa-Zulu's "citizens" by refusing to take "independence."

That's the standard account, not yours.

[struggle4progress]

120. In the reality-based community, we would say you make a distinction without a difference

You say Transkei, Bophutatswana, Ciskei and Venda "accepted" independence. From contemporary documents:

SELF-DETERMINATION AND THE “INDEPENDENT BANTUSTANS”

~snip~ Motivation of the South African Government ~snip~ A claim to independent status for a people within a sovereign State is usually made by the people concerned who strive to obtain that independence, who formulate the proposals and decide the territory for which they are seeking the independence, and it is the government of the sovereign State which usually opposes this. In the South African case, the roles are reversed. It is the government of the sovereign State which formulates the proposals, and decides to what peoples and to what territories they are to apply, and any attempt to organise opposition to their proposals by the persons concerned is ruthlessly repressed under laws supposedly formulated to protect the national security. ~snip~

http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/campaigns/legal/part6.html

And more recently:

African National Congress
Statement to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission
August 1996

~snip~ 3.2 INSTITUTIONAL VIOLENCE AND SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES

During the 1960s, concurrent with the new security legislation, the apartheid rulers embarked on radical new forms of social engineering designed to entrench white minority rule. Instances of such "bureaucratic terrorism" included:

* huge numbers of arrests for contravention of pass laws;
* large-scale forced removals and resettlements;
* the redefinition of all Africans as 'citizens' of ethnic bantustans.

Basic apartheid measures systematically denied black South Africans 'first generation' rights like the franchise, civil equality, freedom of movement and freedom of association. The social order underpinned by apartheid also ran roughshod over 'second generation' rights, such as the right to education, health care, security and social welfare. ~snip~

[struggle4progress]

101. You want to lecture me that "Saying the homelands began in the 1960s is playing semantics; each had

been a reserve for a long time before they were re-christened homelands."

But of course what I actually said was If the history of the original "reserves" rather resembles the history of the "Indian reservations" in North America, the "homeland" scheme was a nasty mid-twentieth-century twist, typically grouping together a number of noncontiguous reserves as new administrative units and declaring that the new units would become independent countries.

In order to denounce this as counter-factual, you apparently must resort to misrepresenting what I actually said.

[HamdenRice]

107. I called your post counter-factual because it was riddled with errors

Your post took an unintentionally ironic position of "correcting" my "sloppy" modern history -- which actually was correct -- while spouting off a stream of inaccurate howlers. That's why I called it "counter-factual," not because I misinterpreted that one sentence.

You mischaracterized the extent of the success of denationalization by falsely stating that 75% of South Africa's population was denationalized.

You failed and still seem to fail, to understand the relationship between the UDF and ANC. The UDF was considered the legal, internal wing of the ANC before the latter was unbanned -- not unlike the relationship between Sien Fein and the IRA. Are you unaware that the criteria for a membership organization being permitted to affiliate with the UDF was acceptance of the ANC's Freedom Charter? Are you unaware that despite being a formally non-violent organization, some UDF cadres provided support for the ANC's Operation Vula -- the building up of military structures in the country before it was unbanned? Are you not aware that when the ANC was unbanned the leadership of the UDF formally joined the ANC, the UDF organizations were transformed into ANC party branches and the UDF formally dissolved? Your inability to understand this basic fact calls into question any alleged "expertise" you seem to be claiming about Africa.

Then you spouted the bizarre notion that the Bisho massacre occurred when Sebe was overthrown.

In other words, your posts are riddled with errors -- confidently, almost arrogantly stated errors, but errors nevertheless. It's your confidence in your errors that makes your posts not just mistaken, but "counter-factual."

Btw, do you know where Nelson Mandela retired to after leaving the presidency? To his home town in Qunu, Transkei. Mandela comes from a royal family of the Mpondo -- but of course this is difficult to reconcile with your belief that Transkei has no any meaning other than as a creation of the apartheid regime.

[struggle4progress]

114. I have previously pointed out that NOT all organizations under the UDF umbrella

accepted the Freedom Charter, in the course of explaining why the UDF cannot be regarded as the "legal .. wing of the ANC" (which is your claim).

Although founded in 1983, the UDF did not adopt the Freedom Charter until August 1987. This is, of course, inconsistent with your claim that "the criteria for a membership organization being permitted to affiliate with the UDF was acceptance of the ANC's Freedom Charter."

And the UDF itself was banned in February 1988. This was a significant development and would have been known to anyone who lived in the country or who paid any attention to South African affairs in the late 1980s.

Since you say you "didn't live there until 1988," after which you say you lived there for several years, one would have expected to you to know this. And yet you claim the organization was "legal" at that time.

At this point I seem only to be helping you tighten up a bullshit story. Good day.

[HamdenRice]

115. You argument is the rhetorical equivalent of

putting your finger in your ears and saying nyanyanya, I can't hear you. I had cited for you my post in an earlier thread about recollections of living there:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=1147525&mesg_id=1151650

Do you think I just made that up in advance to impress you?

I'm sorry that you can't imagine a DUer going to do human rights work under dangerous conditions, but that is your loss.

BTW, you still seem constitutionally unable to comprehend the idea that the national UDF leadership could be banned but its constituent organizations continue. Nor that banning by the late 80s was ineffective because the popular struggle had overwhelming momentum.

What is it about the internet that makes people unable to simply say, gee, I guess I was wrong, thanks for the new information -- rather than, like you, drag on and on into ever more ridiculous positions?

As for me and anyone reading this, I'm sure that we'll trust first hand experience backed up by sources such as this US country study:

United Democratic Front

The United Democratic Front (UDF) was an extraparliamentary organization established in 1983, primarily in opposition to the government's constitutional proposals of that year. It served as an umbrella organization of antiapartheid groups. Membership was open to any organization that endorsed the principles of the ANC's Freedom Charter. Affiliates of the UDF included the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), the South African National Student Congress (Sansco), the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS), and the Congress of South African Students (COSAS).

http://countrystudies.us/south-africa/79.htm

Do you really believe that COSATU went out of business because the UDF was nominally banned? If so, you have so grasp whatsoever of South Africa's modern history. Why not just say so and move on.

[struggle4progress]

117. Concerning the UDF and the Freedom Charter

The US State Department is not a credible source on such topics. Here's what's on the ANC website:

THE UNITED DEMOCRATIC FRONT AND TOWNSHIP REVOLT
By Mark Swilling
Work in Progress, 9 September 1987

~snip~ Phase one: reactive politics ~snip~ At this stage, the UDF's objective was not to pose alternatives to apartheid or establish organizational structures designed to sustain a long-term struggle. Rather, the front aimed to counter the divisive tactics of state reforms by calling for the maximum unity of the oppressed, urging them to reject apartheid by refusing to vote. The concern to build this consensus was reflected in the UDF's decision not to adopt the Freedom Charter as a formal statement of principles. It still wanted to draw in non-charterist groups like black consciousness and major trade union organizations. ~snip~

http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/pubs/umrabulo/umrabulo19/revolt.html

This disproves the claim that UDF affiliates accepted the Freedom Charter and hence your earlier claim that the UDF was the arm of the ANC. Note that this is written about a month after the UDF finally adopted the Freedom Charter and about five months before the UDF was banned.

[HamdenRice]

122. Silly word games will not save your argument

Nor will taking snippets out of context.

The very article you cite states:

The major affiliates subscribe to the national democratic programme of the Freedom Charter. This involves dismantling white minority rule and establishing a non-racial unitary democratic state based on the rule of law, constitutional equality, freedom of association and other democratic liberties. The charter proposes dismantling the white capitalist power-structures through a combination of nationalization, land redistribution and social welfare. The UDF insists the Freedom Charter is anti-capitalist: if implemented it will dislodge the basic foundations of South African capitalism. But this, they acknowledge, does not make it a socialist programme. Presenting the Freedom Charter as anti-capitalist reflects the UDF's concern to represent the front's ideology in a way that mirrors its multi-class character.

On the same website, an article by Jeremy Cronin states:

http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/pubs/umrabulo/umrabulo19/history.html

It was, however, always an uneven process. From the very beginning, it was an open secret that the UDF was ANC-aligned. It was a front of affiliates, but it was also a legal and more or less self-conscious front for the banned ANC, standing in, but without claiming to substitute for it. However, not all ANC-supporting structures inside our country joined the UDF, or initially accepted it as a national co-ordinating structure of Charterist forces. This was partly related to the initial campaigning focus of the UDF.

<end quote>

Why are you playing these stupid games? Everyone knows the UDF was the legal, internal wing of the ANC but obviously could not say so directly, which would have resulted in its immediate banning.

The government even half tolerated this alignment as a way of talking indirectly to the ANC. UDF leaders used to fly to Lusaka, Zambia to discuss tactics with the ANC, and it would be reported in the Weekly Mail (now Mail & Guardian). That's how the UDF pursuaded Chris Hani to stop his Johannesburg bombing campaign.

Obviously this was an evolving situation. The UDF started out, as I stated, primarily as a means of boycotting the tricameral parliament (you know what that is, I hope) and evolved into a national anti-apartheid organization.

When the ANC was unbanned, the UDF dissolved itself, and its civic assocations converted into ANC party branches.

There is no argument here. You're just plain wrong. I honestly don't understand how you can possibly belabor this point. Arguing that the UDF was not acting as the ANC's legal internal wing, but within the limits of its legal situation, is like arguing that the moon is made of green cheese. Your argument has exactly that much truth content.

There's very little point in going on about this. You are wrong. You don't know anything about South Africa's modern history but seem determined to protect your fragile self-image as someone knowledgable about Africa.

[struggle4progress]

127. I didn't claim that no ANC members belonged to the UDF -- I disputed your assertion that

the UDF was "the legal, internal wing of the ANC." I have demonstrated that it wasn't legal after early 1988, when you say you returned to South Africa for several years. Nor have I claimed anywhere that no UDF-affiliates supported the Freedom Charter (which was always a sine quo non for full acceptance by the ANC); I merely pointed out that before late 1987, the UDF did not explicitly endorse the Charter; and this remark is, of course, fully supported by the snippet you quote "not all ANC-supporting structures inside our country ... accepted it as a national co-ordinating structure." Nor have I claimed anywhere there was no coordination between the ANC and the UDF: my aims were rather more precise, namely to show that your claim that the UDF "the legal, internal wing of the ANC" was in fact incorrect, as evidenced by the legal situation and by the Freedom Charter issues.

[HamdenRice]

131. To summarize this circular rabbit hole

Can you summarize exactly what your overall point is?

It seems to me that Leopoldsghost made a valid point that there are many precolonial kingdoms and civilizations that are not taught in American school systems. I appreciated what he had to say and added a few corrections about the transformation of the scale and identity of Southern African kingdoms around the time of colonization.

Your objection to both the OP and my posts seems to be that you don't believe that these precolonial kingdoms existed and are just creatures of the apartheid system of homelands. When it was demonstrated that your premise was false, you seem to be making two rather bizarre "arguments" -- although rhetorical strategies is perhaps a better description. You seem to be saying that I could not have lived in South Africa (ie a pure ad hominen argument that obviously is false), because I disagree with your strange, egregiously erroneous interpretation of events in the late 80s, the relationship between the ANC and UDF, or what happened at Bisho in 1992.

So my question is what is your point? What on earth do all your false erroneous characterizations of the events of the 80s and 90s, your digressions and time wasting misdirections, have to do with the the question of whether South African kingdoms existed or were creatures of apartheid? Can you provide any proof whatsoever that neither Zululand nor the Zulu kingdom existed before colonialism or apartheid? Can you demonstrate that there was no 19th century BaPedi kingdom? Can you show that all those missionaries and explorers who in the early 1800s wrote about the "Bechuana" people were lying?

Please get back to the original point and provide your evidence.

As for your strange fixation with mischaracterizing the UDF, I suppose we've reached a dead end. Even the sources you cite show that it was an open secret that the UDF operated as the internal wing of the ANC. What on earth is there more to say? Is your only point that you want to get the last word?

Moreover, based on newsreports, ANC histories or my own personal experience, I can tell you that despite the arrest of its national leadership and the formal banning of the central organization of the UDF and the attempt to restrict COSATU political activity, UDF affiliate political activity and COSATU political continued.

In case you are not aware, the UDF, COSATU and the ANC won the political struggle. That's why there is a democratic government in SA today. The government's inability to shut down black political activity is why they threw in the towel and began negotiating. Despite these formal bannings, the confident internal liberation movement continued to hold mass rallies even after 1988, where they boldy flew ANC colors and COSATU continued to successfully call general strikes and stayaways. If, as you seem to believe, the government successfully shut down black politics by these bannings, why do you think they decided to release Mandela and begin to negotiate in 1989? Out of generosity of spirit?

[struggle4progress]

118. Concerning COSATU and the UDF

You ask me, Do you really believe that COSATU went out of business because the UDF was nominally banned?

The question is mere rhetoric and does not reflect any claim I've made. Nevertheless, your implication that COSATU was a UDF-affiliate is incorrect, as show by the following from the COSATU website:

Reflections on the past

~snip~ Cosatu and the UDF ~ Mufamadi says Cosatu explored relationships with a range of political organisations.

"In 1988 I was sent to Cape Town to have a meeting with the New Unity Movement, to explore possibilities of working together around specific issues. At the time we were trying to organise the Anti-Apartheid Conference (AAC). The New Unity Movement put forward conditions which in our view were calculated to make a working relationship impossible. Similarly with the black consciousness movement. But in the UDF, Cosatu found a ready and willing ally around common struggles. Both Cosatu and the UDF were satisfied with a working relationship on programmes that were defined jointly, without Cosatu having to affiliate to the UDF." ~snip~

http://www.cosatu.org.za/shop/ss0406-8.html

[HamdenRice]

123. Huh?

Again, your own sources disagree with you. The point I was making was that banning the leadership of the UDF did not crush the organization, as banning the ANC in the 60s had crushed that organization, because the UDF was an "organization of organizations" not a membership organization. Your own cited paragraph shows that the UDF and COSATU worked together. If you can understand the concept of what the UDF was, you would understand that COSATU locals joined the UDF, not COSATU. Banning the UDF leadership did not cause COSATU or its locals to go out of business because the constituent organizations could not all be banned.

Increasingly, you are not just wrong, but incoherent and self-contradictory.

[struggle4progress]

129. Here is why COSATU said it did not join the UDF:

~snip~ Cosatu adopted the Freedom Charter at its second congress in 1987, but did not affiliate to the UDF. Although it had political overtones, the two hats debate was a much more practical issue. Organised workers wanted to make sure that their leaders and officials carried out their union responsibilities, they did not want to deny them office in political organisations. ~snip~ http://www.cosatu.org.za/shop/ss0406-10.html

This, of course, is again inconsistent with your latest argument.

[struggle4progress]

119. Concerning your claim that the UDF the United Democratic Front was "the legal, internal wing

of the ANC" (made here and here and here)

I have already established that the UDF was illegal by early 1988.

You now claim you were visiting the country to do human rights work under dangerous conditions, and yet immediately upthread you claimed it was not particularly dangerous. It of course seems odd that a supposed human rights worker would be unaware of the legal status of various organizations the person proposed to work through. But it is even odder that twenty-years after the fact, you prefer to use the language of the state security apparatus in describing the UDF:

~snip~ Accused by the security forces as being the 'internal wing of the ANC', the leadership of the UDF and its affiliates became targets of extreme repression. The better organized the UDF was, the more dangerous it was, and the worse the repression. Thus in mid-1985, when the first, partial State of Emergency was declared, the key leaders of UDF affiliates in the Eastern Cape were detained and brutally tortured until the 'Wendy Orr interdict' posed -for a while- some limitations on security police activity. Key leaders of the UDF - notably Matthew Goniwe, the regional organiser - and its affiliates were assassinated by the security forces. ~snip~

http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/pubs/umrabulo/umrabulo19/legacy.html

[HamdenRice]

124. Huh?

Again, you are becoming incoherent. As cited above, it was an "open secret" that the UDF was acting as the legal internal wing of the ANC.

Obviously "danger" is relative. You first raised this issue suggesting that everyone in the UDF was subject to immediate arrest or worst. They weren't. That's because most of the work the constituent organizations were doing was legal. So it was not "dangerous" in the sense that by working for a UDF affiliated organization one was subject to immediate arrest or worse. But obviously it was dangerous in the sense that there were bullets flying around, crazy white neo-Nazi farmers, and brutal security police.

Did you read my post about recollections? If so, you shouldn't have to play these silly word games.

If you don't believe I was there, that's your rather silly perogative. But I've written about living in SA on DU many times before this encounter with your silliness.

Of course, you are trying to lose sight of what this "debate" was about in the first place: It was that you don't know what you are talking about when it comes to South Africa, and it was extremely silly of you to say my explanation of the homelands was "sloppy." I realize that you are so desperate to save your self image that you want to go down endless, useless rabbit holes of trivia, all of which expose you as being ever more mistaken and ignorant of basic South African politics and history.

But the basic issue is this: You don't understand the origins of the homelands and hence don't understand 19th century South African history; you don't understand modern South African history and the role that ethnicity and the homelands played in the transition to democracy; and you don't understand what the UDF was.

That's the bottom line. Trying to pretend that I didn't live through part of that history is just plain silly.

[HamdenRice]

126. The basic illogic of your argument

I just wanted to add that there is a fundamental illogic to your argument of which you may want to take cognizance before proceeding further down this hole.

It's basic components are:

1. Here are some factual statements about the UDF during the period you claim to have been in SA;

2. You don't seem to know these facts;

3. Therefore, you could not have been in SA at the time.

The problem is that your factual statements are all wrong, as has been amply demonstrated -- even by the sources you, yourself, cite. So you seem to be saying that unless I agree with your howlingly erroneous "factual" portrait of SA at the time, I must not have been there.

But of course I disagree with your erroneous portrait, precisely because it is erroneous, not because I wasn't there.

[struggle4progress]

130. Somehow you also failed to notice all COSATU's political activity was illegal after February 1988

Campaigns
~snip~ In February 1988, the UDF was banned and Cosatu was restricted from engaging in any 'political activities'. ~snip~
http://www.cosatu.org.za/shop/ss0406-11.html

Your view of what was "legal" in 1988 South Africa does seem somewhat odd.

Southern Africa Report Archive
Vol 8 No 1
Striking back: An insider's view of COSATU
a review by David Pottie
~ snip~ We must not forget that COSATU was born into a state of emergency. But Baskin does not imply that COSATU became a political substitute for UDF's banning during the state of emergency. If anything, the state of emergency heightened COSATU's union character by forcing affiliates to rely on the shop floor to continue action. ~snip~
http://www.africafiles.org/article.asp?ID=4720

This shop-floor emphasis is consistent with other snippets I have provided on COSATU's non-affiliation with the UDF.

[struggle4progress]

102. Here is a fairly standard account of the events in Bisho 1992:

~snip~ Various inquiries over the years have largely agreed on how the order to open fire came about. Mkosana was the field commander at the massacre. Gonya was in charge of a grenade-launcher.

Mkosana radioed to his commanders, Colonel Dirk van der Bank and Brigadier Marius Oelschig, that his troops were under fire and asking for permission to open fire. This permission was granted on the understanding that the marchers were shooting at the troops.

Ngcuka said the senior officers had authorised Mkosana to "return fire" -- meaning that troops should only fire when they were actually fired at -- but Mkosana had simply ordered his troops to "fire", resulting in them immediately starting to shoot.

"In our view, Mkosana bears responsibility for the entire massacre."

In addition, said Ngcuka, there was no evidence that any shots had ever been fired at the troops as Mkosana had claimed. ~snip~

Ngcuka said these three were part of a group of marchers, led by Kasrils, who were fleeing the bullets. "It was a cold-blooded and brutal murder of people who were running away." ~snip~

http://www.dispatch.co.za/2001/06/01/easterncape/AAMASACR.HTM

The inquiries have been uniform in finding the only shots fired were fired by troops. So it appears you have also misrepresented Kasrils' activities at the time of the shooting.

[HamdenRice]

105. So now you have acknowledged your error?

You had believed that the Bisho massacre was associated with the overthrow of Sebe. Now you realize that the Bisho massacre occurred in 1992 during an attempted overthrow of Gqozo.

You can throw out more counter-factuals if you like, but I suggest you do a little research. Obviously, the ANC and SACP members were shot by the Ciskei soldiers as I indicated. But the Goldstone Commission also place blame on Kasrils for his reckless decision to attempt to storm past armed Ciskei soldiers. So, no, I did not "misrepresent" Kasrils role in any way, but if you need to try to save face with rhetorical games, I suppose that's your prerogative.

[struggle4progress]

121. The Bisho Massacre did not involve a coup attempt but was an attack on a peaceful marchers

Statement ANC on the Bisho Killings

The unprovoked killing of unarmed demonstrators at Bisho, today, Monday 7th September, by troops in the hire of Brigadier Oupa Gqozo, the military dictator of the Ciskei, marks a crucial turning point in the current phase of the struggle for democracy in South Africa.

The mass demonstration, involving thousands of people, in support of the demand for basic civil liberties in the Ciskei, was met with every possible obstacle by the Military junta and finally with a massacre when all else had failed. ~snip~

http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/pr/1992/pr0907a.html

The Goldstone Commission did not accuse Kasrils of plotting a coup, it merely asserted that by attempting to remove some razor wire he and those with him contributed to the tension. The fact remains that the shots were not fired defensively but at people who were fleeing. And what I said about Bisho upthread is accurate:

<In 1990>

Gqozo rather promptly asked the SADF to help him maintain order; the role of the SADF in Bisho massacre seems clear from Truth and Reconciliation Commission meetings.

Gqozo's popularity dropped rather quickly after the early days of his 1990 "coup" (which probably could not have survived without Nationalist Party complicity), and he promptly made clear to the apartheid government that the South African Defense Forces were wanted and welcome. Thus Ciskei continued to be ruled by the SADF and its proxies. SADF members, incidently, apologized at Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings for their role in the Bisho massacre despite the fact that they were never charged for that.

[HamdenRice]

125. Irrelevant

Again, I can't fathom what you are trying to accomplish. Everyone knows that it was the Ciskei security forces that did the shooting. That's not in dispute, so why are you bringing this up other than to distract from your basic ignorance of what the Bisho massacre was. After all, you initially thought it occurred in 1990 with the overthrow of Sebe. You had no clue whatsoever about what the Bisho massacre was, yet you were trying to criticize what I wrote with your confident but error-ridden account of the massacre.

The point is that believing that the "Leipzig option" was feasible, SACP leader Ronnie Kasrils and his cohorts tried to "rush" the Ciskei security forces. Obivously it was the security forces that did the shooting and took the lion's share of the blame. But Kasrils was roundly denounced within the SACP and ANC at the time for what seemed to be an extremely reckless tactical decision.

That's just history. Why are you tring to argue this? Again, arguing with you is like trying to argue with someone who believes that the moon is made of green cheese. But I suppose you are trying to rescue your image as "knowledgeable" about Africa by throwing up strawman and irrelvant arguments. Well, sorry, you aren't knowledgeable about Africa and with every post you make that more and more clear.

Here is the series of howlers you wrote about the Bisho massacre upthread:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=1138208&mesg_id=1157889

Your discussion of Bisho in 1990 is also inaccurate. Sebe was not overthrown by South African Communist Party plotters in March 1990 but by yet another protege of the SADF, Gqozo of the Ciskei Defense Forces. Gqozo rather promptly asked the SADF to help him maintain order; the role of the SADF in Bisho massacre seems clear from Truth and Reconciliation Commission meetings.

<end quote>

In other words you had no clue whatsoever about what the Bisho massacre was. Wrong year; wrong dictator; wrong event. You had no clue.

It is gratifying to see that since that preposterous post you've done some googling, but you need to actually go out and buy a book and learn something.

[struggle4progress]

128. You are also incorrect about the ANC position on the events in Bisho 1992:

CAPE TOWN June 3 1997 — Sapa
FORMER CISKEI SOLDIERS SEEK AMNESTY FOR BISHO MASSACRE

~snip~ CDF chief Maj-Gen Marius Oelschig, who retired from the SA National Defence Force last week as chief director of transformation, ... Testifying before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission last September ... admitted ordering CDF troops to open fire on a group of African National Congress supporters led by Kasrils that was marching on Bisho to demand free political activity in the homeland. ~snip~

Kasrils has said he still "agonises" over his decision to lead a group of marchers through a hole in the Bisho Stadium fence on September 7, 1992, in an attempt to break through a security cordon preventing the main crowd from entering Bisho. ~snip~

In presenting the ANC's views on the shootings, former ANC secretary general Cyril Ramaphosa described the actions of the CDF troops as "criminal" and suggested a trap had been set. Police investigation into the shootings found no evidence to support a chain of events which had created panic among the CDF troops and led to the order to fire. ~snip~

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=post&forum=389&topic_id=1138208&mesg_id=1178464

Thus, as I said in my first post on this subject, the SADF had admitted its role in those events before the TRC, having been invited to play an increased role in Ciskei after the 1990 coup. The ANC position taken here regarding the events does not suggest any effort by Kasrils to launch a coup not does it suggest any other activities panicked those who shot. Of course, if you had any evidence for your claim regarding such events, you should have felt free to provide it; otherwise, I shall be inclined to regard this as another example of the mind-set that produced Sharpeville some years earlier, justified by exactly the same cluster of lies that surrounded that event.

[HamdenRice]

90. Addendum re "modernists"

Your characterization of "modernist" historians is quite a strawman. Modernists and post modernists who question the "invention of tradition" in Africa are not saying that "Black Africans have no history,
that Zimbabweans have no national history pre-colonization,
and that the very existence of pre-20c. KwaZulu is an apartheid fiction." No modernist or post-modernist says that. They are saying that the specific "traditions" that relate to specific political entities, like "KwaZulu" or "Botswana" have been created in times much more recent than they purport to have been, and that these manipulated traditions have been useful to the colonizers -- as when the security forces pitted the "Zulu" Inkatha against the "Xhosa" ANC in order to try to prevent the democratic transition of the early 1900s.

Modernists and post-modernists take a critical look at the mythological pre-colonial history in order to discover the "real" pre-colonial history. In the 1990s, they are not trying to get rid of ethnic consciousness to create a Marxist utopia, but trying to help people understand that the idea of an eternal enmity between Zulu and Xhosa was a myth designed to get people to kill each other and prevent the end of apartheid. It's quite unfair to build up such an odious strawman in order to knock it down.

[struggle4progress]

92. You should be embarrassed to play such games

I nowhere used the phrase "overcome their archaic ethnic classifications." I nowhere called you a supporter of apartheid. Nor does the phrase "some ancient kingdom," around which you so carefully place quotation marks, appear in my text -- and where I do say "ancient kingdom" I say something rather different that you claim I do. And I did not anywhere claim that the population of South Africa had no pre-colonial history.

I did, however, object to certain features of your discussion of South Africa, including some discussion of the apartheid-era "homelands" in your OP, despite your claim that the "entire post was about pre-colonization era."

I therefore find it extremely informative that your reaction to my objections is to denounce my supposed belief in a "Marxian sociological utopia," insofar as my post contains no Marxist referents.

[NewJeffCT]

71. Thanks - looks like a great post

and, I'm replying now so I can find it later tonight when I get home.

[Blue_Tires]

72. ttt n/t

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

81. I was taught about the Aztecs, Mayans and Incans in school some 40 years ago. I did not

learn about these African Kingdoms. Thank you for this fascinating information.

[Odin2005]

89. It's mostly a time issue.

When I was in high school I was taugh the usual stuff on the most powerful African states (Mail, Songay, Ghana, Great Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Kongo).

[Jim Warren]

106. Of course, as with all cultures

there were failings...........

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/06/070612-tomb-child.html

[nadinbrzezinski]

112. Wow, you mean to tell me that

they don't teach this in American HS? Never mind you've been told by folks they were taught this in HS?

I don't count, I was taught this in a MEXICAN school... and the Aztecs, Toltecs, Olmecs and Maya are part of the national pride.

[ncabot22]

113. Not African, but I never learned about the Celts

I never realized, as a kid, that the Celts were powerful warriors and gave rights to women--unlike most other European cultures. Women could make contracts, divorce their husbands, etc. All I learned is that they were savages who needed to be christianized.