Editorial Collective Introductory Note

This Special Issue combines a sampling of articles from the 2019 Southern African Historical Society (SAHS) 27th Biennial Conference with the theme ‘Trails, Traditions, Trajectories: Rethinking Perspectives on Southern African Histories’, together with a more general cross section of research articles, showcasing the range and diversity of our discipline.

As part of our focus on the SAHS Conference, we open this issue with the Presidential Address by Enocent Msindo, ‘Rethinking Histories of Southern Africa and the Contemporary Challenges’, which offers a provocation for all of us working in and on the subregion. We then offer the conference’s Keynote Address by Francis Nyamnjoh on ‘Mobility, Globalisation, and the Policing of Citizenship and Belonging in the Twenty-First Century’. This is followed by the award-winning article by Bryan Umaru Kauma, who won the SAHS’s Best Student Essay Prize for ‘“Small Grains, Small Gains”: African Peasant Small Grains Production and Marketing in Zimbabwe during the Colonial Period, c.1890–1980’. All three pieces remind us of a splendid conference in Makhanda, in a very different world.

You will see that there is a significant focus on KwaZulu-Natal history that runs through this issue, which is timeous, given the recent crises. Our roundtable, by Jill Kelly, Jabulani Sithole, and Liz Timbs, is on ‘King Zwelithini and the Historians’. Our first two articles resonate with this roundtable and each other: Nancy Jacobs’ ‘How Washington Okumu Became the Mediator who Saved the 1994 South African Elections’ and Hilary Lynd’s ‘The Peace Deal: The Formation of the Ingonyama Trust and the IFP Decision to Join South Africa’s 1994 Elections’.

We then offer our readers a smorgasbord of articles, showcasing a variety of themes, methodologies, and periodisations, but all grappling with power and politics. We begin in the nineteenth century with Paddy O'Halloran’s ‘Beyond the Pale: The “Foreigner” in the Politics of the “Frontier” in the Fish River Marches of the British Cape Colony, c.1830–1850’. We travel to the twentieth century with Laura Richardson’s ‘“Too Unsavoury for Our Fastidious Tastes”: Unmarried Motherhood in South Africa’s Mother City, Cape Town, 1910–1948’. Jakob Zollmann’s ‘Negotiated Partition of South Africa – An Idea and its History (1920s–1980s)’ and Toivo Asheeke’s ‘“Literacy, Armed Struggle, and Black Consciousness”: The Evolution of NAYO, 1973–1976’ focus on political intellectual history. Ria van der Merwe’s ‘The Jester in Verwoerd’s Court: English Press Cartoons, 1959–1965’ and Chris Bolsmann’s ‘Flouting Apartheid Rules: Stanley Matthews and South African Football, 1955–1988’ examine different facets of the nexus of society and politics from the 1950s onwards. Staying in the same period but crossing the border to the north, Mark Nyandoro’s ‘Forced Migration, Resistance, and Adaptation: The Madheruka Cotton Production and Differentiation in Pre-Irrigation Era Sanyati, Zimbabwe, 1950–1967’ concludes a strongly political issue by examining internal migration and forced evictions by the state.

Our book review section, edited by Laura Phillips, includes a variety of the latest books and maintains the issue’s key foci on politics, identity, and KwaZulu-Natal. We conclude this special conference issue with a commemoration to renowned scholar Bill Freund – academic of African economic history and urban centres and historian of Durban – with Chris Saunders’ review of Freund’s autobiography, An Historian’s Passage to Africa, published in 2021 soon after his passing, and with Robert Morrell’s beautiful celebration of his life and work.