Forgotten Sustainabilities in Indigenous Archives

a keynote presentation at the UniZul Conference on Sustainable Information

representing: South African National Lexicography Units & South African Heritage Publishers

For more information, you can visit www.saheritagepublishers.co.za or email info@saheritagepublishers.co.za.

[greeting in isiZulu, explaining who I am and why I am here, and introducing the topic to everyone]

Which word does one use for knowledge?

ulwazi? umniningo?

And how do we translate sustainability?

ukugcina? ukulondoloza? ukuxhasa? ukusekela? ukumisela?

The last 200 years, coinciding with the arrival of people like me in this part of the world, kwaZulu, has seen a change in many things here – a change from orality to literacy, from pastoral nomadism combined with subsistence crop-growing and hunting with foraging to intensive commercialised agriculture and monoculture, from diversity of language to a set of homogenised official languages. 

In 2023 we live in a world dominated by monoglossia, monotheism, monoculture and biodiversity extinction. We live in a world of shrinking homogeneity, where the knowledge of how we survived up to this point has been forgotten in favour of tips and tricks for how we can maximise profit and extract as much as we can from a world that increasingly has less and less left to give us. 

I have been alive for just under 40 of those 200 years, and my father (who was there in the audience) has been around for more than twice as long as that. The changes that we have witnessed and been part of have been extensive – a movement from Empire to Independence, from Apartheid to Democracy, from rural traditional modes of life to urbanised homogenous globalised standard of behaviour. 

How many of us remember the droughts of 1992?

How about further back, the effects of Demoina in the late 1980s?

There have been 10 generations since colonisation, and how many of those have been recorded? If so, by whom, and in what form?

Sustainability is something that has been introduced into this part of the world, and into this last generation, but it is not alien to the ways of living that have always existed here. The astonishing thing is that the sustainability models that existed did not simply wane or stop of their own accord. They were systematically uprooted – eradicated and maligned in favour of the paternalism of the north and the west, who believed that their views were the best, and anything that Africa had to offer was sub-standard or sub-par, the province of amahhedeni and amagqabi. 

I have used the plural ‘sustainabilities’ in the title of this paper today because to call it ‘sustainability’ implies that it is a monolithic concept. Sustainability is responsive – it incorporates Indigenous Knowledge, Knowledge of the Land that predates the arrival of colonists, and that was contained in the minds and stories of the local people. These traditions contained an inherent respect for the rhythms of the natural world, an understanding of the way that the world interrelated. The knowledge-keepers have always transmitted their knowledge of the world to their children. 

The colonists have always known that the greatest opponent to the monoculture, monotheism, mono-economy of the west is the local, specific, contextual knowledge of the people in the areas being colonised. 

Privilege

I, as a white man, have less say in this because it was my ancestors and people who came here and imposed approaches from Europe that were, themselves, unsustainable.

I, as a descendant of colonised and abused peoples, the Irish and Scots, also have a word of warning to give to all who still possess fragments of their inheritance.

Sustainability is inherent in the languages spoken: e.g. the isiZulu word umona, the worst of all sins, is one of selfishness. The noun class specifically for humans is only one of eight different groups of things: words for natural resources encode their nature for others to interpret rapidly. As such, for example, the words for different rivers in KZN encode for whether they were perennial or seasonal, whether they were prone to flooding or were carved deeply into the soft rocks.

Et cetera.

What is contained in the archives around us, textual and ephemeral?

If you keep stuff in an archive, and you make it an object of study that is kept under lock and key, you are actually contributing to its loss to successive generations. Publishing, by the nature of the word, is to make public that which was previously private or secret. 

There are human archives, and there always have been – people who are the collectors and keepers of wisdom that is deep and yet specific, which requires careful curation and linking, and acts of translation, before it can be available to the widest possible group for the widest possible benefit.

The Ancestral Voices collection represents archival information collected by mother-tongue speakers about all aspects of precolonial indigenous life, including the relationship between people and their environment, agricultural practices, medicine, cosmology and beliefs about the world.

The van Warmelo Ethnographic collection at the University of Pretoria represents the most comprehensive collection of South African oral history. It contains 891 indigenous language texts, by 187 authors, which were recorded from 1930 to 1950, in all languages that then had written orthography – 41 writings in Xitsonga, 13 in isiXhosa, 476 in Sesotho sa Leboa, 157 in Setswana, 29 in Sesotho, 35 in Tshivenda and 140 in isiZulu. The histories and traditions of amaNdebele and amaSwati, since their languages were not written at the time, were recorded in various languages, including isiZulu and Sesotho sa Leboa. 

In addition to these hegemonic languages, some of the authors recorded oral history and indigenous knowledge in dialects which are rare or no longer extant, having been absorbed into other languages. An example of this is the writings of Henrietta Mhlongo, who wrote extensively in the ukutekela fashion of isiLala. 

The writings represent the voices of great-grandmothers and great-grandfathers. They are rare accounts of cultural practices and their origins, clan battles and unions, and the movement of people. They also speak of unknown clans that have faded from history, and dialects no longer spoken. 

Working with the University of Pretoria, South African Heritage Publishers have started to make the texts available to a wider public – transcribing them into the latest orthographies, and then translating into English. At the time of this paper, 362 texts have been transcribed and translated into English, and uploaded to the Ancestral Voices website for the public to access via subscription. 32 bilingual volumes have been produced, in all but Tshivenda and isiLala. At the other end of the spectrum, 130 texts remain in paper format in the archives at the University of Pretoria while 278 are awaiting transcription and translation. A further 141 texts are in various stages of transcription and translation. 

We estimate that full extent of these writings is 16 000 A4 old transcription pages containing 5 000 000 indigenous language words. Certainly the largest heritage preservation project in South Africa at the moment. We need the support of all to ensure these works are made available for all South Africans and indeed future generations. 

How did we Discover these Writings?

Some eight years ago, four friends met in the rural Limpopo village of Vuwani. There were two Xitsonga speakers, one of amaShangana heritage the other a Vatsonga, a Tshivenda speaker and an English speaker. One of the discussions we had was about how their ancestors came to meet, and the role played by the Portuguese in those years. It was agreed that the majority of South Africans know little of their own past and even less about the heritage of South Africans who have another language as their mother tongue.

We further agreed that there are very few easily available resources on the history and heritage of indigenous languages speakers in particular. It was felt that we should explore the development of a series of readers focussing on the people and events of the past that have shaped South Africa. 

Soon after this, a meeting was held with Dr. M Nemudzivhadi, then a leading historian of the Vhavenda, who gave his wholehearted support for the project but felt that due to his advanced age could not participate directly in it. He then told me about a collection of writings in our indigenous languages held by the University of Pretoria and asked if I would do something to make sure that South Africans have easier access to these valuable writings. This is how the Ancestral Voices project came to be.

The archives contain many records of indigenous sustainability, including stories of Nomkhubulwane. How many people know about Nomkhubulwane? And how many know about Mvelingqangi?

Nomkhubulwane and her veneration or ritual is only one of many different practices that were assimilated and standardised during the Shakan conquests, and then perverted or destroyed by the colonisers. But they are not gone, even though they may be forgotten. Go and seek more deeply. Drink deeply of the the true hidden histories.

Correlation between information, biodiversity, and sustainability

The indigenous records and archives transcend the arbitrary colonial distinctions that have been set up to divide and set people against each other.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to sustaining and to finding sustainable approaches, and there needs to be attention given to the way that people have developed approaches aimed at local and regional sustainabilities, rather than some global idea of sustainability.

Caring for only one section of the world is not enough, and indigenous knowledge is acutely aware of how we are all interlinked and inter-related.

{the rest was ad lib, including a discussion of the fact that potatoes and maize were not part of the indigenous diet}