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Indigenous southern African  architecture

• A Venda Sketch-Book
• Architecture, Art and Artifact
• Architecture without Architects
• Colonialism as a Factor in the Development of Southern African Indigenous Vernacular Architecture, 1810-1910
• Folk Architecture in Transition
• From Brakdak to Bafokona
• From Matjieshuis to Kapsteilhuis
• KwaMsiza: The History and Architecture of a Ndebele Village
• The Pre-Industrial Architecture of the Eastern Cape
• The Pre-Industrial Architecture of the Transvaal
• Processes and Product in Rural Architecture: A Southern African Case Study
• Some Thoughts on the Process of White-Black Cross-Cultural Fertilisation in Southern Africa
• The Processes of Rural Architecture
• Rural Art and Rural Resistance: The Rise of a Wall Decorating Tradition in Rural Southern Africa
• The Architecture of Southern Africa before the Difaqane
• Southern African Regions of Rural Building Technology
• Structure, Settlement and Society
• An Introduction to Tswana Architecture
• The Ecology of Rural Habitat
• The Zulus of the Highveld: The Role of Architectural Form in the Establishment of a Competing "Zulu" Political Identity among the Matabele 1822-1897
• Transmission and Change in Architecture

 

THE ARCHITECTURE OF SOUTHERN AFRICA BEFORE THE DIFAQANE

Franco Frescura

ABSTRACT

The Sotho word Difaqane, or to give it its Nguni equivalent mfecane, means, literally, "the scattering of the people". It represents a period in the history of southern Africa, between 1822 and 1837, which saw massive population shifts, the depopulation of large tracts of land, widespread hardship and famine and the emergence of centralised forms of government over many parts of the sub-continent. It also coincided with the large scale encroachment of migrant Dutch farmers into the southern African interior, an increase in European missionary efforts, an acceleration of British military involvement in the affairs of the region and a rise in the entrepreneurial activities of white traders and merchants. The Difaqane therefore was a time of transition which was to transform the whole nature of rural tribal society and pave the way for changes in the region's economy and system of government.

As might be expected, the Difaqane also marks a point of no return in the indigenous architecture of southern Africa. Its momentous upheavals not only altered local settlement patterns but, in many ways, also facilitated future events. Thereafter contact between white immigrant and black indigenous groups took place with increased frequency thereby creating opportunities for the cross-cultural transmission of building forms and technologies. The introduction of trader artifacts, sun-dried bricks, triangulated roof systems, new roofing materials and the educational efforts of missionaries all combined to bring about slow but irreversible changes in the local built environment.

This paper seeks to analyse the nature of southern African architecture before and during the Difaqane. It synthesizes data from a variety of early historical and archaeological sources and examines the validity of currently-held stereotypes of past built environments. It also looks at examples of early cross-cultural architectural borrowings and attempts to establish patterns of future change.

INTRODUCTION

The organisers of this conference have chosen to focus its theme upon the twin concepts of "Enlightenment" and "Emancipation", most particularly as they manifested themselves during the ninety-odd years between 1744 and 1834. This is, of course, quite ironic, for, in southern Africa at least, it represents a period when the indigenous inhabitants of the region began to be subjected at the hands of white immigrants, to a process of colonialisation, of dispossession, of enslavement and, in some cases, even of genocide.  It was a time when they began to lose control over their lands, their labour, their culture and their lives. At first the only people affected by the European settlement of the Cape were the Khoikhoi pastoralists who bartered their cattle for Dutch trinkets, but as white farmers, traders and explorers began to expand ever inland, these came into contact with San hunter gatherers, with the Nguni farmers of the coastal belt and ultimately with the Sotho/Tswana farmers of the interior. The relationships which developed between white and black during this era established a pattern which survives, in many ways, to the present day.

During the eighteenth century, for example, the Khoikhoi were progressively dispossessed of their lands, decimated by smallpox and deprived of their labour by a series of laws designed to reduce them to a level slightly better than slavery (1). By 1834 all that was left of this once numerous nation was small pockets in Namaqualand and southern Namibia, in the northern Cape and southern Free State, and in the eastern Cape. Miserable as their lot must have been, even they fared better than their San compatriots who were subjected during this time to a systematic campaign of enslavement and genocide. Barrow told in 1797 of how:

"A boor from Graaff Reynet being asked ... if the savages were numerous or troublesome on the road, replied he had only shot four, with as much composure and indifference as if he had been speaking of four partridges. I myself have heard one of the humane colonists boast of having destroyed with his own hands near three hundred of these unfortunate wretches." (2)

This slaughter did not cease with the imposition of a British colonial administration at the Cape in 1806, nor indeed for many years thereafter. Thompson reported in 1823 that:

"While at this place, I heard that a Commando (or expedition of armed boors) had been recently out against the Bushmen in the mountains, where they had shot thirty of these poor creatures.  I also learned that about 100 Bushmen had been shot last year in the Tarka". (3)

Further east by 1834 the Cape frontier had become the stage for a long series of protracted border conflicts against the Xhosa. Four of them took place by this time and their resultant effect was to drive these people from their winter grazing, which at one time had extended as far south as Port Elizabeth, to an area north of the Great Kei, a distance of some 350km. The ensuing overpopulation of the southern Transkei and the build up of pressures for more grazing land were to set the stage for the so-called "Great Cattle Slaughter" of 1856 with all the resultant hardship and famine that this brought to the region.

Finally, only two years after this era of supposed "enlightenment and emancipation" had ended, groups of indigent, land-hungry Dutch farmers invaded the southern African interior, unleashing one land war after the other, and taking with them a baggage train filled with prejudice, chauvinism, greed and intolerance, the legacy of which lives on to plague our lives and our relationships to this very day.

It is against this "enlightened" and "emancipated" social backdrop that the architectural events which I am about to outline took place.

THE BROAD PICTURE

It must be understood that before the 1820s such concepts as "Sotho", "Tswana", "Pedi", and "Ndebele" did not have the firm connotations of regional and group identity which have been awarded them in more recent times. The South Sotho, for example, were a conglomeration of Sotho/Tswana and Nguni speaking groups who fled to the Lesotho highlands during the Difaqane of 1822-1836 and came to be united under one leader, Moshweshwe. The Zulu, on the other hand, were a small clan living in northern Natal who, at the turn of the nineteenth century, numbered little more than 2000 persons. The idea of a larger Zulu kingdom was not initiated until after 1816 when Shaka took over their leadership. Thus it becomes difficult to discuss the indigenous architecture of southern Africa before this time through the use of current group nouns or regional identities. The best we may do is to interpret the larger architectural patterns of that time in terms of regional technologies, dwelling forms and the economic activities of their builders. An overlay of all three such images gives us a picture which is not only well focused but, amazingly enough, yields a large amount of fine detail.

CONCLUSIONS

Many of the architectural traditions I have outlined here are no longer with us. Some, like the stilt dwellings of Kaditshwene have not existed for over a century; others, like the "inverted sparrowpots" of Lesotho, only vanished a bare generation ago. Much of my own work in rural areas over the past twelve years has, in many ways, been the task of a modern archaeologist, piecing together the fragments of vanished traditions, and many of the patterns I observed as recently in 1979 in places such as Venda, have now disappeared, never to return.

I must therefore ask that you not be fooled by the academic nicety of your conference title. The whites who came here during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries may have been living in their own age of emancipation and enlightenment, but they brought none of these qualities with them. Instead they came as rapacious invaders who subjugated, plundered and destroyed. The same morality which converted "natives" to christianity also enslaved them and took away their land; the same people who rode out in 1823 on horseback to shoot "bushmen", ride out today on "Buffels"; and the same barbarians who shot out the quagga from our plains now trade in ivory and rhino horn. What little is left today is but a fraction of the rich natural and cultural heritage we have lost and our current political stance will undoubtedly ensure that the rest will be gone within the lifetime of my generation.

POSTSCRIPT

This paper was originally delivered to a conference on Enlightement and Emancipation? South African Perspectives on the 18th and Early 19th Centuries, held in Durban on 13-16 September 1989, entitled The Architecture of Southern Africa Before the Difaqane. To the best of my knowledge it has never been published.