ABSTRACT
Over the past century, the work done by anthropologists, historians, cultural historians and lately art historians, resulted in the accumulation of a collective resource, a body of knowledge, located in libraries and museum collections. In most cases, it was largely overlooked by archaeologists. In South Africa, the recent rise to prominence of concepts such as indigenous knowledge systems, political inclusiveness and the use of oral histories, especially by archaeologists, serves to bring into focus this work, illustrating the validity in applying it in the process of trying to unravel the past. The problem was that in its production, this knowledge had to comply to norms and standards universally accepted, as well as be presented in a format that is universally understood. This, all the while suffering from domination of a theoretical stance preferred by the individual researcher or school of thought from which they came. It was thus mostly done from a point of view in which there is little place for the cultural viewpoint of the people that were responsible for generating the ideas or creating the objects. The danger arising from this is that those who stand outside of these theoretical approaches can at best only be part of the subject matter of the study. In this paper, by focusing on a select few topics, based on extensive ethnographic and archaeological research amongst the Sotho- and Tswana-speakers of South Africa, I aim to show how, by making the ‘insider’ speak, they can contribute massively in helping us to gain a more sophisticated understanding of their own world, past and present.
