Hostname: page-component-6bb9c88b65-g7ldn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-07-24T04:23:55.167Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

In praise of outlaws

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 November 2018

Rachel King
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

‘Outlaw’ is not a common category of archaeological thought but it is perhaps more useful than meets the eye. ‘Outlaws’ are typically viewed as contingent on legal and capitalist systems; they are, I suggest, also material, affective phenomena that draw our attention to how transgression, dissent and disorder are conceived through archaeological thinking. Here, I outline some ways in which ‘outlaw’ figures are ‘good to think with’, particularly for historical and colonial contexts but also for broader, more global frontier situations. Through three sketches of archetypal ‘outlaws’ in southern Africa's recent past, I consider where these disruptive figures draw attention to how mobility, violence, rebellion and state imagination (and the limits thereof) have been imagined through material misbehaviours.

Keywords

outlawscattle raidersvagrancyrebellionresistancesouthern Africacolonialism

Information

Type
Articles
Information
Archaeological Dialogues , Volume 25 , Issue 2 , December 2018 , pp. 105 - 133
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Adhikari, M., 2010: ‘A total extinction confidently hoped for’. The destruction of Cape San society under Dutch colonial rule, 1700–1795, Journal of genocide research 12, 19–44.Google Scholar
Allison, A., 1869: Statement of Dinilape a Basuto resident near Silesa's kraal, Western Cape Archives, GH 14/27, South Africa.Google Scholar
Anderson, M.S., 2009: Marothodi. The historical archaeology of an African capital, Woodford.Google Scholar
Arbousset, T., and Daumas, F., 1968 (1846): Narrative of an exploratory tour to the north-east of the Colony of the Cape of Good Hope, trans. J.C. Brown, Cape Town.Google Scholar
Ashley, C., Antonites, A. and Fredriksen, P.D., 2016: Mobility and African archaeology. An introduction, Azania. Archaeological research in Africa 51, 417–34.Google Scholar
Atmore, A., 1970: The Moorosi Rebellion. Lesotho, 1879, in Rotberg, R.I. and Mazrui, A.A. (eds), Protest and power in black Africa, New York, 2–35.Google Scholar
Austen, J., 1879a: J. Austen to C. Griffith, 18 February, Western Cape Archives, NA 276, South Africa.Google Scholar
Austen, J., 1879b: Report upon the case of Maketa Andreas and Zwartboy, 4 July 1879, in Further papers in re. Morosi Rebellion in Basutoland, presented to the House of Assembly, 122–24, Western Cape Archives, A.49-’79, South Africa.Google Scholar
Austen, J., 1879c: Report on the case of Mohula, Mojaki, and Pata, 4 July 1879, in Further papers in re. Morosi Rebellion in Basutoland, presented to the House of Assembly, 124–35, Western Cape Archives, A.49-’79, South Africa.Google Scholar
Austen, J., 1880: Statement of Mofetudi, 23 February 1880, enclosed in J. Austen to C. Griffith, 3 March 1880, Western Cape Archives, NA 277, South Africa.Google Scholar
Austen, R., 1986: Social bandits and other heroic criminals. Western models of resistance and their relevance for Africa, in Crummey, D. (ed.), Banditry, rebellion, and social protest in Africa, London, 89–109.Google Scholar
Beaudry, M.C., and Parno, T.G. (eds), 2013: Archaeologies of mobility and movement, New York.Google Scholar
Beinart, W., and Bundy, C. (eds), 1987: Hidden struggles in rural South Africa, London.Google Scholar
Blundell, G., 2004: Nqabayo's Nomansland. San rock art and the somatic past, Uppsala.Google Scholar
Boeyens, J., and Hall, S., 2009: Tlokwa oral traditions and the interface between history and archaeology at Marothodi, South African historical journal 61, 457–81.Google Scholar
Brabant, E.Y., 1931: Life of General Sir E.Y. Brabant, Western Cape Archives, ACC 459, South Africa.Google Scholar
Browning, F., 1880: Fighting and farming in South Africa, London.Google Scholar
Burman, S., 1981: Chiefdom politics and alien law. Basutoland under Cape rule, 1871–1884, London.Google Scholar
Casella, E.C., 2000: ‘Doing trade’. A sexual economy of nineteenth-century Australian female convict prisoners, World archaeology 32, 209–21.Google Scholar
Casella, E.C., and Voss, B.L., 2011: Intimate encounters. An archaeology of sexualities within colonial worlds, in Casella, E.C. and Voss, B.L. (eds), The archaeology of colonialism. Intimate encounters and sexual effects, New York, 1–10.Google Scholar
Challis, S., 2008: The impact of the horse on the AmaTola ‘Bushmen’. New identity in the Maloti–Drakensberg mountains of southern Africa, D.Phil. thesis, Oxford.Google Scholar
Challis, S., 2012: Creolisation on the nineteenth-century frontiers of southern Africa. A case study of the AmaTola ‘Bushmen’ in the Maloti–Drakensberg, Journal of southern African studies 38, 265–80.Google Scholar
Challis, S., 2014: Binding beliefs. The creolisation process in a ‘Bushman’ raider group in nineteenth-century southern Africa, in Deacon, J. and Skotnes, P. (eds), The courage of Kabbo. Celebrating the 100th anniversary of the publication of ‘Specimens of Bushman folklore’, Cape Town, 247–65.Google Scholar
Challis, S., 2016: Re-tribe and resist. The ethnogenesis of a creolised raiding band in response to colonialism, in Hamilton, C. and Leibhammer, N. (eds), Tribing and untribing the archive. Critical enquiry into the traces of the Thukela-Mzimkhulu region from the Early Iron Age until c.1910, Pietermaritzburg, 282–99.Google Scholar
Comaroff, J., 1985: Body of power, spirit of resistance. The culture and history of a South African people, Chicago.Google Scholar
Crais, C., 1992: White supremacy and black resistance in pre-industrial South Africa. The making of the colonial order in the eastern Cape, 1770–1865, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Crossland, Z., 2013: Signs of mission. Material semeiosis and nineteenth-century Tswana architecture, Signs and society 1, 79–113.Google Scholar
Cullinan, P., 1992: Robert Jacob Gordon, 1743–1795. The man and his travels at the Cape, Cape Town.Google Scholar
Dante, A., 2017: Histories of a burnt house. An archaeology of negative spaces and dispossession, American anthropologist 119, 253–68.Google Scholar
Dawdy, S.L., 2005: Thinker-tinkers, race and the archaeological critique of modernity, Archaeological dialogues 12, 143–64.Google Scholar
Dawdy, S.L., 2006: The burden of Louis Congo and the evolution of savagery in colonial Louisiana, in Pierce, S. and Rao, A. (eds), Discipline and the other body. Correction, corporeality, colonialism, Durham, NC, 61–89.Google Scholar
Dawdy, S.L., 2008: Building the Devil's empire. French colonial New Orleans, Chicago.Google Scholar
Dawdy, S.L., and Bonni, J., 2012: Towards a general theory of privacy, Anthropological quarterly 85, 673–99.Google Scholar
Elbourne, E., 1994: Freedom at issue. Vagrancy legislation and the meaning of freedom in Britain and the Cape Colony, 1799–1842, Slavery and abolition 15, 114–50.Google Scholar
Elbourne, E., 2002: Blood ground. Colonialism, missions, and the contest for Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799–1853, Montreal.Google Scholar
Eldredge, E.A., 2007: Power in colonial Africa. Conflict and discourse in Lesotho, 1870–1960, Madison, WI.Google Scholar
Etherington, N., 2001: The great treks. The transformation of southern Africa, 1918–1854, London.Google Scholar
Fleisher, J., 2004: Behind the sultan of Kilwa's ‘rebellious conduct’. Local perspectives on an international East African town, in Reid, A. and Lane, P. (eds), African historical archaeologies, New York, 91–124.Google Scholar
Fleisher, J., and Norman, N., 2015: Archaeologies of anxiety. The materiality of anxiousness, worry, and fear, in Fleisher, J. and Norman, N. (eds), The archaeology of anxiety. The materiality of anxiousness, worry, and fear, New York, 1–20.Google Scholar
Fredriksen, P.D., and Bandama, F., 2016: The mobility of memory. Space/knowledge dynamics in rural potting workshops in Limpopo Province, South Africa, Azania. Archaeological research in Africa 51, 489–506.Google Scholar
Fredriksen, P.D., and Chirikure, S., 2015: Beyond static models. An evaluation of present status and future prospects for Iron Age research in southern Africa, Cambridge archaeological journal 25, 597–614.Google Scholar
Giblin, J.D., 2014: Toward a politicised interpretation ethic in African archaeology, Azania. Archaeological research in Africa 49, 148–65.Google Scholar
González-Ruibal, A., 2014: An archaeology of resistance. Materiality and time in an African borderland, Plymouth.Google Scholar
Gosden, C., 2004: Archaeology and colonialism. Cultural contact from 5000 BC to the present, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Gray, D.F., 2011: Incorrigible vagabonds and suspicious spaces in nineteenth-century New Orleans, Historical archaeology 45, 55–73.Google Scholar
Hall, M., 2000: Archaeology and the modern world. Colonial transcripts in South Africa and the Chesapeake, London.Google Scholar
Hall, S., 1995: Archaeological indicators for stress in the western Transvaal region between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, in Hamilton, C. (ed.), The Mfecane aftermath. Reconstructive debates in South African history, Johannesburg, 307–21.Google Scholar
Hall, S., 1998: A consideration of gender relations in the Late Iron Age ‘Sotho’ sequence of the western Highveld, South Africa, in Kent, S. (ed.), Gender in African prehistory, Walnut Creek, CA, 235–58.Google Scholar
Hall, S., 2012: Identity and political centralisation in the western regions of the Highveld, c.1770–c.1830. An archaeological perspective, Journal of Southern African studies 38, 301–18.Google Scholar
Hall, S., Anderson, M., Boeyens, J.C.A. and Coetzee, F., 2008: Towards an outline of the oral geography, historical identity and political economy of the late precolonial Tswana in the Rustenburg region, in Swanepoel, N., Esterhuysen, A. and Bonner, P. (eds), Five hundred years rediscovered. Southern African precedents and prospects. 500 year initiative 2007 conference proceedings, Johannesburg, 55–85.Google Scholar
Hamilton, C., 1998: Terrific majesty. The powers of Shaka Zulu and the limits of historical invention, London.Google Scholar
Harris, O.J.T., and Sørensen, T.F., 2010: Rethinking emotion and material culture, Archaeological dialogues 17, 145–63.Google Scholar
Hartnett, A., and Dawdy, S.L., 2013: The archaeology of illegal and illicit economies, Annual review of anthropology 42, 37–51.Google Scholar
Hobsbawm, E., 1959: Primitive rebels. Studies in archaic forms of social movement in the 19th and 20th centuries, Manchester.Google Scholar
Hobsbawm, E., 2000 (1969): Bandits, New York.Google Scholar
Huffman, T.N., 2001: The central cattle pattern and interpreting the past, Southern African humanities 13, 19–35.Google Scholar
Joffe, A.H., 2003: Identity/crisis, Archaeological dialogues 10, 77–95.Google Scholar
King, R., 2014: Voluntary barbarians of the Maloti–Drakensberg. The BaPhuthi chiefdom, cattle raiding, and colonial rule in nineteenth-century southern Africa, D.Phil. thesis, Oxford.Google Scholar
King, R., 2017a: Cattle, raiding and disorder in southern African history, Africa 87, 607–30.Google Scholar
King, R., 2017b: Living on edge. New perspectives on anxiety, refuge, and colonialism in southern Africa, Cambridge archaeological journal 27, 533–51.Google Scholar
King, R., forthcoming: Among the ‘headless hordes’. Missionaries, outlaws, and logics of landscape in the Wittebergen Native Reserve, c.1850–1871, Journal of southern African studies.Google Scholar
King, R., and Challis, S., 2017: The ‘interior world’ of the nineteenth-century Maloti–Drakensberg mountains, Journal of African history 58, 213–37.Google Scholar
King, R., and McGranaghan, M., forthcoming: The archaeology and materiality of mission in southern Africa, Journal of southern African studies.Google Scholar
Kuper, A., 1982: Wives for cattle. Bridewealth and marriage in southern Africa, London.Google Scholar
Landau, P.S., 2010: Popular politics in the history of South Africa, 1400–1948, New York.Google Scholar
Lane, P.J., 2004: Reconstructing Tswana townscapes. Toward a critical historical archaeology, in Reid, A. and Lane, P. (eds), African historical archaeologies, London, 269–99.Google Scholar
Lane, P., 2011: Slavery and slave trading in eastern Africa. Exploring the intersections of historical sources and archaeological evidence, in Lane, P. and MacDonald, K. (eds), Slavery in Africa. Archaeology and memory, Oxford, 281–316.Google Scholar
Lane, P., and MacDonald, K., 2011: Introduction. Slavery, social revolutions and enduring memories, in Lane, P. and MacDonald, K. (eds), Slavery in Africa. Archaeology and memory, Oxford, 282–316.Google Scholar
Lester, A., 2005: Imperial networks. Creating identities in nineteenth-century South Africa and Britain, London.Google Scholar
McGranaghan, M., 2016: The death of the agama lizard. The historical significances of a multi-authored rock-art site in the Northern Cape (South Africa), Cambridge archaeological journal 26, 157–79.Google Scholar
Macquarrie, J.W., 1958: The reminiscences of Sir Walter Stanford, Vol. 1, 1850–1885, Cape Town.Google Scholar
Maggs, T.M.O'C., 1976: Iron Age communities of the southern Highveld, Pietermaritzburg.Google Scholar
Mallen, L., 2008: Rock art and identity in the north Eastern Cape Province, M.A. thesis, Johannesburg.Google Scholar
Marks, S., 1972: Khoisan resistance to the Dutch in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Journal of African history 13, 55–80.Google Scholar
Marshall, L.W., 2014: Marronage and the politics of memory. Fugitive slaves, interaction, and integration in nineteenth-century Kenya, in Marshall, L.W., The archaeology of slavery. A comparative approach to captivity and coercion, Carbondale, IL, 276–99.Google Scholar
Martin, C.J., 1879: Diary of events kept by Mr C.J. Martin, aide-de-camp and interpreter to Colonel-Commandant Griffith, commanding forces in and upon the borders of Basutoland, in Correspondence and papers (in part) respecting the rebellion in British Basutoland, presented to the House of Assembly, 10–15, Western Cape Archives, A. 17-’79, South Africa.Google Scholar
Mitchell, P., 2002: The archaeology of southern Africa, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Mitchell, P., 2005: African connections, Lanham, MD.Google Scholar
Mitchell, P., 2010: Making history at Sehonghong. Soai and the last Bushman occupants of his shelter, Southern African humanities 22, 149–70.Google Scholar
Morton, F., 2009: When rustling became an art. Pilane's Kgatla and the Transvaal frontier 1820–1902, Cape Town.Google Scholar
Moshenska, G., and Myers, A., 2011: An introduction to archaeologies of internment, in Myers, A. and Moshenska, G. (eds), Archaeologies of internment, New York, 1–20.Google Scholar
Nielsen, A.E., 2009: Ancestors at war. Meaningful conflict and social process in the south Andes, in Nielsen, A.E. and Walker, W.H. (eds), Warfare in cultural context. Practice, agency, and the archaeology of violence, Tucson, 218–62.Google Scholar
Norman, N., 2016: Feet of clay. An archaeology of Huedan elite anxiety in the era of Atlantic trade, in Fleisher, J. and Norman, N. (eds), The archaeology of anxiety. The materiality of anxiousness, worry, and fear, New York, 95–119.Google Scholar
Oma, K.A., 2010: Between trust and domination. Social contracts between humans and animals, World archaeology 42, 175–87.Google Scholar
Orser, C.E., 2004: Race and practice in archaeological interpretation, Philadelphia.Google Scholar
Orton, J., 2015: The introduction of pastoralism to southernmost Africa. Thoughts on new contributions to an ongoing debate, Azania. Archaeological research in Africa 50, 250–58.Google Scholar
Parkington, J., 1984: Soaqua and Bushmen. Hunters and robbers, in Schrire, C. (ed.), Past and present in hunter gatherer studies, Orlando, 151–74.Google Scholar
Parsons, N., 1995: ‘The time of troubles’. Difaqane in the interior, in Hamilton, C. (ed.), The Mfecane aftermath. Reconstructive debates in southern African history, Johannesburg, 301–6.Google Scholar
Penn, N., 2005: The forgotten frontier. Colonist and Khoisan on the Cape's northern frontier in the 18th century, Cape Town.Google Scholar
Ranger, T., 2012 (1983): The invention of tradition in colonial Africa, in Hobsbawm, E. and Ranger, T. (eds), The invention of tradition, Cambridge, 211–62.Google Scholar
Rao, A., and Pierce, S., 2006: Discipline and the other body. Humanitarianism, violence, and the colonial exception, in Pierce, S. and Rao, A. (eds), Discipline and the other body. Correction, corporeality, colonialism, Durham, NC, 1–35.Google Scholar
Richard, F.G., 2013: Thinking through ‘vernacular cosmopolitanisms’. Historical archaeology in Senegal and the material contours of the African Atlantic, International journal of historical archaeology 17, 40–17.Google Scholar
Sadr, K., 2015: Livestock first reached southern Africa in two separate events, PLoS One, at https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0134215, accessed 15 March 2018.Google Scholar
Sanders, P., 2011: ‘Throw down white man’. Cape rule and misrule in colonial Lesotho 1871–1884, Morija.Google Scholar
Schrire, C., 1992: The archaeological identity of hunters and herders at the Cape over the last 2000 years. A critique, South African archaeological bulletin 47, 62–64.Google Scholar
Scott, J., 1985: Weapons of the weak. Everyday forms of peasant resistance, New Haven, CT.Google Scholar
Scott, J., 2009: The art of not being governed. An anarchist history of upland southeast Asia, New Haven, CT.Google Scholar
Seal, G., 2009: The Robin Hood principle. Folklore, history, and the social bandit, Journal of folklore research 46, 67–89.Google Scholar
Smith, A.B., 2008: Pastoral origins at the Cape, South Africa, Southern African humanities 20, 49–60.Google Scholar
Southey, R.G., 1879: Colonel R.G. Southey to Colonel E.Y. Brabant, 2 June 1879, in Correspondence and papers (in part) respecting the rebellion in British Basutoland, presented to the House of Assembly, 20–21, Western Cape Archives, GH 28/53, South Africa.Google Scholar
Spear, T., 2003: Neo-traditionalism and the limits of invention in British colonial Africa, Journal of African history 44, 3–27.Google Scholar
Spencer-Wood, S.M., and Matthews, C.N., 2011: Impoverishment, criminalization, and the culture of poverty, Historical archaeology 45, 1–10.Google Scholar
Stahl, A.B., 2004: Political economic mosaics. Archaeology of the last two millennia in tropical sub-Saharan Africa, Annual review of anthropology 33, 145–72.Google Scholar
Stoler, A.L., 2008: Imperial debris. Reflections on ruins and ruination. Cultural anthropology 23, 191–219.Google Scholar
Stoler, A.L., 2009: Along the archival grain. Epistemic anxieties and colonial common sense, Princeton.Google Scholar
Theal, G.M., 2002: Basutoland records, Vol. 5 (ed. Thabane, M.), Roma, Lesotho.Google Scholar
Van Dommelen, P., 2014: Moving on. Archaeological perspectives on mobility and migration, World archaeology 46, 477–83.Google Scholar
Van Schalkwyk, J.B., and Smith, B.W., 2004: Insiders and outsiders. Sources for reinterpreting a historical event, in Reid, A. and Lane, P.J. (eds), African historical archaeologies, New York, 325–46.Google Scholar
Vandkilde, H., 2003: Commemorative tales. Archaeological responses to modern myth, politics, and war, World archaeology 35, 126–44.Google Scholar
Vinnicombe, P., 2009 (1976): People of the eland. Rock paintings of the Drakensberg Bushmen as a reflection of their life and thought (ed. Mitchell, P. and Smith, B.), Johannesburg.Google Scholar
Voss, B.L., 2011: Sexual effects. Postcolonial and queer perspectives on the archaeology of sexuality and empire, in Voss, B.L. and Casella, E.C. (eds), The archaeology of colonialism. Intimate encounters and sexual effects, Cambridge, 11–28.Google Scholar
Webster, A., 1995: Unmasking the Fingo. The War of 1835 revisited, in Hamilton, C. (ed.), The Mfecane aftermath. Reconstructive debates in South African history, Johannesburg, 241–76.Google Scholar
White, H., 2011: Beastly whiteness. Animal kinds and the social imagination in South Africa, Anthropology of southern Africa 34, 104–13.Google Scholar
Whitelaw, G., and Hall, S., 2016: Archaeological contexts and the creation of the social categories before the Zulu kingdom, in Hamilton, C. and Leibhammer, N. (eds), Tribing and untribing the archive. Critical enquiry into the traces of the Thukela-Mzimkhulu region from the Early Iron Age until c.1910, Pietermaritzburg, 146–81.Google Scholar
Winter, S., 2013: Legislation, ideology and personal agency in the Western Australian penal colony, World archaeology 45, 797–815.Google Scholar
Wright, J.B., 1971: Bushman raiders of the Drakensberg, 1840–1870, Pietermaritzburg.Google Scholar
Wright, J.B., 1996: Sonqua, Bosjesmans, Bushmen, abaThwa. Comments and queries on pre-modern identifications, South African historical journal 35, 16–29.Google Scholar