414

Ethnologised Pasts and Their Archival

Futures: Construing the Archive of
Southern KwaZulu-Natal Pertinent to the
Period Before 1910
Carolyn Hamilton and Nessa Leibhammer

This essay makes two methodological interventions designed to explore modes of engag-
ing with inherited colonial collections of material pertinent to southern KwaZulu-Natal’s
late independent and early colonial past.1 We focus primarily on collections of objects
(and photographs that feature such objects and other items of material culture) often
categorised as ethnographic, historically denied archival status and more recently habil-
itated as ‘art’. The first move draws this material into the ambit of archive. Our move
differs from what art historians and archaeologists do when they engage with these kinds
of materials in their analyses. Where they use objects as historical evidence, we take a
different tack by investing in the research necessary to frame collected material culture
as archival. We then take the further step of reconstructing the archival histories of these
materials. The two interventions offer us a position of engagement with the available
archive that holds in view its making and remaking over time, with what we hope are
productive possibilities for redressing some of the yawning gaps in our knowledge of
the remote past. In pushing beyond critique of colonial and apartheid practices affect-
ing understandings of pre-industrial times, and attempting to offer something new, our
Figure 1 (opposite). aim in this essay is not to write a history for the region and period with which we are
Detail of map featured in Figure
6. This shows the railway line and
concerned. It is to provide a carefully researched and historicised account of the preserva-
branches in Natal as they were tion of material remains pertinent to the region and period with which we are concerned.
in 1903. The main stops visited This includes their entanglement in colonial collecting practices, in dominant and local
by the British Association for the
Advancement of Science in 1905 knowledge practices, then and subsequently, and the establishing of a sense of their
have been highlighted archival potential.2

(overlay) Spine of the bound folio

British Association Visit to South
Africa, 1905, Volume 4, containing
1 This essay is part of a long-term research project of the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative, ‘Ethnologised Pasts
correspondence assembled by the
and their Archival Futures’ (see http://www.apc.uct.ac.za). The project draws attention to the archival capacities and challenges
Royal Observatory, Cape of Good of ethnographic material. It does this in order to enable ongoing engagement with pasts that were denied or given shape in
Hope with Natal et al. relating to various ways under colonialism and apartheid. Parts of the argument that appear in this essay were tested out in publication at
the Association’s visit to South an early stage of the research, namely, C. Hamilton and N. Leibhammer, ‘Salutes, Labels and Other Archival Artefacts’ in Uncertain
Africa, in 1905. Collection of Curature: In and out of the Archive, edited by C. Hamilton and P. Skotnes, Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2014, pp. 155–88.
Cambridge University Library, File 2 Certain objects readily lend themselves to the kind of treatment we undertake in this essay. Others appear to be more deci-
no. RGO 15/192. Photograph: Nessa sively marooned without the necessary clues about their histories. It is an implication of our argument that this condition can be
Leibhammer mitigated where they can be linked to related materials in other settings.

415
 Our engagement with a handful of objects and images inaugurates a project of invest-
ment in resituating and interpreting collected objects along with the associated material
culture of field trip and museum, as well as linked photographs and texts, as archive
rather than ethnological museum material or fine art. In this way we seek to enhance
significantly the capacities of these materials to illuminate the past. Objects and images –
hairpins, belts, photos of individuals important in creating that archive, such as Laduma
kaTetelegu, Tetelegu kaNobanda, Mqayikana kaYenge, Lokothwayo kaManzini, Henry
Balfour, Alfred Cort Haddon and Brother Aegidius Müller, photographic glass plate
negatives, labels, accession registers, diaries, galleries, cabinets, databases and salutes
– comprise the archive of objects and images available to us. Along with the sound and
word texts of the time, they allow us to get a sense of complex local networks of interac-
tion and coevalness that laid down the extant record of the late independent and early
colonial periods. 
Concerns about the nature of the available archive for the historical reconstruction
of the remote past and curatorial anxieties about the eschewed and often neglected state
of the public collections, even as they hold objects of national patrimony, prompted us
to explore the implications of what it might mean to think such collections as archive.
Drawing on Carolyn Hamilton’s arguments about archive as being a form of recog-
nition or a status conferred, usually on document assemblages, we wondered what it
would mean actively to invest these assemblages of objects with the mien of archive.3 We
imagined the objects of the so-called traditional collections released from ethnographic
classification or liberated from the boutique-lit art pedestal and treated as ‘archives’, that
is, not simply as sources, but as archival sources.4 As archival items they would re-enter
the world laden with an enhanced potential for enabling thinking about the past, open
for invitation into public life, not only by professional and family historians, but also by
researchers, intellectuals and creative producers of all kinds. For in archives, things do
not stand as representative of ‘a culture’ or as aesthetic achievements, but as inherited
resources available for engagement in the present.
As we pursued this line of inquiry into museums, we found a host of other objects
of tremendous archival significance alongside the knobkerries, headrests and beaded
girdles – the prized objects of the ‘traditional’ collections. The research value of some of
the linked items, notably the photos and drawings of accoutred ethnographic subjects,
is well recognised. What attracted our attention was a group of objects with unacknowl-
edged archival potential, namely more than a century of museum materials attached
to the objects: labels, accession registers, vitrines, dioramas and catalogues, as well as
historically linked materials severed from the collected objects in the course of their
ethnographisation and aestheticisation, including journals, correspondence, evidence of
provenance, cognate items and so on. We decided to explore what is involved in thinking
about such objects – all of these objects – within the frame of archive. In addition to

3 C. Hamilton, ‘Backstory, Biography and the Life of the James Stuart Archive’, History in Africa 38(1), 2011: 319–41.
4 See the discussion on the respect des fonds in this essay.

416
making a contribution to the challenge of these volumes to the dichotomy of traditional
and modern, our essay refuses the dichotomy in the idea that the knobkerrie is an item
of material culture and its label a neutral knowledge tool. This essay is a preliminary step
in a process of thinking critically the one dichotomy in tandem with the other.
In this experiment we focus on items relevant to the pre-industrial history of the
area between the Thukela and Mzimvubu rivers, collected for two British metropolitan
museums, an Austrian institution and a local South African museum, in the late colonial
period. The first half of the essay is focused on items of material culture collected (and the
images taken) by Henry Balfour (1863–1939), the first curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum
(PRM), Oxford, and by Alfred Cort Haddon (1855–1940), president of the anthropology
section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, honorary curator to
the Horniman Museum in London and a lecturer in ethnology at Cambridge, under
whose influence the school of anthropology was formed at Cambridge. Balfour and
Haddon respectively donated objects to the PRM and the Museum of Archaeology and
Anthropology in Cambridge (MAA). The items in these two museums offer illuminat-
ing entry points into how metropolitan museum practices first captured material for
preservation, classified and subsequently curated it, in the process characterising and
changing it. These museums and the new British anthropology departments were histor-
ically influential in South Africa, both in terms of shaping early museum practices and
in the role that they played in the early development of the form of the discipline that
was to dominate English-speaking South African universities for much of the twentieth
century.
In the second part of the essay, we focus on items obtained by the Natal Museum,
Pietermaritzburg, and its predecessor institution, the Natal Society, from the mission-
ary, Franz Mayr between 1898 and 1912. The Natal Museum was established in the first
instance to be of practical use to miners and farmers and its emphasis was on its natural
history collection.5 The first curator, the zoologist Dr Ernest Warren, was interested in
building a strong collection of ethnological objects. The museum sought to represent ‘all
the chief native races of Africa’ so that the display could constitute a ‘unique record of the
people at the present time, and in the future it will be invaluable in scientific enquiries
and in marking the rapid changes they are undergoing through contact with Europeans’.6
We extend our first instance concern with collected objects and linked photos to
encompass the history and the culture of the collection process and of the museums. We
scrutinise networks and occasions of collection, examining along the way the labels, cata-
logue entries, classification systems, storage boxes, shelf and display contexts to which
they have been subjected, touching on as well their entry into public life beyond the
museum. Our aim is to develop a detailed understanding of the processes involved and

5 B. Guest, A Century of Science and Service: The Natal Museum in a Changing South Africa 1904–2004, Pietermaritzburg: Natal
Museum, 2005.
6 H.A. Tatlow, Natal Province: Descriptive Guide and Official Handbook, Durban, South African Railways Printing Works, 1911,
p. 37.

417
of how the collections came to preserve what is available today to think about the remote
past.
One of our purposes in doing the research necessary to invest the material culture
with archival features is to encourage its utilisation as historical source. But the thrust
of the essay is not limited to according the apparatus of archive to material denied that
status under colonialism and apartheid. We seek also to use material exiled from the
established archive to challenge the limits of the inherited official archive and indeed
the limits of the assumptions involved in the notion of ‘archive’. We track the processes
of the installation of the objects and images, often in tribal categories, in ethnological or
ethnographic repositories. Illuminating the ways in which material objects and linked
images came to be preserved, the essay allows us to begin to consider how this differed
from the processes by which late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century documentary
records were archived. Thus we focus on collected objects, linked images and the related
museum materials, not only to expand what is acknowledged as the available material
relevant to the pre-industrial past, but also in an effort to open up new opportunities for
critical interrogation of the recognised written and oral archive of the region contained
for the most part in colonial and missionary collections. The essay also reveals shared
practices and connections across documentary and material preservatory contexts. Our
essay, although relatively narrow in what it deals with, begins to identify something of a
collection hotspot in place and time, when key records, material, oral and written, perti-
nent to the pre-industrial history of the region, were laid down in mutually informing
ways, by a relatively small cluster of individuals operating within relatively circumscribed
networks.
Throughout this essay our primary focus is on the archival potential of objects. We
engage with photographs and texts in so far as they illuminate the objects or, in turn,
where the objects challenge, shift or augment the archival potential and potency of the
photographs and texts. Photographs and texts merit extended methodological engage-
ment and have established bodies of literature that offer insights into the terms of such
engagement.7 Photographs and texts are themselves also objects, that is, items of mate-
rial culture, which are open to engagement as things. Within the scope of this essay we
make only a start on what an explicitly cross-medium engagement offers our under-
standing of the conditions of production of archive.

‘Writing and typing out very neat labels . . .’

Searches of the PRM online database, under the categories: ‘Africa’; ‘South Africa’;
‘KwaZulu’; ‘Natal’ and ‘Nguni’, turned up 46 items held by the museum that appear to
come from Natal in the period before Union.8 The list includes eight items collected in

7 See, inter alia, E. Edwards, Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology and Museums, Oxford: Berg, 2001; E. Edwards and C.
Morton (eds), Photography, Anthropology and History, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009; W. Hartmann, J. Silvester and P. Hayes, The Colo-
nising Camera: Photographs in the Making of Namibian History, Cape Town: UCT Press, 1998; Hamilton, ‘Backstory’.
8 Pitt Rivers Museum (PRM): http://databases.prm.ox.ac.uk (accessed 16 April 2010).

418
1905 by Balfour.9 While it is relatively common to have the name of the collector record-
ed, unusually the attached labels document the exact place, date and name of the chief
at whose homestead Balfour collected the objects. One such label reads: ‘Kaffir woman’s
hair-pin, from Laduma’s kraal, SWARTKOP, near P.MARITZBURG, NATAL, 1905. d.d.
H.Balfour, 1906’. Also collected at the same time and place were, according to their
labels, a ‘Kaffir woman’s grass work necklet, from LADUMA’S KRAAL, SWARTKOP,
near PIETERMARITZBURG, 1905. Pres by H. Balfour, 1906’; ‘Woman’s belt. KAFFIR,
from Laduma’s Kraal, SWARTKOP, near PIETERMARITZBURG, NATAL, 1905. Pres by
H. Balfour, 1906’; ‘KAFFIR woman’s beadwork belt, from Laduma’s kraal SWARTKOP,
near PIETERMARITZBURG, NATAL, 1905. Pres by H. Balfour’; ‘3 wire-work leg orna-
ments worn by women. Coll by donor 1905, Don. H. Balfour, 1906.39.34-36’.10 The
eighth item is noted as another ‘hairpin’ but there is no image available.11
The labels encourage us to read up about Balfour in the secondary literature. The
online biography at the PRM notes that Balfour, initially a student of natural science at
Oxford, was employed in 1885 to arrange the newly acquired ‘Pitt Rivers Anthropology
Collection’ in the custom-built University Museum, a task that was described to him by
his tutor as involving the ‘making [of] little drawings, writing and typing out very neat
labels, writing catalogue descriptions, arranging things in cases, mending and batching
and cleaning, helping a carpenter fix things on screens, looking up objects of all kinds
in illustrated books, Cooks travels etc.’.12 In late 1890 Balfour was appointed curator, a
position he held until his death. Across that period, Balfour was instrumental in consol-
idating the typological tradition of museum classification and display, or more accurate-
ly as William Chapman has characterised it, ‘the typologically organized ethnographic
series’.13 The PRM structured its displays along the ‘evolutionary principle’. Material
objects were arranged according to external form, from the most simple to the most
complex, with the accompanying assumption that these reflected the relative level of
development of the societies from which they originated.14
Through an examination of Balfour’s papers, we get a close-up view of some of the
shaping forces at work on the items that we are interested in. His diaries and documents

9 In response to a request by Nessa Leibhammer, Jeremy Coote, Joint Head of Collections at the PRM, provided us with already
available studio shots of seven of the eight objects (e-mail, 20 May 2010). Besides Balfour there are a further six named donors.
These are: Mrs Charles Roberson (wooden headrest, band of beadwork), S.W. Silver (pipe, beadwork necklet, shield, chieftain’s
state staff ), W.N. Cowie (two snuff gourds, three beaded necklets, two beaded belts, beaded waist ornament, necklet or belt),
Miss Mary Kennedy (wooden headrest), Miss B.P. Legg (headrest) and Kate Theresa Escombe (headrest, carving of man holding a
bowl, bowl, gourd, four wooden spoons, two horn combs, nine items of beadwork, snuff box, horn tube), http://databases.prm.
ox.ac.uk (accessed 16 April 2010).
10 This label is different from the others mentioned. It is probably a later attachment.
11 PRM online database of objects, http://databases.prm.ox.ac.uk/fmi/iwp/cgi?-db=objects_online&-loadframes (accessed 23
February 2015). On the use of the term ‘Kaffir’ see the discussion on page 17 in Volume 1.
12 http://history.prm.ox.ac.uk/collector_balfour.html. Quotation from entry written by Francis Larson, August 2005 (accessed
2 March 2011).
13 W.R. Chapman, ‘Arranging Ethnology: A.H.L.F. Pitt Rivers and the Typological Tradition’ in Objects and Others: Essays on Mu-
seums and Material Culture, History of Anthropology, Volume 3, edited by G.W. Stocking, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1985, p. 26.
14 Chapman, ‘Arranging Ethnology’, pp. 15–48.

419
are held separately in the archives of the PRM. The combination of the record in the
diaries and the meticulous labels makes it possible to begin to establish connections
between the objects, the places from where they came, the individuals associated with the
collection event and their histories. With this information we were further able to carry
out a similar exercise in relation to 39 objects in the MAA in Cambridge, collected at the
same time by Haddon, who, it turns out, was on tour in South Africa with Balfour.15
Details of Balfour’s visit to Natal in 1905 are captured in detail in his diaries (Figure
16
2). Journeying to South Africa in 1905 to attend the joint meeting of the British and
South African Associations for the Advancement of Science,17 he travelled through the
country on a British Association tour along with Haddon and other British Association
guests.18 A careful plotting of the itinerary of the British Association tour through South
Africa shows that many of the visitors, including Balfour and Haddon, after landing by
boat in Durban on 22 August 1905,19 spent four and a half days in Natal before travel-
ling on to the Transvaal, Rhodesia, Mozambique and further. By linking documentation
such as train timetables and Haddon’s tour notebook, found in the manuscripts lodged
at the Cambridge University Library, we could construct an equally detailed account of
Haddon’s itinerary over those few days.20
On 23 August a group, including Haddon, was hosted at Mount Edgecombe outside
Durban by Marshall Campbell, the sugar entrepreneur and influential assimilationist
Natal politician opposed to the colonial locations policy.21 Here guests were not only
treated to a ‘war dance’, but were also addressed by local black activists Mohandas
Gandhi and John Dube, editor of Ilanga lase Natal, a major voice of educated, Christian
African opinion at the time, and first president of the African National Congress (ANC).
One of the local Qadi izinduna also delivered a speech.22 In his notebook for the day
Haddon makes no mention of Gandhi, Dube or the izinduna, but writes of the dance
performance: ‘Large war dance. Men in a long line one or two deep clothed in mournful
costume – most made some attempt to deck themselves in the traditional war-costume,

15 Cambridge University Library (CUL), Commonwealth Archive, A.C. Haddon papers, File RGO 15/191: Bound volume of cor-
respondence entitled ‘British Association Visit to South Africa, 1905: Volume 4, Correspondence with Natal, O.R.C., Rhodesia,
Kimberley, Eastern Province, Swaziland, Beira, etc.’.
16 These are held at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford and available online at http://www.prm.ox.ac.uk.
17 Three hundred and eighty overseas visitors attended the 75th British Association meeting in Cape Town. CUL, Manuscript
Archives, File 5015, ‘Narrative and Itinerary of the Meeting of the British Association in South Africa, 1905’, reprinted from the
‘British Association Report, 1905’, p. 618 of the appendix. However, only 178 guests travelled on the organised tour.
18 S. Dubow, ‘A Commonwealth of Science: The British Association in South Africa, 1905 and 1929’ in Science and Society in
Southern Africa, edited by S. Dubow, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000, pp. 66–100.
19 There were three Union Castle ocean liners – Kildonan Castle, Durham Castle and Saxon – bringing British Association
guests to South Africa, and they did not all arrive at the same time. Haddon’s itinerary notes that guests travelled to Durban on
the Saxon and the Durham Castle and docked in Durban on 22 August 1905. CUL, Commonwealth Archive, File 5017.
20 As there were so many British Association guests on the tour not everyone was able to go on the same outings, so there
is some variation in individual experience while in Natal. On the same day Balfour, for example, went to Umlazi and Haddon to
Mount Edgecombe.
21 Balfour travelled ahead to Pietermaritzburg where he attended a garden party at Government House.
22 See essay by Heather Hughes and Mwelela Cele in Volume 1.

420
but had to content themselves with sticks, etc. – as no assegais or real weapons were
allowed.’23
On Thursday 24 August Haddon visited Bellair, an area south-west of Durban and
now a suburb of the city. Assistant magistrate of Durban, James Stuart, the man respon-
sible for the enormous recorded archives of oral evidence pertinent to the region in the
period with which we are concerned, probably acted as the tour guide for the group.24
Active photographers in the group included Haddon, British anthropologist, ethnogra-
pher and archaeologist Norman Evans and a Mabel Rose (whom we have not been able
to identify further). They took photographs of Ndunge kaXabashe of the Cele, a chief in
the Umlazi division. Rose took two photographs of Ngidi kaMcikaziswa, a man in his
late eighties who was well known to Stuart as an informed narrator of history. Stuart
independently interviewed Ngidi extensively and we are able to connect these weakly
contextualised photos to detailed material in an entirely separate archive (see Figure 5 in
Wright essay, Volume 1), Stuart’s interviews, held at the Killie Campbell Africana Library
in Durban and published as the The James Stuart Archive of Recorded Oral Evidence
Relating to the History of the Zulu and Neighbouring Peoples.25 This revealed that Ngidi
belonged to a minor branch of the chiefly house of the eLangeni people and was a distant
relation of Nandi, the mother of the 1820s king, Shaka. He had grown up in the eLangeni
country north of the Thukela during the reign of Shaka (reigned c.1815–1828), became
an inceku (personal attendant) in the household of Dingane (reigned 1828–40) and won
the praise name ‘Magambukazi’ for his prowess as a fighter in Dingane’s army.26 After
Mpande’s revolt against Dingane in 1839, he crossed over into Natal. In the early 1900s
he was living near Bellair under the authority of Ndunge,27 and became an important
source for Stuart on the circumstances of Shaka’s birth among the eLangeni and on the
history of the Zulu kingdom under Dingane.28
The available contextual information allows us to begin to track Balfour’s collect-
ing activities. At 9.15 a.m. on Friday, 25 August 1905, the British Association delegates
travelled by train to the ‘Native Location’ at Henley approximately 12 kilometres west
of Pietermaritzburg. Here ‘Native dances and wedding’ were ‘splendidly performed +
admirably organized’(Figures 2 and 13).29 They returned by train to Pietermaritzburg in
the afternoon and Balfour visited the Natal Museum. On Saturday, 26 August Balfour
and Haddon, once again as part of a large group, visited the homestead of Laduma in the

23 CUL, Commonwealth Archive, Files 5017 and 5018: Haddon’s notebook.

24 A letter sent by Stuart to Haddon while he was on the 1905 British Association tour shows that they were in written contact
with each other. See CUL, A.C. Haddon papers, File 5015: letter, 28 August 1905.
25 C. de B. Webb and J.B. Wright (eds), The James Stuart Archive of Recorded Oral Evidence Relating to the History of the Zulu and
Neighbouring Peoples, Volumes 1–6, Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1976, 1979, 1982, 1986, 2001, 2014. For the Ngidi
interview, see Webb and Wright, James Stuart Archive, Volume 5, pp. 28–115.
26 The information about his praise name is recorded on the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge (MAA)
catalogue card for the photographic image.
27 Webb and Wright, James Stuart Archive, Volume 5, pp. 28, 35.
28 Our thanks to John Wright for his e-mail pointers on this, 8 November 2012.
29 PRM: Balfour Diaries. http://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/manuscripts/balfourdiaries1905.html (accessed 14 June 2010).

421
Swartkop region outside Pietermaritzburg. Here they collected objects, took photographs
and recorded the event – Balfour in his personal diaries and Haddon in his notebook.
Balfour’s diary reads:

Spent most of the day at Laduma’s Kraal near Swaartkop [sic] station, with the Haddons, Brown, the
Hartlands, J. [illegible] Woodhead, D. Maynard, + others with Mr. Lugg (government interpreter). All
Ladumas [sic] people (some hundreds) gathered at kraal. Native welcome + dances. Two oxen had been
presented by government + were consumed. Drank Kaffir beer in Laduma’s hut. The chief was most
courteous + obliging. Took many photos, + purchased ornaments etc. from natives. Spent 5 hours or so
at the kraal which contained several well constructed huts + a stone cattle kraal of good size.30

Haddon wrote of the same event: ‘Drink beer in hut of chief . . . Laduma – son of Teteleka
son of Nobanda chief of the Amampumuza tribe’ (Figure 15).31
Christopher Morton, head of photograph and manuscript collections at the PRM,
supplied us with 32 images taken by Balfour during his visits to Henley and Swartkop;
18 are from the visit to Laduma. These show various scenes, including beer drinking,
visitors interacting with the local inhabitants, groups of women and images of Chief
Laduma posing for the camera.32 A similar set of images taken by Haddon covering the
same topics exists in the MAA photographic collection (for example Figures 9, 10 and
11).33
The first indication of a possible shared origin for the 39 objects given to the MAA by
Haddon, and those collected by Balfour on the same trip, was a hairpin in the Cambridge
collection – Number 1905.504 (Figure 4). While the MAA paper label stuck to it declared
it to be ‘Zulu’, it was identical to the one collected by Balfour (Figure 6). The MAA acces-
sion register, the document first filled in when objects enter the museum collection,
also identified it as ‘Zulu’ and that it was collected by Haddon whilst on the 1905 British
Association trip (Figure 3). In the 1906 ‘Twenty-First Annual Report of the Antiquarian
Committee to the Senate’,34 compiled when the object was officially accepted into the
museum, this object and the others collected at the same time were all labelled ‘Zulu’ and
recorded as coming from ‘Zululand’ (Figure 7). The accession cards – those pre-comput-
er recording and documenting systems – had the same information inscribed (Figure 5).
Yet neither Haddon nor Balfour had ventured anywhere near ‘Zululand’, north of
the Thukela River. Not only was it unlikely, given their short time in the region and tight
schedule, that they would have travelled north of the Thukela, many of the 39 objects
in the MAA collection bear a striking resemblance in colour, form and pattern to those

30 PRM: Balfour Diaries. http://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/manuscripts/balfourdiaries1905.html (accessed 14 June 2010).

31 CUL, Commonwealth Archive, Files 5017 and 5018: Haddon’s notebook.
32 We are further grateful to Christopher Morton for sharing with us his unpublished paper, ‘ “Interesting and Picturesque”:
Staging Encounters for the British Association in South Africa, 1905’, 1999.
33 These are easy to identify: Haddon’s camera was malfunctioning and as a result streaks of light from the left-hand corner
are imprinted on the images.
34 MAA Archive: Museum of General and Local Archaeology and of Ethnology, ‘Twenty-First Annual Report of the Antiquarian
Committee to the Senate, May 31, 1906’, pp. 15, 16. Items numbered 801–16 are noted as having been collected by the donor
‘A.C. Haddon. SC.D., F.R.S.’ in 1905.

422
collected by Balfour – the ones firmly documented as coming from the Swartkop loca-
tion. The question is then, as Haddon was familiar with the names and identities of those
he visited, how did this information get separated from the objects and replaced by ‘Zulu’
and ‘Zululand’?
Interestingly the photographs taken by Haddon during his four days in Natal, now in
the MAA photo collection, are much more fully annotated than the objects in the same
museum and locate him in Durban, Bellair, Mount Edgecombe, Henley and Swartkop.
Discussion with staff at the MAA suggested that Haddon would have handed the objects
into the care of the then curator, Baron Anatole von Hügel, soon after he had returned.35
It was most likely that Von Hügel was then responsible for cataloguing the objects and
may not have consulted Haddon, thus assuming a general ‘Zulu’ identity for all objects
that came from the Natal region.
In contrast, Haddon kept his lantern slides and photographs for teaching. This may
well be the reason why these have more detailed annotations regarding who was photo-
graphed and where (Figures 9, 10 and 11). This information and that attached to the
objects and registers have been kept separate in the MAA for more than a hundred years.
Only by bringing the information gleaned from Haddon manuscripts in the University
library (F1gures 1, 12, 13, 14 and 15), in the photographic collection (Figures 8, 9, 10
and 11), in the Balfour diary (Figure 2) and the objects in the PRM collection (Figure 6)
to bear on the collected MMA objects and their documents (Figure 4) were we able to
contextualise them beyond their ‘Zulu’ classificatory confines.
Giving of attention to the origins of objects and linked images and texts, separated in
terms of museum practices of organisation, and convening them all into a single frame,
invests the dispersed elements of one visit with the grammar of archive, notably the
archival principle of respect des fonds. The core idea in the notion of ‘respect des fonds’ is
that records should be maintained in the units in which they were accumulated. (Thus
the deposited papers of a prominent public figure such as Nelson Mandela would be
kept as a single collection by an archive as the ‘Mandela Collection’. Letters received
by Mandela from other prominent people would remain in his collection, while letters
written by him to those same people would, if they have survived, remain in their respec-
tive collected papers in other archives.) Rethought in terms of the principle of respect des
fonds, ‘ethnographic objects’ in a museum, currently most often classified and separated
according to region, function or ethnicity, which emanated from one collection circum-
stance or as a result of the activity of a single collector over time, would be reunited as the
collection from that circumstance or that person’s collection. This could involve reunifi-
cation across media, bringing documents, sound recordings, ephemera and so on back
into the same frame as the ethnographic object. The primary gain is, of course, that this
enables researchers to understand a great deal about how an object came to be collected
and why that particular one.

35 Discussion at the MMA, Nessa Leibhammer with Rachel Hand and Joselyn Dudding, February 2013.

423
Figure 2. Henry Balfour’s handwritten diary containing notes on his visits to Henley and Swartkop on
Friday 25424
and Saturday 26 August, 1905. Pitt Rivers Museum Manuscript Collections, Balfour Papers, Box 1,
item 5, pp. 27 and 28
425
426
Figure 3 (opposite, top). Accessions Register with entry for ‘A wooden hair-pin,’
‘Zulu,’ item number 1905.504 collected by A.C. Haddon while on the B.A.A.S.
visit to South Africa. Duplicate Accessions Register, Vol. 7 (Ethnology 1904.394–
1907.369) University of Archaeology and Anthropology, p. 62, Museum of
Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge

Figure 4 (opposite, centre). Hairpin, Accession Number 1905.504. Museum of

Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge. Photograph: Nessa Leibhammer

Figure 5 (opposite, bottom). Recto and verso of record card 1905E.504. Muse-
um of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge

Figure 6 (top). Hairpin, Accession Number 1906.39.32 with its label. Pitt Rivers
Museum Collection, Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford

Figure 7 (centre). Reference to item number 801 the hairpin collected by A.C.
Haddon while in South Africa. It has been entered under ‘Zululand.’ Twenty-first
Annual Report of the Antiquarian Committee to the Senate, May 31, 1905, p. 15.
Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge

Figure 8 (bottom). Detail of screen shot of catalogue entry for photograph of

women at Swartkop taken by A.C. Haddon. P. 7317.ACH1. Museum of Archaeolo-
gy and Anthropology, Cambridge. Provided 18 February 2013

427
Figures 9–11. Selection of A.C. Haddon’s lantern slides
and their accompanying record cards documenting the
visit to Swartkop and Henley during the 1905 B.A.A.S.
tour of South Africa. All courtesy of the Museum of
Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge

(top) Laduma ka Tetelegu and others. Taken by A.C.

Haddon at Henley on 25 August 1905 (date incorrectly
noted on slide as ‘26 August 1905’). LS.121102.TC1/cat.
LS.121102.TC1.jpg. (opposite) Record card 44.22 for
above

(middle) Men at a beer drink wearing hair-rings. Taken

by Henry Balfour at Laduma ka Tetelegu’s homestead at
Swartkop, 26 August 1905. LS.121083.TC1/cat.LS.121083.
TC1.jpg. (opposite) Record card 44.5 for above

(bottom) Three women talking to an English officer.

Taken by A.E.M. at Laduma ka Teteleku’s homestead at
Swartkop, 26 August 1905. LS.121088.TC1/cat.LS.121088.
TC1.jpg. (opposite) Record card 44.10 for above

428
429
Figure 12. Draft of telegram from David Gill, astronomer at the Figure 13. (opposite) Four-page pamphlet prepared for
Royal Observatory at the Cape of Good Hope, to the Governor of the British Association guests explaining the programme for
Natal asking if the Colony of Natal wishes to join in the invitation ‘The Native Dance’ held at Henley on Friday, 25 August, 1905.
to the British Association to tour South Africa in 1905. 8 August Collection of the University Library, Cambridge. Photograph: Nessa
1902. Vol. 4. File no. RGO 15/192. Collection of the University Leibhammer
Library, Cambridge. Photograph: Nessa Leibhammer
430
431
 Figure 14. Details recto and verso of Haddon’s ticket
for the 75th B.A.A.S. meeting in South Africa. File no.
5414. Collection of the University Library, Cambridge.
Photographs: Nessa Leibhammer
432
Figure 15. A page from A.C. Haddon’s 1905 B.A.A.S. tour notebook describing visit to Laduma’s
homestead. File no. 5414. Collection of the University Library, Cambridge. Photograph: Nessa
Leibhammer 433
Figure 16. Frontispiece from Natal: An Illustrated Official Railway Guide and Handbook of General
Information, compiled and edited by C.W. Francis Harrison. London: P. Jennings, 1903
434
 Reuniting the objects, the journal, notebooks and the photos emphasises their status
not as objects and images representative of technological types or ethnological groups,
the museum’s governing perspective, but as, in the first instance, objects – objects here
understood not only as the collected items of material culture, but also the linked photos,
labels, registers and journals – assembled by Balfour,36 Haddon and the respective cura-
tors at a particular time and in specific circumstances.37 The archival principle of respect
des fonds proves to be productive in releasing the materials from their capture as tribal
specimens.

Backstory: Archival grammar, curatorial fingerprints and beyond

But the grammar of archive alone is not sufficient a methodological move to enable
researchers to begin to use these items to illuminate the kinds of identities that prevailed
in the region and period with which we are concerned. Nor is it sufficient to enable users
of the archive to contemplate the complex networks that surrounded these objects and
brought them into the archive. Conventional archival practice, which privileges acqui-
sition details as provenance, occludes the backstory of the archived item before it was
admitted to a collection.
‘Backstory’ is the term used for the history or background created for a fictional char-
acter in a play, film or television programme. Hamilton uses the term to refer to the
researched history or background of an object once it has been deemed an archival object,
that is, that which accounts for the archival object being so identified, but conventionally
is not a feature of an archival script.38 As used by Hamilton, ‘backstory’ is defined in the
first instance by its endpoint: the moment the object enters the archive (what archiving
institutions, paradoxically, think of as the point of ‘provenance’). It is also the story of
where the object came from and how it ended up in the collection context. It involves
providing an account of how the circumstances of collection came about, situating all
the parties in the transaction, identifying them as fully as possible, accounting for their
presence and motivations at that moment and contextualising the collecting event in
conditions of the time. And ultimately the backstory can reach back still further for the
circumstances and the context of making and the pre-collection life of the object and its
contexts. As applied in this essay to objects that were collected as ethnographic material,
rather than archival material, the backstory continues through time until the occasion of
the object being treated as archive. For a number of the objects discussed in this essay,
the point of deeming an object archival is the occasion of this essay itself. Hamilton uses

36 On Balfour’s view of the photos as an adjunct, albeit an important one, to the objects of material culture, see Balfour cited
in E. Edwards and L. Williamson, World on a Glass Plate: Early Anthropological Photographs from the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford,
Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum, 1981, p. v.
37 Significantly, in the twenty-first century the PRM itself works actively to augment this perspective. The museum’s project
‘The Relational Museum’, October 2002–March 2006, ‘charted the history and nature of the relations composing the Pitt Riv-
ers Museum through analysing the history of its collections’. The project ‘explored collections in order to throw light on the
movement of material culture through the respective colonial structures . . . analys[ing] the mix of biographical, intellectual,
institutional and economic forces which structured these major collections’ (http://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/RelationalMuseum.html)
(accessed 27 December 2014).
38 Hamilton, ‘Backstory’, pp. 319–41.

435
the term ‘backstory’, and the linked concept of ‘biography’, the latter mobilised in rela-
tion to the history of the object once it is transformed into an explicitly archival object, to
focus attention not merely on the history of the object, but also on the pre-archival object
in the case of backstory and the archival object in the case of biography, as a subject
moving through history, being shaped by what it encounters, notably public, political and
academic discourses and practices and in turn shaping what it encounters. The mobi-
lisation of the concept of ‘backstory’ for the time before the object is interpolated as an
archival object recognises that the way in which we look at the life of the object in that
phase of its existence is determined by the activity it undertakes on the archival stage.
‘Backstory’ is thus a conceptual tool that enables us to explain and keep in mind why one
object rather than another ended up in an archive. It is thus not an alternative to a history
of an object or of its social life (a bigger story that encompasses the backstory), nor a
genealogy of archive, two closely related, complementary and often useful approaches
to the understanding the origins of archives. Both concepts, backstory and biography,
emphasise their own status as crafted stories about the object and more specifically about
the object as an archival item.39 They are concepts that are useful in helping researchers
pay attention to the effects of the production of archives.
In the first instance, it is the so-called metadata attached to the items assembled and
photographs taken by Balfour and Haddon that allow us to begin the work of construct-
ing the backstory of the items. We are, for example, able to search other sources for the
name ‘Laduma’. Taking advantage of the detailed indexes to the published James Stuart
Archive, we track the name into the 33-page, annotated testimony of Mqayikana kaYenge
(see Figure 3 in Wright’s essay, Volume 1), who was intensively interviewed by Stuart over
a period of about a week in May 1916, eleven years after the British Association visit to
Laduma.40 Mqayikana, who was born in the early 1830s, was then living under Laduma’s
authority. He identifies himself as ‘Zondi’ and offers considerable information not only
about Laduma, but also about the complex nexus of more than 50 years of identity and
colonial politics in which he and Laduma were embedded. From Mqayikana we also learn
that Laduma was, as was his father Tetelegu before him, chief of the Mpumuza people in
the Estcourt, Impendhle, Lion’s River, New Hanover, Umgeni and Umvoti magisterial
divisions and that the Mpumuza were an offshoot of the Zondi. Mqayikana contributes
to the record a poetic biography of Laduma in the form of the chief’s izibongo (personal
praises). The Zondi suffered under the first Zulu king, Shaka. Mqayikana describes their
situation in the first half of the nineteenth century as highly marginal, living in the bush
and being afraid to erect homesteads. He notes that they were insultingly called ‘lala’ by
the Zulu, a designation that the research of Hamilton and John Wright indicates was the

39 For a published exposition of what backstory entails, see Hamilton ‘Backstory’, while C. Hamilton, Terrific Majesty: The Pow-
ers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical Invention, Boston: Harvard University Press, 1998, provides examples of the kind of
backstory work that Hamilton considers must be undertaken in relation to recorded oral texts in order to situate them. In so far
as ‘backstory’ is a concept linked to the story of an archival object, it is not the same thing as the history of the object in its own
right.
40 Webb and Wright, James Stuart Archive, Volume 4, pp. 1–3.

436
label used in Shakan times to mark off a super-exploited tributary underclass, made up
of many diverse conquered chiefdoms, from the emergent Zulu aristocracy.41 (See also
essay by Hall and Whitelaw in Volume 1).
Under Dingane, the Zondi were encouraged to settle lands and did so. While
Mqayikana’s account points to a distinctive Zondi identity – including details of unique-
ly Zondi facial scarification marks – it is an account of successive moves amongst kin
and strangers. Everyday life saw Zondis living amidst many other groupings, including
the Nhlangwini, Mpondo, Dlamini and Nxamalala. Mqayikana’s testimony and the anno-
tations provided by the editors of the published James Stuart Archive point out that the
leader of the famous 1906 Natal poll-tax rebellion, Bhambatha kaMancinza, was a chief
of a section of the Zondi, with adherents in many of the same areas, and reveal a complex
configuration of Zondi chiefships in the area, some colonial loyalists and others rebels,
with some sequentially both.
In 1905, the Natal colonial government, which organised the local itinerary of the
British Association expedition, favoured Laduma as the host for the distinguished visi-
tors, providing the beasts for slaughter and assigning the government interpreter, Harry
Lugg, to facilitate the interaction at Swartkop.42 The cordial relationship between Laduma
and the colonial establishment is one that was carried through the lineages of Mpumuza
chiefs from the early nineteenth century. Laduma’s grandfather, Nobanda kaNgwane,
was killed while fighting alongside the British traders of Port Natal against Dingane in
1838, while his father Tetelegu was ‘the only chief in the colony permitted to walk into
Government House at his leisure’.43 Less than a year after the British Association visit
to Swartkop, colonial forces beheaded Laduma’s Zondi relative, the resistance leader
Bhambatha, and brutally suppressed the uprising against the newly introduced poll tax.
Significantly, it was to Swartkop that one of the rebels, Ndlovu kaThimuni, was confined
after his release from incarceration on Saint Helena in 1910. Ndlovu, interviewed by
Stuart in 1902 and 1903 and again in 1919, only returned to his home in the Timati Valley
in 1918.44 In 1916, Stuart himself was contemplating using Laduma as a possible research
subject for the Science Association.45 Indeed, the diligent Stuart had already interviewed
Tetelegu briefly in 1899, in the course of which conversation Tetelegu made explicit
the special relationship between the Mpumuza and the new European presences in the
Natal region, situating its origins in the time of the establishment of Port Natal when,
‘as soon as there came Europeans to Durban, these natives took courage by seeking and

41 C. Hamilton and J. Wright, ‘The Making of the AmaLala: Ethnicity, Ideology and Relations of Subordination in a Precolonial
Context’, South African Historical Journal 22(1), 1990: 3–23.
42 Harry Lugg was at the time attached to the Native Affairs Department in Pietermaritzburg, probably as an interpreter. See
H. Lugg, A Natal Family Looks Back, Durban: T.W. Griggs, 1970, p. 92.
43 J. Lambert, Betrayed Trust: Africans and the State in Colonial Natal, Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1995, p. 27;
Natal Witness, 24 November 1982, quoted in Lambert, Betrayed Trust, p. 130 (see also p. 27).
44 J. Guy, The Maphumulo Uprising: War, Law and Ritual in the Zulu Rebellion, Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal
Press, 2005, pp. 214, 253.
45 Webb and Wright, James Stuart Archive, Volume 4, p. 12, Mqayikana ka Yenge.

437
obtaining the protection of the Europeans against the Zulus’.46 Interestingly, Tetelegu
had apparently converted to Christianity and had given up his multiple wives the year
before Stuart first interviewed him.47 We begin to get a sense of the investments made
by all parties in these relationships from Stuart’s poignant last addendum to his notes
of his conversation with Tetelegu. ‘22.6.1899. The chief Teteleku was found dead in his
hut this morning (no suspicions). I had arranged to have another long talk with him on
Saturday. I regret extremely that this is impossible as I felt I had discovered a man.’48
What seems at first to be a range of separate sources are revealed, in their making,
to be overlapping and often mutually entangled, in a variety of ways. And our account
has not yet exhausted the connections at work. In 1906, less than a year after the British
Association visit, Stuart recorded what he called the ‘evidence’ of yet another member
of the Zondi, Nongamaluma kaNoyehe, the notes of which are missing from the Stuart
collection.49 A photograph of Mqayikana was taken by ‘Allerston’ on 16 May 1916,
presumably in Pietermaritzburg, at Stuart’s request and yet survives in the Stuart Papers
(see Figure 2 in Wright essay, Volume 1).50 In this way, at least one, and possibly more,
images enter the picture convened in the wake of our inquiry, now archivally ‘personal-
ised’ and laden with information about identity and elements of subjectivity. As does the
possibility of another item of material culture: Stuart mentions that Laduma sent him ‘a
fine pot’, the next day (17 May 1916). The whereabouts of that pot, if it yet survives, are
unknown, but even in its absence the pot attests to Laduma’s involvement in the process-
es relating to Stuart’s interview with Mqayikana. A strong possibility exists that Laduma,
who paid Mqayikana’s rail fare for the visit to Stuart and refused to accept a refund from
Stuart, actively facilitated the entry of Mqayikana’s material into the recorded oral record
that Stuart was assembling. Laduma’s own curatorial fingerprints are now revealed in
more than one place in the record, as are Stuart’s.
The PRM collection contains another two items from Laduma’s residence: ‘2 Zulu
snuff-spoons’, received by the Museum in September 1908 from Sidney Hartland, possi-
bly the same person as ‘Hartlands’, noted by Balfour as a member of the group who
accompanied him to Laduma in 1905.
When he visited Laduma in 1905 and photographed him, among other things, salut-
ing while standing in front of a crowd of headringed men, Balfour, who had been getting
around by train, was familiar with the 1903 Natal: An Illustrated Official Railway Guide
and Handbook of General Information. It featured Laduma’s father, Tetelegu, captioned
‘Tetelegu, A Native Chief’, similarly saluting for the camera in front of a thatched dwell-
ing (see Figure 3, far right-hand overlay in Croucamp essay, this volume, as well as diss-
cussion pp. 465–6).51 While we cannot be certain that Balfour actually carried this book

46 Webb and Wright, James Stuart Archive, Volume 6, p. 221, Teteleku ka Nobanda.
47 Webb and Wright, James Stuart Archive, Volume 2, p. 43, Dyer D. Macebo.
48 Webb and Wright, James Stuart Archive, Volume 6, p. 221, Teteleku ka Nobanda.
49 Webb and Wright, James Stuart Archive, Volume 4, p. 12 and editors’ note 49.
50 Killie Campbell Africana Library (KCAL), Stuart Papers, File 57: Notebook 1.
51 The image of Tetelegu kaNobanda appeared on the frontispiece and on p. 65 of C.W.F. Harrison (ed. and comp.), Natal: An

438
with him on the days that he travelled around Natal, we know that he possessed a copy,
which he bequeathed to the PRM on his death in 1939, and that he acquired this during
his 1905 trip to Natal.52 The situation of Laduma’s home near Swartkop Station, in easy
reach of the rail line, may well have been one of the reasons why it was the venue for the
British Association visit in 1905, itself possibly only one visit among many by travellers
of various kinds. So closely tied in with the European settlement of Natal was Tetelegu
that his image has a prominent showing in the Railway Guide, as the frontispiece (Figure
16).53 A central archway reveals a view of Durban Bay and the Bluff and is positioned thus
as the entrance to Natalia. Flanking the archway to the left is a figure of a white woman
with coronet, holding a scroll. This is likely an image of Clio, the Greek muse of History,
also known as the ‘Proclaimer’, the scroll in her hand referring to her special connections
to writing: she is credited with introducing the Phoenician alphabet to Greece.54 Flanking
the archway to the right is the figure of Tetelegu, holding a shield in his left hand and
staff in his right, seemingly the guardian of tradition. Where she reads as emblematic
of white people in Natalia, bringing history and progress, he stands for its black inhab-
itants represented as tribal and timeless. Considering the image further, it is possible
that Tetelegu guards, not only tradition, but people as well. As a friend of the colonial
government his presence, in pictorial form, serves to allay the fears of potential travellers
and would-be immigrants regarding any threat from ‘war-like’ Zulus. Here, the ‘savage’
appears to have been harnessed – into the service of the settler. This image of the Natal
chief Tetelegu would be reproduced many times, thereafter becoming iconically ‘Zulu’.55
The British Association guests at Swartkop that day included among others, the
United States-based astronomer, Professor Ernest Brown,56 who published an account
of the British Association expedition, discussing in some detail the logistical arrange-
ments involved. His account makes mention of the free railway passes given to the expe-
dition members by the governments and ‘over a hundred cameras [that] were continually

Illustrated Official Railway Guide and Handbook of General Information, London: P. Jennings, 1903. Tetelegu’s salute has subse-
quently been reproduced in a number of publications, such as the image captioned ‘Tetelegu, a native chief’ in Twentieth Century
Impressions of Natal: Its Peoples, Commerce, Industries and Resources, London: Lloyds Greater Britain Publishing Company, 1906.
It is also in F. Mayr, ‘The Zulu Kafirs of Natal: Part One’, Anthropos 1, 1906: 453–71 and J. Wright and A. Manson, The Hlubi Chief-
dom in Zululand-Natal: A History, Ladysmith: Ladysmith Historical Society, 1983. Lambert, Betrayed Trust, front page, features an
image captioned: ‘Thetheleku kaNobanda chief of the Mphumuza’. A version can be found in the Natal Archives, and another in
the Smithsonian Archives.
52 C. Morton, personal communication with N. Leibhammer, March 2011. Morton also draws the conclusion that Balfour had a
copy of Harrison’s Natal with him on his 1905 trip to Natal. C. Morton, ‘ “Interesting and Picturesque”: Staging Encounters for the
British Association in South Africa, 1905’, unpublished paper, 1999.
53 Harrison, Natal, frontispiece.
54 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clio. We would like to thank Joslyn Dudding for drawing our attention to this (accessed 15
May 2013).
55 See the discussion of the labeling of photographs of Teteleku as a ‘Zulu’ or ‘Basuto’ chief in C. Geary, ‘ “Zulu Mothers” and
Their Children Travelling around the World: From Photograph to Picture Postcard’ in African Photography from the Walther Col-
lection: Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive, edited by T. Garb, Göttingen: Gerhard Steidl, p. 78.
56 S. Mullins, ‘Haddon, Alfred Cort (1855–1940)’ in Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 14, Melbourne: Melbourne Uni-
versity Press, 1996, pp. 349–50; A.C. Haddon, ‘Anthropology at the South African Meeting of the British Association for the Ad-
vancement of Science, 1905’, Science 23(587), 1906: 491–7; A.C. Haddon, ‘Leland Stanford Junior University: A Suggestion’, Science
16(397), 1902: 231–2.

439
employed on all varieties of subjects throughout the whole of the trip’.57 Amongst Brown’s
own published photos are to be found one of the ‘commoner’ bride, her bridesmaids
and an induna (civil or military official) at the wedding at Henley that the party attended
(Figure 13). Brown records that the groom that day was a chief, Mhlola of the Nadi
Again, by cross-referencing with the James Stuart Archive, more backstory comes to
light. In 1918 Stuart recorded a discussion with the praise poet, Sende kaHlunhhlungu,
and with Sikhumba kaMangofo, of the Zondi people living under Mhlola, and record-
ed Mhola’s praises, noting further that his mother was daughter of Pakade, the Chunu
chief. Alfred T. Bryant, author in 1929 of the single most detailed publication on clan
histories for the KwaZulu-Natal region, tells us that the Nadi were also Zondis, who
suffered at the hands of Shaka, and that Mhlola (alias Magqubu) was the grandson of
Dibinyika, who reigned from 1900 to 1923, when he died.58 Tracking these complex rela-
tionships and paying close attention to the mutual imbrication of the identities involved
not only allows distinct personages with clear histories and contexts of their own entry
onto the historical stage, but also allows us to see how processes of knowledge gather-
ing centered on a particular cast of characters. Also included in Brown’s photo is the
figure of Mr Samuel Olaf Samuelson, the permanent Undersecretary for Native Affairs.59
Brown records that S.O. Samuelson was the only white man living on the reservation at
Henley. Clearly the community at Henley was no less squarely in the sights of the colo-
nial administration than the one at Swartkop.60 That the Native Affairs Department was
also closely involved in the arrangements for the tour is evident from correspondence
between Samuelson and Stuart, who was the Assistant Magistrate in Durban. On 15
September 1905 Samuelson wrote to say that he was glad that the ‘B Association appre-
ciated our little efforts to entertain them’.61 As the minutia gleaned from labels, captions
and objects begins to build up and to lead us into the textual archive, we start to recognise
the colonial loyalist Zondi Mpumuza chieftaincies near Pietermaritzburg as especially
active spots in the laying down of the institutionalised record of the region.
The web of connections within Natal that facilitated the visit of the British Association
tour to Laduma’s home had substantial roots in personal interactions and increasingly
complex local politics. In fact, it was in the exact month of the British Association visit that
the Poll Tax Bill, that was to precipitate a major uprising in the region within six months,
became law.62 A close reading of Stuart’s A History of the Zulu Rebellion 1906 (published

57 E.W. Brown, ‘With the British Association in South Africa’, Popular Science Monthly LXVIII, 1906: 15.
58 A.T. Bryant, Olden Times in Zululand and Natal, London: Longmans, Green, 1929, p. 524; Webb and Wright, James Stuart
Archive, Volume 5, p. 280.
59 His brother, Robert Charles Samuelson, was the solicitor for King Dinuzulu during his 1908–9 trial after the Bhambatha
Rebellion. R.C. Samuelson collected objects from the region, which were donated to the British Museum after his death (a snuff
spoon, three beaded belts and a blanket pin). See Nettleton’s essay in this volume.
60 Brown’s note that Samuelson had apparently requested Mhlola to postpone the wedding so as to coincide with the British
Association visit gives a sense of the scope of official orchestration of the expedition.
61 KCAL, Stuart Papers, File 40, item 4, pp. 1–4, letter from Samuelson to Stuart. The quotation is on p. 4. We would like to thank
John Wright for bringing this to our attention.
62 J. Stuart, A History of the Zulu Rebellion, 1906, London: Macmillan, 1913, p. 99.

440
in 1913), suggests that the earliest rumours of resistance to the Bill only began to surface
in ‘about September or October’ of 1905. Even if disaffection had been in the mind of
officials such as Samuelson at the time of the British Association visit, the Stuart account
suggests it was not then a matter of significant official concern or alarm.63 However, Stuart
does refer to a change in the temper of the people around this time: ‘A sullen demeanour
was assumed by them as soon as the poll tax was proclaimed. To use a Zulu metaphor
(without equivalent in English), and one that exactly expresses the position, the new tax
had caused them to “qunga” ’, a term glossed by Stuart as to be ‘filled with an angry, venge-
ful spirit’, leading to ‘the contemptuous manner in which Magistrates and other officials
were treated in various parts of the country’.64 The British Association visit occurred on
the eve of a seismic shift in the politics of Natal, as many groups who had engaged closely
in the politics of colonial chiefships as an alternative to Zulu hegemony began irretrieva-
bly to lose ground and capacity to navigate a future for themselves.
The choice of Swartkop and Henley for the British Association visits in Natal took the
visitors into chiefly homesteads known for their good relations with the colonial admin-
istration. In the language of the following year, the year of substantial uprisings against
the colonial authorities, this would have been translated as ‘loyal’ to the administration.
But we can take a lesson from Jeff Guy’s thoughtful study of a part of the uprising, which
alerts us to the complex paths taken by chiefs responsible for navigating a course for the
people for whom they were responsible, in the face of the weight of colonial power, inad-
equate access to land, increasing taxation and following the post-war economic depres-
sion. Writing about two senior rebel leaders, Meseni kaMusi and Ndlovu kaThimuni,
Guy reveals them to have been clever and adroit leaders, ‘political strategists who had
kept their positions amongst their people in the most difficult of situations, utilising both
African custom and the colonial political and legal system’.65 In his careful unravelling of
the pressures and politics at play in relation to the two rebel leaders, we find a sensitivity
to the entanglement of the world that was colonial Natal, even in a situation of major
acts of resistance. We would do well to recognise similar situations of entanglement
in sites of substantial accommodation, such as at Swartkop a year earlier. This was a
time of intensely complex new politics in which indigenous forms and incoming forms
were inextricably tied together in an amalgam of vernacular modernity and the nature of
their enmeshment was under active review. As we have noted previously, in their visit to
Mount Edgecombe the British Association party met the progressive politician Campbell
and the activists Gandhi and Dube. At the same event, the entertainment in the form of
traditional dancing was provided by Chief Mqhawe of the Qadi (see Figure 9 in essay
by Hughes and Cele, Volume 1 and discussion pp. 325–6), one of the most senior and
respected hereditary chiefs in the Colony of Natal and well connected in the colonial

63 Stuart, History of the Zulu Rebellion, p. 103.

64 Stuart, History of the Zulu Rebellion, p. 109.
65 Guy, Maphumulo Uprising, p. 236.

441
administration, with whom Campbell was as much politically engaged as he was with
Gandhi and Dube.66
The label information, the collected objects, Balfour’s diary, Haddon’s notes and anno-
tated lantern slides, the Railway Guide photos of Tetelegu, photographs of Laduma taken
by Balfour, Haddon and others, information about Laduma in Mqayikana’s testimony,
Mqayikana’s photograph, the rebellion of their famous relative, Bhambatha, and the fine
pot sent as a gift to Stuart by Laduma, all located in separate places and set in the context
of a growing crisis in what was known at the time as ‘Native Affairs’, were united through
the bringing of the history of Laduma, Balfour and Haddon together. This assembly of
information across the silos of race, class, culture, politics and taxonomy, enables back-
story. It results in a vastly expanded archive convened across a variety of separate loca-
tions. It also overcomes the anonymity and ‘radical depersonalisation’ usually associated
with museum objects.67 It fills out Stuart’s recognition of having ‘discovered a man’. And
men they all are. Women remain resolutely metonymised as ‘brides’, ‘wives’ and the
gendered possessors of hairpins. Indeed, of the almost 200 people whose testimonies
Stuart recorded, only a handful were women.

Networks and hotspots

A set of objects lodged in the Natal Museum in Pietermaritzburg extends our under-
standing of the networks involved to include missionary activity. First we note that
on Friday, 25 August, after the Henley wedding festivities that were also attended by
‘Laduma’s people’, Balfour paid a visit to the just-opened Natal Museum and in all likeli-
hood viewed there the objects obtained from the Austrian missionary, Franz Mayr. The
Natal Museum has some items collected by Mayr. All of these are listed by the museum
as being from Natal. Of the total number, four were obtained between 1898 and 1901,
before Balfour’s visit.68
Like Balfour and Haddon, Mayr’s own history is relatively well known and a collec-
tion of his writings has been reproduced by Clements Gütl.69 Initially attached to the
Mariannhill Mission in 1890, between 1891 and 1909 Mayr established and worked in
missions in the Pietermaritzburg area, as well as on the south coast of Natal, before
proceeding to Southern Rhodesia and Swaziland. He studied the Zulu language inten-
sively and pursued a vocation in the emerging discipline of anthropology, publishing
amongst other things a three-part article in the journal Anthropos in 1906. In addi-
tion, in response to a proposal by Wilhelm Schmidt, the editor of Anthropos and a
member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna, Mayr was given a phonograph

66 H. Hughes, First President: A Life of John L. Dube, Founding President of the ANC, Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2011, pp.
111–13.
67 F. Lionnet, ‘The Mirror and the Tomb: Africa, Museums and Memory’, African Arts 34(3) 2001: 50–9, 93.
68 KwaZulu-Natal Museum, Department of Human Science (DHS), Anthropology Accessions Register, Book 1, 1888–1912 (ac-
cessed December 2010 by N. Leibhammer and November 2014 by R. Lombard).
69 C. Gütl, ‘Adieu ihrlieben Schwarzen’: Gesammelte Schriften des Tiroler Afrikamissionars Franz Mayr (1865–1914), Cologne:
Bèohlau, 2004. See also C. Gütl, ‘Dictionary of African Christian Biography: Franz Mayr’, 2009. http://www.dacb.org/stories/south-
africa/mayr_franz.html (accessed 15 May 2011).

442
to record local music. Once recorded, the original wax cylinders were returned to the
Phonogrammarchive of the institution.70 Along with recordings made in Johannesburg
by the Austrian scholar, Dr Felix von Lushan on 20 and 21 August 1905,71 as part of
the same British Association visit undertaken by Balfour and Haddon,72 and one other
set of recordings made in 1906, these are the earliest recordings of what is regarded as
Zulu music.73 Mayr’s notes accompanying the recordings are uneven, but on the whole
provide significant information about the singers, many of who are named. All of Mayr’s
recordings are dated to September 1908, but may have been originally recorded as early
as 1907.74 In much the same way as the labels and journal entries enable us to locate the
objects collected by Balfour and Haddon in a complex network of archival production in
which named individuals such as Laduma kaTetelegu participated, so too do the sound
recordings and the linked notes in Vienna enable us to develop an increasingly filled-out
picture of Mayr’s local networks and research sites, in a way that illuminates the objects
lodged in Pietermaritzburg. We are further alerted to the filigree of connections between
the three collecting projects of Balfour, Haddon and Mayr and, presumably, a host of
other similar endeavours of the time.
Patrick Harries has shown how the missionary and amateur anthropologist, Henri
Junod, researching and writing a few hundred kilometres to the north at much the same
time as Mayr, adopted models from natural history research that enabled him to use
detailed fieldwork from a limited area to present findings that he used as representative of
a larger tribe, in his case, ‘the Thonga’. Junod, himself a contributor to the anthropology
section of the 1905 British Association meeting with an offering on ‘The Thonga Tribe’,75
transformed individual persons and creations, such as huts, carvings or weapons, into
standard Thonga types, a homogenous species like the butterflies he collected so assidu-
ously. Harries comments that Junod’s vision

subjected the tribe to the insights of direct observation, the methodological convention used to
describe zoological and botanical species. In these fields, this way of seeing created a stark dichotomy
between the viewer and the object of interest . . . His vision of an organically stable tribal society was
reinforced when Junod presented his evidence in the present tense, concerned only with the moment
of observation.76

70 At the time it was known as the Imperial Academy of Sciences ( https://www.gmi.oeaw.ac.at/about-us/the-austrian-acad-

emy-of-sciences/) (accessed 8 June 2016).
71 In 1905 Felix von Lushan was director of the Africa and Oceania Department at the Königliches Museum für Völkerkunde in
Berlin, the present-day Ethnological Museum. For more on Von Luschan, see Rippe’s essay in this volume.
72 Von Luschan must have been one of the British Association delegates who made their travel arrangements themselves as
his name does not appear on the list of guests who opted for the official tour.
73 G. Lechleitner (ed.), with comments by C. Gütl and A. Schmidhofer, The Collection of Father Franz Mayr: Zulu Recordings
1908, sound documents from the Phonogrammarchiv of the Austrian Academy of Sciences: The Complete Historical Collections
(1890–1950), 2 CDs and a booklet, 2006, p. 25.
74 Lechleitner, Collection of Father Franz Mayr, pp. 38–9.
75 Haddon, ‘Anthropology’, pp. 491–7; Haddon, ‘Leland Standford Junior University’, pp. 231–2.
76 P. Harries, Butterflies and Barbarians: Swiss Missionaries and Systems of Knowledge in South-East Africa, Oxford: James Cur-
rey, 2007, p. 219.

443
It was an approach that favoured representative specimens over the singular and the
particular that is the focus of archival practice. Much the same can be said about Mayr,
himself an avid collector of natural history. In the opening paragraph of his Anthropos
article, entitled ‘The Zulu-Kafirs of Natal’, Mayr made it clear that his article referred to
the inhabitants of ‘Natal larger, ie. Natal and Zululand, 16¼ and 31 degr. S.B and 29–33
degr. E.L’77. Covering topics such as ‘Zulu proverbs’, ‘Food’, ‘Luxuries’ and ‘Medicines
and Charms’, Mayr painted a picture of the Zulu as a distinctive cultural group. The
text was accompanied by drawings of household items and photographs with generic
captions referring to ‘Young Zulu Man’ and ‘Dresses and ornaments of Zulu Women’,
with one exception – the first photograph, a reproduction of the saluting Tetelegu labeled
‘Chief Teleku [sic] in full attire’. However, not only was Mayr’s own ‘Zulu’ experience
exclusively in the area south of the Thukela, but initial scrutiny of the photographs and
items drawn and collected suggests that they too emanated from the same southerly
region.78
Mayr’s first base in Natal, the Mariannhill Mission Station near Pinetown, was founded
by the Catholic Trappist Order in 1882 and it soon had mission stations all over southern
Natal, some in the Drakensberg region, others in the Eastern Cape and only one north of
the Thukela.79 It is most likely that the brothers at Mariannhill began collecting objects
of ethnographic interest as soon as they arrived. Christoph Rippe (in this volume) notes
that the objects and photographs were for the purposes of exhibition and to promote the
mission both in South Africa and Europe. Relations with European museums were set
up, but objects seem to have only been sold locally.80 Mariannhill generated ethnograph-
ic photographs of people from the mission and further afield and, from 1898 onwards,
these were compiled into sets that were sold to ethnographic museums abroad and locally

77 Mayr, ‘Zulu Kafirs: Part One’, p. 453. These lines of latitude and longitude delineate an area much larger than what we under-
stand as KwaZulu-Natal. They encompass the southern tip of Zimbabwe in the north down to Port St Johns in the south and run
through Botswana, North West Province and the Eastern Cape in the west to beyond Inhaca Island off the coast of Mozambique
in the east.
78 Of the fourteen photographic images of people that appear in the reprinted Mayr articles in Gütl, ‘Adieu ihrlieben’, at least
six are securely identified as being taken in southern Natal. These are: three women with distinctive hairstyles that identify them
as Bhaca from southern Natal (but also eastern Cape); an image of Tetelegu and two images of women wearing beadwork that
is similar to that seen at Laduma’s homestead in Balfour’s photographs and collected items. The remaining eight appear to be
from southern Natal, but this will need further verification. Of the drawn images of beadwork that appear in the publication,
many resemble pieces found in the Mariannhill collection, also largely put together in the Colony of Natal (Christophe Rippe,
pers. comm., August 2011).
79 Maria Ratschitz, established in 1890, was the only linked mission station north of the Thukela River.
80 Considerable background information about this collection has been written up by Christoph Rippe, who has been using
the archives at Mariannhill, Rome and other centres for research. C. Rippe, ‘New Light on Old Images: Historical Photographs
from the Mariannhill Mission in KwaZulu-Natal, Then and Now’, MA thesis, Leiden University, 2007, p. 48. Rippe notes that by 1890
the mission already had a collection of some 200 pieces. As for sales of objects to European museums, he is able to confirm sales
to only three and those were made through middle men. While the photographs were distributed to museums intentionally and
directly, the same cannot be said for objects, as they were probably too cumbersome and costly to ship. However, the occasional
freight for mission exhibitions, as well as objects as gifts for European benefactors, is documented. Rippe was able to trace the
selling of photographs to the Natal Museum in Pietermaritzburg and the South African Museum in Cape Town. However, no
objects seem to have changed hands. Certain artefacts, such as ‘kafir sticks and pots’ were sold locally, probably when there
was sufficient material available and visitors to the museum showed interest (Christoph Rippe, e-mail to Nessa Leibhammer, 26
January 2015).

444
to raise funds.81 Balfour, it turns out, had in fact been in Natal prior to the 1905 visit. In
1899 he had visited Mariannhill and purchased photographs for the PRM, while Von
Luschan had been in contact with the Mariannhill photographers since the late 1890s.82
In 2009, when Nessa Leibhammer visited the collection housed at Mariannhill,
it was in a state of neglect. Labels had dropped off items and inroads by fish moths
had rendered some accession numbers unreadable. According to the architect for the
Mariannhill missions, Robert Brusse, a number of objects had gone missing. An acces-
sions register exists that was compiled in the late 1970s by Brusse and Yvonne Winters,
then head of the Campbell Collections in Durban. At the time Brusse, with help from
Winters, worked on the documenting, cataloguing and re-installation of the small
museum at the mission that housed the collection.83 Other than their documentation,
information dating to the time that the collection was put together consists of generalised
texts describing what the objects are (‘waistband’ and so on) and their utilitarian uses (for
example, ‘worn by married women’) by Mayr and Brother Aegidius Müller.84
The mission further has four albums of black and white ethnographic photographic
images. About 2 000 photographic glass plate negatives of both ethnographic and mission
content also exist at Mariannhill. This is only part of the collection as the archive of glass
plate negatives has been split – some are kept at the Mariannhill Mission and others at
the congregation’s headquarters, the Generalate in Rome.85 Many of these images do not
appear in the albums at Mariannhill. Some have useful information, such as the names
of the subject and place, annotated in their margins.86 Despite the fragmentary nature of
this collection, backstory possibilities exist here too. There are a number of photographs
of a chief who lived in the vicinity of the mission. Rippe has established that these are
photographs of Lokothwayo, the son of Chief Manzini of the Ngangeni and Masiyengelo
of the Mbo and the great-grandfather of the present chief.87 This, in turn, can be linked to
historical writings. Bryant, himself originally a Trappist from Mariannhill, writes about
the Nganga who were attached to the Hlomendlini regiment of Dingane, many of whom
deserted the Zulu army to join the settlers at Port Natal. When Mpande turned against

81 Rippe, ‘New Light’, p. 31. See also Rippe’s essay in this volume.
82 C. Rippe, pers. comm., N. Leibhammer, August 2011.
83 The original museum at Mariannhill was started around 1894. In 1932 a new wing was added to the existing monastery
building and the collection of ‘curiosities’ was housed there. In 1980−1, as the monastery was approaching its centenary, Robert
Brusse was asked to set up a new museum, changing the mainly ethnographic nature of the old museum to one that reflected
the founding, development and evangelising work of the Mariannhill Mission. N. Leibhammer, e-mail communication, R. Brusse,
17 March 2011. Objects were arranged according to sex and age group. The three-dimensional objects were placed in a central
case and the balance of the beadwork was placed in drawers. Leibhammer, e-mail communication, Brusse, 24 June 2011. How-
ever, these displays were taken down in the early 2000s. A committee, including Brusse, was set up to design the new displays,
but the overall principle that associated beadwork with various parts of the body and with status was retained. These displays
have never been completed. Leibhammer, e-mail communication with Brusse, 29 August 2011.
84 Mayr, ‘Zulu Kafirs: Part One’: 453–71; F. Mayr, ‘The Zulu Kafirs of Natal: Part Two’, Anthropos 2, 1907: 392–9; F. Mayr, ‘The Zulu
Kafirs of Natal: Part Three’, Anthropos 2, 1907: 633–45; A. Müller, ‘Zur Materiellen Kulture der Kaffern’, Anthropos 12–13 (5–6), 1918:
852–8. See also Rippe’s essay in this volume.
85 Rippe, ‘New Light’, p. 5. The collection, however, is in the process of amalgamation, as the plates from Pinetown are currently
being digitised, along with those held in Rome by the Consulate General.
86 Cover images on Volume 1 and 2 taken from the glass plate negatives in this collection.
87 Rippe, ‘New Light’, p. 103.

445
Dingane, the remainder of the Nganga under Manzini joined their clansmen already in
Port Natal. The colonial government settled them on the north side of the middle Mlazi
River, later relocating them to what Bryant describes as the broken country on the oppo-
site side of the river (just above the Richmond road drift), with another section of the clan
at Ndwedwe (near Verulam).88
Bryant’s text confirms Lokothwayo’s location in the area near the Mariannhill Mission.
Mariannhill photographs titled ‘Kindergruppe bei Lokotwayo’; ‘Chief Lokotwayo mit
4 seine Indunas beim Umlas’; ‘Heid[en]. Mutter mit Babies? Nov 1912 Umlazi’ and
‘Frauenarbeitenvor der HutteNoveb 1912 Umlazi’ now accumulate to themselves infor-
mation that places them in history and begins to provide personal identification.89 One
of these photographs shows us Brother Aegidius in the field with his camera in the
process of ‘composing’ the photographs (see Figure 1 in Rippe essay, this volume). The
photographs, which provide insight into the Mariannhill Monastery’s engagement with
surrounding communities, in their turn illuminate Bryant’s sources, suggesting that
Bryant may well have drawn on established Mariannhill connections with the Nganga,
amongst others, in acquiring his material. Bryant was in contact with Stuart, with whom
he corresponded and whose ‘Zulu Readers’ he drew on in compiling his clan histories.90
In the period around the turn of the nineteenth century, the archive of the material
culture of people variously labelled ‘Zulu’ and ‘Zulu-Kaffirs’ and the images of everyday
‘Zulu’ life that appeared in publications were decisively shaped by collection activities
south of the Thukela, taking place in a relatively circumscribed network set up through
missionary and official colonial contacts. In her essay, ‘A Man of Splendid Appearance:
Angas’ Utimini, Nephew of Chaka’, Sandra Klopper draws attention to the fact that if
the reader carefully tracks George Angas’ journey, when he documented people and
places for his folio volume, The Kafirs Illustrated, published in 1849, it is evident that
with the exception of one image sketched near the Thukela River, his ‘panoramic views
of “Zulu” homesteads are all based on sketches made on the outskirts of Durban’ and
that ‘Angas relied heavily on the assistance of missionaries from the American Board
of Commissioners . . . seldom venturing beyond the protection they were able to give
him’.91 Our essay speaks to similarly circumscribed conditions operating to shape the
archive of material culture and indeed the textual archive, though at a later point in
time. That the circumscription prevailed across time is vividly attested to by the fact that
the ‘Utimini’ whom Angas depicted in the 1840s was the father of Stuart’s important
informant, Ndlovu, discussed above.
By giving close attention to the backstory, collection and institutionalisation of the
objects and images we can restore some of the identity distinctions of the time and
track the processes that led to their blurring. By the mid-1930s distinctions of the kind

88 Bryant, Olden Times, pp. 546–7; Rippe, ‘New Light’.

89 Rippe, ‘New Light’, pp. 25–6.
90 J. Stuart, uTulasizwe, London: Longmans, 1923; J. Stuart, uBaxoxele, London: Longmans, 1924; J. Stuart, uHlangakula, Lon-
don: Longmans, 1924; J. Stuart, uKulumetule, London: Longmans, 1925. See Hamilton, Terrific Majesty, pp. 125, 150.
91 S. Klopper, ‘A Man of Splendid Appearance: Angas’ Utimini, Nephew of Chaka’, African Studies 53(2), 1994: 7.

446
that we pick up in the material, reflected in the identity ascriptions offered by Balfour,
Mqayikana, Mayr and Bryant, were slipping out of view as a generalised notion of Zulu
identity and culture took firm hold in politics and in much anthropology. This identity
formation, that had begun after the 1879 Anglo-Zulu War, gained ground at the end of
the nineteenth century and on into the twentieth century. The definitive ethnographic
study for the region was published by Eileen Krige in 1936. The dust jacket of a 1981
impression of the study asserted its long-standing position as ‘the only complete and
systematic account of the life and customs of the most romantic and best-known South
African tribe’. The Social System of the Zulus was primarily a compilation of material
already published by 1936, key components of which date to the late colonial period and
reflect conditions in the Colony of Natal at least as much, and possibly more so, as they
do those in Zululand north of the Thukela and rely on the kinds of images and objects
and identity ascriptions discussed in this essay. Mayr, Bryant and Stuart were amongst
Krige’s primary sources, along with a host of other Natal-based recorders.92
Close assessment of the sources utilised by Krige reinforces the finding of this essay
that while the image of Zulu military activity is tied to the Anglo-Zulu War and writers’
and recorders’ experiences in the region north of the Thukela, the ethnography of everyday
life was strongly shaped by writings and activities of a relatively circumscribed network
of missionaries, officials and travellers based primarily south of the Thukela, interacting
in sustained ways over time with particular chiefs and their councillors. By the late nine-
teenth century, Natal was a complex entanglement of local politics and long-standing
cultural and political practices, as well as new colonial ones, connected through networks
of relationships to institutions in metropolitan centres in other parts of world, notably
in Britain and Austria. Lokothwayo, his activities, the people and area over which he
was chief, show up as a focal point in the Mariannhill processes of generating knowl-
edge, contained in objects and images, about those whom the missionaries sought to
convert, just as the relatively nearby chieftaincy of the Mpumuza, Tetelegu and later his
son Laduma show up as a significant reference point for colonial processes of knowledge
creation contained in objects and images. We can only tentatively begin to imagine what
it means that these events took place in people’s own homes, encompassed events organ-
ised by them and enacted by individuals self-accoutred for the day. The photographs
taken were, without question, selected and framed by the photographers. However, in
some instances, it is possible that the photographs may have been taken by members of
the particular homesteads. The subjects selected, whether homes, dress, dances, or beer
drinking situations, also incorporated elements of self-curation. The settings may have
been chosen by administrators and missionaries, but we begin to see signs that they were
also made available by chiefs and others. Laduma’s salute in front of his assembled men

92 A remarkable feature of the bibliography in E.J. Krige, The Social System of the Zulus, Pietermaritzburg: Shuter and Shooter,
1962, is that only 32 items carry dates of publication, while 62 are listed without. While the Krige book was to prove the definitive
ethnographic text for the region, anthropological studies, many of them conducted in Natal, looked at identities embraced
within a larger Zulu identity. D.H. Reader’s work on the Makhanya is especially relevant to the Krige book. D.H. Reader, Zulu Tribe
in Transition: The Makhanya of Southern Natal, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1966.

447
was itself a mixture of colonial and local military idioms and symbols, echoing that of his
father Tetelegu.93 This was one gesture in a day rich in cultural complexity centred on
photography, translations, performance, purchase, government provision of beasts for
slaughter and local hospitality in providing beer for consumption; colonials, metropoli-
tans and indigenes moving in a shared frame. It was far from unusual.
On the very next day, Sunday, 27 August 1905, Stuart was conversing with Mahaya
kaNongqabana and his son Nzunzu, of the Mtwana people, whom Stuart had invited
from the Mzimkhulu area.94 One of the topics covered in the discussion that day, proba-
bly in Durban where Stuart was based, was the history of Machibise, possibly the daugh-
ter of Dibinyika who belonged to a section of the Zondi people (the latter, we noted
earlier in our discussion of the British Association visit to Mhola’s homestead, was iden-
tified by Bryant as the grandfather of Mhola), but described by Mqayikana as Bhaca, who
lived in the 1830s in what became the Edendale area near Pietermaritzburg. The focus
on the full range of objects and images, that is objects of expressive culture operating in
homesteads, on so-called fieldtrips and in museums – hairpins, railway guides, silver-
rimmed labels and photographic glass plate negatives – allows us to bring into view the
web of relations and instances of concurrent, but not necessarily directly linked, develop-
ments in adjacent spaces, between producers and users of objects, facilitators of contacts
between them and a variety of collectors of such objects, as well as the range of institu-
tional concerns active with regard to and partly constitutive of these webs of relations.
The burden of our analysis is that across a small span of time, sometimes in the
same places, or very close by and certainly concentrated in particular areas, not only were
objects of material culture being made and collected, photographs taken, ethnographic
observations noted and contemporary politics performed, but also the colonial official,
Stuart, was busy collecting the testimonies that became the highly influential, docu-
mented and published archive of recorded oral tradition, The James Stuart Archive, and
Bryant was marshalling material for his own comprehensive compendium, Olden Times
in Zululand and Natal. While our essay shows moments of overlap in these activities,
or resonances across a relatively short period of time, it does not make the case in every
instance for specific, direct connections. Rather it draws a picture of remarkable co-pres-
ence of facilitators and collectors of various kinds. The essay reveals layers of connections
between individuals and places and connections in and out of metropolitan anthropology
and museums, local anthropology and museums, missions and administrations, as well
as homesteads and local political formations, that allow us to gain a picture of webs of
activity that supplied the materials that contributed to the instantiation of ideas of tradi-
tion and tribe and, increasingly, of a particular traditional, tribal identity and culture
as ‘Zulu’. These ideas were to loom large in the twentieth century. At the same time,
these webs of activity laid down key materials in a variety of preservatory contexts about

93 Mahmood Mamdani notes that the Natal Code of Native Law of 1891 ‘specified the type of salute natives must give to and
the manner in which they must hail each category of officialdom, from the white supreme chief to the native headman’. M.
Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism, Cape Town: David Philip, 1996, pp. 63–4.
94 Webb and Wright, James Stuart Archive, Volume 2, p. 120 and editors’ note 50.

448
identity distinctions that enable us to unpick a blanket notion of Zulu identity. All this
activity, we see, took place at a time when the meaning of being Zulu or not Zulu, which
had existed for much of the nineteenth century, was beginning to shift.
While a difference is noted between the areas north and south of the Thukela and
is acknowledged in studies by scholars of material culture such as Klopper and Marilee
Wood, very little specific information is available that links collected objects to actual
people. There is published material that gives detailed analysis of who lived where and
when, showing that identities and affiliations in the region shifted dramatically across
time,95 but there has been little attempt by historians, ethnographers and curators
(both amateur and professional) to link material culture to these identities. Bryant, for
example, provides highly detailed histories of local clans, but his illustrative photographs
are subjected to generalised labelling. His Olden Times in Zululand and Natal is replete
with photo captions such as: ‘A Zulu Brave in full dancing dress’; ‘A Husband makes the
Fire’; ‘His Wife goes to the Field for Corn’; ‘Two Zulu Youths Go Out A-courting’ and
‘The Girls They Wooed’.96 This is in direct contrast to the text that offers considerable
chronological and local identity specifications.97
What became colonial Natal was an area with a significant and intimate early
European and British involvement in local African politics, social life and thought, with
concomitant reporting and collecting activities culminating in a style of indirect rule
that built on an intensive investment in gaining an understanding of local ways of doing
things. Traders, travellers, missionaries, colonial officials, military personnel, settlers
and scholars all collected the material culture, or images of it, of the populations they
encountered between the Thukela and the Mzimvubu rivers. While some of these mate-
rials were published in one form or another, the majority were dispersed into collections
and museums, locally and abroad, in most cases with no records of where or from whom
the items were collected, when they were collected and, in many cases, without records of
how they were collected. Many came to be labelled ‘Zulu’ as a consequence of the promi-
nence of their dominant neighbour or, where a distinction was drawn between north and
south of the Thukela, generically as ‘Natal Kaffir’ or sometimes ‘Lala’ and occasionally
‘Bhaca’. Treating the records and labels as objects of expressive culture and seeking their
histories, in turn, has proven, in this essay at least, to be a productive way of contextualis-
ing them and of breaking an inherited segregation of material culture, images and texts
and thereby gaining insight into complex webs of interaction.

95 Stuart, History of the Zulu Rebellion; Bryant, Olden Times; N.J. van Warmelo, A Preliminary Survey of the Bantu Tribes of South
Africa, Pretoria: Department of Native Affairs, 1935; C. Hamilton, ‘Ideology, Oral Traditions and the Struggle for Power in the Early
Zulu Kingdom’, MA thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, 1986; J. Wright, ‘Political Transformations in the Thukela-Mzimkhulu
Region in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries’ in The Mfecane Aftermath: Reconstructive Debates in Southern
African History, edited by C. Hamilton, Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press; Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press,
1995, pp. 163–81; Lambert, Betrayed Trust; M. Mahoney, The Other Zulus: The Spread of Zulu Ethnicity in Colonial South Africa,
Durham: Duke University Press, 2012.
96 Bryant, Olden Times, pp. 146, 241, 320.
97 Trappist missionaries Father Franz Mayr and Brother Aegidius Müller, writing about beadwork in the early twentieth century
also do so in generalised terms. See Mayr, ‘Zulu Kafirs: Part Two’, pp. 392–9; Mayr, ‘Zulu Kafirs: Part Three’, pp. 633–45; Müller, ‘Zur
Materiellen Kulture’.

449