A History of Movement in Central Southern Africa, 1500–1850

For centuries before its full colonization, southern Africa harbored and developed a prolific and rich culture of movement. Southern Africans were often on the move for environmental, political, or economic reasons. The idea of movement shone in its multifaceted reality within the very different social arrangements of southern African communities. Their actions and choices regarding movement shaped, sometimes literally, the landscape of the country: they trod paths, channeled anthropic change, and oriented worldviews. Movement was a normal, socially acceptable, and even constructive activity . Travel on land and sea faced material and conceptual conditions that were not wholly unalike, mostly because the monsoon deeply affected the landscape and because celestial navigation was the basic key to several refined travel techniques both on land and on sea. Knowing when you were was fundamental to understand where you were, where you wanted to be, and how to get there. Both noncolonial and colonial travelers struggled to adapt to the challenges of the landscape, but whereas the latter spent centuries acclimating horses to southern Africa, the former were content with an apparently less refined form of movement: walking. However, both very strongly influenced each other, to the point that colonial cattle farmers learned how to move on the landscape from those they had dispossessed and decimated, and many noncolonial actors became proud horse riders—in addition to being ox riders, as their ancestors had been for centuries. When discussed through the lenses of movement, southern African identities manifest themselves as mobile and ever changing, challenging or at least complementing older interpretations of southern African movement as a disruptive and crisis-inducing force. In this perspective, southern African roads were a physical and social reality that enabled complex patterns of movement and functioned as places where identities were made, pointed out, consolidated, left behind, and forgotten.