The importance of oral history in southern African historiography

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This paper was read on Saturday 26 July 2025 in Cradock/Nxuba during the annual Etienne van Heerden Veldsoirée.

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This epistemic violence carried into apartheid historical frameworks, which privileged written colonial “proof” – military journals, missionary dispatches – and dismissed black oral testimony as unreliable hearsay. Such bias underpinned the myth of “empty land syndrome”, which erased indigenous land use and presence.

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Introduction

At its foundations, the written record of history is inseparable from oral tradition – a lineage often dismissed in modern parlance as hearsay, yet remaining the primordial wellspring of historical consciousness. Before historiography was formalised, societies remembered through voice: epic, lamentation, chant and testimony.

What we call “history” began as a sacred transmission, a communal negotiation with memory and meaning. Thus, the archive is not merely a collection of documents, but the sediment of narratives once spoken by the living.

Classical foundations: From Herodotus to Tacitus

In the Western canon, this lineage was first codified by Herodotus of Halicarnassus, often called the “father of history”. His Histories (~ 430 BCE) weave fact, myth and testimony into a lyrical mosaic derived largely from oral interviews and travellers’ reports.¹ Notably, Herodotus does not conceal his sources; he frequently introduces narratives with discretionary qualifiers such as “so they say” or “this is what I was told”, thus acknowledging the inherently provisional nature of oral testimony.²

Tacitus (c 56-117 CE) continues this tradition, integrating senatorial records with popular rumour, eyewitness testimony and survivor memory in his Annals and Histories.³ Tacitus understood that true historical insight often lay not in imperial edicts, but in rumour and recollection – revealing a moral-political texture that official archives alone could not provide.

These works inaugurated the Hellenic-Roman tradition: literary, ethically infused historiography that posited itself as rational, relegating other modes of knowledge, particularly oral traditions, as inferior or “barbaric”. This epistemological hierarchy would resonate into the colonial era, with lasting effects.

Oral histories and colonial records in southern Africa

In southern Africa, the earliest written accounts of indigenous societies emerged not from African voices, but from Portuguese navigators and slave traders in the late 15th century. Figures like Duarte Barbosa and Valentim Fernandes recorded fragmented descriptions of African polities, blending ethnographic detail with colonial interests.⁴

By the 17th and 18th centuries, missionary ethnographers, notably from the London Missionary Society, Glasgow Missionary Society and Moravian Church, began documenting African customs and languages, ostensibly for conversion and control. Nonetheless, they depended heavily on indigenous informants to interpret social systems, rituals and beliefs. Oral intellectual labour went uncredited in their reports.

JH Soga’s pioneering contributions

Tiyo Soga (c 1829-1871), the first black Presbyterian minister in southern Africa, challenged this pattern. In his writings and translations (including The Christian Express), he foregrounded the structural coherence and cosmology of Xhosa oral traditions, asserting their intellectual depth against missionary stereotypes.⁵

His son, John Henderson Soga (1846-1923), continued this work in The South‑Eastern Bantu. His magisterial treatise systematised the oral traditions of Xhosa and related peoples, giving African worldviews and historiography the rigour of ethnographic and historical study.⁶

Theal’s colonial appropriation

By contrast, George McCall Theal (1837-1919), who also drew on Soga’s knowledge, compiled voluminous colonial and oral records in works that recast indigenous agency through a Eurocentric lens. Oral narratives were reframed to legitimise colonial dispossession, categorised under notions of superstition or irrationality.⁷

This epistemic violence carried into apartheid historical frameworks, which privileged written colonial “proof” – military journals, missionary dispatches – and dismissed black oral testimony as unreliable hearsay. Such bias underpinned the myth of “empty land syndrome”, which erased indigenous land use and presence.

Reclaiming oral historiography in postcolonial scholarship

In the mid-20th century, Cheikh Anta Diop (1923-1986) spearheaded an intellectual revolt against Eurocentric historiography.⁸ Arguing that African history could not be properly written without reconnecting with Egypt and other oral traditions, Diop reframed the continent’s past as an interconnected civilisational matrix.⁹

Mazisi Kunene (1930-2006), poet-scholar of Zulu praise poetry (izibongo), revived oral narrative as method – not merely story. In Emperor Shaka the Great, Kunene infused historiography with performative, cyclical structure, merging lyricism with historical analysis, asserting oral tradition’s epistemological authority.

In South Africa, Jeffrey B Peires (born 1948) undertook a methodologically rigorous approach by grounding his major works – The house of Phalo and The dead will arise – in oral testimony.¹⁰Peires elevated indigenous oral testimony (eg Xhosa elders’ accounts) to be on par with archival sources, reinterpreting events like the Mfecane and Nongqawuse cattle killing as complex cultural-political phenomena rooted in oral models of prophecy and resistance.¹¹

Conclusion: Oral history as foundational knowledge

Today, oral history is no longer a mere preliminary to written records; it is a paradigmatic epistemology capable of conveying grief, contradiction, cosmology and lived memory. It preserves what empire seeks to forget, affirming that memory and voice remain more enduring than ink. Recent projects, as we saw when we were documenting regional naming histories in Somerset East, highlight persisting biases: oral knowledge still receives validation only when mediated by colonial-written texts, as when scholars demand proof in referencing European travellers and adventurers like John Barlow.

At all stages, oral history remains history’s pulse and breath – not anecdotal, but foundational. Separating the literary from the factual betrays a misunderstanding of historical knowledge. The memory of a people, preserved through speech, lament, proverb, endures beyond any inscription. To revive oral history is not a retreat; it is to rediscover history whole.

Notes:

1 Herodotus, Histories, trans Aubrey de Sélincourt (Penguin, 1954).

2 Ibid, Book I.

3 Tacitus, Annals and Histories, trans Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb (Modern Library, 1942).

4 Duarte Barbosa, Book of Duarte Barbosa, trans Gordon Brotherston (Hakluyt Society, 1992).

5 JH Soga, The South-Eastern Bantu (Methuen, 1930).

6 Ibid.

7 GM Theal, History of South Africa, 1795-1834 (Nasionale Boekhandel, 1919).

8 See discussion in Sarah C Dunstan, Cheikh Anta Diop’s recovery of Egypt: African history as anticolonial practice (Cambridge, 2023).

9 Cheikh Anta Diop, African origin of civilization: Myth or reality? (Lawrence Hill, 1974). Diop argued: “The history of Africa will remain suspended in air … until African historians connect it with Egypt.”

10 Jeff Peires, The dead will arise: Nongqawuse and the great Xhosa cattle‑killing movement of 1856-7 (Ravan Press, 1989). His use of oral testimony is widely acknowledged.

11 Jeffrey B Peires, The house of Phalo (Jonathan Ball, 2003).