Tswana

Ethnologist Dr Paul-Lenert Breutz (Department of Native Affairs, 1948-1960) authored eight volumes on South Africa's Tswana-speaking communities as well as many other lesser known publications. The oral traditions and histories embedded in Breutz's 'tribes series', as well as in his self-published compendium, have provided a major source for scholars of the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Tswana. His methods in compiling this ethnohistorical record have not been understood, and his background, thinking, and professional training have gone unexamined. This study explores Breutz's views of the world, and of Africans in particular, which were shaped and influenced by a set of racial theories, including anti-Semitism. It also closely examines Breutz's oral historical accounts, which stand up to close scrutiny and remain essential to the exploration of the early Tswana past. Though Breutz's mind was skewed by racism, his craft of recording the past was systematic, based on knowledgeable informants he interviewed and guided by the ethnological and language tradition of his doctoral studies at the Hamburg School. Breutz was foremost an antiquarian collector of information. Scholars will find some of his interpretations wanting, but they can place confidence in the historical record he carefully recorded.

This article aims at the presentation of data recovered from an acoustic analysis of the vowels of Setswana (S31), a Bantu language spoken in Botswana, the North Western, Northern Cape and Gauteng provinces of South Africa. Descriptions of the Setswana vowels as found in textbooks and other sources are mainly articulatory in nature and are based on auditive perceptions. Due to the lack of scientific evidence to support these descriptions, many discrepancies exist that were transferred to the vowel charts as well. To improve this situation, an acoustic study was carried out. The data presented in this article should lead to a more scientific description and presentation of the Setswana vowels. The vowel system of Setswana consists of seven vowels and four raised variants of the mid vowels. The vowels are positioned on the vowel chart according to their auditory qualities and those of the cardinal vowels. Choi (1991:4) summarizes the traditional articulatory approach fittingly as follows: ”While such descriptions are valuable, they are nonetheless qualitative, and ideally, should be complemented by instrumental examination. The results of the acoustic analysis encompassed in this article, hope to provide quantitative acoustic data on a limited scale regarding the formant structure of the Setswana vowels in order to assess the present perceptual descriptions of these vowels.

Archaeologists in southern Africa who wish to provide public access to visible sites face the challenge of widespread farm privatization and the associated displacement of African communities. Most of today's six million Tswana speakers cannot access the private farms where many stonewall settlements built by their ancestors are located. Recent research in southern Botswana identified a site on communal land in close proximity to people who can identify it as part of their heritage. In 2017, preparations got underway to develop the large stonewall capital of Makolontwane as a cultural heritage tourism destination. Makolontwane was built by the Tswana-speaking (Ba)Ngwaketse in the eighteenth century as part of their raiding state. Efforts to preserve and restore Makolontwane are grounded in a desire to make such history accessible to all visitors, including Tswana speakers who have been routinely alienated from their own archaeological heritage.

In Botswana, it has become a habit of late for some living in Tlokweng, adjacent to the capital of Gaborone, to claim that the Khama family took Tlokwa land and are now bound to return it to the Batlokwa.  The question is, on what basis do the Batlokwa have a claim to this farm and the 107 freehold 4-hectare plots created in 1987 that form its perimeter?  This article tries to answer this question

In the heart of the African bushveld, thriving communities competed for land and luxuries before the arrival of European missionaries and traders. Archaeology, oral histories and ethnography have uncovered a startling story of prosperity, violence, and the dispersal of a proud and resourceful people.

Deep in the heart of southern Africa, the ruins of a colossal stone walled town bear silent testimony to an African way of life almost forgotten … Undisturbed since it was abandoned nearly two centuries ago, Marothodi was the royal capital of a Tlokwa chiefdom, the metal-producing ancestors of a community still living in South Africa and Botswana. Using an interdisciplinary combination of archaeology, history, ethnography and oral tradition, the remarkable legacy of Marothodi and its people can now be explored. Filled with the results of recent research and over 170 maps, plans, photographs and illustrations, this book introduces the historical archaeology of one of the great Iron Age Tswana towns of South Africa, and tells a fascinating story of pre-colonial African achievement.

Explores the potential of the application of a low cost, quick, and minimally invasive technique to detect chemical markers in anthropogenic sediments from a Stone Walled Site, and proposes a way to analyse the results in order to improve our understanding of the use of space at non-generalized scales in such sites.

The point of departure of the present article is the realisation that more and more serious contemporary linguistic applications are based on electronic corpora. If African linguistics is to take its rightful place in the new millennium, the active compilation, querying and application of corpora should therefore become an absolute priority. In order to illustrate the feasibility of corpus applications for the African languages at present, the article first considers ‘fundamental linguistic research’ in the fields of phonetics and question particles. It is shown how that research was boosted as a result of the utilisation of corpora. In a second section ‘language teaching and learning’ is given due attention by means of the corpus-aided compilation of pronunciation guides and textbooks, and the teaching of morpho-syntactic and contrastive structures. Finally, in the field of ‘language software’, a series of first-generation spellcheckers based on corpora is reviewed. All applications are exemplified with reference to one or more of the following African languages: Cilubà, Sepedi, isiXhosa, isiZulu, and Setswana.

In this article a measurement instrument for the degree of conjunctivism / disjunctivism of the South African languages is presented. Following a discussion on conjunctivism versus disjunctivism, both absolute and relative approaches towards this measurement instrument are experimented with. Three potential absolute instruments are derived: one based on word length, one on sentence length, and one on the standardised type/token ratio. All of them pose problems. The search for a relative instrument is more successful. Although large sets of parallel texts would provide the ideal data, two-by-two parallel corpora offer a good substitute. The final 11 x 11 array is also compiled in this way. Applications of the 11 x 11 array in several fundamental and applied linguistic fields are reviewed. The fields include translation, academic writing, corpus linguistics, and theoretical reflections about spellcheckers and multi-dimension dictionary Rulers. A complete Bantu Array could be the ultimate goal.

Corpora have been built in the Department of African Languages of the University of Pretoria since the early 1990s. Work began on a corpus for Sesotho sa Leboa, the Pretoria Sesotho sa Leboa Corpus (PSC), which gradually grew from 156 000 running words or “tokens” in 1990 (see Prinsloo 1991) to 5.8 million words a decade later (see De Schryver & Prinsloo 2001a). Today, this corpus stands at 8.7 million words and is still growing. In addition, corpora had been built for all other official South African languages by the end of the 1990s, although the sizes of these corpora remained rather small compared to PSC (see De Schryver & Prinsloo 2000a). Around the turn of the millennium, however, a dedicated major effort brought about an important change. A joint project between the African-language departments of the University of Pretoria on the one hand, and Ghent University (Flanders, Belgium) on the other hand, resulted in relatively large corpora for all official South African languages, with sizes averaging several million tokens per language. In the process, quite a number of other African-language corpora were built as well, such as corpora for Cilubà, Kiswahili, Hausa, Somali and Lingala (see Van der Veken & De Schryver 2003).

Phonetic string matching involves taking two or more strings to determine if they match. Strings that are often orthographically spelt differently are matchable (nearly equivalent), either as people's names, e.g. Smith and Smythe, or as words, e.g. colour and color. Equivalent examples in various indigenous Southern African languages would be surnames, e.g. Radebe and Hadebe or words, e.g. mpša, mbwa, ntsha which are all equivalent words for ‘dog’ in the various indigenous Southern African languages; similarly, hlapi, tlhapi, inhlanzi for ‘fish’. The authors look at two common string matching algorithms, SoundEx and NYSIIS, and show how they are inadequate for Southern African use. Modifications of these algorithms for Southern African use as well as new algorithms are proposed.

The Cradle of Humankind is known for sites such as Sterkfontein, Swartkrans, Drimolen and Kromdraai, among others, that offer a detailed understanding of the Plio-Pleistocene. However, the 'Tswana' stone-walled structures that are found in this landscape have seen comparatively less research. We present preliminary results from an ongoing mapping and research programme on the farm Project 58 where a multi-component settlement is located. The site is composed of several distinct areas, a partially crenated boundary wall design, kraals located inside and outside the settlement, and internal housing and grain bin structures. Based on the architecture of the stone-walled structure, the site was most likely occupied between AD 1450 and 1700 and appears similar to Taylor's (1979) Group I sites. Studying the more recent past of this region reclaims a history that has been disarticulated from the landscape.

Il est temps de faire le point sur l'apport théorique et empirique de l’œuvre majeure de J. et J. Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, dont deux tomes sont désormais parus (le troisième est en attente) et qui reste largement méconnue du public français. Cette anthropologie historique de l'évangélisme colonial est centrée sur la rencontre entre les missionnaires non-conformistes d'origine britannique et les Tswana d'Afrique du Sud. Le paradigme de l'interaction coloniale appliqué à une période qui s'étale de 1820 à 1920 rompt avec une lecture unilatérale en termes de domination et de résistance, pour mieux souligner les contradictions et les ambivalences de chacun des protagonistes et la double entente qui est au fondement des échanges. Mais le dialogue des formes symboliques qui sous-tend la dispute idéologique n'exclut pas le jeu des rapports de forces, une dialectique subtile où se négocie, dans la vie quotidienne et la culture matérielle, le rapport entre civilisation et évangélisation. La mobilisation des notions d'hégémonie et d'idéologie vient particulièrement éclairer le double jeu de la conversation et de la conversion religieuse en faisant toute sa place aux bricolages et à l'agencéité des natives. Ce vaste chantier ouvert par les Comaroff répond à un souci de synthèse ambitieux et fait appel à une « ethnographie sur archives » qui interpelle les historiens du fait colonial aussi bien que les anthropologues du contemporain.

In the face of the dominating tradition of British structural functionalism, anthropological studies of political leadership represented an important move towards accounting for the dynamics of centralized, as well as acephalous, polities (for example, Barth 1959 and Baily 1970; cf. Schapera 1956). Moreover, in focusing upon political actors and, by extension, political relations, these studies necessarily took account of the role of the subjects. Yet, despite Gluckman's innovative notion of “rituals of rebellion” (1954; cf. Beidelman 1966), the issue of political leadership has rarely focused upon the political dynamics of the ruler-subject relationship, examining the concerns and responses of those who more or less voluntarily subject themselves to an authority figure. Even such an important contribution as Succession to High Office (Goody 1966) completely ignores this issue.

"""Paperback issue October 2014; see:
http://www.berghahnbooks.com/title.php?rowtag=GulbrandsenState
Reviews:
1) http://www.academia.edu/3191450/Invited_Review_of_The_State_and_the_Social_State_Formation_in_Botswana_and_Its_Precolonial_and_Colonial_Genealogies._By_Ornulf_Gulbrandsen_New_York_Berghahn_Books_2012_
2) http://journals.sub.uni-hamburg.de/giga/afsp

Botswana has been portrayed as a major case of exception in Africa—as an oasis of peace and harmony with an enduring parliamentary democracy, blessed with remarkable diamond-driven economic growth. Whereas the “failure” of other states on the continent is often attributed to the prevalence of indigenous political ideas and structures, the author argues that Botswana’s apparent success is not the result of Western ideas and practices of government having replaced indigenous ideas and structures. Rather, the postcolonial state of Botswana is best understood as a unique, complex formation, one that arose dialectically through the meeting of European ideas and practices with the symbolism and hierarchies of authority, rooted in the cosmologies of indigenous polities, and both have become integral to the formation of a strong state with a stable government. Yet there are destabilizing potentialities in progress due to emerging class conflict between all the poor sections of the population and the privileged modern elites born of the expansion of a beef and diamond-driven political economy, in addition to conflicts between dominant Tswana and vast other ethnic groups. These transformations of the modern state are viewed from the long-term perspectives of precolonial and colonial genealogies and the rise of structures of domination, propelled by changing global forces."""

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