African History in South Africa

Extract

The recent conference on the History of the Transkei and Ciskei held at the University of Rhodes, Grahamstown, in the Eastern Cape, in many ways marked a new step in the development in South Africa of African studies in general and African history in particular. Out of a total of some seventy-five participants, more than half were historians, ten were anthropologists or enthnologists, and the remainder were drawn from a variety of academic disciplines including archaeology, economics, politics and medicine, and from the non-academic world, including representatives of some of the major museums and libraries. Sponsored by the Transkei and Ciskei Research Society, and organised by Robin Derricourt, a Cambridge-trained archaeologist at present working at the University of Fort Hare, the conference discussed a wide range of problems in the history of the area in the precolonial and colonial periods.