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Paper short abstract

The paper reassessrs understandings of political incorporation through exploration of ancestor archives across the late pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial periods in the region that is today southern Swaziland and KwaZulu-Natal.

Paper long abstract

Colonial archives are organized in such a way that they foreground forms of political incorporation and dislocation framed in terms of tribe and, subsequently, ethnicity. Formal collections of oral traditions, in turn, tend to focus on lineage politics. The proposed paper seeks to reassess these understandings of political incorporation through exploration of alternative archival assemblages, notably through what I term ancestor archives. In particular, the paper focuses on forms of negotiation of the presence of ancestors in the land by incoming political powers, across the late pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial periods in the region that is today southern Swaziland and KwaZulu-Natal. The paper is based on the book manuscript that I am currently working on which theorises and explores ancestor practices as a form of archive pertinent to the understanding political processes.