Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Book contract for Popular Politics in the History of South Africa, 1400 - 1948

Cambridge University Press, New York.

The "Syndics'" caveat or proviso was that the revised ms. be read by a reader selected by the press, but this will be one of the previous readers, and I am following advice.
I'm secretly very happy but I'm keeping the feeling from myself as a neurotic kind of self-punishment.  Now and again I realize for a moment.

All I have to do is take away the textual self-obfuscations and reveal what remains, undistorted.
Huffman is to be praised more than contested.  The point must be to acknowledge the greatness of Great Zimbabwe and other northern states while sharing in the traditions and heritage and effects of the rise and fall of same. People in South Africa rose and grew from the injection of organization represented by the ha rotse and later the rolong order.

This corresponded to similar kinds of authority north of the Limpopo, in the Zimbabwean highlands, of the Rozvi (rozvi).  There was a single loan term and a shared way of doing things, despite the difference in ethnicity ("Tswana" vs. "Shona").  There are other such shared ideas and terms, and one example is "ini" meaning little, a suffix.  One links the grasslands of the east with the highveld in a partnership of unequals, which as I show structured brotherhood (putative) among chiefs settling together in "twin-court" settings.  These are Motebele and Motebeyane, or Tebele and Tebeyane, or similar.  This is the paradigm within ha rotse ("Hurutshe") as well as Crocodile and so on lineages on the highveld in South Africa.  This is the ini connection again (in the form, ane: diminutive version of, i.e. "junior court").

Revised 3/26/09

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