We live in a paradox

we academics, I mean me, rather: All my information comes from the digital interface, but my sole desire is to create the artifact the book. I read an article on Tonga Christian conversion in the Journal des Societies Oceanistes, and it is there, permanently, irretrievably, forgottenly, but there. The old yellow pages heavy and shiny.

Actually I am reading books. I am still reading Against the Day, the monumental and awesome Thomas Pynchon book, which I had to put away after a while when I realized the Chums of Chance and the retreat into altered history and the buzzing Lovecraftian beings without pathos were not all going to be explained, but were parallel threads overleaving themselves with each other. I do understand what the novel is up to, finally, (p. 657 or so). The doubling that time is weirdly involved with: the alternative realities in all of us, the reversals of contemporary virtualities by repositioning them in history differently.

And Van Dieman's Land, by James Boyce. A little bit. But mostly it's -- let's go to the INTERNET! EBSCO, JSTOR, etc. etc.

Who can keep up?

Moravians in the Eastern Cape, 1828-1928: four accounts of Moravian mission work on the Eastern Cape frontier
By Friedrich Rudolf Baudert, Timothy J. Keegan
Published by Van Riebeeck Society, The, 2004
ISBN 0958452229, 9780958452229

Colin Rae's Malaboch: The Power of the Book in the (Mis)Representation of Kgalui Sekete Mmalebh

Author: LIZ KRIEL a
Affiliation: a University of Pretoria,
DOI: 10.1080/02582470208671417
Publication Frequency: 4 issues per year
Published in: South African Historical Journal, Volume 46, Issue 1 May 2002 , pages 25 - 41

Wittgenstein is remarking on this passage in Frazer’s Golden Bough:

“At a certain stage of early society the king or priest is often thought to be endowed with supernatural powers or to be an incarnation of a deity, and consistently with this belief the course of nature is supposed to be more or less under his control’ (Frazer, Golden Bough, 168 [iii, 1]); Ludwig Wittgentstein, “Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough,” I, 1931 (MS 110), and II, ca. 1948 (MS 143), in Philosophical Occasions, 1912-1951.

Acknowledging that perhaps some of Ellenberger’s and Breutz’s

retrieved ancestral brotherhoods and fatherhoods were constructed over time, provokes a new strategy. Instead of following out each “tribe” from start to finish, let us take some of their components deliberately out of order: removing them from their never-fully-consistent chronology.

In the winter,

In the winter, the mornings would often be leavened by the acrid smoke of wood-buring fires, dogs barking, babies crying, and cocks crowing.

ONGOING: EXCISED FOOTNOTE TEXT FROM MS., "POPULAR POLITICS IN THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA, 1400 - 1948"

Only in South Africa, corresponding to the apparent homogeneity of the Central Cattle Pattern, have the Matebele, crocodile, and ha-rotse (as Hurutshe) been grasped as tribes, with little conceptural room left for alliances or other forms of mobilization.

Thank you to Karen Milbourn

Thank you to Karen Milbourne for alerting me to the tradition that “Toka” and “Subiya” (tribes), of the Ngamiland inland delta, told the passing “people of Kololo,” Sebitwane, that the Luyi or Luyana speakers to the north were “a people rich in cattle who inhabited swampy places with many rivers.”  This was apparently bena beluizi or something like it which became “barotse” (without first passing through balozi?): The gist is that “-luizi” meant all that, “a people rich in cattle . . .” etc., which is plausible if taken loosely: for being rich in cattle, in a place of many rivers, was exactly what all rozi - rotse associations aspired to, and “-luizi” may have been a variant therein.

ONGOING: EXCISED FOOTNOTE TEXT FROM MS., "POPULAR POLITICS IN THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA, 1400 - 1948"

When Samuel Broadbent shot a guinea hen out of the sky, “delighting” (not astonishing) chief Sefunelo, the chief “made the sound of the report, and with his hand the action of the falling bird” . . .

The “dynasties” and “titles” among Rozvi-connected chiefs in David Beach’s reconstructions of Shona political history,

and the new “peoples” or “the earliest tribes” (the Bahurutshe, Barolong, etc.) in South Africanist anthropology, are in this reading part of a single, larger phenomenon, with different levels of wealth and stability.

And Christianity

only grew with acolytes decades later, when deploying the same vocabulary on behalf of genuine leaders became absurd or criminal.

Later, with the growth of amakholwa Christian communities south

the Thugela River, “Natal Kaffirs” of Fingo (mfengu: refugee) background, Zulu came to have a broader meaning still, and led by teachers, clerks, and venders, it became a subnationality, with vital connections to the house of Cetshwayo, yet subject to the stresses of urban and rural divisions and gender conflicts.  Such struggles over the speakings of “zulu” redefined the word further, and by the late 1910s it had become an ethnicity, independent of any royalist connection, as royalist Zulus tossing sand in graves with their spears might nonetheless be Christians in good standing.

ONGOING: EXCISED FOOTNOTE TEXT FROM MS., "POPULAR POLITICS IN THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA, 1400 - 1948"

Robert Moffat, Apprenticeship at Kuruman: Being the Journals and Letters of Robert and Mary Moffat, 1820-1828 (ed. Isaac Schapera)(London: Harrow, 1951).

 

Thomas Arbousset, Voyaqe d’exploration aux Montagnes Bleues (Paris: Societe des Missions Evangeliques, 1933), 90; Robert Moffat, Missionary Labours and Scenes in South Africa, 261.

We are in a blur in the middle of the imperial century,

the nineteenth century, observing it as if from a moving train. 

In South Africa “ancestor” did not indicate a “kind”

of “supreme being” (as in the strongest god of a pantheon, or a “remote God”); nor a projection of a principle (light, air, fire), a first ancestor, or any supreme personhood at all to great heights or potency as a controlling figure, power, or central symbol.  There is a little evidence counter to my hypothesis here, notably Lichtenstein’s early (Foundations, 1807) understanding of modimo as a remote and distant deity; and Chidester, Savage Systems, 182.  But the term did not mean the creator of the elements, earth and the heavens.

Records show

Records show there were several prominent names which crossed the road from Barolong to Coloured in this period.

Rush Limbaugh

Fascinating to watch him with Hannity.  The latter is sweating, giving a little smile that says, "I am yours," telling Rush he was quoted out of context, boy that's typical, from their last interview, and perhaps Rush meant something more subtle than "I want Obama to fail."  He said so much more given the full context . . . Do you care to comment?  Rush then repeated he wants Obama to fail.  Meaning, he now says, he wants Obama's economic interventions to fail, he wants his supreme court nominee to fail.  He has nothing against Obama "personally."

When Rush says, I love this country, and gives examples of his friendship for the people and their ways, his tone of voice somehow suggests he feels he is doing his country a favor.

When he says, "I have all the answers," he is making fun of himself because he does radio, where you have to talk all the time, as a pundit on crack, because he knows he's Jeff Crest the radio voice guy, and the rest is too good to be true.

A performance, like apparently Lou Dobbs is?  A life as performance?  Is there another guy there too, a quiet and reflective man?  Hardly seems like it.

Rush tells Sean Hannity . . .

Sotomayor is a racist because she said being an hispanic woman would make her a better judge than a white man, according to Rush.  Then, Rush said, perhaps I'll change my mind about Sotomayor if she'd vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, something "very important to me."  Because she is Puerto Rican and Catholic, and they tend not to like abortion, so that's a possibility, and if so, Rush would support her even after the racism thing.

So, being an hispanic woman might make her a better justice after all.

Or am I missing something?