By Prof. Fumene George Tsibani:
As we gather this month to celebrate the women who gave birth to herstories, we must first return to the dust. Dust we must, not as an end, but as a beginning. From dust we were formed, and to dust we return only to rise again with memory intact for generations to come. This is the poem our foremothers whispered when empires tried to erase them. It is the poem we must now write into policy, into classrooms, and into law.
The urgent task before Albekuan, the Cradle of Humankind, is to correct our historiography. Long before Greek imperialists named this continent “Africa”, the Iingqwayingqwayi (Inkhwe or Khoe), San (the AbaNtu baseNtabeni or AbaThwa), and the Bantu, Ngoni, lived as juristic persons under Royal Monarchies and Aristocracies ( AmaBhunga akoMkhulu). They governed land, water and lineage through Kings and Queens accountable to both the people and to the Creator, Yahweh. That order was not primitive. It was sophisticated, and it predates the archives that now presume to define us.
The distortion began with an invention, not a discovery. It started with the imagination of “Terra nullius” by Global North Royal Monarchies and their elites, which was translated to an “empty land” in Albekuan. The “empty land” ideology was codified under British Indirect Rule ( BIR) from 1846. It served two purposes. It denied prior sovereignty, and it justified appropriation and the replacement of legitimate Kings and Queens with illegitimate and pseudo-leaders appointed to administer empire. From that fiction, the colonial project moved to British Direct Rule ( BIR) in 1886, and then to the Berlin Conference of 1884 and 1885, where Africa was demarcated according to the economic interests of the Global North and their elites. None of this was undone at CODESA in the early 1990s. Women must be reminded of this. The negotiated settlement and the sunset clauses transferred the architecture rather than dismantled it. The result is the system we live with today: Traditional Governance and Traditional Leadership Acts that view Royal Monarchies through Global North lenses. The law privileges appointees over inheritors, administration over custodianship, and written archives over oral memory. This is not reform. It is continuity. It is hegemony dressed in democratic language by the Republicans and so called democrats.
The cost of this continuity is measured in erased Kings and Queens and displaced Royal Aristocracies across all pre-colonial Kingships and Queenships in Africa. The cases of AmaCirha Royal Monarchy at the Cape and the Vhasebzi Royal Council in Limpopo are not isolated. They are the founding and microcosm of defeated Royal Monarchies. Their histories tell a continental story. From the Cape to Limpopo, from the Zambezi to Kilimanjaro, to Cameroon and Ancient Egypt, Royal African Monarchies have been reduced to “tribes” and their leaders reduced to “traditional leaders” who account to a system born of British Indirect Rule ( BIR) in post-colonial Africa and post-apartheid South Africa.
Language was the first weapon of erasure of legitimate Kingships like Cirha, Ndwandwe, Vhasebzi, et al. For instance, the term “Khoisan” has no root in African historiography or memory. It is a 19th century German academic coinage that grouped the Ikhwe (Iingqwayingqwayi or Khoe) and the San (AbaNtu baseNtabeni or AbaThwa), Nguni supposedly Ngoni as “half-human” because their languages were deemed strange to the writers. In African oral memory there is no such fusion. There are Iingqwayingqwayi (Inkhwe or Khoe) trusted juristic persons who have lived side by side with Bantu and AbaThwa across African soil. There are AbaNtu baseNtabeni ( San), the people of the mountains, or AbaThwa. There are Bantu, Ngoni, the holy people. These three streams appointed monarchs as custodians of heritage and land. All derive from Ntu, meaning person and humanity. Long before Portuguese ships in the 1460s at the Cape Point, Dutch settlement in 1652, and British colonies of 1806; these peoples co-existed. That is why the liberation struggle in the Cradle of Humankind adopted “side by side” as ethic and strategy against an inhuman system imported from the Global North Royal Monarchies and their elites. It was not new. It was a return to an older order, ie, correct the broken foundations.
The post-1994 period was meant to correct this. Instead, the Government of National Unity ( GNU) under Mandela’s guardianship, stewardship and leadership, and subsequent administrations, working through the Congress of Traditional Leaders of South Africa (CONTRALESA), and the National House of Traditional Leaders, continued to administer Royal Monarchies as if they were colonial departments. The Traditional Governance and Traditional Leadership Acts are applied with bias. They confer recognition on fabricated authorities while authentic houses such as AmaCirha, AmaNdwandwe and Vhasebzi Royal Monarchies remain in dispute and in poverty. The State therefore lacks the moral authority to lead royal clans and communities. What was needed was revolutionary restoration. What we received was rhetorical democratisation. As we celebrate Women’s Month, we must say plainly that our rebirth crisis has not been met. It is central to nation-building. Our ancient practice was to live side by side. That was not about exclusion. It was about order, accountability and the protection of heritage. That protocol has been lost, and with it a key mechanism of social cohesion.
It is concluded that a people without memory are a people without a future. To restore PRIDE, defined as Production, Reindustrialisation, Innovation, Domestication and Entrepreneurship, and to build WEALTH, defined as Water, Energy, Agriculture, Accountability, Land, Legal, Technology and Health, we must first restore historical memory and rebirth. First, we must demystify colonial language. Words like “Khoisan” and “Traditional Leaders” are not neutral. They are products of terra nullius, Social Darwinism and neoliberal hegemony. Second, we must return to archaeological and oral sources. We must go back to the dust, not to mourn, but to gather our foundation from the Creator of earth and heaven. From the Cape to Limpopo, from the Zambezi to Kilimanjaro, to Cameroon and Ancient Egypt, the same quasi-mythical narrative of empty land was used to justify the same dispossession. Archaeology, linguistics and living memory together disprove it. Third, we must restore the fiduciary role of Royal Monarchies. Pre-colonial monarchies were not ceremonial. They managed land, water, justice and heritage. Their restoration is not nostalgia. It is governance, and it is economic strategy.
This is why our celebration of women matters now. We celebrate the women who gave birth to herstories, to lineages, to languages and to nations. We also remember Dr Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, who as Chairperson of the African Union Commission and as a leader of the ANC Women’s League, gave us African Union Agenda 2063. That agenda calls for an Africa of good governance, of cultural identity and of shared prosperity. It cannot be realised while the institutions that carried our heritage for centuries are treated as relics.
We respect international arrangements and diplomacy, except British Indirect Rule and the Berlin Conference of 1884 and 1885, and their impact on herstory in the Cradle of Humankind. But respect cannot mean surrender of memory. Patriots and heritage practitioners must lead the work of putting the dust back together. We must return to the roots of pre-colonial Royal Monarchies not to reject modernity, but to ground modernity in African sovereignty. Only then will the African Union ( AU) Agenda 2063 be more than a document. Only then will Albekuan be recognised in full as the Cradle of Humankind, and Africa as the home of governance systems that pre-date and will outlast colonial invention.
Dust we must. From that dust we will give birth again. To our daughters we will hand back names, titles and authority. To our sons we will hand back custodianship. To the nation we will hand back institutions that answer first to the people and to the land they have kept for centuries. That is how we move beyond Agenda 2063. That is how we ensure that the women we celebrate today are not the last to remember, but the first of many to rule in memory restored.
Prof Tsibani is a Water Governance and Heritage Expert at the University of Johannesburg. He is writing in his personal capacity. – @NewsSA_Online
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