During my intended stay in Cambridge I intend to write as much as possible of a book on the development of African material culture in South Africa and the countries to its north.  The prime process which I will attempt to explain is the virtually total replacement of household goods (and indeed clothing) from what was held in the mid-nineteenth century until the present.  This work will be based on a number of sources—early traveller and missionary descriptions and prescriptions, the reports of ethnographers, from 1900 up to 2000 or later, information on what migrant labourers took back with them, and what was sold in the mine stores and the country trading stores, photographic collections, budget studies, advertisements in the black press, and, for the period after about 1960, marketing research and advertising material. I have already located and noted a considerable quantity of this material, and expect to have collected much of the remainder before I arrive in Cambridge.  This will include information deriving from the South African Advertising Research Foundation in Johannesburg, whose archives are not unsurprisingly very rich for the recent years.

In addition from such intrinsic interest as this subject has, study of changing material culture will illuminate two of the most crucial aspects of South African history during the twentieth century. The first is the striving for a “respectable”, “civilised”, bourgeois life style which was general among very large sections of the Black population (as well indeed as among the whites, Indians and coloureds, with whom I will not be primarily concerned.) Indeed, I would argue that the denial of opportunities to realise these wishes was frequently what drove political opposition to segregation and apartheid, at least as much as the denial of political rights. Secondly, and in continuation of this, the desire for material goods became manifest when the brakes on expenditure and accumulation were removed with the ending of apartheid in the early 1990s. South Africa’s economic growth since then has been largely fuelled by buoyant black consumer demand. I hope that in the course of the book I will write I will be able to explain the what lies behind that demand.

Robert Ross


More information:

NWO Project Muskets to Nokias
NWO Project Black Photographic