THEAFRICANS
its own right, providing examples of the constraints and possibilities,
achievements and setbacks of preindustrial and preliterate communities as
they established their niches in a variety of environments. It is also signifi-
cant as providing essential links in explaining what has followed. Indige-
nous Southern Africans were not a tabula rasa for white invaders or cap-
italists to civilize or to victimize. Over many centuries, they had been
developing social forms and cultural traditions that colonialism, cap-
italism, and apartheid have assaulted, abused, and modified but never
eradicated. One cannot understand how Africans have endured the frag-
mentation of their family lifeby migrant labor unless one has knowledge of
their customary social values and networks. Nor can one fathom the vigor
of black resistance to the apartheid state without knowledge of precolonial
African ideas about the social and economic obligations of rulers and
rights of subjects, and the basis of political legitimacy.
The precolonial inhabitants of Southern Africa, however, were not liter-
ate, and there are peculiar difficulties in reconstructing the history of pre-
literate societies. Archaeologists, physical anthropologists, and linguists