Vernacular traditions as counter-hegemonic archives in Eastern Cape historiography

There is a rich archive of African-language historical writing that was produced in South Africa in the late nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth century, but it has remained marginal to the debates that have shaped knowledge production about the country’s past for nearly a century. By default or design, the discipline of history in South African universities has devoted ample attention and debate to works written in English and Afrikaans, largely by white historians, while works by African authors, especially in indigenous languages, have been engaged cursorily if at all. This indigenous archive includes not only classics such as Walter