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The creation of a modern, democratic, South Africa was a long drawn out process of struggle for possession of the more obvious resources and symbols - land, political power, wealth and, not least of all, the ‘right’ to author the past. Over centuries, a general image of Africa, its peoples, and their pasts, had been created by outsiders and this image, in time, played an important role in determining attitudes and relationships, especially in the development of abstract social theories. In South Africa this image was (mis)used for the development of an ideology of separation, according to which indigenous people had to determine their own future within discrete ‘homelands’, replete with their ‘own’ political culture, supported by paraphernalia and icons of an ersatz nationhood (Perry and Perry 1991: 169). In addition, a ‘past’ was supplied, courtesy of government ethnographers and historians, which was developed …