In the process, a great deal of local historical data was compiled, particularly in the Griqua towns of Danielskuil, Jenn-haven and Philippolis. This is drawn primarily from church records and the title deed registers at the Deeds Registry.

The data is now available for publication and this process will be advanced with expertise from the ICDF and the wider UFS community of experts. This is a collaboration between the UFS and the KDF, since the project manager of the Forgotten Highway Route, Prof Doreen Atkinson, has accepted a part-time position at the UFS Interdisciplinary Centre for Digital Futures.

The use of genealogical data, such as church registers, opens a new window for community and family empowerment. Many communities in South Africa do not have the means to search for their own family and community histories.  Genealogy remains a largely white middle-class interest, and our desire is to assist previously marginalised communities to capture their own family histories, and to potentially share it on ICDF's data platform.  

Genealogy is an important route to social inclusion and to address problems of social alienation.  One important avenue to do this is via the school curriculum. We intend rolling out genealogical projects for high school learners at towns along the Forgotten Highway Route. Our initial focus will be on Danielskuil, Fraserburg, Griquatown and Postmasburg.

In addition to the data that has already been captured, there are several additional data sources that can be processed, including the church registers of the Congregational Church (the erstwhile London Missionary Society) at Moffat Mission in Kuruman; the NG and VGK churches in Fraserburg and Griquatown (Danielskuil is already captured); and the family histories of the Kgosis people at Jenn-haven (near Postmasburg). The Kgosis were removed from the Lohatlha Army Training Centre near Postmasburg in the 1990s.

KDF is also currently collaborating with the Department of Classics at Stanford University, USA, to develop public profiles of museums along the route. Our focus will be on the museums at Griquatown, Fraserburg and Kuruman (Moffat Mission). This, in turn, will offer attractive visual material for the broader public, as well as for the learners and teachers in our focus towns.

The process of collaboration between a wide variety of stakeholders is likely to be highly creative, pushing everyone's boundaries, but ultimately creating knowledge assets which are not only useful to the academic community, but also to local communities in a previously neglected and remote area of South Africa. 

Given the prevalence of artists in this area of the Limpopo Province, an initiative, the Ribola Art Route was created by LoveLimpopo Well-known artists, some of whom are still alive, have their work on display on this art route. Artists such as Jackson Hlungwani (passed on in 2010 – in New Jerusalem in Mbokota close to Elim), Thomas Kubayi, Lucky Ntimani, Patrick Manyike, Kenneth Nonyana, Dr Phuthuma Seoka, Samson Makwala, Bevan Mkhabele (passed on in 1980), Johannes Maswanganyi, Collen Maswanganyi, Amorous Maswanganyi, Richard Chauke, and Philip Rikhotso among others.

ZZ2 requested assistance from the UFS to engage critically and academically with this unique and valuable collection, for two main reasons:

Firstly, to conserve and to make accessible this treasured collection to the immediate community and possibly to the wider world, and

Secondly, to use this collection as a conduit to engage in meaningful, important yet sensitive issues of heritage, belonging, and deeper cultural understanding.

This rich source of information lends itself to a variety of academic projects, especially within the Humanities and Social Sciences disciplines. These works of art by contemporary and past artists hold promise to unlock unique opportunities for scholarship of engagement and teaching objectives. The context and narratives of the artwork and artefacts will also allow for deep social scientific enquiries that could ideally translate into interdisciplinary projects where narratives and art are exhibited in unison

 We intend to embark on an ethnographic study of current artists in the area, and to see their interpretation and additions to the existing canon of artefacts and associated myths, symbolism, and the evolution of meanings and interpretations over the years. From a scholarly perspective, there is also a deep interest to translate the narratives captured more than 20 years ago and to juxtapose these with contemporary understandings and interpretations of cultural meaning. It is believed that Witt commissioned the daughters of one of Limpopo’s well-known sculptors, Philip Rikhotso in the early 2000s to collect folk tales and stories about Rikhotso’s characteristic and phantasmagorical sculptures. Over 20 notebooks full of stories written in “deep” and complex (replete with figurative speech) Xitsonga were generated as a result.

During our September 2022 “fact finding mission”, ICDF scholars engaged with a variety of local inhabitants to ascertain how to go about translating these stories into English to use in combination with the Rikhotso sculptures. The explicit aim is to avail this collection – the stories and the sculptures – to a larger national and international audience through digitalising parts of the Rikhotso collection (sculptures and stories).

During our fact-finding mission in 2022, we met a local public historian, Richard Mabunda, who started Thomo Heritage Park in Giyani. We visited this park and got immersed in the knowledge of the area and the Tsonga people through the renditions of Richard Mabunda. He is a well-known public figure among the Tsonga people, and he is also known to Rikhotso’s family (his daughters too). Richard Mabunda is in the process of translating these handwritten stories. Interviews with living storytellers (or proxies of those who have passed away) took place first discuss around intellectual property and authorship of the stories, as well as to gauge the level of cultural sensitivity in relation to this translation process.

We envision a long-term, interdisciplinary, and evolving project to grow from this unique opportunity where we embark on engaged scholarship to the benefit of communities and quality academic outflows, given the interdisciplinary nature of the team, comprising the ICDF, academic departments of Anthropology, Fine Arts, Art History, Sociology, the Stegmann Art Gallery, the Digital Scholarship Centre, as well as non-academic partners (ZZ2, local community members, founders of LoveLimpopo, Thomo Heritage Park).