This book explores how objects landscapes and architecture were at the heart of how people
imagined outlaws and disorder in colonial southern Africa. Drawing on evidence from several
disciplines it chronicles how cattle raiders were created pursued and controlled and how
modern scholarship strives to reconstruct pasts of disruption and deviance. Through a series of
vignettes Rachel King uses excavated material rock art archival texts and object
collections to explore different facets of how disorderly figures were shaped through
impressions of places and material culture as much as actual transgression. Addressing themes
from mobility to wilderness historiography to violence resistance to development King
details the world that raiders made over the last two centuries in southern Africa while also
critiquing scholars' tools for describing this world. Offering inter-disciplinary perspectives
on the past in Africa's southernmost mountains this book grapples with concepts relevant to
those interested in rule-breakers and rule-makers both in Africa and the wider world.
