CHRISTOPHER SAUNDERS
The title of Julian Cobbing's article, 'The Mfecane as Alibi', suggested a key part of his argument: that the view of the Mfecane held by previous historians was not only a false one, but had diverted attention from something else of greater importance. What Cobbing called in his article 'mfecane theory' – the idea of a great upheaval caused by the Zulu – was, he claimed, 'integral to a white settler, "Liberal" history', and had been refined and elaborated in the 1960s. For Cobbing, settler historians, liberal historians and apartheid apologists were essentially all of one mind in believing that the Mfecane began with, or was caused by (if they confined that term to the consequences of the rise of the Zulu state), 'a self-generated internal revolution' in what became known as Zululand. That these 'mfecane theorists' all treated the Mfecane as something separate from the colonial history of South Africa was, he argued, no accident. There was, he claimed, an ideological purpose at work, in particular a concern to justify the racially unequal division of the land.1 What these historians had failed to point to, as the major process at work in the early nineteenth century, as later, was the violence of colonialism.
In what follows I discuss some of the earlier historical writing on the Mfecane to demonstrate that Cobbing has presented too stereotypical a view of what previous historians – hardly 'theorists' in any usual definition of that word – said about the Mfecane. He did not allow for the way in which views had changed over time, nor did he discuss previous work in its historical context.2 Historians from Theal to the liberal Africanists of the 1960s all to a greater or lesser extent saw the Zulu as playing a major role in the Mfecane, but they by no means all agreed either on its causes or its consequences. Nor did they all treat the Mfecane as something entirely separate from the history of colonisation, or ignore the violence associated with colonialism. That the liberal historians failed to give more weight to colonial violence was not because, as Cobbing suggested, they supported or were linked to segregation and apartheid,3 but for other reasons. And it is pointed out that the main ideas in Cobbing's anti-Mfecane critique are also to be found elsewhere.
Theal and Walker
Cobbing rightly recognised the crucial importance of George McCall Theal in advancing what was for long an extremely influential view of what happened in the Natal/Zulu kingdom area and the interior in the early nineteenth century. Theal's History, written towards the end of that century, told of a time of vast destruction, from the Natal/Zulu kingdom area to the far interior, begun by Shaka. Theal did not use 'Mfecane' – nor 'Great Trek', for that matter – but in essence his view of 'the Zulu wars' – or, as he sometimes called them, 'the wars of Tshaka'4 – was the same as that of Eric Walker and later historians who did write of the 'Mfecane'. Theal was not the first to describe great wars in the Natal/Zulu kingdom area in the 1810s and 1820s; earlier writers had also ascribed them to the career of one frequently compared to Napoleon Bonaparte, Shaka's European counterpart, and had gone on to describe Mzilikazi as responsible for much of the death and destruction carried far into the interior.5 Nor was Theal the first to link violence in the Natal/Zulu kingdom area and the interior,6 but he systematised and carried further earlier views, and his History was long considered by many as a basic text and near-'definitive'.
After describing the rise of Shaka, his reorganisation of the Zulu army – 'The world has probably never seen men trained to more perfect obedience' – and his military innovations, Theal wrote of Shaka's aggression and cruelty – 'such cruelty as is hardly comprehensible by Europeans' – and of the sequence of warfare from the Zulu kingdom westwards, what Omer-Cooper was to call 'the great chain of wars and migrations'7 and Cobbing a 'chain reaction or "shunting sequence'".8 No writer before Theal had presented a picture of quite such destruction and devastation flowing from Shaka's conquests; his narrative, which was dull and lifeless on most topics, came alive at this point. Clearly he wished to leave his readers with an image of black barbarism at its most extreme. After writing of a torrent of invasion', and a land 'covered with skeletons', Theal concluded that The number of individuals that perished in the whole of the ravaged country from war and its effects can only be roughly estimated, but it must have been nearer two millions than one.'9 Theal also wished to give his readers the impression that, compared to precolonial savagery and violence, colonial rule was peaceful and beneficial.10 The 'Zulu wars,' said Theal, 'rendered insignificant the total loss of human life occasioned by all the wars in South Africa in which Europeans have engaged since first they set foot in the country.'11
But even for Theal the events occurring in the interior were not altogether unconnected with the Cape colony. Had the Griqua not intervened at the battle of Dithakong in 1823, he believed, the Cape would have been invaded from the north.12 And his picture of what happened in the interior at this time was not entirely negative. His reference to nearly two million deaths concludes a chapter entitled 'Terrible Destruction of Bantu Tribes during the Early Years of the Ninetenth Century'. One turns the page to find the following chapter called 'Formation of New Bantu Communities . . .'There Theal writes in positive terms of the early history of Moshoeshoe's Sotho state and of the survival of some Tswana polities through the period of upheaval.13 In his chapter on 'The Wars and Devastations of Shaka' in South Africa ( 1894), Theal describes a 'process of reconstruction' which had taken place under Moshoeshoe, 'in one corner of the vast waste that had been created'.14
Yet the map which he included in the 1891 edition of his History showed a large part of South Africa 'nearly depopulated by the Zulu wars before 1834'.l5 And he did not alter his text to take account of new evidence uncovered in his own work, while even for his original version the evidence available to him should have led him to a more nuanced interpretation of events. Only in one footnote in his History, and in a mention in passing there drawing upon African traditions, does he provide clues to his sources on 'the Zulu wars'. We know that he not only read what was available in the Cape archives, but also collected oral evidence from Africans in the eastern Cape and trans-Kei in the 1870s, and consulted a number of published accounts, such as those by P. Mhlanga ('An Aged Fingo') and Moloja.16 Instead of analysing this evidence critically, he seized upon what would serve his purpose. Thus he took over as fact a statement recorded from an unnamed missionary in a book by J.C. Chase (1843) that 'twenty-eight distinct tribes' had disappeared in this time of upheaval, 'leaving not so much as a trace of their former existence'. Theal should have realised that the list of these twenty-eight 'tribes' in Chase's book included the names of many Tswana chiefdoms which continued to exist after the Mfecane.17 And he ignored the evidence he came across when he edited the archival records which he included in the many volumes of Records of South-East Africa and Records of the Cape Colony. In the latter, for example, he printed a report which Thomas Pringle sent to Cape Governor Somerset in 1825 concerning 'Fetcani' who had been driven from their land by 'a people of yellow complexion with black beards and long hair and who were armed with swords. This long-haired people must certainly be the Portuguese,' Pringle added, 'tho' it is odd they are not described as being armed with firearms rather than swords'.18
Alas, many later historians merely repeated, or embroidered, what Theal had written in his History. George Cory, another extremely influential amateur historian, told his readers that 'twenty-eight tribes' were 'completely wiped out' and that 'the loss of human life . . . has been roughly estimated at two millions', adding: 'Probably never in the history of the world has there been such an upheaval and such carnage caused by one man as took place during this enormous disturbance.'19 Eric Walker, Professor of History at the University of Cape Town, drew upon Theal's 1891 map for his Historical Atlas (1922), and in the first edition of his History of South Africa (1928), wrote of the 'pandemonium' that 'raged' east and west of the Drakensberg in the 1820s and early 1830s.20 Walker, who now introduced 'Mfecane', a word of Xhosa origin21 – he added in a note: '= the crushing' – pointed out that those defeated at the battle of Dithakong were possibly not the Tlokwa of 'MaNthatisi, but Fokeng.22 In the second edition of his History (1940), we read 'The Bantu still call those the days of the Mfecane . . .',23 while in the third (1957) Walker expressed no doubt that it was the Fokeng who were defeated at Dithakong, and he used 'Mfecane' more often,