Mfecane Aftermath. John Wright

of his opposition to racial segregation, and Walker actively campaigned against Hertzog's franchise and land policies before he left the country in 1936. In their writings, Macmillan and De Kiewiet wrote much about the hardships brought by colonial penetration. Indeed, few since have written more eloquently than De Kiewiet about the consequences of conquest and dispossession.³⁶ While what the early liberals wrote had numerous shortcomings, and must be seen in the context of the time, their work did not defend segregation. And the liberal Africanists of the 1960s, whom we will now consider, were fundamentally opposed to the apartheid state and what it stood for.

       Omer-Cooper and Others

      In 'The Mfecane as Alibi' Cobbing fails to bring out the great change in attitude among historians that became evident about 1960 and flowed from the revolution in African historiography that occurred as the countries of tropical Africa moved to independence.³⁷ For those who identified with that 'Africanist revolution', the Mfecane was now reinterpreted as primarily constructive and creative. These writers wanted to show that Africans had acted with initiative, and positively. The destructive aspects of the Mfecane and European influences were both downplayed, though neither was ignored altogether. Omer-Cooper's eastern Cape roots, which Cobbing regards as significant to his view of the Mfecane,³⁸ were a much less important influence on his work than the fact that he taught at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria while he was writing his seminal book, The Zulu Aftermath: A Nineteenth-century Revolution in Bantu Africa (1966). It was at Ibadan that he was exposed to the new thinking on African history, which in the West African case argued convincingly that the European role had been grossly exaggerated in previous histories.

      The Zulu Aftermath was a pioneering work of synthesis and interpretation which told the history of a 'socio-political revolution' beginning in South Africa and reaching to 'the southern shores of Lake Victoria'. Omer-Cooper saw this revolution as 'independent of European influence in origin', but though he wished to stress that the Mfecane was the result of internal rather than external forces, he did add that as it developed, it 'interlocked with expanding European activity affecting and being affected by it'.³⁹ His main theme was state building, with the movement of people over vast distances a secondary positive development. Besides the Zulu, the other states whose history he summarises were seen as reactive states, created in response to the raiding to which they were subject. In his relatively brief chapter on the Zulu kingdom, Omer-Cooper accepted the importance of Shaka, but also recognised that the process of change had begun before, and therefore independently of, Shaka. The argument for a lengthy process of change, which at least implicitly plays down the importance of the 1820s in the state-building process east of the Drakensberg, has a long pedigree.⁴⁰

      Omer-Cooper's general synthesis was soon followed by the completion of more detailed research, especially on the area west of the Drakensberg. This was because Leonard Thompson, who began teaching African history at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), in the early 1960s, at a time when there was a great expansion in doctoral programmes in African studies, started to direct doctoral students to the topic. Thompson had decided to write a major biography of Moshoeshoe, and wished the highveld background explored. He himself wrote about the Mfecane, in similar vein to Omer-Cooper, in his chapters for the first volume of The Oxford History of South Africa (1969), and then in his Moshoeshoe book (1975).⁴¹ The students of his who worked on aspects of the topic included William Lye, Martin Legassick and Alan Smith.

      For Lye, a Mormon, the many migrations of the 1820s and 1830s, white and black, could be compared to the Morman trek, as Eric Walker had suggested in his history of the Great Trek.⁴² Lye could build on some revisionist work done by non-historians on one part of his topic: in his edition of the journals and letters of the London Missionary Society missionary Robert Moffat (1951),⁴³ the anthropologist Isaac Schapera had shown that 'MaNthatisi's Tlokwa had never been anywhere near Dithakong, and a fuller discussion followed from Marion How, who, like Cobbing later, found an alibi, though of a very different kind: hers was for the Tlokwa ruler 'MaNthatisi.⁴⁴ In a paper presented at the conference on 'African Societies in Southern Africa' which Thompson organised at the University of Zambia in 1968, Lye offered 'a corrective' to the view of massive social destruction on the highveld: in place of devastation and depopulation, he showed – this time through a detailed examination of the evidence – that there had only been displacement.⁴⁵ And in his thesis, Legassick pointed to the importance of Griqua raiding in the history of this period,⁴⁶ a theme Cobbing was to take up almost two decades later, with the new hypothesis that their raiding had been for slaves. In another dissertation completed at UCLA after Thompson left, R. Kent Rasmussen explored the history of the Ndebele state south of the Limpopo River, a central aspect of the Mfecane,⁴⁷ showing that the Ndebele had not been forced out of the trans-Vaal by the Zulu, but by Griqua and later Boer attacks, and in the process uncovering many errors in previous work, such as Lye's uncritical use of the account of Ndebele raids in Alfred Bryant's Olden Times in Zululand and Natal (1929).⁴⁸

      No work of comparable depth was completed in the 1960s or early 1970s on the Zulu in the Shakan period. Alan Smith investigated trade at Delagoa Bay, concluding that the slaves exported from there did not come from the south and were not significant in number before the 1820s.⁴⁹ Shula Marks wrote a short survey of 'The Rise of the Zulu Kingdom' and presented a critique of Bryant's work to the Lusaka conference, but did no further work on the topic.⁵⁰ Among her doctoral students at the University of London, Jeff Guy and Philip Bonner both moved in their work from the Mfecane period to later ones, and neither David Hedges's highly speculative thesis, completed in 1978, on 'Trade and Politics in Southern Mozambique and Zululand in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century', nor Henry Slater's at Sussex, tackled the overall concept of the Mfecane.⁵¹

      Meanwhile, Floors van Jaarsveld, the eminent Afrikaner historian, and other apartheid-apologists writing in the 1970s drew upon the new liberal Africanist work by Omer-Cooper and Thompson in the Oxford History to suggest that the Mfecane had created a pattern of settlement which formed the basis for the Bantustans of grand apartheid policy. Such writers also now used the Mfecane to justify the white seizure of land.⁵² Omer-Cooper and Thompson were appalled when they found their work so used by apartheid apologists, for The Zulu Aftermath and the Oxford History were written to begin the task of restoring Africans to history as active agents and not just victims, and so to help undermine apartheid.⁵³

      From the mid-1970s Africanist work began to flourish in South Africa, with workshops being held at the National University of Lesotho in July 1976 and August 1977, at the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg in October 1977,⁵⁴ and at Rhodes University in mid-1979. But in none of this work, much of it heavily rooted in materialist theory, was there a general critique of the concept of Mfecane.⁵⁵ In his introduction to the published collection of papers presented at the Rhodes Nguni workshop, J.B. Peires began by saying that Omer-Cooper's Zulu Aftermath 'firmly established the Mfecane as a central event in the history of Africa, a revolutionary process of change spreading from a single centre'. He went on to say that the Mfecane had, as a result of recent work, to be seen 'as a social and economic revolution rather than as a military upheaval', but he did not question the idea of the Mfecane.⁵⁶ Nor did Cobbing at that time; his contribution to the Nguni workshop volume accepted that Mzilikazi 'was one of the greatest figures thrown up by the mfecane'.⁵⁷

      In 'The Mfecane as Alibi', Cobbing said that the earliest criticism of the Mfecane he had traced was that in Marianne Cornevin's Apartheid, Power and Historical Falsification ( 1980).⁵⁸ Her discussion of the topic in that book on apartheid historical myths was brief and not entirely accurate;⁵⁹ many South African historians probably shared Peires's view that she had said nothing new.⁶⁰ The first general and detailed critique of the prevailing view of the Mfecane came in fact from the pen of Hosea Jaffe, amateur historian and Unity Movement activist. In Three Hundred Years: A History of South Africa, published as early as 1952, he had very briefly introduced the idea of a colonial vice to explain what happened to African societies in the early nineteenth century, referring to 'the southward influence of the Portuguese and the northward influence of the British', and relating the Portuguese role to the Delagoa Bay slave trade.⁶¹