the Liberal-manufactured accounts in their histories would have us believe that the Mfecane took place in a vacuum; that the sole agency for these events, the only actor on the stage, was the Zulu Tshaka, who chased the tribes into the wilderness. The Boers, the British colonists and the Portuguese were innocent, disinterested onlookers, playing no part at all.
The myth of the Mfecane or Difaqane was fabricated by the Boers and the British to disguise and justify their land-robbery and to whitewash their own genocidal Mfecane . . . [their] crushing of peoples by slave-running . . . [and] chasing out of the peoples whose land they wanted to grab.64
Some months before the appearance of Jaffe's article Cobbing presented his first version of his critique – 'The Case Against the Mfecane' – at a seminar at the University of Cape Town.
Conclusion
Until relatively recently, historians who wrote about the Mfecane either merely repeated what others had said or offered speculations without having done detailed research. Though, as we have seen, all historians by no means presented the same views, they were too ready to link an explanation for the process they described to the Zulu, and Shaka in particular. When detailed work was undertaken, from the 1960s, it was narrowly focused; Jaffe and Cobbing were the first, in 1983, to begin to present detailed critiques, in which the 'Mfecane' was both disaggregated and presented as a myth, distracting attention from the main cause of the upheaval, slaving and colonialism.
Fundamental problems relating to the evidence for this interpretation remain. On many aspects it is unlikely that we shall ever be able to say for certain what happened. We can see now that Rasmussen went too far when he asserted that there are 'simply not sufficient data to support intelligent discussion of most issues' .65 But what Macmillan wrote with reference to this topic is still relevant: 'History, for want of serious and sufficient documentary evidence, must walk warily.'66 His caution will have to be borne in mind by anyone bold enough to attempt the 'new and integrated conceptual framework for analysis of the period' which Wright and Hamilton have recently called for.67 Any such framework will have to rest on detailed, careful checking of the available evidence, the kind of analysis which Cobbing himself employed when in the 1970s he subjected the arguments in Terence Ranger's Revolt in South Rhodesia to criticism.68
Cobbing's presentation of his case against the Mfecane since 1983 has not only been marred by inaccurate references to the historiography – as shown above – but also by overstatements, exaggerated claims and a selective use of evidence, examples of which are cited elsewhere in this book. Nevertheless, his achievement remains: to have challenged old ideas, destroyed the concept of an upheaval that was solely Zulu-inspired, and generally to have stimulated new interest in, and research on, central themes in early nineteenth-century South African history.
Acknowledgement
I wish to thank Pam Scully for her comments on a draft of this paper.
1.J. Cobbing, 'The Mfecane as Alibi: Thoughts on Dithakong and Mbolompo', Journal of African History, 29 (1988), 487 and 519.
2.In his unpublished papers 'The Case against the Mfecane', seminar paper presented to the Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town, 1983; and 'Jettisoning the Mfecane (with Perestroika)', seminar paper presented to the African Studies Institute, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 1988, Cobbing did devote more attention to the historiography than in 'The Mfecane as Alibi'; I here concentrate on his published paper.
3.E. g. Cobbing, 'The Mfecane as Alibi', 519. Similarly, he is too ready to accept that James Stuart shared the racist views of his fellow magistrates: cf. J. Cobbing, 'A Tainted Well: The Objectives, Historical Fantasies and Working Methods of James Stuart, with Counter Argument', Journal of Natal and Zulu History, 11 (1988) and C.A. Hamilton, '"The Character and Objects of Chaka" A Reconsideration of the Making of Shaka as "Mfecane" Motor', in this volume, pp. 183–211.
4.E.g. G. M. Theal, The Republic of Natal. The Origin of the Present Pondo Tribe, Imperial Treaties with Panda and Establishment of the Colony of Natal. . ., Cape Town, 1886, 1.
5.E.g. W.C. Holden, The Past and Future of the Kaffir Races, London, 1866, ch.2. This book, by a Wesleyan missionary, was written in the early 1850s and published in 1866. The comparison between Shaka and Napoleon Bonaparte continues down to the present day; for one recent example, see B. Magubane, The Politics of History in South Africa, New York, 1982, 17.
6.As suggested in e.g. J. B. Wright, 'Political Mythology and the Making of Natal's Mfecane', Canadian Journal of African Studies, 23, 2 (1989), 278–9.
7.J.D. Omer-Cooper, The Zulu Aftermath: A Nineteenth-century Revolution in Bantu Africa, London, 1966,5.
8.Cobbing, 'The Mfecane as Alibi', 517.
9.G.M. Theal, History of South Africa from 1795 to 1828, London, 1903, 389.
10.Heinrich Vedder had the same purpose in his history of precolonial Namibia, published in German in 1934 and in English in 1938 as South West Africa in Early Times; see B. Lau, '"Thank God the Germans Came": Vedder and Namibian Historiography', in University of Cape Town, Centre for African Studies, African Seminar, Collected Papers, vol.2, ed. by K. Gottschalk and C. Saunders, Cape Town, 1981.
11.G.M. Theal, History of South Africa, 1891 ed., quoted in Cobbing, 'The Case Against the Mfecane', 7.
12.G. M. Theal, Compendium of South African History and Geography, Lovedale, 3rd ed., 1877, 198.
13.G.M. Theal, History of South Africa from 1795–1872, vol. 1, 4th ed., London, [19161, chs. 19 and 20.
14.G.M. Theal, South Africa, London, 1894, 170–1.
15.This map is reproduced in T. R. H. Davenport, South Africa: A Modern History, Johannesburg, 3rd ed., 1987, 14. It was omitted from later editions of Theal's History.
16.P. Mhlanga, 'A Story of Native Wars', Cape Monthly Magazine, New Series, 1 4 , 84(1877)248–52; Moloja, of Jozani's Village, 'The Story of the "Fetcani Horde" by One of Themselves', Cape Quarterly Review, 1, 2 (1882), 267–75.
17.J.C. Chase, The Cape of Good Hope and the Eastern Province of Algoa Bay, London, 1843, 1. Cf. W. Lye, 'The Distribution of the Sotho Peoples after the Difaqane' in L. M. Thompson, ed., African Societies in Southern Africa, London, 1969, 192 and n.l. If Theal did use Theophilus Shepstone's 1875 paper on early Natal, 'The Early History of the Zulu-Kafir Race' reprinted in J. Bird, ed., Annals of Natal, vol.1, Pietermaritzburg, 1885, as suggested by J. Raum in 'Historical Concepts and the Evolutionary Interpretation of the Emergence of States: The Case of the Zulu Reconsidered Yet Again', Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 114 (1989), 127 and n. 2, one wonders why he did not repeat the story of Dingiswayo going to the Cape.
18.G. Theal, comp., Records of the Cape Colony, vol.22, London, 1904, 433.
19.G. Cory, The Rise of South Africa, vol.2, London, 1913, 231.
20.E.A. Walker, A History of South Africa, London, 1928, 210 n.2, 182–3. Though he does not use 'Mfecane' in his discussion on pp. 182–3, it is clear that he viewed 'Mfecane' as a general term for this upheaval: cf. the sub-head on p. 164. 'Fetcani' was much used in the 1820s and 1830s, and after, for refugees who entered the trans-Keian region: see e.g.