62.H. Jaffe, A History of Africa, London, 1985, 67, n.36.
63.H. Jaffe to C. Saunders, 9 October 1991; interview with H. Jaffe, Cape Town, 16 January 1992.
64.V.E. Satir [H. Jaffe], 'The Difaqane: Fact vs Fiction', The Education Journal (September 1983), 10.
65.Rasmussen, Migrant Kingdom, 3; W. F. Lye, 'The Difaqane: The Sotho Wars in the Interior of South Africa, 1822–1837', Ph.D. thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, 1969; 'The Ndebele Kingdom South of the Limpopo River', Journal of African History, 10 (1969), 87–104.
66.Macmillan, 'The Frontier and the Kaffir Wars', 301.
67.Wright and Hamilton, 'Traditions and Transformations', 69.
68.J. Cobbing, 'The Absent Priesthood: Another Look at the Rhodesian Risings of 1896–1897 ', Journal of African History, 18 (1977), 61–84. I thank Nigel Penn for this point.
2
Old Wine in New Bottles
The Persistence of Narrative Structures in the Historiography of the Mfecane and the Great Trek
NORMAN ETHERINGTON
If Julian Cobbing is right in his contention that the root causes of the mfecane lie not in the Zulu kingdom but in disruptive forces emanating from Mozambique and the Cape, then rethinking the mfecane means rethinking the Great Trek. One of the oddest circumstances in historical writing about South Africa is that those contemporaneous phenomena, each of which has been called 'the central event in South African history', have been treated as isolated occurrences. According to the dictates of a peculiar historiographical apartheid, the only recognised linkage is the supposition that the mfecane cleared the highveld of people at the very moment the Voortrekkers decided to go and live there. This essay offers some revisionist propositions about the 1830s developed from a bird's-eye view of the historiographical landscape. The word 'revision' is used in its original sense. No new archival research findings which change our picture of the past are reported here. Instead, some familiar and obvious sources are re-examined with a view to changing standard versions of history. In particular, an attempt is made to explain the remarkable persistence of certain narrative structures in accounts of the Great Trek and mfecane written by historians working in different periods and informed by dramatically different ideologies.
When Cobbing finds the same story repeated in different eras, he suspects historians of complicity in a lie which serves the interests of dominant groups in South African society.1 Such explanations, whether cast in terms of interest group theory or structuralist theory, have much to be said for them but are less than totally satisfying because they have flourished not just at home but also abroad. Why should foreign scholarship dance to the favourite tunes of South African politicians, miners and farmers? What could move John Omer-Cooper in Nigeria or Kent Rasmussen in California to serve among the legions of 'settler history'?2 Are there not other possible reasons for the persistence of certain story-lines?
Narrative Structures that have Shaped the Trek and the Mfecane
In many ways the Great Trek and mfecane are twins beneath the skin. Each was retrospectively discovered by nationalists and historians. (Decades passed before the 'movement of the emigrant farmers' was inscribed as the Great Trek; the word mfecane first appears in history books in the twentieth century.) Each has been touted as the 'central event' or 'centrepiece' of the history of a people.3 Each, indeed, has been held to express the peculiar genius of a people. Each has been characterised as a movement of people out of touch and out of tune with the surging tides of nineteenth-century capitalist development. With a few exceptions, historians have accepted each as a unique event in human history.4
Both the Zulu kingdom and the Trekker republics are conventionally treated as states which desired more than anything else to be left alone once they had achieved their initial objectives. The similarities do not end there. Each phenomenon has been reified in both academic and non-academic publications. Their historicity is no more doubted than that of the Hebrew Exodus or the French Revolution. Although only a tiny number of historians have tackled either movement as a whole, swarms of industrious researchers have beavered away within the paradigms specifying precisely who was who, who did what, where and how.
Rising above the detailed unfolding of events, it is possible to discern three different templates governing narrative structure in standard accounts of the Trek and mfecane:
The onward march of civilisation;
The growth of a nation;
The advance of the capitalist mode of production.
Naturally, the content of these narrative structures differs according to local circumstances. Here are some examples.
The March of Civilisation
The Trek as the march of civilisation (or, in the words of Albert Grundlingh, 'resilient Afrikanerdom marching inexorably to its predetermined destination as the legitimate rulers over non-Afrikaners in South Africa'5) is pictured, not just in the works of historians such as J. A. Wiid, A. J.H. van der Walt and D. W. Kruger, but in the very bricks and stones of the Voortrekker Monument.6
The official guide still in use today explains:
[At the gate] assegaais [sic] represent the power of Dingane, who sought to block the path of civilisation . . . [The statue of mother and child] symbolises the civilisation and Christianity that were maintained and developed by the women during the Great Trek. Black wildebeest: symbolise Dingane's warriors, but also the barbarism that yielded to civilisation. Triangular Cornice: Around the top of the Monument is a cornice in a zig-zag pattern. This symbolises fertility. The civilisation brought by the Voortrekkers must grow
. . . The floor of the Hall of Heroes is lined with ever-widening rings of marble . . . which represents ripples after a stone has been cast into the water, become progressively wider until it [sic] fills the entire building. It symbolises the diffusion of the spirit of sacrifice that was generated by the Voortrekkers, and that eventually spread throughout the entire country . . . Flame: symbolises the flame of civilisation in South Africa.7
The theme is continued on the panels of the historical frieze that lines the interior. The Voortrekkers, immaculately groomed and dressed, leave the Cape colony with herds and fancy bibles. The land they enter is anything but empty. To possess it they must go into battle (the men wearing coats and ties, the women, their best frocks) against countless savage and deceitful enemies.
The classic stories of the Trek written in English propagate a very different version of the march of civilisation. According to their accounts, the torch of enlightenment carried ashore by Van Riebeeck glowed but dimly in the camps of rude frontiersmen. Out on the veld the volk lost touch with progress, took on the colours of their wild environment and passed on from generation to generation the stunted mentality of Calvinist slaveholders. When British rule stoked up the bonfires of civilisation the trekboers shrank back from the unaccustomed light. With their flocks, bibles ands bondsmen they fled to the wilderness.
Beatrice Webb had this version of history in mind when, in 1899, she called the South African War a clash between the nineteenth century and a 'remnant of seventeenth-century puritanism'.8 So did Edgar Brookes 60 years later when he called the Great Trek a reaction 'of the eighteenth century against the nineteenth'.9
More than a hint of patronising hauteur creeps into most of the accounts. It resembles in many particulars nineteenth-century stereotypes of the Irish. W.M. Macmillan was not immune:
Under these easy-going and yet arduous conditions, Dutch and Huguenots . . . were welded into South Africans with a predominantly