Thus Jeff Peires could assert in the 1989 revised version of The Shaping of South African Society, that 'the central causes of this emigration are commonly agreed on by most historians'. In Peires's restatement, the advancing forces of 'a fully capitalist free market' brought a 'revolution in government' to the Cape after the British annexation. 'The territories north of the Orange and the Vaal Rivers were settled by Cape Afrikaners determined to perpetuate their threatened precapitalist social order.' The British, he writes, brought with them the new conception, 'foreign to both African and Afrikaner farmers, that land was a commodity that could be acquired and sold without ever necessarily being possessed and worked first'.27
Giliomee, rejecting S.D. Neumark's unique attempt of the 1950s to link trekboer expansion to the growth of commodity production, sees Afrikaner frontier rebels as 'poor, landless and desperate colonists' who could not reach the accommodation with British rule achieved by 'wealthier farmers [who] had come to agree that their interests lay in supporting the government'.28
Elphick and Giliomee, summing up what they see to be the dominant view of frontier history among historians at the end of the 1980s, declare that:
In the mid-1830s emigrant Afrikaner farmers, the Voortrekkers, left the eastern regions of the Cape Colony to plant new societies in the interior of southern Africa. In large part they wished to restore the traditional social order of the Cape as they knew it . . . Their successful secession . . . greatly expanded the area of extensive, low-capitalized agriculture . . . [Their] conviction and social realities formed the fateful legacy of the preindustrial Cape to the modern people of South Africa.29
Thus, what the old version of the march of civilisation depicted as a flight of 'seventeenth-century' or 'eighteenth-century' trekboers from the advancing forces of nineteenth-century progress becomes a flight of 'precapitalist' and/or 'pre-industrial' producers from the onrush of a more mature capitalist mode of production. While the denigrating anthropological stereotype of the trekboer is dumped, the underlying narrative structure survives intact in the transition from liberal-humanist to Marxist discourse.
Applying Cobbing's Revisionist Thinking to the Great Trek
All three of the narrative structures I have identified in standard views of the Great Trek are also evident in classic accounts of the mfecane.
The advance of civilisation, again cast in two versions
One version pictures barbarous, virtually self-exterminating peoples pushed on by Zulu izimpi into clearing a place for expanding settlers. The other sees the genius of black invention and statecraft working in isolation to open another dynamic chapter in the constantly changing pageant of African history.
Growth of nations, cast in a form practically identical to the Afrikaner version.
A new nation springs up in secluded valleys north of the Thukela, grows to manhood in the wars of Shaka and Dingane, suffers under the oppression of High Commissioner Bartle Frere and Natal colonists, and struggles towards a rebirth of freedom in a time yet to come. Similar narratives are, with appropriate variations, applied to the new states raised up in the turbulence that followed the rise of the Zulu.
Advance of the capitalist mode of production
The self-sufficient, pre-capitalist political economies of the Zulu state and its Nguni-speaking offshoots seek to resist incorporation into the capitalist system of production but eventually succumb to (or are 'articulated' into) that system as mining and capitalist agriculture demand the 'freeing' of their labour.
The revisionist enterprise begun by Cobbing, and lately joined by John Wright, identifies the same fatal flaw in all three master narratives: the wrong assumption that the Zulu state arose in isolation. Cobbing and Wright hypothesise the previous penetration of both the highveld and the Natal/Zulu kingdom area by trading and raiding enterprises linked to disturbing economic activity at the Cape and Mozambique, which were in turn linked to the developing world economy. This denies neither the dynamism nor the originality of Zulu or other state-builders, but it does reject the idea of primordial nations developing purely in response to their local environments. Neither is there a denial of the importance of relations of production, only a denial that the enterprises of individuals, groups and states were determined in the final instance by the predominant local mode of production. There are also, from at least as early as the second half of the eighteenth century, dynamic, disturbing forces emanating from nearby colonies.
Cobbing and Wright, who see 'mfecane theory' functioning in the interests of definable economic and political interests in the modern South African state, are perfectly aware that their own project reverberates with significance for contemporary political struggles. It challenges long-standing concepts of land rights and the legitimacy of all sorts of claims about the origins and meaning of various ethnic nationalisms. In particular, they notice how Omer-Cooper's formulation of the mfecane was spectacularly misused by F. A. van Jaarsveld in 1971 in an attempt to show that land distribution in contemporary South Africa was historically generated by the black devastations of the early nineteenth century.30 In a single amazing map Van Jaarsveld manages to link imaginary Bantu-speaking migrations from Central Africa in the eighteenth century to both the Great Trek and the Bantustans of the 1960s.
Applying to the Great Trek the kind of thinking Cobbing used to attack the mfecane also has contemporary implications, though of a different sort. Ken Smith has called attention to the way in which the Afrikaner nationalist interpretation of history began to decline from the very moment of its supreme triumph in 1961.31 Faced with the growing force of black nationalism at home and anti-apartheid movements abroad, National Party governments sought support from voters of British descent. The anti-British elements in the saga of national achievement were muted. The fiasco of the sesquicentennial celebrations, described by Grundlingh and Sapire, demonstrated that meaning is fast ebbing from the Great Trek. When I visited the Blood River monument in mid-February 1993, my name became the 62nd on the register for the month. Except for the woman serving tea I had the battlefield to myself. Plummeting enrolments in the history departments of the Afrikaans-medium universities suggest that a whole generation is fleeing the past.
One of the most interesting passages in E.H. Carr's eternally youthful What is History? is his analysis of the process by which a 'fact about the past' becomes an 'historical fact'. His illustration of the gingerbread vendor kicked to death by an angry mob in 1850 is meant to show that what one historian seizes upon as a 'fact' of great significance becomes an 'historical fact' only when other professionals accept the claim and write it into their own books.32
Because Carr, for all his relativism, believed in the project of cumulative historical knowledge, he did not contemplate the possibility that an historical fact might slip back into the primeval ooze of facts about the past. Something of the sort had been foreseen by F. F. J. Muller when he predicted in 1963 that if white South Africa disappeared as a political factor 'the Great Trek would be seen as merely a brief era of white imperialism that moved up from the Cape as far as the Limpopo or Zambezi Rivers'.33
The remainder of this essay speculates on what the meaning of the Trek may be for historians if we forsake old narratives and reshape the Great Trek to mesh with the new understanding Cobbing and Wright have brought to the mfecane.
Cobbing, like many other historians writing in the last decade, abandons the idea that analysis of a particular economy should be keyed completely to the locally dominant mode of production.34 By cutting loose from the notion that the starting point for the study of any society is a scrutiny of the predominant internal forces and relations of production, he can see a variety of factors at work. It seems to me unnecessary to ask whether slaving or trade was the external force that provoked the ingenious creation of the Zulu state. Trading and slaving, hunting, climatic change and labour-raiding can all be incorporated into a larger picture of defensive reactions and novel opportunities stirring the African people of the southern African interior toward the end of the eighteenth century.
Applying a similar breadth of vision to the Trek requires