26.M. Legassick, 'The Frontier Tradition in South African Historiography', Collected Seminar Papers on the Societies of Southern Africa in the 19th and 20th Centuries, 2, London, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, 1971, 1–33. In 1985 John D. Omer-Cooper protested against the abandonment of frontier studies as aids to the understanding of twentieth-century segregation in 'The South African Frontier Revisited', paper presented at a conference of the African Studies Association of Australasia and the Pacific, Melbourne, 1985.
27.Peires, 'The British and the Cape', esp. 4 7 2 , 480, 499, 511.
28.'The Eastern Frontier, 1770–1812' in Elphick and Giliomee, eds, The Shaping of South African Society, 450. S.D. Neumark's ideas appear in Economic Influences on the South African Frontier, Stanford, 1957.
29.Concluding paragraph of Elphick and Giliomee, eds, The Shaping of South African Society, 560–1.
30.F. A. van Jaarsveld, Van Van Riebeeck tot Verwoerd, 1652–1966, Johannesburg, 1971, 114–5. A similar use of the mfecane is made by C. F. J. Muller in Die Oorsprong van die Groot Trek, Cape Town, 1974, in which the mfecane becomes one more factor disturbing the 'security' of white frontier farmers on the Cape eastern frontier: see especially 94–104.
31.Smith, The Changing Past, 90–2.
32.E.H. Carr, What is History?, London, 1961, 12.
33.Quoted in Smith, The Changing Past, 71.
34.He is not alone in this; African historians have been dumping mode of production analysis in increasing numbers since the early 1980s. See the special issue devoted to the question by the Canadian Journal of African Studies, 19, 1 (1985). See also my discussion of Peires, ed., Before and After Shaka in the Journal of Southern African Studies, 3 (1984), 157–61.
35.Figures 8.4 and 8.2 in Elphick and Giliomee, eds, The Shaping of South African Society.
36.P. J. van der Merwe, Die Noordwaartse Beweging van die Boere voor die Groot Trek 1770–1842, The Hague, 1937. See the discussion of this point in Smith, The Changing Past, 76–7.
37.T. Keegan, 'The Making of the Orange Free State, 1846–54: Sub-Imperialism, Primitive Accumulation and State Formation', Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 17, 1 (1988), 26–8.
38.R. Ross, Adam Kok's Griqua, Cambridge, 1976, 134.
39.Quoted by Peires in Elphick and Giliomee, eds, The Shaping of South African Society, 508. See also Macmillan, Bantu, Boer and Briton, 172: 'The presence of the Griquas helps in part to explain why it was that from the very beginning the mass of the trekkers moved so far away, instead of planting their secession states on the reputedly "empty" land immediately adjoining the parent Colony.'
40.Quoted in Ransford, The Great Trek, 99.
41.See, for example, J. Boeyens, "'Zwart Ivoor": Inboekelinge in Zoutpansberg, 1848–1869', Suid-Afrikaanse Historiese Joernaal, 24 (1991), 31–66.
42.Du Toit and Giliomee, Afrikaner Political Thought, vol. 1, 213.
43.M. Streak, The Afrikaner as Viewed by the English 1795–1854, Cape Town, 1974, 158.
44.Peires, eager to make his point about the 'revolution in government' brought by the British de-emphasizes Retief's land speculations in order to point up the way he carried on into the nineteenth century manipulations of government characteristic of the Dutch East India Company ( VOC) past. See Elphick and Giliomee, The Shaping of South African Society, 508–10.
45.Elphick and Giliomee, The Shaping of South African Society, 504.
46.Walker, The Great Trek, 154.
47.Walker, The Great Trek, 248.
48.Walker, The Great Trek, 220.
49.Walker, The Great Trek, 249.
50.Walker, The Great Trek, 247.
51.The work of Peter Delius on the relationship of the Pedi polity to the Transvaal government is especially revealing. See The Land Belongs to Us: The Pedi Polity, the Boers and the British in the Nineteenth-century Transvaal, Johannesburg, 1983.
52.This is true even of De Kiewiet, who noticed in A History of South Africa, 57, that 'between the exodus of the Boers and other colonizing movements in the nineteenth century similarities are easily discerned'. None the less, he too insisted that the 'Boers moved inland not to found a new society and to win new wealth . . . theirs was not the aggressive movement of a people braving the wilderness for the profit that it would bring their purses, or the education that it would give their children', 58–9.
53.J.B. Wright, 'Political Mythology and the Making of Natal's Mfecane', Canadian Journal of African Studies, 23, 2(1989), 272–91.
54.Macmillan, Bantu, Boer and Briton, 235n.
55.Houghton Library, Harvard University, Archives of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, folio 15.4, vol.2, D. Lindley to Rufus Anderson, 27 March 1838.
56.Du Toit and Giliomee, Afrikaner Political Thought, vol. 1, 228, 284.
3
Hunter-Gatherers, Traders and Slaves
The 'Mfecane ' Impact on Bushmen, their Ritual and their Art
THOMAS A. DOWSON
Julian Cobbing's critique of the notion of the 'mfecane' has, despite some criticism, provided a framework for the integration of what have been many different sectional histories of South Africa.1 But, because early accounts of South Africa's past have not yet been totally unloaded of prejudice and of the colonists' legitimising ideologies, other myths and cultural stereotypes continue to act as alibis for present-day cultural divisionist policies. One such myth is the part played by various Bushman groups2 in the colonial history of southern Africa. If we are to abandon the 'mfecane' myth because of its role in legitimising the apartheid state, the new historical constructions of the period conventionally designated the 'mfecane' should take cognisance of all peoples present on the landscape at the time.
Here I challenge the once explicit, now implicit, view that 'of the unlucky Bushman there is little for history to say'.3 Perhaps one of the reasons for this view having become implicit is that although some historians have already confronted the issue,4 they have not been able to develop an approach that reincorporates the Bushmen fully into southern African history. As a result many historians have ignored archaeological discourse and have tended to rely on cultural stereotypes. Nigel Penn, however, presents us with a notable exception in this regard for the western Cape.5 In this essay I advance a methodology that will allow us to restore the Bushman peoples to their rightful place not only in the events commonly known up until now as the 'mfecane' but also in the history of southern Africa.
The Bushmen in History
The Bushmen have been politically marginalised since the arrival of European colonists. The white settlers brought with them a specific set of European morals and standards, and it was against these that the Bushmen were seen and judged. Early writers forcefully convey these essentially conservative and racist attitudes. Missionaries in particular were scathing of the Bushmen: Robert Moffat and H. Tindall, for instance, were among many who emphasised what they considered to be a lacuna in Bushman life:
Hard is the Bushman's lot, friendless, forsaken, an outcast from the world, greatly preferring the company of beasts of prey to that of civilized man. His gorah soothes some solitary hours, although its sounds are often responded to by the lion's roar or the hyeana's howl. He knows no God, knows nothing of eternity, yet dreads