35.For more on the essentially shamanistic nature of Bushman rock art throughout southern Africa see, for example, Lewis-Williams 'The Economic and Social Context'; J.D. Lewis-Williams, 'Introductory Essay: Science and Rock Art, South African Archaeological Society, Goodwin Series, 4 (1983); Lewis-Williams, 'Ideological Continuities in Prehistoric Southern Africa'; J.D. Lewis-Williams, 'Paintings of Power: Ethnography and Rock Art in Southern Africa', in M. Biesele, R. Gordon and R. Lee, eds, Past and Future of !Kung Ethnography, Hamburg, 1986; J.D. Lewis-Williams, Discovering Southern African Rock Art, Cape Town, 1990; Lewis-Williams, 'Ethnographic Evidence Relating to "Trancing" and "Shamans'"; T.N. Huffman 'The Trance Hypothesis and the Rock Art of Zimbabwe', South African Archaeological Society, Goodwin Series, 4 (1983); T. M.O'C. Maggs and J. Sealy, 'Elephants in Boxes', South African Archaeological Society, Goodwin Series, 4 (1983); R. Yates, J. Golson and M. Hall, 'Trance Performance: The Rock Art of Boointjieskloof and Sevilla', South African Archaeological Bulletin, 40 (1985); R. Yates, J. Parkington and T. Manhire, Pictures From the Past: A History of the Interpretation of Rock Paintings and Engravings of Southern Africa, Pietermaritzburg, 1990; S. L. Hall, 'Pastoral Adaptations and Forager Reactions in the Eastern Cape', South African Archaeological Society, Goodwin Series, 5 (1986); Hall, 'Hunter-gatherer-fishers'; A.H. Manhire et al, 'Cattle, Sheep and Horses: A Review of Domestic Animals in the Rock Art of Southern Africa', South African Archaeological Society, Goodwin Series, 5 (1986); P.S. Garlake, The Painted Caves: An Introduction to the Prehistoric Rock Art of Zimbabwe, Harare, 1987; P. S. Garlake, 'Themes in Prehistoric Art of Zimbabwe', World Archaeology, 19 (1987); P.S. Garlake 'Symbols of Potency in the Paintings of Zimbabwe', South African Archaeological Bulletin, 45 (1990); J. Deacon, 'The Power of a Place in Understanding Southern San Rock Engravings', World Archaeology, 20 (1988); T.A. Dowson, 'Revelations of Religious Reality: The Individual in San Art', World Archaeology, 20 (1988); T.A. Dowson, Rock Engravings of Southern Africa, Johannesburg, 1992; Kinahan, 'Pastoral Nomads', J.D. Lewis-Williams and T. A. Dowson, Images of Power: Understanding Bushman Rock Art, Johannesburg, 1989; Mazel, 'People Making History'; J. Parkington, 'Interpreting Paintings without a Commentary', Antiquity, 63 (1989).
36.Lewis-Williams, 'The Economic and Social Context'; C. Campbell, 'Contact Period Rock Art of the South-eastern Mountains', M.A. dissertation, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 1987.
37.Lewis-Williams, Believing and Seeing, 103–16; Lewis-Williams, 'The Economic and Social Context'; Campbell, 'Contact Period Rock Art', 38–55.
38.J. B. Peires, The House of Phalo: A History of the Xhosa People in the Days of their Independence, Johannesburg, 1 9 8 1 , 2 4 .
39.P. Wiessner, 'Reconsidering the Behavioural Basis for Style: A Case Study Among the Kalahari San', Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 3 (1984); P. Wiessner, 'Is there a Unity to Style?', in M. Conkey and C. Hastorf, eds, The Uses of Style in Archaeology, Cambridge, 1990.
40.P. Vinnicombe, People of the Eland: Rock Paintings of the Drakensberg Bushmen as a Reflection of their Life and Thought, Pietermaritzburg, 1976; J.D. Lewis-Williams, ' "People of the Eland": An Archaeo-linguistic Crux', in T. Ingold, D. Riches and J. Woodburn, eds, Hunters and Gatherers: Property, Power and Ideology, Oxford, 1988.
41.For a more fully developed discussion, see T. A. Dowson, 'Pictorial Pasts: Bushman Rock Art and Changing Perceptions of Southern Africa's History', Ph.D. thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in preparation.
42.Richner, 'Eastern Frontier Slaving'.
43.For numerous reports on Bushmen, their raids and raids against them, selling of their children, and slaving, see A. Smith, Andrew Smith's Journal of his Expedition into the Interior of South Africa, 1834–1836, intro. and notes by W.F. Lye, Cape Town, 1975, 44, 284; Richner, 'Eastern Frontier Slaving'; and BPP, 'Reports and Papers on the Affairs of Cape Colony', for numerous reports on Bushmen, their raids and raids against them, selling of their children, and slaving.
44.A.G. Bain, Extracts from the Journals of Mr Andrew Geddes Bain: Trader, Explorer, Soldier, Road Engineer and Geologist, ed. by M. Lister, Cape Town, 1949.
45.Wright, Bushman Raiders of the Drakensberg, 62.
46.Wright, Bushman Raiders of the Drakensberg, 34.
47.Vinnicombe, People of the Eland, 12, 14; see also Wright, Bushman Raiders of the Drakensberg, 33–4.
48.W.E. Stanford, 'Statement of Silayi, with Reference to his Life Among the Bushmen', Transactions of the Royal Society of South Africa, 1 (1910), 436.
49.Wright, Bushman Raiders of the Drakensberg, 189.
50.D.F. Bleek, 'Beliefs and Customs of the /Xam Bushmen', Part 7, entitled 'Sorcerers', Bantu Studies, 9 (1935).
51.J. Cobbing, 'The Mfecane as Alibi: Thoughts on Dithakong and Mbolompo', Journal of African History, 29(1988), 487–519.
52.C. Campbell, 'Images of War: A Problem in San Rock Art Research', World Archaeology, 18(1986); Campbell, 'Contact Period Rock Art'.
53.Campbell, 'Contact Period Rock Art'.
54.Stow, The Native Races of South Africa, 229.
55.D.F. Ellenberger, History of the Basuto: Ancient and Modern, London, 1912.
56.Marks, 'Khoisan Resistance to the Dutch', 55–80.
57.For example R. Hallett, Africa to 1875, Ann Arbor, 1970, 238, and Thompson, A History of South Africa, ch. 1.
58.Harinck, 'Interaction between Xhosa and Khoi', 146.
59.Hall, 'Hunter-gatherer-fishers', 243.
4
Language and Assassination
Cultural Negations in White Writers ' Portrayal of Shaka and the Zulu
DAN WYLIE
The range of attitudes towards Shaka in 'colonial' writing is wide and tangled, but the strongest and most consistent has undoubtedly been one of 'character assassination'. This has varied from the openly vicious (Nathaniel Isaacs and Elizabeth Watt) through the jarringly ambivalent (A.T. Bryant and E.A. Ritter) to the concealed (J. Omer-Cooper and L. Thompson). It runs counter to, and often in confused company with, the tendency to lionise Shaka; it permeates even the most recent historiographical efforts to assess him 'objectively'.
This essay is concerned with recognisable patterns of language-use in the Shakan literature through which some common 'assassinatory' attitudes are expressed. Virtually all cross-cultural attempts to convey the Zulu 'reality', inevitably inscribe the individual and cultural identity of the writer as powerfully as they describe the subject. More accurately, what is inscribed is a certain perception of the subject, a mode of thinking about it, which is discernible in the manner in which words are chosen, juxtaposed or deployed in argument. I take it as axiomatic, then, that style, or rhetoric, is a seamlessly integral part of any portrayal of 'Shaka', and that any assessment of our primary or secondary sources depends in large part on an assessment of the heritage, resources and implications of their rhetorical choices.
There is no unmediated historical documentation of Shaka's reign. This is as true of the earliest eye-witness accounts1 as of James Stuart's oral traditions or of the latest research. 'Shaka' is in every sense a 'verbal construct'. His 'history' consists very largely of legends, or anecdotes, or lies, or inventions, rather than what we conventionally think of as 'historical evidence' (i.e. statements which we can unproblematically assume to have a direct representational relationship with 'what happened'). His portrayal is conditioned by a plethora of Eurocentric prejudices, inherited concepts and narrative conventions; his is a 'literate' mythology, whose selection of words (and by extension, selection of allusion, metaphor, sentence structure, tense,