These are not isolated examples; and the metaphors persist into the mainstream histories. Thus Shaka unleashes a 'wave of bloodshed' (Cory),18 or becomes the 'storm-centre' of the 'mfecane' (Eric Walker; Omer-Cooper);19 the 'upheaval' and 'turbulence' caused by a 'galaxy of leaders' (Omer-Cooper)20 is 'cataclysmic' (Davenport),21 an 'eruption' (Ballard).22 In this way the central idea of the revolutionary and irresistible power of the Shakan state is built into assessments otherwise quite different from each other. Similarly, even Omer-Cooper, despite his project of putting a positive gloss on Shaka's nation-building project, reveals a palpable repugnance in his diction of predation, rape and aberration: 'ravenous hordes of pillagers' throw 'peaceable tribes' into 'turmoil and confusion', 'accompanied by carnage and destruction on an appalling scale' in which 'whole tribes were massacred', and Shaka's armies 'ravished' others' territories and inflicted 'monstrous sufferings' on his own.23
More important is Darlow's assertion of linguistic inadequacy in the face of 'savagery'. It is the same kind of alleged inadequacy embodied in the language of the clichéd, formless, exaggeratedly violent popular literature to which Shaka has always been confined (in this sense, the choice of genre itself is a form of enterrment). Elizabeth Paris Watt's historical novel Febana (1962) is paradigmatic:
All the torture and damnation of hell itself rent the shuddering night as human flesh and blood in searing anguish ran this fearful race of death . . . No words at the command of civilized man could describe the horror of all that followed . . . the awful bloodshed, the wild mingling of battle-cries, the screams of hate and fury, the groans of anguish, the massacre and revolting mutilation.24
This kind of dismissively unindividuated description still echoes through the histories: in Leonard Thompson's A History of South Africa women and children are 'massacred' with 'unprecedented ferocity' in a 'reign of terror', the landscape 'littered with human bones' in the Zulus' 'zeal for conquest'.25 Thompson's 'despotic and capricious' Shaka is still the centrepiece of this 'internal' development. The characterisation is here also intimately related to the deepest possible enterrment, that of relegating the Zulus to the underworld. In Watt, Shaka is 'Satan himself hearing the hiss of hell's flames and the dying agonies of the damned',26 echoing Isaacs's duplicitous 'giant without reason'27 and Bryant's 'Satanic majesty', 'devil', and 'arch-demon of iniquity'.28
Like Darlow, Watt explicitly states the incapacity of her 'civilized' language to accommodate the Zulu reality – hence the resort to cliché. As Russell Martin has noted, this syndrome begins with Isaacs's struggle 'to devise a suitable language that will convey his apprehension of an historical figure and a society, utterly outside his own and his audience's experience and understanding'.29 Hence, for instance, Isaacs's statement that Shaka 'finally succeeded in establishing a sort of Zoolacratical form of government (if I may so term it, for I do not know of anything resembling it in either ancient or modern history), a form that defies description or detail',30 and his more ambivalent withdrawal from the effort to describe Shaka's atrocities 'too harrowing to be narrated'.31 Similarly, Holden noted that 'those who have written about [Shaka] have laid the English language under contribution in order to find suitable epithets to describe his horrible and revolting conduct',32 adding, 'No language can describe the frantic joy of the conquerors: their hideous yells, their vociferous songs, their savage delight, exceeded all bounds.'33 George McCall Theal lamented Shaka's career of 'such cruelty as is hardly comprehensible by Europeans'.34 This is echoed half a century later by Edgar Brookes and Colin Webb, for whom the suffering caused by Shaka is 'almost indescribable'.35
In effect, language-use enacts those 'bounds', constitutes a 'pale' beyond which Shaka and the Zulu are linguistically banished, in its extreme form to a realm of utter incomprehensibility. The Zulu are reduced to a 'blank darkness', to use Miller's title, the ultimate form of the negatives so commonly employed – unrestrained, irredeemable, insatiable, inhuman, and so on. This is one of the conceptual preconditions developed for white narratives of Africa, as Edgar Wallace wrote: 'There are many things that happen in the very heart of Africa that no man can explain . . . a story about Africa must be a mystery story.'36 Thus, for Bryant, 'The Bantu character is one to us not easily analyzed. It is largely a study in contrasts; one may say, even in paradoxes.'37 Shaka is the epitome of this indecipherability: 'But who shall fathom the devious ways of Shakan diplomacy?'38 His 'caprice' and 'deviousness' is thus seen as iconic of a general incomprehensibility inherent in 'the Bantu character' (itself a reification which writers 'observe' and 'study' while simultaneously inscribing its impenetrability); this caprice serves as a cornerstone of historical explanation right up to, as already noted, Leonard Thompson. Brookes and Webb, again, attribute to Shaka 'complete unpredictability', then in order to circumnavigate the threat to a logical historical explanation that this poses, resort to a neat tautology: 'To reconcile these conflicting qualities is difficult except by the assumption that Shaka, like Napoleon, considered himself above morality, responsible to none, and free from ordinary restraints.'39 This is the historiographical version of McMenemy's fictional gesture of simultaneous repulsion, mystification and enterrment: Shaka is finally 'neither good not evil; more, he was a personification of that affliction which life produces now and again, an impersonal product of nature'.40
The impulse to associate the Zulu with raw nature is often entangled in another gesture of enterrment: the embedding of the people in the landscape. This usually occurs within the ethos of a kind of qualified 'Edenism' – qualified because it is not an Eden in which the white writer actually finds participation possible. J.M. Coetzee has argued that a pure Eden-myth failed to take hold of the South African literary imagination as it did the American: the white settlers in the former were rather 'apprehensive that Africa might turn out not to be a Garden but an anti-Garden, a garden ruled over by a serpent, where the wilderness takes root again in men's hearts'.41 Shaka is the symbol of that fear.
A.T. Bryant puts it this way in A History of the Zulu:
Out on the grassy plain, amidst the blue forget-me-nots and the pink gladioli, placidly moved the grazing herds, while groups of merry herdboys, clad only in the sheen of the setting sun, fluted plaintively on their panpipes hard by, as though to say, 'Sun! goodbye! goodbye!' Away in the distance, circles of grass brown huts, each with its attendant patch of waving millet, were scattered here and there where, had we approached, we should have found the elder folk peacefully assembled – busy women in their leathern kilts and swarthy damsels in their girdles of fringe, moving artlessly to and fro, while the men squatted leisurely about, plying their simple trades of wood-carving or basket-making, little knowing that the angel of death even then hovered above them.
Such was the pleasing idyll that everywhere rejoiced the traveller's gaze as he passed through the breadth of Lalaland betwixt the Tukela and Mngeni in the year 1810. And with the dawn all this picture of living loveliness was to be blotted out. The reign of Appollyon [Shaka] would enter in the night and this happy spot would become the Armageddon on which the corpses of the wood carvers and basket makers would be strewn o'er the plains. Infants would be pinned to the backs of their slaughtered mothers, tender trembling children would be struck down in their homes, cattle and panpipes would be swept furiously from the hillside – bloody devastation would stalk triumphant through the land and beautiful peace would die a violent death.42
Romantic language of sensual indolence and music in a Georgian landscape of levelled, floral luxuriance, in which nakedness is unabashedly paraded and labour is blissfully aimless, is reinforced by a sequence of gently tumbling relative clauses, present participles and archaisms, evoking a timeless idyll of humans in harmony with nature and each other.
Superficially, this is not a gesture of enterrment, appearing more positive than derogatory. But Bryant deliberately distances the scene: it is panoramic rather than insightful; some things we would observe only 'had we approached'; the traveller remains a hypothetical one, despite the spurious specificity of '1810'; the views of boys 'clad only in the sheen of the setting sun' and of 'swarthy damsels' are distinctly voyeuristic. The anachronisms ('panpipes'), clichés and stereotypes (the 'corpses . . . strewn o'er the plains' is a staple of