Similarly, in his magnum opus, Olden Times in Zululand and Natal, Bryant uses the stereotypical language of popular fiction to enliven an alleged incident of Shaka's reign, in which 'natural' sensuality is murderously punished:
One hundred and seventy boys and girls caught in the height of their merriment, were hurdled like sheep for the slaughter within the cattle-fold, tremblingly awaiting their doom. Nor needed they wait long. His majesty, the personification of death, appeared at the gateway like an awful spectre, picked out several fine lads, 'the worst', ordered their necks to be wrenched by their own 'brothers', then be dragged away and beaten by sticks until life became extinct. After this fiendish prelude, a general and indiscriminate butchery followed . . . a happy spot on God's earth, a moment before sparkling with youthful vivacity, became at once transformed into a hell of moaning and pain; and with the golden sunshine as their pall, one hundred and seventy battered children, like withered wild-flowers from the veld, were cast away on the green.44
Again, a paradisaical 'happy spot' is exploded by the implacable doom of an apocalyptic bearer of death, here even more explicitly associated with the fiendish and with Hell; again, the theme of an idyllic innocence of the young is ruptured by sibling-murder;45 and again, the very language, the saccharine hyperbole of the closing metaphors, serve to insulate us from real sympathy.
Bryant's enterrment of the people, as opposed to the place, is more clearly revealed in another description of the rape of Paradise:
The Bantu on the whole are tame and genial savages. But there are fighting-cocks amongst the hens, who now and again, here and there about the continent, grow fitfully gamy and make the feathers fly. Among such game-cocks our Nguni folk were numbered. Those halcyon days of the Golden Age ere Dingiswayo first disturbed the idyllic peace marked but an interval wherein the aggressive, plundering spirit of the race lay for the moment torpid. Once the ancient fire had been by Dingiswayo re-kindled, then fanned by Shaka to roaring conflagration, there was no longer any power to stay the natural impulse of the race. One after another wild spirits emerged among the clans, and led forth, north and west and south, fierce blood-thirsty hordes, revelling in slaughter and destruction . . .46
Here the people as a whole are animalised, their attackers simply more so; Shaka is seen merely as one form of animal life predating another, a 'wolf',47 the 'king of beasts',48 a 'wild animal',49 a 'hyena'.50 The derogation of these 'natural impulses', moreover, is delivered in a rhetoric of classical elevation, syntactic inversions and vocabulary of ponderous dignity, with an effect almost parodic; the prose itself enacts the elevation of reader above subject, and thus functions as a screen of formality.51
The 'pre-cataclysmic' 'Golden Age' evoked in the first two descriptions quoted above is, Bryant reveals in the third, seen merely as a temporary hiatus, a period of repression of innate ferocities which are capable of exploding anywhere on 'the continent' and in any direction. This is surely an expression of projected fears of a resurgence of African rebellion, such as that of 1906, through which Bryant himself had lived, and of which, again, Shaka is the most prominent and vivid icon. More accurately, Bryant invokes a myth of an Edenic state only opportunistically to reinforce a notion of revolutionary change, impelled by Shaka's personal violence.52 Indeed, true paradise has no (indigenous) men in it at all: the many battles 'pollut[ed] the virgin sward with gore and putrid corpses . . . Such was the coming of man into this hallowed paradise where heretofore nature had luxuriated undefiled in unruffled bliss'.53 Happily, the blacks' inveterate, autophagous violence, here expressed in the metaphors of disease, creates a 'No-Man's-Paradise'54 into which the white man opportunely arrives:
anon this most beautiful and fertile garden in all South Africa, this Black Man's arcady smiling, century long, in the joy of peace and plenty and perpetual sunshine, had become transformed into a sullen and desolate waste; and into this wilderness, in the nick of time, two streams of colonizing Whites, from east and from west, had as suddenly walked, and taken possession.55
Arguably, Bryant is here turning his characteristic sarcasm against the whites: the 'No-Man's-Paradise' is 'all a mirage, an illusion', the thousands of inhabitants were 'in being all the time, unseen, in hiding or in captivity', and soon making their unwelcome presence felt.56 Bryant is not above pouring vitriol on his own party – within limits:57
The history of modern European colonization among primitive peoples has proven beyond all gainsay that, where the White man wills he goes; that with him still might is right . . . this arrogant, greedy, lawless element struts over the face of the globe, disturbing all, molesting everybody, in its insatiable lust for further lands and further wealth.58
This sounds precociously 'liberal', but it is framed as a tentative hypothesis ('something of the Black man's criticism . . . might run somewhat on these lines'), and quickly slips into a revelation of Bryant's underpinning hierarchy:
To be sure, the Black man is not one whit better; but when the White man descends to do as the Black man does, he thereby lowers himself to the Black man's level and can claim no other justification for his deeds than that conferred by the Black man's sanctions. For, after all, that might is right is a law of nature; but of nature at its lowest, brutish stage, not of that higher and nobler nature which is enlightened by reason, guided by conscience, and ruled by a recognition of altruistic duties and responsibilities.59
This invokes the threat of 'going native' – the derogation of which is another gesture of enterrment – of becoming, like Shaka, 'arrogant, greedy, lawless'. Shaka is that man 'reverted not to the savage, but to the brutish stage' ,60 the real propagator of imperialistic violence. So Bryant goes on ingenuously to exonerate the Natal whites altogether:
The acquisition of Natal by Briton and Boer was not, we are happy to state, accomplished by such methods – in the last instance . . . The Natives of Natal lost their fatherland largely owing to a misunderstanding and a mischance [!].61
Bryant continues to place himself and his culture on the moral high ground, so enterring 'the Other' with a palpable defensiveness. In effect, he postulates a kind of 'reconstructed Eden', built by hard European work and suffused with Christian values.62
Bryant's propagation of those values, like Watt's, involves a withdrawal from insight and empathy, which in turn is the foundation of the language of clichéd, formless, exaggerated violence with which he describes the Zulu. In contradistinction, a certain type of discourse is being more or less explicitly privileged, one framed by a distinctively Western logical structure of cause and effect, classification, judgement.
This is inscribed, for example, in Isaacs's faintly ambivalent condemnation of Shaka as a 'giant without reason'63 – a judgement consonant with and dependent on the views expressed in his Introduction. There, Africa is characterised as 'vast', 'trackless' and 'impenetrable', full of 'wild', 'noxious' and 'ignorant' people; Isaacs's ideal explorer's task is to achieve an Africa 'accurately described', 'delineated' and 'minutely investigated' by a 'general and comprehensive' mind, resulting in a 'stock of information' 'elaborately and clearly laid down' :64 the reconstructed Eden, again. This is the kind of late Enlightenment discourse privileged by Bryant, who repeatedly relates oral traditions in a wickedly sarcastic vein, only to revert triumphantly to his own conception of adequate historical explanation. The same is true of Watt's novel, in which a good deal of very precise documentary research into the whites' activities, expressed in the unvarnished style of the serious researcher, is dramatically juxtaposed with the virulence of the Zulu scenes.
Some implications of these