A second plane is the linguistic manner in which that stance is described: the same broad division is re-enacted in the styles and structures of literary works. For instance, in virtually every historical work on Shaka's reign, the account begins with a more or less static description of 'Nguni society' as it 'stood' before the Shakan 'revolution' ; then 'history' proper begins, coinciding, of course, with the advent of written records and the possibility of reconstructing a sequence of explicably linked events. This is the case even with recent works deliberately aimed at rehabilitating Shaka, such as Louis du Buisson's The White Man Cometh and Charles Ballard's The House of Shaka. Of course the lack of written records is in part responsible for this, given that explicable sequence is just what 'history' has come to comprise. But there is a dearth of written records for the 'state' of Shakan society, too, and I suggest that the stylistic and structural antinomies are equally the result of the received, centuries-ingrained 'iconographies of enterrment'.65
A final knot of examples will illustrate this. A structural partition between 'ethnographic observation' and 'historical narrative' begins with Isaacs, who, in the convention of the day, appended his notes on customs and practices to the end of his work. Notable is his intensive use of stative verbs and possessives:
They are, doubtless, the most extraordinary people in existence, if we look into their peculiarities of character, and it is difficult to determine whether we should pity their ignorance or guard against their duplicity; for although they are proverbially in a state of perfect simplicity, yet there is a cunning about them, and an irrevocable desire for indulging in all their savage propensities . . .66
This is a good example of what Johannes Fabian has termed 'the ethnographic present'. As Fabian points out, this is another form of distancing, since the use of the present tense strongly implies a present speaker and hearer, a 'dialogic situation' from which the subject (here the Zulus) are in effect excluded; they are denied both 'personness' and an evolved and evolving position in time. Furthermore, the ethnographic present 'presupposes the givenness of the object of anthropology as something to be observed'.67 'Anthropological knowledge' is privileged; the Other is enterred.
Similar traces of this structurally differentiating gesture of enterrment can be found in the mainstream histories, even one like Omer-Cooper's The Zulu Aftermath, which explicitly states that the pre-Shakan world was 'far from idyllic' .68 Times were still 'relatively peaceful', by contrast with the 'anarchy' which Shaka, working with 'forces which had been gathering strength over centuries', unleashed in the 1810s. While Omer-Cooper's historical explanations are certainly more sophisticated than most of his predecessors', he still demonstrates a tendency to attribute an essential stasis to pre-Shakan society: 'the southern sub-continent seems usually to have evolved at a slower pace than the res'.69 This more muted manifestation of the Edenic is inscribed in what might be termed an 'ethnographic past':
Administrative authority in the tribe was distributed between the chief and a hierarchy of subordinates. Depending on its size, the tribal territory was divided into a number of sub-divisions, provinces and districts. Each of these was under the authority of a sub-chief and where the tribe was large there might be a two-tier system . . . All the important subordinate chieftaincies were normally held by close relatives of the chief.70
Phrases such as 'there might be' and 'normally' admit of the possibility that 'exceptions to this might arise', but essentially this is the language of Western categorisation and normative anthropology which would regard any deviation from it as aberrant. The use of the preterite, effectively distancing the subject, thus comes close to that 'narrative past' characterised by Roland Barthes as 'part of a security system . . .one of those numerous formal pacts made between the writer and society for the justification of the former and the serenity of the latter'.71 This same gesture, as Shula Marks has pointed out, commands the account in The Oxford History of South Africa, in which the 'pre-colonial history of the black man has been relegated to an anthropologist [Monica Wilson], and is handled in wholly static, a-historical terms':72 Wilson states, for example, that 'the manners of 1686 are those of the same countryside nearly three centuries later' .73
Two final points can be made. Firstly, the whole concept of the 'mfecane' – as a kind of subcontinental, endemic autophagia74 – is, in this perspective, as much the result of the myth of a destroyed paradise, constantly reinforced by the fear of renewed destruction of the reconstructed idyll, as it is the result of actual evidence. This is inscribed in numerous ways in the language of the overlord's judgementalism (enterrment). Secondly, of course, the concept itself (and whatever concept may arise to replace it, including any in the present study!) is the inscription of that logician's discourse of cause-and-effect, explication, categorisation and the representational word which, in the end, may conceal as much as it reveals.
Layback
When Nathaniel Isaacs, in a rare moment of self-reflection in his Travels, acknowledges his 'anomalous description of Zoolas – savage yet hospitable',75 he is not merely balancing two irreconcilable facets and leaving the judgement to his narratee. Embedded in massive derogation and undisguised Eurocentrism, this momentary 'admission' is more likely to be just another reification of the incomprehensible. This is not to deny that there is a genuine inner tension here, but the actual manifestation of the tension, when placed in context, serves primarily to reinforce the Eurocentric foundation of the discourse itself.
The Shakan literature is riddled with ambivalences, contradictions and paradoxes: admiration vies with repulsion, derogation with lionisation, ethnographic insight with Eurocentric judgement, assiduous fascination with practical oppression. Doubtless much of this is unavoidable in any kind of cross-cultural discourse. Some of it, however, like this example from Isaacs, is more than simple equivocation; it actually functions, in a more backhanded way than enterrment, to promote the interests of the writer and his group. For this gesture I offer the term layback.
The word is derived from rock-climbing; it describes a technique used to climb a vertical crack in a chimney, in which the feet are placed against the rock and push outwards, while the hands, inserted in the crack, pull inwards; by the friction and tension thus achieved progress is made upwards. In the textual context to which I now transfer it, it denotes an inner tension or ambivalence, used within a single narrative gesture to reinscribe an aspect of Eurocentrism; for this reason I will isolate it largely among stories told of Shaka (stories of which even the 'history', or perhaps more accurately, the 'biography' of Shaka almost wholly consists).
The layback gesture is frequently made quite plain. For instance, when Viola Ridgway characterises Shaka in her novella as 'the cruel Brave', this is not merely the inscription of an unresolved paradox. It is already the distillation of numerous illustrative anecdotes; the adjective 'cruel' has already been laden with judgement. In its context, the epithet serves as the touchstone for the assertion of the writer's own values, which are kindness, even-handed justice, restraint. Much the same can be said of the antithetical motion of approbation contained by 'Brave'. Ridgway 'happens' to make this explicit in her very next lines:
If these stories from the life of Shaka have softened the old ideas of this great leader, and brought the reader a deeper understanding of his faults and his greatness, they will not have been written in vain. Perhaps, some day, there will be another leader among the black men, with Shaka's genius for leadership and organization, tempered with the democratic ideas of the white man for trade, scientific cultivation of the soil and development of the wonderful inventions of the modern world, a