The echoes of Isaacs's agricultural Eden and the missionary stance of the nineteenth century are clear here: 'leadership and organization' are primary virtues, structured by science, technology and the tolerance of a democratic judiciary. The 'deeper understanding' of Shaka, ostensibly Ridgway's objective, is not in fact a resolution or explanation of the antinomy of 'cruel Brave', but an exploitation of it in the inscription of a European world-view. Neither the Zulu chieftain nor his people are viewed as whole or are accorded their own voice; instead, approved aspects – 'the one who never allowed a worthy man to go unrewarded', the 'genius', and so on – are split off, while the condemned aspects are attributed to, say, an unexplained 'madness'.77 This schizoid quality, it needs hardly be added, arises from an interpretation founded on a writer-centred adherence to values irrelevant to the Zulus themselves: the split attributed by Isaacs and his numerous clones to the Zulu character and thence epitomised by Shaka is inherent not in the Zulu but in the colonial mind, in what Abdul JanMohamed has termed a 'Manichean allegory'.78
Few writers, especially the more recent, are so blatant. But the tension of this kind of layback and its schizoid undercarriage is present in, for instance, Brookes and Webb's History of Natal: 'the qualities of the Zulu at his best are the qualities so fearfully taught in Shaka's blood-stained school – submission to authority, obedience to the law, respect for superiors, order and self-restraint, civic duty'.79 Terror and blood as instruments of this education are condemned, but the values attributed to it are precisely those 'taught', by precisely this process of fear and bloodshed, to the subject black peoples by white authorities.
A particularly common species of anecdote which embodies the notion of layback involves the meeting of Shaka with items of European technology. There are numerous stories (many common to all colonial literatures), involving mirrors, medicines, Mr Petersen's music-box, the figurehead of the wrecked vessel Mary, firearms, writing, a knowledge of astronomical phenomena, and so on. In almost all cases, what is superficially told at the expense of the white man reveals an inner tension which, on examination, rebounds to promote the white over the black.
Almost all these gestures of layback are underpinned by the promotion of particular species of logic, of the 'scientific' thought-processes and modes of expression which are by definition opposed to irrationality, 'superstition' or unintelligibility. This attitude is unconcealed in the earlier texts. Isaacs, for instance, makes no effort to hide his derision even when apparently bettered in argument, as in this exchange between Isaacs, Shaka and a Portuguese man:
[Shaka] then asked me to fight with the Portuguese, but I told him that, although our nation had conquered the Portuguese, we were now not only at peace with them, but were by treaties their protectors . . .
'Well,' said he, 'what need you care? You have once conquered, and may conquer again.' My Portuguese new acquaintance sat all this time and heard our conversation with concealed chagrin, and swelling with rage; but when we had left the presence of Chaka, we both laughed at the vanity of the savage.80
The implicit agreement between writer and narratee in this telling is that open derision is as acceptable to the narratee as it was to the white protagonists. The story is really designed to reassert the superiority of European morality over Shaka's unbridled violence. The same comfortable contempt informs Isaacs' s other stories of Shaka's encounters with medicines, firearms and mirrors,81 which became staples of the dramatisation of this particular culture-contact.
Similar, though less arrogant, is Fynn's story, also frequently repeated, of Shaka's encounter with purgatives supplied by Petersen, one of the whites' financial backers:
During my [Fynn's] absence Mbikwana informed Shaka that Mr Petersen also had medicine. Mr Petersen was requested to produce it and state its virtues. He produced a box of pills which he said were good for all diseases and strongly advised Shaka to take two. The King took four and giving one each to four chiefs, made them swallow them. Mr Petersen was also desired to take four. Mr Petersen after vainly endeavouring to convince the King that four were too much for one person was reluctantly compelled to swallow the four . . . The King now swallowed two and ordered Mr Petersen to keep him company. This Mr Petersen peremptorily refused to do, but the King insisting, and the chiefs adding the pressure of the argument that one who recommended medicines should not refuse to take them himself, Mr Petersen was compelled to swallow two more, that is, six in all. The consequences of this to a person of 63 does [sic] not require to be explained in detail.82
All the elements of subsequent stories of Zulu encounters with white technology are present here. Fynn laughs at his companion's predicament; the white man is apparently overcome by 'native logic'. But throughout there persists an awareness that it is Shaka who is misinterpreting the nature of the medicine, is being characteristically unrestrained; comment on the purgative's effects on Shaka himself is conspicuous by its absence; and Fynn suggests in an alternative version that it was 'fear', rather than logic, which forced Petersen's hand.83
Other stories, such as that of Shaka besting Francis Farewell's carpenter by forcing him to bend his house-building nails on a piece of ironwood, or demonstrating the impossibility of a round world by showing how pips fall off a turning pumpkin,84 also momentarily demonstrate the efficacy of Shaka's 'native logic' within the confines of his own paradigms; but they inevitably carry the layback dimension of exposing limitations to those paradigms, so promoting the whites' wider ones.
The incident of Shaka's encounters with a meteor or eclipse (another perennial of colonial fictions),85 has similarly been used to assert the expertise of the white man. It is presumably derived from a brief note in Fynn's Diary: 'On Shaka's preparing to attack the Ndwandwes, a meteor appeared which detained him some time from proceeding until perceiving it throwing its meteoric sparks in that direction announced a favourable issue, it being a sign that the enemy would be entirely defeated, which was verified [by the outcome of the battle]'.86 Though Fynn is largely free of Eurocentric sneering here, there is no doubt that he disbelieves this explanation himself, and regards it as an ethnological curiosity symptomatic of 'the uninformed and unenlightened state of minds, the result of ages of the grossest ignorance' which make the Zulu, 'feeling conscious of existing superior powers, endeavour to supply that deficiency by invention from their own limited ideas'.87
It is worth touching on one retelling of this story which is not a layback, in order to sharpen my definition. In Elizabeth Paris Watt's account in Febana, Shaka is depicted as 'petrified, the victim of his own superstitious fears' and 'desperate that [the comet] might be subject to the influence of the white men'. The hero Francis Farewell, of course, is 'astronomer enough to know' when the comet will disappear, and turns this to advantage. The inevitable 'verification of [Farewell's] prophecy earned Frank a veneration which secretly amused him' – and which, by virtue of this privileged insight into Farewell's mind, less secretly amuses Watt and her narratee, at Shaka's expense.88 The derogation of Shaka's fear and 'superstition' and promotion of 'science' is totally undisguised here: hence it does not qualify as layback. Where Fynn, or rather his editor, James Stuart, relegated the incident to the 'ethnographic' back pages, Watt transforms it into a turning-point of the plot, a hinge of 'historical' efficacy: such is the empowerment of logographic discourse.
A different, and subtler story of Shaka's reaction to a similar celestial phenomenon, an eclipse, is related by E.A. Ritter. There are no white characters involved here, and it is Shaka's stature which apparently is elevated, in accordance with Ritter's general lionising project. But there is a layback gesture involved nevertheless. Ritter portrays the Zulus as terrified, Shaka as calm but disturbed, 'mutter[ing]'; he is handed some medicine by one Mqalane, to spit at the sun, 'commanding it to return'. This Shaka does, the sun duly returns; Shaka's 'commanding figure seemed to be magnified to majestic proportions in that weird and unreal light'; and 'like Joshua of old, Shaka continued to exploit the dramatic possibilities of the situation', until, the eclipse over, 'there was one continuous roar of victory, which continued in triumphant waves of adulation for the all-powerful Warrior-King who had saved the nation' .89
This may or may not be tolerably close