Mfecane Aftermath. John Wright

the Zulus might have seen it, but it is certainly not how Ritter sees it, or expects his readership to see it. It is, in Ritter's own, only partially concealed, view, no more than a 'dramatic' situation of which Shaka can shrewdly take advantage; he only 'seems' to be magnified; and the medicine is shown to be really beside the point, the 'saving of the nation' in some sense spurious. In the commandeering of a 'superstition' to a political stratagem, Shaka is seen to exploit the Zulu people's 'credulity'; but the credulity is also being exploited by Ritter. While there is a stated admiration for Shaka's self-control and shrewdness, the final flow of sympathy is in fact against Shaka, since Ritter (and, he assumes, his narratee) still knows better; were it not for the implicit gap between species of knowledge, of which the European is clearly seen as the superior, this story would not have been told at all. Hence, Ritter manipulates narrative 'suspension of disbelief up to a point at which, in this and numerous other cases in Shaka Zulu, he interrupts with an explicatory comment which reasserts the primacy of European paradigms of logic or historical perspicacity: 'It is appropriate at this point to note that Shaka was far too wary to engage in the very uncertain business of rain-making, which all other chiefs, and kings, dabbled in'.⁹⁰ Ritter's contempt is evident in the word 'dabbled', and here Shaka is commandeered to support him; Shaka's stature in the novel, in the end, depends upon his being crafted to conform with Ritter's own values. Like Viola Ridgway, Ritter cannot resist making these values plain:

      One outstanding fact, however, emerges and stands forth like a shining beacon above the haze of time and controversy, and that is that the White men had some dominant quality even when in rage which compelled the black men to regard them as their superior. Shaka not only recognised this but had it proclaimed to all his nation. It had nothing to do with sky-rockets or horses or firearms, for these had been met with in the hands of Portuguese half-castes, and of the White men's Hottentots who were regarded with contempt. No! the root of the European's superiority lay in his possession of ubu-kosi – the quality and air of chieftainship – for which only the Zulu language has a single word which fully defines that otherwise indefinable aristocratic ascendancy which radiates authority without any apparent effort.⁹¹

      At least part of Shaka's stature in Ritter's eyes depends on Shaka's 'perception' in the whites of precisely the quality which Ritter has projected on to the Zulu chief in the first place; thus Shaka is, at best, admired for his 'white' traits, and at worst, positively overshadowed. Moreover, it is a Zulu word which is invoked as most adequately descriptive of this quality, a quality 'instantly and instinctively recognized by every Zulu' ; a Zulu perspective is domesticated in order to justify the white assumption of superiority; the Zulus, in effect, are obliged (textually) to connive at their own subordination. In this textual acquisition of a 'Zulu point of view', layback overlaps with what I call deadlighting, which I will treat shortly.

      One final example will serve. A crucial question which lurks behind a great deal of the writing on Shaka is the question of what light to judge his actions in. From the beginning the whites have with varying degrees of fervour condemned Shaka's alleged atrocities, even inventing increasingly dastardly deeds with which to 'assassinate' him. Isaacs almost certainly projected a great deal of his own violence on to Shaka. Some, like Holden, try to assimilate the atrocities into God's plan for the world. Some attempt in various ways to explain Shaka's violence in terms of practical politics: Lewis Grout, for instance: 'Cruel and bloody as this mighty African conqueror is reputed to have been, or as he really became in the progress of his triumphs, his policy, especially at first, was not so much the utter destruction of the neighbouring tribes, as to subdue, and incorporate them with his own.'⁹² However, Grout adds delicately, in Shaka's final years 'his own mind seems not to have been at rest' ;⁹³ there are hints here of the fast-developing idea, which would be carried by Bryant and Ritter in particular into the later histories, that after the death of his mother Nandi he went distinctly insane. Once again, Western logic seems determined either to dragoon Shaka into the realm of the perfectly logical, or utterly to banish him beyond it.

      But a more subtle tack has been to compare Shaka's policies to those pertaining to the England of the time. This has been hinted at in numerous instances since Isaacs and Fynn related how horrified Shaka was at hearing of the practice of imprisonment. There appears to be a kind of irrefutable logic to the Zulu's argument in favour of the death sentence, and the white men are, again, momentarily bested in the exchange. But there is no question that Fynn believed, on moral grounds, that imprisonment was preferable to the atrocities which he and Isaacs repeatedly condemn in Shaka. Here again we see the gesture of layback.

      Louis du Buisson's The White Man Cometh is a more recent representative. The opening paragraph of Du Buisson's Foreword is:

      It was a savage age. In England, the most 'civilised' nation in the world, boys were sent to sea at the age of six, children were made to labour for sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, in mines and cotton mills. In London, Mondays were still public hanging days.

      Du Buisson then quotes A. K. Millar on the 'heartless' customs of the English, with 'no fewer than two hundred offences for which death by hanging was the prescribed punishment', and notes that in North America 'Europeans were systematically exterminating the natives and the animals and taking over their land', and doing the same in Africa with the pernicious addition of taking slaves.⁹⁴ This appears a useful reminder that, after all, Shaka's atrocities were not unusual. But Du Buisson fails to press the point, continuing:

      1815. Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice topped the bestseller list, Beethoven's Fidelio was first performed in Vienna, the waltz was all the rage in the ballrooms of Europe, Napoleon Bonaparte faced his Waterloo and President John Madison unveiled America's latest weapon, the USS Fulton, the world's first steam-powered warship. And in a grass-hutted village on the south-east coast of Africa a young Zulu invented the stabbing-spear. In the context of time and place he might as well have invented gunpowder. By the end of that year with the great European star of Napoleon in its final eclipse, a new star was rising in Africa. Shaka.⁹⁵

      Du Buisson's purpose becomes immediately obscure. Is he merely setting the scene? But the juxtaposition of hanging-days and Austen is disconcertingly abrupt, even irrelevant, inviting awkward comparisons. The 'invention' of the stabbing spear is manifestly overstated, the tone of the passage melodramatic. This is a cinematic list of items designed for the Eurocentric reader, and whatever Du Buisson's stated purpose, 'grass-hutted' sounds either condescendingly 'natural', or slightly pathetic, against 'ballrooms', 'stabbing spear' frail against 'warship' and 'gunpowder'. It seems that something of Europe is meant to rub off on this Shaka, particularly something of Napoleon (I will have more to say on this gesture under 'Dead-lighting'). It is by no means clear whether we are to read this warship as iconic of laudable industry, or (rather indirectly) of the threat of the white man, or (perhaps unconsciously) of a belittlement of the Zulu. And it is by no means clear whether Du Buisson intends a defence of Zulu, alongside his condemnation of nineteenth-century English punishments, or to include Shaka in this 'savage age' and condemn both. In either case, the lens through which we are initially introduced to Shaka here is undeniably European; so, presumably, is the concept of justice which we are invited to bring to bear. Du Buisson goes on:

      Fynn and Isaacs ... professed themselves horrified that condemned criminals were dragged out of the [Zulu] capital and clubbed to death. But then king Shaka was equally horrified that Europeans should deprive people of their freedom for ever, something he considered more inhuman than the death penalty.

      . . . It is . . . true that the Zulu monarch's power was absolute and that life was cheap. Yet in the Cape, during king Shaka's lifetime, executions were still public affairs and accompanied by hair-raising brutality . . . Isaacs was aware of this.

      'In such a rude state of society,' he wrote, 'the death penalty for crimes of a capital nature does not differ from more civilised nations, but the execution is exceedingly revolting and only to be found amongst barbarous hordes.'

      Yet, curiously, when 'king' Henry Fynn of Natal and his chief legislator Nathaniel Isaacs set up their own government and began meting out death sentences, their victims were executed in the traditional Zulu manner – by clubbing! Isaacs crowned his own duplicity with the following comment: 'These executions contributed not a little to enlighten them