Several ambivalences are tangible here. Firstly, Du Buisson seems concerned to damage the credibility of Fynn and Isaacs: his insinuation is that they were not actually horrified by Shaka's misdeeds – but Shaka was 'equally horrified' by theirs. Shaka is at least honest, it seems – or equally dishonest – even if, for him, 'life was cheap'. Not only does Du Buisson appear to accept the picture of Shaka as violent despot, he also implicitly agrees with Isaacs's judgement of 'exceedingly revolting', while simultaneously attacking Isaacs for his 'duplicity'. The final sentence here seems less an example of duplicity than of sheer, if defensive, Eurocentric arrogance; and one wonders why the contradiction between Isaacs's revulsion at Zulu executions and the meting out of his own should be merely 'curious'. 'Curiously' signals Du Buisson's hesitancy, evident throughout his book, adequately to press his conclusions; in this passage he fails to address the question of why, if Fynn and Isaacs really were not horrified, they 'professed' to be; or why, if everybody were living in a 'savage age', they thought their moral outrage should have had any effect. Behind these inner tensions, the layback gesture is visible: Du Buisson contextualises Shaka's world both against and within a European value-system which is equally distant; the nineteenth-century English being as 'other' to Du Buisson as the Zulu, he effectively inscribes his own, late twentieth-century morality over the heads of both.
In sum: once again, this is not a matter of mere fictions which may be discarded. The same impulses operate in historiographical texts, too: the crucial stories of Shaka's encounters with firearms and of his alleged land concessions are among those in the telling of which evidence is skewed or suppressed by deep-seated gestures of cultural negation.
Deadlighting
A third narrative gesture, closely related to layback, I term deadlighting, which I take from the nautical term for a stormshutter which is dropped over a cabin window or cannon-port. By it I denote a gesture by which the writer claims to 'shed light' on the Other, but inadvertently hides more than he or she reveals. There is often a certain defensiveness about this manoeuvre – a desire to conceal the writer's own predilections, or a lack of real knowledge, or a quiver of 'colonial guilt' – which the image of the deadlight also catches.
An extremely common gesture of deadlighting involves the comparison of the Other with something or someone European. This is a natural enough reaction for anyone trying to make sense of the culturally different; the Other is appropriated to, or domesticated by assimilation into, a familiar metaphor or figure. Essentially, this is a defence against the threat of the absolutely Other, an attempt to explain (and 'explanation' is the psychological cornerstone of a great deal of colonial discourse) what might otherwise be unassimilable, thus uncontrollable. The effect of this assimilation is to create a new, metaphorical 'reality' – here, a new, textual 'Shaka'.97
A particular instance will demonstrate how this works. The comparison of Shaka to other 'tyrants' – Attila, Napoleon, Alexander and so on – has become almost a reflex, so ingrained a gesture that it earns a term of its own: vindice. This I have taken from the character in Cyril Tourneur's play The Revenger's Tragedy, in which Vindice induces the Duke to selfdestruct by kissing a poisoned skull disguised as his lover. This is, in effect, what happens to Shaka; he is poisoned (or at least violently misrepresented) by being juxtaposed with another autocrat or general with whom he is supposed to have affinities. This is frequently linked to a defensive admission that Europe has also had its tyrants and its injustices;98 the term vindice thus appropriately carries the twinned connotations of vindictiveness and of vindication (either of Shaka, or of the writer's condemnation of him, or of the condemnation of his own society: the ambivalences here, as we have seen with Du Buisson, are multiple).
Once again, an example from Bryant will clarify these points. He writes: 'One judges the worth of an object by its contrast with the rest of its class. And one can gauge the true worth of Dingiswayo's character only by comparing him with other men of his position whose greatness is universally acknowledged.'99 The first sentence here demands judgement by intra-cultural contrast (the epitome is Bryant's characterisation of Shaka as the 'active doer', utterly distinct from the rest of the Nguni). The second, which Bryant in fact proceeds to follow, proposes assessment by cross-cultural similarity. Bryant then gleans examples of 'the outstanding political geniuses of the ancient Mediterranean and Oriental world' to demonstrate 'how identical were the mental characteristics which drove these men to such glorious deeds'. Significantly, Bryant chooses models from '5,000 or more years ago', assuming that this is bound to be equivalent to the present African 'stage' of development. He also selects foreign (i.e. non-British) examples, even as he argues that these were 'the founders of our own civilization': a necessary defence to accommodate his own clear preference for enlightened European advancement. Thus he goes on to argue that Dingiswayo's talents 'were buried in a field whereon the light of knowledge had never shone, and whereto the fertilizing waters of foreign intercourse never penetrated', but these abilities were fortuitously liberated by his momentary contact with a white man or men (a legend if ever there was one). After several pages, in which Bryant provides more information on other leaders than he is able to provide on Dingiswayo himself (one of the primary impulses behind the vindice gesture is to compensate for the extreme paucity of concrete evidence), he concludes that 'If Shaka was the Timur and the Attila of his race, Dingiswayo was its Menes and its Alfred the Great.'100
At least part of this contrast derives from, and is designed to reinforce, the notion of Shaka's revolutionary violence and unnatural cruelty. Two further points need to be stressed. The first is the non-Britishness of the vindice comparison: in Bryant, it is Attila, Napoleon, Caesar, the Spartans, Timur. While the gesture is occasionally in praise (particularly with Napoleon), the figure is at best ambivalently heroic. The second point is to note the way in which the vindice gesture is constantly updated, warning us again that we are dealing with Eurocentric projections. Russell Martin detects a shift from the Attila comparison to Napoleon as Shaka becomes gradually less monstrous (though the Attila comparison persists sporadically right up to the 1986 South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) television series); Alexander the Great also becomes more common in the twentieth century, where Nero was more popular in the nineteenth. After the Second World War, Hitler and the Nazis are invoked; after the 1960s, Stalin. Leonard Thompson summons 'Robespierre, Stalin, Mao Zedong' to illuminate the process whereby the rule of 'revolutionary leaders' 'degenerated into a reign of terror' (this last phrase, like 'cohorts', 'legions', 'Golden Hordes', even 'regiments', is itself a kind of vindice).101
The effect of this is surreptitiously to associate Shaka with better-documented examples of genocide, the evidence for which in the Zulu case is extremely shaky, to reproduce the undocumented prejudice evident in the earliest comparisons with Nero and Tamurlaine, to obscure the individuality of Shaka's reign, and by proxy and proximity, rather than by evidence, to exaggerate the extent of Shaka's conquests and depredations. After all, Shaka could not possibly have conquered as much territory as Napoleon did, or murdered as many people as Hitler or Stalin.
Writers are sometimes aware of the potential absurdity; and so insert a counterbalancing (additional, not replacement) argument that Shaka had as dramatic an effect in his smaller, more primitive, less technological world as these other dictators had in theirs. This is to introduce a slightly different species of cross-cultural comparison, the difficulties of which Bryant almost inadvertently lays bare:
In writing or reading of the rulers of simple, primitive tribes, we are wont to use the grandiloquent terms and to imagine the magnificent state appropriate to our modern European royalties. We assume that our reader possesses the ability to visualize things in their proper perspective and to realize that, though the events herein recorded occurred but one short century back, the conditions under which they occurred were those of many thousands of years ago. Yet it is not easy for everyone to place himself mentally two or three thousand years back in the days when our own 'kings' wore raiment and ate food and dwelt in habitations we would now not offer to a beggar, and ruled over 'peoples' too few to run a modern factory. We call wretched and unsavoury grass hovels 'palaces,' and speak of 'great battles' and 'conquests' fought and won where the combatants were a couple of score a side . . . The general idea