Whether or not this is extrapolated from a genuine tradition, it is very clearly cast as a fiction, is a logographia; the tone of derision dismisses any idea that it might be intended as a genuine attempt to elucidate the Zulu mind or mores. The concentration is on Shaka's caprice; Bryant playfully colludes with his character (and with his narratee) in making the boys the butt of an obliquely lubricious jest: 'Of course, it was very wicked of Shaka to encourage vice in this wholesale fashion – if, indeed, vice there be in Nature's dictates.111 A strange statement for a priest to make, this verbal indulgence towards Africans' apparently liberated sexuality is characteristic of white writers' mingled envy and defensiveness towards a perceived threat to their own moralities. More important in the context of deadlighting is the way in which an absurd levity and contrived archaism ('quoth he', 'insooth', and so on) serve not to clarify the reality of Shaka, but to distance it. In the sentence in which Bryant pretends to 'quote' Shaka's actual thoughts (a technique possible only in a fictional, not an historiographical context), the 'light' is effectively extinguished by the trivialising anachronism.
Archaisms of language are frequent in the literature, particularly in direct speech. Probably Rider Haggard was the primary exponent of this 'imaginative, pregnant, compressedly aphoristic way [of speaking] which later writers have taught us to think typical' of 'natives', largely a legacy of Macpherson's Ossian, Hereward the Wake, and the colonial literature of the Amerindians.112 This combines with the hierarchic thought-patterns touched on earlier. Colonial writers' cross-cultural imaginative forays tended to be predicated on interwoven hierarchies of technological, religious and societal or political development, at the pinnacle of which the European, and his current modes of expression, was perceived to stand. As with Bryant's injunction to step back '5,000 years', the perception of a temporal or evolutionary progression is transposed to the immediate spatial, social and racial differentiations of actual contact, and the difference expressed in a 'speech of temporality'; that is, 'primitives' were accorded the modes of expression thought appropriate to a much earlier stage of European development.
Archaic language is, ostensibly, intended to display with greater veracity the 'feel' of primitive society; in fact it banishes understanding in favour of logographic sensationalism. The Zulu world is portrayed as being as different as possible from that of the European writer. As Georg Lukacs writes of the historical novel: 'it is a present-day story-teller who speaks to present-day readers of [the past] . . . It follows therefore that archaism must be ruled out of the general linguistic tone of the historical novel as a superfluous artificiality. The point is to bring a past period near to a present-day reader.'113 Lukacs is being prescriptive in terms of his Marxist framework, but his perception is accurate that the true ideological purpose of such popular novels and stories is often not to bring this particular past closer, but defensively to defuse it with varying admixtures of derision, improbability and voyeurism, to make it into a harmlessly bloodthirsty object of entertainment. This distancing, this spatialisation, is no different in its roots from that which impelled the pragmatics of apartheid.
Haggard's Nada the Lily was among the earliest of many stories ostensibly delivered by a Zulu narrator, among them W.C. Scully's poem 'Aceldama' (1892),114 P.A. Stuart's An African Attila (1927), Geoffrey Bond's Chaka the Terrible (1960), and Cecil Cowley's Kwa-Zulu: Queen Mkabi's Story (1966). Even some third-person narratives claim to give 'a picture of Zulu life before the coming of the white man'. P. J. Schoeman considers it 'of vital importance that we as whites should have a deeper knowledge of "the man behind the black skin" and a thorough knowledge of his past, before he was influenced and perhaps contaminated by western civilisation', and his novel claims to deliver that knowledge. 115 This tendency is by no means confined to self-confessed fiction: several 'histories' also claim to be offering the Zulu point of view, including Bryant, Ritter and Ballard.
Probably the majority of Shakan works, from novels to theses, invoke the 'genuine' Zulu voice in another way: the appeal to 'oral tradition'. Again, it began with Fynn and Isaacs; subsequently William Holden claimed the authority of oral accounts to counter some of their assertions: 'I have been brought into contact with some of the oldest and most intelligent natives themselves, enabling me to look at what transpired from their own stand-point, and record events in the light in which they beheld them' .116 Yet Holden's account alters little of substance, and even the appeal to the testimony of Shaka's nephew, 'Abantwana', is literally buried in Eurocentric comparisons and judgement. Shaka is appropriated to the Christian mythography, the Zulu said to be of 'Ishmaelitish descent',117 and so on. Nowhere is 'Abantwana' quoted, even explicitly paraphrased. The essential defensive dead-lighting of this stance is finally made clear:
We know 'how great a matter a little fire kindleth' sometimes among civilized nations; but among barbarians a single spark has been deposited in the heart, which lies smouldering for years, and then in some unexpected moment, without any apparent cause, has burst forth into a mighty flame, consuming all within its reach.118
This is the Shakan 'revolution' generalised; the fear of its resurgence – once again, capricious and mysterious – haunts almost all the white literature, often explicitly. Thus John Colenso wrote, with good reason: '[If the] tide of passion [remains p]ent up within the bosom of the [Zulu] race, they will either stagnate in sullen hatred, or burst forth again ere long in another terrible outbreak.'119 The worry persists long after 1879, as the figure of John Laputa in Buchan's Prester John (1910) attests, and even longer after 1906. D.J. Darlow ended his epic poem:
Where is the Thing
That shook the hosts of men and made them cringe,
The Thing that hurled them prostrate at his feet
And bent their hearts to fervent loyalty?
Perchance 'tis fleeing from the Hound of Heaven,
Or else, maybe, it ever rests and broods
Undaunted in the Amazulu hearts.120
The same formless fear shadows Viola Ridgway's pious hope, offering sentiments no different from those of Isaacs a century before: 'Perhaps some day the Zulu nation will rise again and, with the help of education, that fine spirit that existed under Shaka will find expression in usefulness and so tread the paths of peace and be a blessing on the world ! '.121 Even more recently, Sir Rex Niven, drawing closer to the ideological facets of the resurgence-fear, asked: 'Is it Chaka and his successors on the Zulu throne who are the real authors of Apartheid? Is it the unspoken fear of the great Chaka's spirit that forces the South African Government to take the line that has made them so unpopular abroad?'122 More recently still (1986), the narrator of the SABC TV series asserts that the Zulu 'can and will rise again'. Perhaps here lies, in the ambiguously fearful and deeply guilt-ridden situation out of which colonial writers have attempted to write themselves, the root of the ambivalences perceptible in their rhetoric – the fascination and the revulsion, the liberalism and the derogation, and the inability to transcend the limitations of their own language.
Conclusion
Two deep, contrary problems run beneath this essay. One is the possibility that the logical structures of our historiography are a gesture of implicit enterrment, that they fail to capture the reality of Zulu dynamics (how many modern histories integrate Zulu spiritual beliefs as historical cause?); more, that history itself is a form of oppression, is part of the armature of what Edward Said calls a 'saturating hegemonic system' which is 'predicated upon exteriority'.123 The second is the possibility