The state of these countries, which have scarcely had any intercourse with civilised nations, is a direct proof in refutation of the theories of poets and philosophers, who represent the ignorance of the savage as virtuous simplicity – his miserable poverty as frugality and temperance – and his stupid indolence as a laudable contempt for wealth. How different are the facts! We ever found uncultivated man a composition of cunning, treachery, drunkenness and gluttony.
42.Bryant, A History of the Zulu, 74.
43.This is strongly reminiscent of another missionary's view that Shaka was a 'scourge of God', an integral part of His plan to 'desolate nations, and pour out the vials of his wrath upon offending men', Holden, The Past and Future of the Kaffir Races, 42. This of course was part of Holden's justification for his own Salvationist project, very like the kind of 'theodicy of occupation' which informed both the 'mfecane' concept and the pragmatics of apartheid.
44.Bryant, Olden Times, 640. Doubtless Bryant is also indulging here in a kind of logographia – a term I take from Thucydides, meaning a compilation 'aimed at audience entertainment rather than truth' (Woodman, Rhetoric, 8) – which permeates all narrative history (see D. Wylie, 'Textual Incest').
45.This also originates with Isaacs, Travels and Adventures, 269; it is implicit in this description of the 'faulty Paradise' in C. Eden's 1871 novel, An Inherited Task, or, Early Mission Life in Southern Africa, Oxford, which functions as a prelude to Shaka's own predations:
The scene was indeed most attractive. The swallows skimmed the surface of the lake; flocks of guinea fowl . . . sought refuge from the heat of the plains . . .; the ravens croaked from the pliant boughs of the weeping-willows; hawks and vultures poised themselves in mid-air, swooping down with lightning rapidity on the young duckling incautious enough to stray from its mother . . .; the green serpent ascended the trees to suck the eggs and devour the young, while the parent birds, uttering piercing cries, fluttered round the enemy . . . (40–1).
46.Bryant, Olden Times, 446.
47.Bryant, Olden Times, 128.
48.Bryant, Olden Times, 477.
49.Bryant, Olden Times, 537.
50.Bryant, Olden Times, 637.
51.I am grateful to Malvern van Wyk Smith for this insight.
52.Elsewhere, contradictorily, Bryant adulates Dingiswayo for bringing peace to a far-from-Edenic 'tumultuous and disintegrated mass of humanity' who are 'powerless and unproductive, because of continuously wasting their thought and energy on fighting each other', Olden Times, 96–7.
53.Bryant, Olden Times, 380–1.
54.Bryant, Olden Times, 237, 390.
55.Bryant, Olden Times, 236–7.
56.Bryant, Olden Times, 237.
57.For example, Olden Times, 78, 162, 297, 300, 563, 580.
58.Bryant, Olden Times, 235.
59.Bryant, Olden Times, 235.
60.Bryant, Olden Times, 648.
61.Bryant, Olden Times, 236.
62.This was Isaacs's view, too, as evidenced by his repeated assessments of the landscape in terms of its agricultural potential, 'rich in verdure and lack[ing] only the art and industry of civilized man' (Travels and Adventures, vol. 1, 26; cf. 57, 111, 149 etc); the remedy 'prescribed against Africa's insidious corruptions was cheerful toil' (Coetzee, White Writing, 3).
63.Isaacs, Travels and Adventures, vol. 1, 269.
64.Isaacs, Travels and Adventures, vol. 1, xxiv–xxxii.
65.Thus Louis du Buisson, The White Man Cometh, London, 1987, 17 writes:
Zululand was a vast natural paradise, one of the most fertile on earth . . . a country with a gentle, generous climate devoid of extremes and with all the animals of creation intact, pursuing their own evolution. Including homo sapiens.
. . . Unwarlike, fun-loving and hospitable, they lived in harmony with their neighbours and when conflicts arose they were settled in the gentlest possible way.
Cf. also P. Becker, Path of Blood, Harmondsworth, 1962, 22–7; D. Morris, The Washing of the Spears, London, 1967, 22–39 ('These, then, were the Kaffirs . . . an aimless people, happy and careless, with little sense of time and less of purpose'); Ballard, The House of Shaka, 13–14. For a survey of more recent blurrings and transcendences of these attitudinal rifts, see J. de Bruyn, 'The "Forgotten Factor" Sixteen Years Later: Some Trends in Historical Writing on Precolonial South Africa', Kleio, 16, (1984), 34–45.
66.Isaacs, Travels and Adventures, vol.2, 243, my italics.
67.J. Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object, New York, 1983, 80, 87.
68.Omer-Cooper, The Zulu Aftermath, 21.
69.Omer-Cooper, The Zulu Aftermath, 2.
70.Omer-Cooper, The Zulu Aftermath, 17.
71.R. Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, New York, 1968, 32.
72.S. Marks, 'Towards a People's History of South Africa? Recent Developments in the Historiography of South Africa', in R. Samuel, ed., People's History and Socialist Theory, London, 1981, 300.
73.M. Wilson and L. M. Thompson, eds, The Oxford History of South Africa, vol.1, Oxford, 1969, 129.
74.I am reminded irresistibly here of Gillray's 1790s cartoon of cannibalistic French revolutionaries (echoing the many, probably apocryphal but widely-repeated stories of Zulu-induced cannibalism; see e.g. Thompson, A History of South Africa, 85). Such imagery cannot circulate without an ambience of extreme xenophobia and 'superiorist' revulsion.
75.Isaacs, Travels and Adventures, vol.2, 102.
76.Ridgway, Stories From Zulu History, Pietermaritzburg, 1946, 95. A Bryant clone.
77.Ridgway, Stories From Zulu History, 95, 87, 89.
78.A. R. JanMohamed, 'The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature' in H.L. Gates Jr, ed., 'Race', Writing and Difference, Chicago, 1985 78–106. 'We can better understand colonialist discourse, it seems to me, through an analysis that maps its ideological function in relation to actual imperialist practices. Such an examination reveals that any evident 'ambivalence' is in fact a product of deliberate, if at times subconscious, imperialist duplicity . . .' (80).
79.Brookes and Webb, A History of Natal, 14. This is plagiarised almost verbatim from Bryant, Olden Times, 641 : 'Strange, but true, this Shaka was as sublime a moral teacher as martial genius. Submission to authority, obedience to the law, respect for superiors, order and self-restraint, fearlessness and self-sacrifice, constant work and civil duty, in a word, all the noblest disciplines of life were the very foundation-stones upon which he built his nation. So rigorously enforced was the life-long practice of all these excellencies, that he left them all a spontaneous habit, a second nature, amongst his people'.
80.Isaacs, Travels and Adventures, vol. 1, 60.
81.Isaacs, Travels and Adventures, vol. 1, 90, 93, 236.
82.Fynn, The Diary, 79n.
83.Fynn, The Diary, 79.
84.Fynn,