A Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the University of Cape Town.
Margaret Kinsman
An educationalist working in Cape Town. Her research interest is in the southern Tswana 1780–1880, with a particular focus on the social history of the period and the changing position of women.
Andrew Manson
Associate Professor of History at the University of Bophuthatswana. He has published in the field of Zulu and Tswana history. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Cape Town.
John Omer-Cooper
Professor of History at the University of Otago and author of The Zulu Aftermath: A Nineteenth-century Revolution in Bantu Africa.
Neil Parsons
A freelance writer. He has held research fellowships in Gaborone, London and Cape Town. His publications include general textbooks on southern Africa and articles on the history of Botswana, and he is a former co-editor of the Journal of Southern African Studies. His most recent book is Seretse Khama, 1921–80.
Jeff Peires
The author of two books on Xhosa history, The House of Phalo and The Dead Will Arise. Formerly Professor of History at the University of Transkei, he is now an ANC Member of Parliament representing the Eastern Cape in the National Assembly.
Christopher Saunders
Associate Professor in the History Department at the University of Cape Town. He is the author of The Making of the South African Past and other books.
Alan Webster
Teaches at Stirling High School in East London and at Rhodes University.
John Wright
Associate Professor in the Department of Historical Studies, University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg. He is co-editor of The James Stuart Archive of Recorded Oral Evidence Relating to the History of the Zulu and Neighbouring Peoples (4 vols. Further volumes in preparation.)
Dan Wylie
Teaches in the Academic Development Programme at Rhodes University, Grahamstown. His doctoral research examines the European literary mythologies of Shaka.
Introduction
History and Historiography in the Aftermath
CAROLYN HAMILTON
In 1991 a colloquium was held at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, entitled 'The Mfecane Aftermath: Towards a New Paradigm'. The title was a play on the name of John Omer-Cooper's 1966 publication, The Zulu Aftermath: A Nineteenth-Century Revolution in Bantu Africa.1 Omer-Cooper, following George McCall Theal's writings some seventy years earlier, argued that the emergence of the powerful Zulu kingdom in the early decades of the nineteenth century caused massive upheaval among neighbouring chiefdoms. This, in turn, set in motion a ripple effect of dislocation and disruption that extended through much of southern Africa, namely, the 'Mfecane'.2 Omer-Cooper's study celebrated both the revolutionary changes within the Zulu kingdom which lay at the root of the tumult, as well as African responses to it – the innovations and achievements which underlay the period of migrancy and increased state–building throughout the sub-continent. This, then, was what Omer-Cooper focused on as the 'aftermath' of the Zulu.
In a series of papers presented at seminars starting in 1983, Rhodes historian Julian Cobbing mounted a campaign for the 'jettisoning' of the concept of the mfecane. Cobbing argued that the idea of a 'Zulu explosion' which set in motion the mfecane was a settler myth which conveniently obscured the disruptions of local societies caused by the labour needs of the Cape colonists and the demands of the Delagoa Bay-based slave trade. Despite their preparation for prestigious forums such as the seminar of the Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town, and the African Studies Institute seminar at the University of the Witwatersrand, Cobbing's early papers elicited little response from historians. Then, in 1987, Cobbing presented yet another version of his case at the University of Durban-Westville, 'The myth of the mfecane'.3 Shortly after that, in 1988 and 1989, an eminent historian of Natal and the Zulu kingdom, John Wright, collaborated with Cobbing in joint presentations to seminars at the University of the Witwatersrand and the University of Cape Town, entitled 'The Mfecane: Beginning the Inquest'.4 Attention to the debate shown by Natal-based interests and historians of the Zulu kingdom was stimulated in the later 1980s both by an efflorescence of new scholarship on the early Zulu kingdom and by contemporary political developments within Natal and KwaZulu. This period saw a number of academic historians enter into public debate over the history of the Zulu kingdom, and the beginnings of a challenge to the near monopoly over the public presentation of Zulu history which Inkatha had enjoyed since the early 1980s.5 In 1988 the influential Journal of African History published a version of Cobbing's critique of the mfecane.6
From the mid-1980s a cohort of graduate students working under Cobbing at Rhodes University began to research topics which extended his critique of the mfecane. Although unpublished, this work stimulated further interest in the debate.7 The 1988 Reader's Digest Illustrated History of South Africa included comment on the emerging debate concerning the notion of the mfecane.8 At the 1990 'Workshop on Natal and Zululand in the Colonial and Precolonial Periods', held at the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, Cobbing presented yet another paper, 'Grasping the Nettle: The Slave Trade and the Early Zulu', while three of his students also gave papers.9 In April 1991 a panel discussion on the debate was held at the University of Natal, Durban.10 Cobbing's 'case against the mfecane' was finally beginning to elicit sustained attention from the academy.
By July 1991 the Journal of African History had accepted for publication two responses to Cobbing's published article. (These articles by Eldredge and Hamilton were also presented at the Wits colloquium and are reproduced in this volume.) Two months later, a total of twenty-four papers was presented at the Wits colloquium which all, one way or another, addressed aspects of Cobbing's work. Participants at the colloquium were mostly historians, but a number of anthropologists, archaeologists, literary specialists, teachers and journalists also attended.
The colloquium attracted widespread attention. A large contingent of secondary school teachers attended a workshop11 held immediately afterwards which focused directly on the debates at the colloquium, as well as on the problems of teaching the mfecane in the South Africa of the 1990s. The South African Historical Journal carried a substantial report on the colloquium, with comments by five participants,12 as did another South African journal, Social Dynamics.13 The colloquium was widely reported in the press,14 and merited a full-page report in The Times Higher Education Supplement.15 By the end of 1991, the debate commanded the attention of both the academy and the general public. While it was the eventual publication of an article by Cobbing that precipitated the debate into the public domain, the timing of the efflorescence of interest in the topic was tied at least as much to the changing context within South Africa. As Cobbing himself put it at the colloquium, '[E]ven as we deliberate, Zulu impis are on their murderous march with the myth of Shaka ringing in their ears and a new mfecane is being threatened, a desperate last throw of the dice to forestall the united, ethnicless South Africa that has to be born.'16 Cobbing's quest for 'a new paradigm' for the history of southern Africa in the immediately precolonial period was motivated both by a re-examination of sources and by pressing political concerns.
A further perspective on the timing of the eruption of the controversy around the mfecane is provided by contextualizing the debate within the development of precolonial17 southern African studies since the time of Omer-Cooper's publication. In his essay in this volume, Christopher Saunders traces in detail the use of the concept