Haggard weaves an envelope of occult spirituality, heroism, weapons with legendary names, and neo-lycanthropy which is more Nordic than Zulu in its mythic atmosphere, with an anti-mercantilism expressed as atavistic medieval chivalry. Within this, both the narrative and the direct speech are delivered in orotund archaisms, a simplified vocabulary and sentence structures, uncomplicated cause and effect, and stark contrast. Intellectualism, subtlety, and qualification are thereby excised.
113.G. Lukacs, The Historical Novel, London, 1962, 232.
114.Curiously, the only full works which pretend to be delivered in Shaka's voice are poems: Scully's successors are F.T. Prince, 'Chaka' in Poems, London, 1938, and S. Gray, The Assassination of Shaka by Mhlangane, Dingane and Mbopa on 22 December 1828 at Dukuza by which Act the Zulu Nation First Lost its Empire, Johannesburg, 1974.
115.E. Roberts, The Black Spear, London, 1950, 8; Schoeman, Pamphatha: The Beloved of King Shaka, Preface.
116.Holden, The Past and Future of the Kaffir Races, 7.
117.Holden, The Past and Future of the Kaffir Races, 2.
118.Holden, The Past and Future of the Kaffir Races, 33.
119.J.W. Colenso, Ten Weeks in Natal, Cambridge, 1855, xxxi.
120.Darlow, Tshaka, 48.
121.Ridgway, Stories from Zulu History, 90.
122.Niven, Nine Great Africans, 103.
123.E. Said, Orientalism, Harmondsworth, 1978, 14, 20.
124.C. L. Miller, 'Theories of Africans: The Question of Literary Anthropology', in Gates, 'Race', Writing and Difference, 282.
Beyond the Concept of the 'Zulu Explosion'
Comments on the Current Debate
JOHN WRIGHT
Since the mid-nineteenth century, writers on the history of southern Africa in the early part of that century have seen the period as one in which an outburst of violent conflict swept through African communities across the central and eastern regions of the subcontinent. Few historians today, if any, would deny that the decades of the 1810s, 1820s and 1830s were a time of widespread upheaval in these regions, but in the last few years a number of commentators have begun to challenge the long-accepted explanation of its primary causes. They have stimulated a debate which has major implications for the way in which historians have so far portrayed the history of southern Africa before the mining revolution of the late nineteenth century. This essay seeks to contextualise a number of contributions to the debate in so far as they are concerned with the region which extends from the area which became Natal to the eastern Cape, and from the Indian Ocean to the basin of the Caledon River.
The north-eastern part of this region, i.e. the area which in the 1820s formed the core of the early Zulu kingdom, has almost universally been seen as the centre of the upheavals referred to. Until very recently these conflicts have generally been regarded in the literature as a consequence of the supposedly explosive expansion of the Zulu kingdom under the ambitious and ruthless leadership of Shaka. A full history of the development of this idea still needs to be written: all that can be said here is that it was the product of a complex interaction between white and black intellectuals, inside and outside southern Africa, that began in the mid-nineteenth century, if not earlier, and has continued to the present day.
The generally accepted view is that the upheavals of the early nineteenth century (which, since the publication of John Omer-Cooper's The Zulu Aftermath in 1966, have been known as the 'mfecane') began in the Thukela–Phongolo region in the 1810s with the rise of Shaka and the Zulu kingdom. Zulu depredations into the surrounding territories then set in train a number of separate sets of migrations, which in turn touched off further cycles of violence. In the region under study in Part Two, the Zulu supposedly devastated Natal south of the Thukela River, sending hordes of refugees fleeing southwards into the frontier regions of the eastern Cape, where they came to be known as amamfengu or Fingo. The Zulu are also widely held to have been responsible for driving the Ngwane across the Drakensberg into the Caledon Valley, thus supposedly setting in train the series of conflicts and migrations which have commonly been called the 'difaqane'.
In the 1970s and 1980s, academic historians began opening up fruitful new lines of enquiry into the origins and early history of the Zulu kingdom, the supposed 'engine' of the mfecane. But virtually none of this work was concerned explicitly to confront the long-established notion that the upheavals of the 1820s and 1830s were primarily the product of a 'Zulu explosion'. It was not until the late 1980s, when the whole concept of the mfecane began to come publicly under fire, that historians began to reconsider the nature of these upheavals and the role played in them by the Zulu kingdom.
Slavers and Alibis
As is now well known, the first historian to mount a comprehensive critique of the concept of the mfecane was Julian Cobbing. In his controversial article of 1988, 'The Mfecane as Alibi: Thoughts on Dithakong and Mbolompo', he rejected the long-established idea that an internally generated process of political change, which had culminated in the so-called Shakan revolution, underlay the wars and migrations of the 1820s and 1830s.1
Instead, he argued that they had been caused primarily by an escalation in the demand for African slave labour on the part of European traders and settlers. From Delagoa Bay on the east coast, Portuguese slavers and their African allies were raiding further and further afield after 1810 in response to a rapidly rising demand for slaves in Brazil. To the south, in the frontier regions of the Cape colony, settler demands for locally acquired forced labour were increasing after Britain's abolition of the slave trade in 1807. Bands of white frontiersmen, Griqua, Kora and others were raiding deeper and deeper into the interior of the subcontinent to seize slaves and cattle to sell in the colony. Certain colonial officials, missionaries and army officers connived at their activities, and on occasion conspired in the organising of what were in effect semi-official slave raids.
By the late 1810s and early 1820s the expansion of raiding activities from these two centres of violence was subjecting the African societies of the interior to unprecedented pressures. Some, like the Zulu, consolidated into defensive states. Others fled or were driven out of their territories, carrying conflict across a wider and wider region. Contrary to the stereotyped view, Cobbing argues that the role played by the Zulu in these events was minimal. The emergence of the Zulu kingdom was not so much the cause as a product of the period of upheavals. In the 1820s and 1830s the kingdom was simply one of many political actors on the southern African scene. The notion that it was responsible for the upheavals was an 'alibi', the product of attempts made by settler writers to cover up the destructive impact of white slave-raiding by pinning the blame for its violent consequences on the Zulu. Later historians continued to reproduce the myth of the 'Zulu wars' as a means of explaining the apparent depopulation of much of the interior of southern Africa which, from the 1830s on, had supposedly enabled advancing white settlers to occupy what were mainly empty lands. From Cobbing's perspective, then, the term 'mfecane' refers not so much to a set of events that took place in the 1820s as to a set of colonial-made ideas about the causes of those events.
From a broad critical perspective, Cobbing's arguments point decisively, in my view, towards the need for a fundamental re-examination of the history of the whole eastern half of the subcontinent from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Most importantly, they reassert the need to see the history of African societies in this period as having been increasingly influenced, from at least the mid-eighteenth century onwards, by the activities of European raiders, traders, and settlers. Other historians have pointed to this need often enough before, but nearly always in the context of relatively narrowly focused studies of particular societies or regions.2
Very