Against this background, Cobbing's assumption of a linkage between what he regards as mfecane theorists and settler interests amounts to a normal reflex action for a South African historian. That does not mean, however, that it deserves to be accepted without examination. It is a proposition that can be tested according to normal canons of historical proof.
Christopher Saunders sets out to do precisely that, and finds no evidence that a continuous chain of settler apologists stretches from Theal to John Omer-Cooper. Without at all denying that historians write in an ideological context, he points to marked contrasts in interpretations of the mfecane. He draws a sharp contrast between Theal and Cory, who traced all violence to Shaka, and William Macmillan, who strongly suspected that the slave trade to Mozambique had much to do with disruptions in what became the Zululand region, the highveld and even the eastern Cape frontier. Moving into the 1960s, Saunders argues that the correct context for Omer-Cooper's influential Zulu Aftermath was not bantustan policies in the Republic of South Africa but movements of nation-building in independent black Africa north of the Limpopo. Floors van Jaarsveld and other apologists for apartheid misused data provided by Leonard Thompson and Omer-Cooper, but that was neither the fault nor the intention of the liberal historians.
One of the most interesting passages in Saunders's article ponders the reasons why Macmillan's speculations on the disruptive influence of invading colonial capitalism should have been forgotten by the liberal historians who followed. Could it, he asks, have been a result of the fire which destroyed the John Philip papers on which Macmillan relied? Or was it that scholars found more important questions to be asked in other parts of the historical record?
I take up the same question at the outset of my essay on the Great Trek and suggest yet another answer: that the narrative structures which give form to historical discourse have a shaping power of their own, quite apart from the ideological agendas of self-serving interested parties. Nationalism favours myths of origins rooted in primordial landscapes in which peoples grow independently from the soil itself and then go into battle against threatening alien forces. Settlers needed their land cleared by the mfecane so that they could take root there through the formative process of 'pioneering'. Black nationalists responded to the idea that nations like the Zulu grew up from mother earth fully formed according to their own organic genius. Neither settler nationalism nor African nationalism could be expected to welcome Cobbing's version of history in which communities congeal into nations through a series of complex interactions with external forces.
Thomas Dowson's contribution makes a related point, which is that the construction of one group's national consciousness can suppress or even obliterate knowledge about other groups. Dowson cites the Bushmen peoples as a prime example. Standard accounts of the mfecane either ignore their presence or shuffle them off the stage at the earliest possible opportunity. Nevertheless, evidence from several different sources shows that the Bushmen were there and adapted in interesting, dynamic ways to the changes engulfing south-east Africa in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Whereas Dowson tries to fill silences in the written records by looking to other evidence, Dan Wylie dismantles the language used by white writers on Shaka and the Zulu. He discovers deep countercurrents and contradictions which continually subvert protestations of sympathy for African ways of life. When language itself is so loaded a weapon for conveying knowledge, what hope can there be of ever knowing 'what actually happened'? Once this question is asked, we have moved far beyond Cobbing's proposition that the true causes of turmoil in the early nineteenth century have been suppressed by 'settler history'. The past looks far more problematical than Cobbing will allow. It is easier to falsify old stories about the mfecane than to put new knowledge in its place. We see the historical landscape of two centuries' past through a very dark glass indeed.
Truth in History
The predominant intellectual currents of our time are sceptical of claims to Truth. 'Truth claims,' writes Pauline Rosenau 'are a form of terrorism.'1 Jacques Derrida's notorious claim that 'there is nothing beyond the text' has pushed some scholars into extreme suspensions of belief. Jane Caplan succinctly expresses the tendencies of this trend:
There remains a basic anxiety for historians in the face of deconstruction: namely that, in making the text ultimately undecidable, it abolishes the grounds for privileging any one interpretation, and therefore makes the writing of conventional history impossible. If all of history is also seen as a text, this only compounds the problem. It may be that here we have to concede deconstruction's ability to discern the paralogies or guilty secrets on which our own practices depend. A deconstructive critique of the historian's practice would point out that it represses what it has in common with its ostensible object, in order to create the illusion of its difference both from literary writing, and from the real. Critical history has shifted from arguing that every 'fact' is an interpretation to arguing that every historical account is a language-act; in other words, from the denial that facts are transparent, to the denial that language is transparent. This is true of language whether used by historians' sources or by historians themselves.2
The revival of language as a central concern for scholars presents no problems for some historical enterprises. Historians who delight in showing how vested interests generate self-serving knowledge about the past can readily decant their old wine into newly labelled bottles. Where once they exposed ruling ideologies and pinpointed mystifications, they can now subvert dominant discourses by attending to gaps and silences.
Other kinds of history look distinctly old fashioned when viewed through the postmodern lens. Up-to-date scholars keep jars of quotation marks handy on their writing tables, and use them constantly to distance themselves from 'what really happened', 'the facts', 'the historical record' and 'the truth' about just about anything. Historical narratives become 'stories'.
These contemporary trends in historical interpretation impact on the mfecane debate in different ways, as can be seen by looking closely at the three parts of Cobbing's case against the mfecane. The first of Cobbing's three theses sets out to correct a mistake. It does not aim to say what is true, but to falsify the statement that social turbulence in southern Africa flowed from the rise of the Zulu state. Even those who are most hostile to 'truth claims' are likely to admit the validity of this part of Cobbing's case. It is always easier to confute false statements about the past than to propound true ones. As it turns out, the most convincing falsifications of the Zulucentric mfecane ultimately come not from Cobbing himself but from others who have been drawn into the discussion. Neil Parsons's essay in another section of this book virtually nails down the coffin.
The second of Cobbing's propositions is an argument of an altogether different order. It asserts that the notion of the Zulu-generated mfecane was invented and perpetuated to serve the interests of white settlers. The proposition could have been put in a form that would be difficult to deny. Cobbing might simply have contended:
That the story of the mfecane told in the 1830s and 1840s provided a justification for incoming settlers to claim the highveld as waste and unoccupied land;
That the repetition of the story by later historians could be used to justify the distribution of land ownership in the twentieth century.
As evidence he might have adduced settler statements about depopulated lands and Van Jaarsveld's statements about the consequences of the mfecane.3 Such a case could only be logically refuted by showing that the evidence was forged or misinterpreted. Instead, Cobbing imposes on himself the argument that everyone who ever told the story of the mfecane was writing settler history. Unless he wishes to resort to the old Marxian doctrine that every social act has an 'objective' character quite distinct from the consciousness of the actor, the task of proving such a case is sisyphean. The way is open for dozens of MA dissertation writers to show that particular historians questioned the mfecane or despised settler history. Christopher Saunders's chapter in this section shows how the job is done. Cobbing himself does not even