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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 of the mfecane in southern African historiography. It is not my purpose to rehearse here his arguments about the mfecane, but rather to examine briefly broader developments within the field of precolonial history so as to help situate the current debate.

In the late sixties and early seventies Africanist trends elsewhere on the continent, backed by the path-breaking work of Jan Vansina¹⁸ on the usefulness of oral traditions as historical sources, prompted a new interest in precolonial southern Africa. As Saunders shows, the work of Omer-Cooper and Leonard Thompson initiated this development. Their endeavours were soon overtaken by a new generation of students working within a materialist paradigm, and trained mostly, though not exclusively, at two institutions, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. The work of these scholars featured in forums such as Shula Marks' interdisciplinary seminar on the societies of southern Africa, at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies.

In July 1976, this interest led to the holding of a workshop on 'Pre-capitalist Social Formations and Colonial Penetration in Southern Africa' at the National University of Lesotho, Roma.¹⁹ As the workshop title makes clear, the participants were concerned to investigate the nature of pre-capitalist economies, and were particularly interested in questions of social stratification and forms of exploitation, as well as how these aspects of precolonial societies were transformed by the penetration of mercantile, and later industrial, capitalism. The publication in 1975 of Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst's Pre-capitalist Modes of Production²⁰ powerfully influenced the papers and discussion at the conference. The Lesotho conference set in place many of the major theoretical ideas which informed a crop of doctoral theses which were completed in the middle and late 1970s dealing with the economies and histories of a range of precolonial polities such as the Zulu and Swazi kingdoms, the Pedi paramountcy, and so on.²¹

A follow-up conference was held in Lesotho in 1977, and, in the same year the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, hosted a regionally specific conference. The prime purpose of this latter meeting was 'to provide a forum for students of Zulu history working in southern Africa to discuss the nature of the Zulu political economy before 1879'.²² The Pietermaritzburg workshop also drew inspiration from the latest developments within Marxist thinking. Earlier that year, Claude Meillassoux had given a seminar in Pietermaritzburg, and the workshop title, 'Production and Reproduction in the Zulu Kingdom', drew attention to the central concepts of the French Marxist anthropologists. The tight regional focus of the Pietermaritzburg conference, and the conscious effort by the organizers to solicit papers from outside the discipline of history, reflected an awareness of a need for new sources of evidence within the field.

A further conference, also concerned with themes of differentiation, production and exchange, focused on the precolonial history of Nguni-speakers more broadly. It was held at Rhodes University, Grahamstown in 1979, and the conference proceedings were edited by Jeff Peires and published under the title Before and After Shaka.²³ These papers reflected a growing concern about the inability of the available evidence to show contradictions, conflict and social cleavages, the dominant themes of a Marxist conception of history. Evidence difficulties, coupled with an increasing sense of the irrelevance of precolonial history in apartheid South Africa, led a number of the scholars hitherto involved in the study of pre-capitalist societies to turn their attention to the history of twentieth-century southern Africa. The emergence of the Wits History Workshop – with its focus on industrialisation and the impact of capitalism – as the pre-eminent historical forum of the period, was an important marker of this trend.

As a result, little new research into the precolonial past was undertaken in the early 1980s. The major publications of the period drew on the seminars and doctoral theses of the previous decade. Marks and Atmore reproduced as Economy and Society in Pre-industrial South Africa a selection of the seminar papers delivered in the 1970s, and a number of the doctoral theses appeared as published monographs.²⁴ It was to be seven years before the next meeting of scholars working on the precolonial past and the presentation of fresh perspectives and research.

This happened at the 1986 'Workshop on Precolonial History' organised by the Centre for African Studies at the University of Cape Town, which was attended by historians, anthropologists, linguists and archaeologists.²⁵ The papers and the conference debates revealed a shift away from the strong political economy approach of the materialist scholars of the 1970s to an examination of questions of ideology, and a concern with methodology. Increasingly influenced by literary theory, a new approach was emerging at the conference and in other work produced at this time, which raised fundamental questions about historians' reading of their evidence, and about the genealogies of their sources.²⁶ In addition a number of papers took up questions of the public presentation of the precolonial past in textbooks and popular histories.

This brief review of the development of precolonial studies in the 1970s and 1980s reveals that Cobbing's early papers were presented in a hiatus between the Rhodes and Cape Town conferences, at a time when interest among historians had swung away from the precolonial past to a concern with the making of the apartheid state. However, the new directions which emerged at the Cape Town conference interlocked with certain of the concerns of the Cobbing critique, notably an interest in how received versions of the past came into place. This congruence of interests underlay the subsequent attention paid to Cobbing's arguments and ultimately, the holding of the Wits colloquium in 1991.

The colloquium itself was preceded by an upsurge of public interest in Zulu history and invocations of the mfecane (widely reported in the South African press) in terms of which contemporary political transformations and upheavals were likened to a modern mfecane.²⁷ The methodological concerns of the academy were thus further complemented by the pressing question in the public domain of how the role of the history of southern Africa before European domination, and narratives of first contact, are drawn on as metaphors for current political developments. Interest in the debate over the mfecane in 1991 reflected the intersection of the Cobbing critique with, on the one hand, specific developments within precolonial historiography, and, on the other hand, contemporary political developments.

This convergence allowed the set of debates which characterised the colloquium to take place when they did, and in the form that they did, even though Cobbing's critique had first been made much earlier, and even though he had sought a different form for his intervention. I use the phrase 'set of debates' for not all the contributors would necessarily agree what those debates are, nor is there any consensus on their ranking in terms of importance.

Generally, it is assumed that in order to have an historical debate, the participants and adversaries must agree on what is at issue. They have to agree broadly on how arguments are properly made, on how sources should be read, on what constitutes evidence or proof, and on what might be persuasive. Usually, in a debate about events in temporally distant times, the participants must agree to share the same imagined idea of what societies were like in remote times, before an argument can be made about the causes of changes in such societies, or about the reconstruction of those causes later in time.²⁸

Readers of the various essays in the book are likely to find such agreements elusive, and occasionally even absent. For this reason, it is not possible to see the book as centred on a single debate, or to regard essays that say different things about particular events as necessarily opposed. This Introduction, and the contextualising essays which precede each of the three sections into which the book is divided, point up some of the areas of debate and difference. Doubtless, readers will find others, and will be able to explore for themselves the significance of points of abrasion between the various studies.

Julian Cobbing argues that the debate is whether the notion of the mfecane should be retained within, or 'jettisoned' from, southern African historiography. Other scholars argue about whether the concept of the mfecane carries the meanings within the historiography which Cobbing ascribes to it. There are debates amongst the essays in this volume about the very issues which are usually agreed upon in the setting of the parameters of an historical debate. The 'rules' of historical reconstruction are themselves contested. Where, for one contributor, a dissembling colonial official is an unreliable or 'bad' source who cannot be used, for another scholar, the same source – indeed, the official's very act of cloaking a motive or misrepresenting an event – becomes the meat of rigorous historical reconstruction.

One debate which percolates through the various essays is the question of African and European agency. Was the period of exceptional violence which most contributors agree occurred in the early decades of the nineteenth century a consequence of African activities (the eruption of the Zulu, and refugees from Zulu imperialism, on to the highveld as proposed by Omer-Cooper, among others) or was it the result of European activities (labour-raiding and slaving from the Cape in the south and from Delagoa Bay in the north, as argued by Cobbing)? In this debate, the contributors have agreed that it is fruitful to pose the question in terms of African and European agency. But there are clear indications in a number of the essays that this argument itself may impose a structure on the study of the period that limits, rather than opens up, historical enquiry. In this form, the disagreements over the relative weighting of European and African agency repeat the conventional bifurcation of the southern African past into black histories and white histories, meeting only in conflict. This division continues despite the wealth of evidence which reveals a more fluid situation, in which European and African actions (and, indeed, the activities of hunter-gatherers – as Thomas Dowson shows in his contribution) are but different ingredients in a well-shaken cocktail. It may be necessary to entertain the idea that the discussions of African and European agency, while facilitating a debate in these pages, may be responsible for the exclusion from these essays of evidence and material which does not fit the bipolar form taken by the debate. There is a further danger that this division of the history of later precolonial times will tempt post-apartheid authors of a revised history of this period – especially the writers of new South African history textbooks – into replacing unproblematically black villains with white villains, instead of encouraging them to come to grips with the full complexity of relations of domination, subordination, resistance and interaction within and between the various societies of precolonial southern Africa.

The collection of these varied essays and their publication in a single volume will help students of the debates to ask crucial questions about what has been occluded from the debates, what has been elided in their presentation in this form, what has been left silent, and what might be absent. The presentation in the book of ongoing debates prompts not only the identification of such silences and absences, but a questioning as to why the agreements about these silences come about. In so far as this volume facilitates the posing of these questions, it seeks to go beyond the presentation of the particular set of positions currently debated to pose further questions about this historiography and this period, and to begin the work of setting the agenda for new research directions.

The title of the book is a reminder that while the ongoing debates are important, the attacking of the mfecane by Cobbing creates a time of aftermath. In this aftermath, for some, the mfecane is, as it was put at the colloquium, dead and buried; for others it is about to have new life breathed into it. For still others, aftermath connotes a mown field with new horizons created by the cropping of the grass. Some scatterings may remain to be raked in and a range of species in the fallow growth – some new, others residual – begin the struggle to assert themselves. In the aftermath, however, the mfecane is, at least, a concept that cannot be taken for granted. However it is used, whether it is treated as a massive historical myth, or a real historical phenomenon, or neither, a new precision, care and explicitness is demanded of its usage.

Acknowledgements

An abridged version of this Introduction was presented to the Sparkling Waters Colloquium on School History Textbooks for a Democratic South Africa (November 1993). I am grateful to John Wright, Thomas Dowson, Rob Morrell, Jeff Peires and Jeff Guy for their comments on that version. I would like to thank David William Cohen for inviting me to host a seminar at the Institute for the Advanced Study in the African Humanities, Northwestern University, where my ideas for this Introduction first crystallised.

1.J.D. Omer-Cooper, The Zulu Aftermath: A Nineteenth-century Revolution in Bantu Africa, London, 1966.

2.'Mfecane' is the form of the word conventionally used in association with the Nguni-speaking peoples of the coastal areas of southern Africa. 'Lifaqane' is the equivalent term written in the Southern Sotho orthography that is used in Lesotho, while 'difaqane' is the same word rendered in Southern Sotho orthography as used in South Africa. The origins of the word are a matter of debate. Scholars who view the term as a word with African origins place it in italics, as they do any other non-English terms that occur in an English text. Likewise some scholars who view the mfecane as a major phenomenon in the history of the period elect to capitalise the first letter. Those scholars who see the term as a European invention without any foundation in African lexicons use the term without either italics or an initial capital letter, as do writers who seek simply to indicate a down-scaling (itself of different orders for different authors) of the term. These choices are maintained in the book as a clear signal of one of the lines of debate around the topic of the mfecane.

3.Cobbing delivered a spoken presentation at Durban-Westville. The revised notes of his talk subsequently circulated as a 'paper'.

4.The two papers delivered at the combined seminars were J. Cobbing, 'Jettisoning the Mfecane (with Perestroika)', and J. Wright, 'Political Mythology and the Making of Natal's Mfecane'.

5.For a discussion of Inkatha's presentation of Zulu history see D. Golan, 'Inkatha and its Use of the Zulu Past', History in Africa, 18 (1991), 113–26; P. Forsyth, 'The Past in Service of the Present: The Political Use of History by Chief A.N.M.Buthelezi, 1951–1991', South African Historical Journal, 26 (1992), 74–92. For a discussion of the engagement of academics in debate over the public presentation of Zulu history see C. A. Hamilton, 'Authoring Shaka: Models, Metaphors and Historiography', Ph.D. thesis, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, 1993, 14–26.

6.J. Cobbing, 'The Mfecane as Alibi: Thoughts on Dithakong and Mbolompo', Journal of African History, 29(1988), 487–519.

7.See, most notably, J. Richner, 'The Withering Away of the "Lifaqane" : Or a Change of Paradigm', B. A. Hons. essay, Rhodes University, 1988; A.C. Webster, 'Ayliff, Whiteside, and the Fingo "Emancipation" of 1835: A Reappraisal', B.A. Hons. essay, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, 1988.

8.Reader's Digest Illustrated History of South Africa: The Real Story, (Consultant Editor C. Saunders, Historical Advisor C. Bundy), Cape Town, The Reader's Digest, 1988, 2nd ed. with amendments, 1989.

9.A selection of the papers from this conference was produced in a bound form, edited by D.R. Edgecombe, J.P.C. Laband and P.S. Thompson, and entitled The Debate on Zulu Origins: A Selection of Papers on the Zulu Kingdom and Early Colonial Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 1992. The papers reproduced were those which focused on the Cobbing intervention and associated issues concerning the production of the history of the Zulu kingdom. Note also that in May 1990, the Wits History Workshop held a History Teachers' Conference on 'Perspectives on Pre-industrial South Africa in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries' at which John Wright gave an invited paper entitled 'Beyond the Mfecane: What do we put in its place?'

10.Organised by the History Department, University of Natal, Durban, the panel included Julian Cobbing, John Wright, John Omer-Cooper, Shula Marks and Jeff Guy.

11.Immediately following the colloquium the Wits History Workshop hosted as part of their series of Teachers' Conferences, a special one-day workshop on 'Teaching the Mfecane'. In November 1993, a four-day colloquium on 'School History Textbooks for a Democratic South Africa' was held at Sparkling Waters, Magaliesberg, the organising theme of which was the mfecane debate.

12.N. Etherington, 'The Aftermath of the Aftermath', South African Historical Journal, 25 (1991), 154–62; P. Maylam, 'The Death of the Mfecane?', South African Historical Journal, 25(1991) 163–6; J. du Bruyn, 'Ousting Both the Mfecane and the Anti–Mfecane', South African Historical Journal, 25 (1991) 166–70; A. Webster, 'The Mfecane Paradigm Overthrown', South African Historical Journal, 25 (1991) 170–2; S. Meintjes, 'The Mfecane Colloquium: Impressions', South African Historical Journal, 25 (1991) 173–6.

13.C. Saunders, 'Conference Report: Mfecane Afterthoughts', Social Dynamics, 17 (2), 1991, 171–7.

14.See for example, Iden Wetherall's article, 'The Mfecane: Fact or Fantasy?' in Vrye Weekblad, 25–31 Oct. 1991; report by Portia Maurice, Weekly Mail, 13–19 Sept. 1993; also see the letters pages, Guardian Weekly, 21 June 1992 and 19 July 1992; N. Etherington, 'Shrinking the Zulu', Southern African Review of Books, Sept.–Oct. 1992; see more recently, Joe Louw, 'Hills Hide Secrets of Unhappy Past', Saturday Star, 30 July 1993.

15.Stephen Taylor, 'Zulu History Rewritten and Rerun', The Times Higher Education Supplement, 1 Nov. 1991.

16.Cited in Taylor, 'Zulu History Rewritten and Rerun'.

17.The term 'precolonial' remains an unsatisfactory label for a period which ends with the establishment of a colonial presence in southern Africa (the date of which varies from region to region, ranging from the establishment of the Cape colony in the late 1600s to the destruction of the Zulu kingdom after 1879, the latter being not strictly the establishment of a colony). The beginning point of this period is even less precise, varying in common – but seldom explicit – usage anywhere between 1400 and 1750, again with regional variation. The term is not only imprecise, it is also intrinsically colonially-centered in terms of the perspective which it induces. Alternatives are not readily available. Terms such as 'pre-industrial or 'precapitalist' suffer similar problems. As research in the period conventionally designated 'precolonial' develops, regional and temporal disaggregation and specification will, hopefully, reduce the need for such a catch-all label.

18.J. Vansina, Oral Tradition: A Study in Historical Methodology, London, 1965.

19.Papers listed on the programme: W. Beinart, 'Labour and Technology: Penetration into Pondoland, 1830–1930' ; P. Bonner, 'The Swazi Kingdom' ; W. G. Clarence-Smith, 'Capitalist Penetration among the Nyaneka of Southern Angola, 1840–1918'; P. Delius, 'The Structure of the Pedi State' ; A. Erwin, 'The Concept of the Mode of Production'; M. Evers and M. Taylor, 'The Archaeologist and the Investigation of the Economic Base'; J.J. Guy, 'Production and Exchange in the Zulu Kingdom'; M. Hall, 'Dendroclimatology, Rainfall and Human Adaptation in the Later Iron Age of Natal and Zululand'; J. Keenan, 'On the Concept of the Mode of Production in Precapitalist Social Formations: (An Anthropological View)'; J. Kimble, 'The Economic History of Lesotho in the Nineteenth Century'; N. Parsons, 'The Economic History of Khama's Country in Southern Africa'; J. Peires, 'Economic History of the Xhosa up to 1835'; I. Phimister, 'Pre-colonial Goldmining in Southern Zambesia: A Reassessment' ; with summing up and discussion led by Shula Marks. (Details taken from the organisers ' letter dated 13 June 1976.) A different programme (undated, but probably subsequent as I have never seen any of the following papers) does not mention papers by Evers and Taylor, Phimister, and Delius. I am grateful to Philip Bonner for giving me access to his set of conference papers, correspondence, and notes.

20.B. Hindess and P.Q. Hirst, Pre-capitalist Modes of Production, London, 1975.

21.G. Liesegang, 'Beitrage zur Geschichte des Reiches der Gaza Nguni im Sudlichen Mocambique, 1820–1895', Ph.D. thesis, Köln, 1967; M. Legassick, 'The Griqua, the Sotho-Tswana and the Missionaries, 1780–1840', Ph.D. thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, 1969; A. Smith, 'The Struggle for Control of Southern Mocambique, 1720–1835', Ph.D. thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, 1970; R. Mael, 'The Problems of Political Integration in the Zulu Empire', Ph.D. thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, 1974; H. Slater, 'Transitions in the Political Economy of South-East Africa', D.Phil. thesis, University of Sussex, Brighton, 1976; J. Cobbing, 'The Ndebele under the Khumalos, 1820–1896', Ph.D. thesis, University of Lancaster, 1976; P. Bonner, 'The Rise, Consolidation and Disintegration of Dhlamini Power in Swaziland between 1820–1899', Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 1977; D. Hedges, 'Trade and Politics in Southern Mozambique and Zululand in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries', Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 1978; W. Beinart, 'Production, Labour Migrancy and the Chieftaincy: Aspects of the Political Economy of Pondoland, 1860–1930', Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 1979; P. Delius, 'The Pedi Polity under Sekwati and Sekhukhune, 1828–1880', Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 1980.

22.M. Hall and J. Wright, eds., Production and Reproduction in the Zulu Kingdom, workshop papers, Pietermaritzburg, 1977, Introduction, 1.

23.J.B. Peires, ed., Before and After Shaka: Papers in Nguni History, Grahamstown, 1981.

24.S. Marks and A. Atmore, eds., Economy and Society in Pre-industrial South Africa, London, 1980. The publication in 1982 of A History of South Africa to 1870, edited by M. Wilson and L. Thompson was a reprint of The Oxford History of Southern Africa of 1969 (minus chapter one on the archaeological background by Ray Inskeep).

25.Among others, papers were given by M. Hall, W.D. Hammond-Tooke and T. Evers, C. Hamilton, H. Webster, J. Wright, M. Kinsman, P. Harries, and A. Mazel.

26.J.B. Wright, 'Politics, Ideology and the Invention of the Nguni', in T. Lodge, ed., Resistance and Ideology in Settler Societies, 4, Johannesburg, 1986, 96–118; C. Hamilton, 'Ideology, Oral Traditions and the Struggle for Power in the Early Zulu Kingdom', M.A. thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, 1986; J. Wright and C. Hamilton, 'Traditions and Transformations: The Phongolo-Mzimkhulu Region in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries', in A. Duminy and B. Guest, eds., Natal and Zululand From Earliest Times to 1910: A New History, Pietermaritzburg, 1989; also see J. B. Wright, 'A.T. Bryant and the "Wars of Shaka'", History in Africa, 18 (1991), 409–25, first presented as a seminar paper in 1988; J.B. Wright, 'The Dynamics of Power and Conflict in the Thukela-Mzimkhulu Region in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries: A Critical Reconstruction', Ph.D. thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, 1990.

27.See for example Bra Mzala in Natal Mercury, 11 Apr. 1991 and Piet 'Skiet' Rudolph quoted in Weekly Mail, 10–16 May, 1991; see also speech by G. Buthelezi, Ulundi, 20 Aug. 1983.

28.My discusssion of the nature of historical debate draws heavily on D. W. Cohen, The Combing of History, Chicago, 1994. Significantly, Cohen uses the example of the debates around the mfecane to stress the temporality and temporicity of historiographical debate. He notes that the mfecane debates are also arguments about the 'fate of implicit social theory concerning the role of ethnicity in the formation of African communities; the value of core and periphery models in the historicization of early capitalism in southern Africa; and the relationship between past, as constituted in historical texts, and the present' (p. 74). Cohen suggests that the mfecane debates, amongst others, are beginning to prompt historiographers to pay greater attention to the ethnography and economy of any particular historical debate.