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Putting the Mfecane Controversy into Historiographical Context

NORMAN ETHERINGTON

Julian Cobbing presents not one, but three arguments in his challenge to accepted versions of the mfecane:

Troubled times in southern Africa were not a consequence of the rise of the Zulu kingdom;

A continuous series of writers seeking to justify white settlement blamed the Zulu for devastating and depopulating vast territories;

The root causes of commotions in the first few decades of the nineteenth century were labour raiding and slaving expeditions mounted to feed demand generated in the Cape colony and Portuguese Mozambique.

The first argument has been widely accepted. The other two have provoked spirited controversy. Essays in Part One of this book take up some of the issues raised by the second and third of Cobbing's propositions.

Settler History and the Mfecane

Cobbing regards the mfecane as the masterpiece of settler history, and in so doing aligns himself with a long-standing tendency of South African scholarship to emphasise the political uses of history. Afrikaner nationalists have at various times advertised their intention to find a past that serves their cause. English-speaking historians such as the influential amateurs George McCall Theal and George Cory made clear their own intentions to write the sort of history that would 'heal' divisions between Boer and Briton. In various ways 'liberal' historians of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s consciously wrote history 'against apartheid'. Those scholars were in turn attacked by radicals for deliberately concealing the functional relationship between segregation and capitalism.

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 begin to verify his propositions about settler history.⁴ Substantiating the case would be the work of a lifetime. Even then it would be open to question from those who treat works of history as literary texts open to a multiplicity of readings. Should Cobbing wish to persevere in a labour which is totally superfluous to his central argument, he would be well advised to join the postmodernists and do some deconstructive readings of major historians' texts on the mfecane.

Judging from the arguments he employs in support of his third proposition, Cobbing is no post-modern. His contention that labour-raiding to serve the Cape and Mozambican economies was the root cause of commotions on the highveld and in Natal is accompanied by a plethora of categorical statements. 'There is no doubt' that missionaries at Dithakong 'were fully and consciously engrossed in what they were doing, i.e. collecting slaves.'⁵ 'Everyone knew what Somerset meant.'⁶ 'The conclusion is inescapable' . . . 'there is a single, unavoidable, explanation' . . . 'it is clear, then, that slaving was having a dramatic impact'.⁷ When he writes in these terms Cobbing does indeed rush upon his readers like a 'terrorist of truth'. Historians of all tendencies are likely to react with scepticism, if not hostility, when assaulted in this way. The vehemence of the counter-attack could have been expected. The pity is that it appears to many scholars to have cast doubt on all three of Cobbing's central propositions.

In order to see why this is not the case, it is necessary to recognise the difference between the method of argumentation used to discredit the Zulucentric mfecane and the quite different method employed to assert the vital importance of slaving as a cause of turmoil among southern African societies. The first argument proceeds, as we have seen, by falsification. It shows that certain state formations and events which had previously been attributed to the impact of Zulu raiding following the rise of the Shakan kingdom could not have been the result of Zulu activity. The second argument proceeds by inference: if the Zulu could not have produced the turmoil attributed to them, what did? Documents indicate that Griquas, Bergenaar and others were engaged in labour raiding on the highveld. Documents also say that slaves were sold in Mozambique. Raiding and slaving are known to have produced great turmoil in other parts of Africa. Therefore we may infer that the turmoil of the early nineteenth century was caused by slaving. Only Cobbing does not say he is making an inference. He says he is revealing the truth.

The argument is scantily clad. Having attacked the notion of a Zulu-generated mfecane because researchers thus far have failed to show the mechanism by which the rise of the Zulu state was linked to trade, drought, population pressure or any of the other phenomena cited by previous scholars,⁸ Cobbing should acknowledge the same problem with his own argument based on slaving. What amount of raiding is required to produce reactive militarised state formations? Why do the most formidable states not appear closer to the centres of raiding? Why is people-raiding more disruptive than raiding for cattle or some other item? He can only respond to these queries by putting forward hypotheses as untestable as those he has attacked. Worse still, he lets himself be drawn on to terrain where he should not be fighting. If the Zulu were not responsible for the round of state formation and population movement that occurred in the first half of the nineteenth century, the Zulu kingdom ceases to be an object of special interest. The reasons for its appearance are no more nor less interesting than the reasons for the appearance of any other African state in the region. Scholars can give up the elusive search for a first cause which set the process of Zulu state formation into motion. While the study of rival hypotheses will continue to be a useful way of introducing undergraduate students to the study of African history, it ceases to be the 'revolution in Bantu Africa'.

However, by putting so much emphasis on slave trading at Delagoa Bay, Cobbing gives the appearance of offering yet another explanation for the rise of the Zulu kingdom.⁹ He should be able to share Elizabeth Eldredge's doubts about the extent of the Delagoa Bay trade. After all, Delagoa Bay is only important if one accepts the key role of the Zulu state. Similarly Cobbing should not be greatly worried by Carolyn Hamilton's view that 'Shaka the monster' was as much a creation of the Zulus' black neighbours as of Port Natal freebooters. Reviving the psychopathic image cannot restore Shaka's status as 'the black Napoleon'. The available texts on both the slave trade and the character of Shaka are capable of enough different readings to keep critical theorists happy for years to come. Cobbing need not have tied his colours to specific interpretations. The work brought together in Parsons's essay, 'Prelude to Difaqane in the Interior of Southern Africa' pushes the onset of conflict, population mobility and state formation so far back that the Shakan state begins to look like a relative late-comer.

Conclusion

This introduction to Part One has attempted to combine a setting for the historiographical essays with an assessment of argumentation and 'truth' in the mfecane debate. In an era more than usually suspicious of truth, the historian's task is especially burdensome. We must be more than usually careful to bear in mind that most of our knowledge about the past is provisional. The kinds of evidence available to us carry most weight when they are used to falsify propositions about the past. When, on the other hand, we argue inductively, our inferences are uncertain and always subject to correction. That is why the case against the Zulu-generated mfecane reads more convincingly than the arguments that the mfecane was the creation of 'settler history' and that slaving was the ultimate source of terror and turmoil in the South African interior.

Leonard Thompson can thus be seen to be only partly right when he writes in his new History of South Africa, that Cobbing's argument 'cannot be substantiated'. Those parts based on inference cannot be substantiated, but the parts based on falsification can be. To judge how far this is so, the reader needs to do no more than appraise how much revision is now required in Thompson's own text on the mfecane:

Until the late eighteenth century the Bantu-speaking mixed farmers south of the Limpopo River lived in small chiefdoms . . . The nucleus of change lay in northern Nguni country . . . This transformation was in essence an internal process within the mixed farming society in southeastern Africa. By the last quarter of the eighteenth century the relation between the population level and the environment was changing . . . Previously, the society had been expansive and the scale of political organization had remained small . . . Gradually, however, the population of the region had been increasing to a level where that expansive process was no longer possible . . . Zulu impis (regiments) and bands composed of people who had been driven from their homes by the Zulu . . . had created the widespread havoc throughout southeastern Africa that became known as the Mfecane.¹⁰

Should there be another edition of Thompson's book, virtually the whole of that section would require rewriting. To that extent, at least, we can revise 'historical truth'.

1.P. M. Rosenau, Postmodernism and the Social Sciences: Insights, Inroads and Intrusions, Princeton, 1992, 7 8 .

2.J. Caplan, 'Postmodernism, Poststructuralism, and Deconstruction: Notes for Historians', Central European History, 22 (1989), 272–3.

3.See N. Etherington, 'The Great Trek in Relation to the Mfecane: A Reassessment', South African Historical Journal, 25 (1991), 12–13.

4.The closest he comes is implying that Eric Walker invented the word in 1928. More thesis writers can follow in the footsteps of Jeff Peires and Neil Parsons by spotting earlier uses of the word or its Sotho equivalent, difaqane.

5.J. Cobbing, 'The Mfecane as Alibi: Thoughts on Dithakong and Mbolompo', Journal of African History, 29(1988), 493.

6.Cobbing, 'The Mfecane as Alibi', 503.

7.Cobbing, 'The Mfecane as Alibi', 509; 'Rethinking the Roots of Violence in Southern Africa 1740–1840', paper presented to the colloquium on the Mfecane Aftermath, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 1991, 21, 15.

8.Cobbing, The Mfecane as Alibi', 488.

9.Or, more precisely, to be reviving an explanation which attracted W.M. Macmillan.

10.L.M. Thompson, A History of South Africa, New Haven, 1990, 80–5.