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Pre-Cobbing Mfecane Historiography

CHRISTOPHER SAUNDERS

The title of Julian Cobbing's article, 'The Mfecane as Alibi', suggested a key part of his argument: that the view of the Mfecane held by previous historians was not only a false one, but had diverted attention from something else of greater importance. What Cobbing called in his article 'mfecane theory' – the idea of a great upheaval caused by the Zulu – was, he claimed, 'integral to a white settler, "Liberal" history', and had been refined and elaborated in the 1960s. For Cobbing, settler historians, liberal historians and apartheid apologists were essentially all of one mind in believing that the Mfecane began with, or was caused by (if they confined that term to the consequences of the rise of the Zulu state), 'a self-generated internal revolution' in what became known as Zululand. That these 'mfecane theorists' all treated the Mfecane as something separate from the colonial history of South Africa was, he argued, no accident. There was, he claimed, an ideological purpose at work, in particular a concern to justify the racially unequal division of the land.¹ What these historians had failed to point to, as the major process at work in the early nineteenth century, as later, was the violence of colonialism.

In what follows I discuss some of the earlier historical writing on the Mfecane to demonstrate that Cobbing has presented too stereotypical a view of what previous historians – hardly 'theorists' in any usual definition of that word – said about the Mfecane. He did not allow for the way in which views had changed over time, nor did he discuss previous work in its historical context.² Historians from Theal to the liberal Africanists of the 1960s all to a greater or lesser extent saw the Zulu as playing a major role in the Mfecane, but they by no means all agreed either on its causes or its consequences. Nor did they all treat the Mfecane as something entirely separate from the history of colonisation, or ignore the violence associated with colonialism. That the liberal historians failed to give more weight to colonial violence was not because, as Cobbing suggested, they supported or were linked to segregation and apartheid,³ but for other reasons. And it is pointed out that the main ideas in Cobbing's anti-Mfecane critique are also to be found elsewhere.

Theal and Walker

Cobbing rightly recognised the crucial importance of George McCall Theal in advancing what was for long an extremely influential view of what happened in the Natal/Zulu kingdom area and the interior in the early nineteenth century. Theal's History, written towards the end of that century, told of a time of vast destruction, from the Natal/Zulu kingdom area to the far interior, begun by Shaka. Theal did not use 'Mfecane' – nor 'Great Trek', for that matter – but in essence his view of 'the Zulu wars' – or, as he sometimes called them, 'the wars of Tshaka'⁴ – was the same as that of Eric Walker and later historians who did write of the 'Mfecane'. Theal was not the first to describe great wars in the Natal/Zulu kingdom area in the 1810s and 1820s; earlier writers had also ascribed them to the career of one frequently compared to Napoleon Bonaparte, Shaka's European counterpart, and had gone on to describe Mzilikazi as responsible for much of the death and destruction carried far into the interior.⁵ Nor was Theal the first to link violence in the Natal/Zulu kingdom area and the interior,⁶ but he systematised and carried further earlier views, and his History was long considered by many as a basic text and near-'definitive'.

After describing the rise of Shaka, his reorganisation of the Zulu army – 'The world has probably never seen men trained to more perfect obedience' – and his military innovations, Theal wrote of Shaka's aggression and cruelty – 'such cruelty as is hardly comprehensible by Europeans' – and of the sequence of warfare from the Zulu kingdom westwards, what Omer-Cooper was to call 'the great chain of wars and migrations'⁷ and Cobbing a 'chain reaction or "shunting sequence'".⁸ No writer before Theal had presented a picture of quite such destruction and devastation flowing from Shaka's conquests; his narrative, which was dull and lifeless on most topics, came alive at this point. Clearly he wished to leave his readers with an image of black barbarism at its most extreme. After writing of a torrent of invasion', and a land 'covered with skeletons', Theal concluded that The number of individuals that perished in the whole of the ravaged country from war and its effects can only be roughly estimated, but it must have been nearer two millions than one.'⁹ Theal also wished to give his readers the impression that, compared to precolonial savagery and violence, colonial rule was peaceful and beneficial.¹⁰ The 'Zulu wars,' said Theal, 'rendered insignificant the total loss of human life occasioned by all the wars in South Africa in which Europeans have engaged since first they set foot in the country.'¹¹

But even for Theal the events occurring in the interior were not altogether unconnected with the Cape colony. Had the Griqua not intervened at the battle of Dithakong in 1823, he believed, the Cape would have been invaded from the north.¹² And his picture of what happened in the interior at this time was not entirely negative. His reference to nearly two million deaths concludes a chapter entitled 'Terrible Destruction of Bantu Tribes during the Early Years of the Ninetenth Century'. One turns the page to find the following chapter called 'Formation of New Bantu Communities . . .'There Theal writes in positive terms of the early history of Moshoeshoe's Sotho state and of the survival of some Tswana polities through the period of upheaval.¹³ In his chapter on 'The Wars and Devastations of Shaka' in South Africa ( 1894), Theal describes a 'process of reconstruction' which had taken place under Moshoeshoe, 'in one corner of the vast waste that had been created'.¹⁴

Yet the map which he included in the 1891 edition of his History showed a large part of South Africa 'nearly depopulated by the Zulu wars before 1834'.^l5 And he did not alter his text to take account of new evidence uncovered in his own work, while even for his original version the evidence available to him should have led him to a more nuanced interpretation of events. Only in one footnote in his History, and in a mention in passing there drawing upon African traditions, does he provide clues to his sources on 'the Zulu wars'. We know that he not only read what was available in the Cape archives, but also collected oral evidence from Africans in the eastern Cape and trans-Kei in the 1870s, and consulted a number of published accounts, such as those by P. Mhlanga ('An Aged Fingo') and Moloja.¹⁶ Instead of analysing this evidence critically, he seized upon what would serve his purpose. Thus he took over as fact a statement recorded from an unnamed missionary in a book by J.C. Chase (1843) that 'twenty-eight distinct tribes' had disappeared in this time of upheaval, 'leaving not so much as a trace of their former existence'. Theal should have realised that the list of these twenty-eight 'tribes' in Chase's book included the names of many Tswana chiefdoms which continued to exist after the Mfecane.¹⁷ And he ignored the evidence he came across when he edited the archival records which he included in the many volumes of Records of South-East Africa and Records of the Cape Colony. In the latter, for example, he printed a report which Thomas Pringle sent to Cape Governor Somerset in 1825 concerning 'Fetcani' who had been driven from their land by 'a people of yellow complexion with black beards and long hair and who were armed with swords. This long-haired people must certainly be the Portuguese,' Pringle added, 'tho' it is odd they are not described as being armed with firearms rather than swords'.¹⁸

Alas, many later historians merely repeated, or embroidered, what Theal had written in his History. George Cory, another extremely influential amateur historian, told his readers that 'twenty-eight tribes' were 'completely wiped out' and that 'the loss of human life . . . has been roughly estimated at two millions', adding: 'Probably never in the history of the world has there been such an upheaval and such carnage caused by one man as took place during this enormous disturbance.'¹⁹ Eric Walker, Professor of History at the University of Cape Town, drew upon Theal's 1891 map for his Historical Atlas (1922), and in the first edition of his History of South Africa (1928), wrote of the 'pandemonium' that 'raged' east and west of the Drakensberg in the 1820s and early 1830s.²⁰ Walker, who now introduced 'Mfecane', a word of Xhosa origin²¹ – he added in a note: '= the crushing' – pointed out that those defeated at the battle of Dithakong were possibly not the Tlokwa of 'MaNthatisi, but Fokeng.²² In the second edition of his History (1940), we read 'The Bantu still call those the days of the Mfecane . . .',²³ while in the third (1957) Walker expressed no doubt that it was the Fokeng who were defeated at Dithakong, and he used 'Mfecane' more often, as in a new paragraph in which he was, for the first time, openly sceptical of Theal's account. 'It is . . . easy', he wrote, 'to exaggerate the numbers of the slain and to forget that there was much displacement . . . Theal estimated the number of dead at "nearer two millions than one" but gave no authority for the estimate.'²⁴ It had taken Walker almost three decades to get that far in challenging Theal. This despite the fact that at the very time Walker published the first edition of his History, his far more imaginative colleague at the University of the Witwatersrand, William Macmillan, had discarded much of the interpretation put forward by Theal.

Before turning to Macmillan, let us consider Cobbing's claim that what Walker and later professional historians said about the Mfecane was integral to their view of South African history. Like Theal, Walker showed himself interested enough in the history of Africans to include a brief passage on 'the Mfecane' in a general history of the country – more Eurocentric historians omitted the topic – but as with other historians of his time, and many of his successors, he had little interest in precolonial history, where the sources were so problematic and it was so difficult even to provide a chronology. For Walker and other early liberal historians, the dominant theme of South African history was the advancing frontier and the white racism that emerged there and dominated the political life of the country after the frontier closed. The Mfecane received relatively little attention in their work, and was hardly central to it.

This is also true for later liberal historians. The first chapter of the most detailed recent history of the country, the successor to Walker's History, begins with a chapter which takes us 'From the Dawn of History to the Time of Troubles', but the balanced interpretation of the Mfecane which T.R.H. Davenport offers there is relatively brief and hardly integral to his vision of South African history as a whole. The same applies to Leonard Thompson's interpretation – very different from Walker's, as we shall see – in his shorter History.²⁵ In all these general histories, the Mfecane receives relatively minor attention, and in the collection of essays on 'The Shaping of South African Society' edited by two leading specialists on early South African history, no significant reference is made to the Mfecane at all.²⁶

Macmillan and De Kiewiet

Though Macmillan in his classic Bantu, Boer, and Briton: The Making of the South African Native Problem (1929) followed Theal in writing of 'the Chaka wars' and their effect 'even on tribes far away in the interior', he went on to anticipate, in outline, central features of Cobbing's argument in 'The Mfecane as Alibi'. For Macmillan the 'great upheaval among the Bantu' in the Natal/Zulu kingdom area and the interior was not unrelated to the process of colonisation. In fact, he linked it specifically to the slave trade, while at the same time making clear that the lack of source material posed a serious problem to any analysis of what had happened. Macmillan wrote as follows:

How far this great upheaval among the Bantu must be attributed, in Bishop Stubbs' words, to the 'generally unsettled state of all tribes bordering' on European conquests,²⁷ can never be fully known. While from the nature of the case the effects of the frontier wars on the remoter tribes are not directly evident, the suggestion that there was a connexion is not wholly to be dismissed. It is significant that the rise of Chaka came at the very moment when things were moving towards a climax on the Cape frontier . . .

Further, to meet the demands of European planters, slave-traders had not only raided on their own account for a hundred years past, but set tribe against tribe in such ruthless fashion that if the consequences were often bloody it is not for Europeans to cast a stone. There is no reason to believe that the slave trade left the southern part of Africa unaffected.²⁸

Macmillan then cited various pieces of evidence in support of the idea that slave-raiding was important: that Lord Charles Somerset had in 1823 considered annexing Delagoa Bay as a check on the slave trade; that John Philip of the London Missionary Society had reported that the Tswana-speaking people in the interior feared the ravages of the slave trade; and that Mzilikazi was said to have met slave- raiders from Portuguese ports before he headed west, and that explains why he did not go north. Macmillan went on to quote Philip as saying both that Mzilikazi's people had to 'maintain an incessant struggle against the Portuguese slave-traders', and that 'To Farewell's establishment at Port Natal we are to trace the devastations of Chaka.'²⁹ Writing in the Cambridge History of the British Empire a few years later, Macmillan cited references in Theal's Records of South East Africa to Delagoa Bay being used by slavers, before adding: 'the effects of the slave trade upon the natives in what is now called Zululand have never been considered. Nor is it possible to gauge the repercussions of the check administered on the Fish River to the coast tribes lying to the west of Chaka's sphere of action.'³⁰

Macmillan's brilliant student C.W. de Kiewiet also rejected Theal's version of the Mfecane. Under Macmillan's guidance, De Kiewiet had written a thesis at the University of the Witwatersrand – no copy survives – on the Cape northern frontier in the period just after the Mfecane. When he came to write about the upheaval itself in the 1930s, first in a chapter in the Cambridge History of the British Empire and then in his History of South Africa Social and Economic, De Kiewiet, though aware that 'the causes of these events can never be adequately investigated', advanced an ecological interpretation. Conflict had occurred because of 'an intense competition amongst the tribes for sowing and grazing land'. There was 'much reason', he asserted, to think that what had been written about 'the devastation of the Zulu, Matabele and Mantati "hordes" was very greatly exaggerated'. What had happened in the 'confusion of the eighteen-twenties' was 'much displacement', after which people 'poured back into their lands'. And in his History he added: 'Amongst the causes of this singular crisis that smashed tribes, scattered others, and dashed the fragments into new combinations, the halting of the Bantu vanguard on the Eastern Frontier probably had much influence.'³¹

For John Philip in the 1830s, then, as for Macmillan and De Kiewiet a century later, the upheavals in Natal and the interior were by no means divorced from the process of colonisation. Only in a paragraph concerning the Ndebele in 'The Mfecane as Alibi' does Cobbing, in passing, acknowledge that Macmillan, 'slightly deviant here as in some other respects', linked the ejection of Mzilikazi to the slave trade and that 'this hypothesis is better than anything we have'.³² Elsewhere in his article Cobbing suggests a line of interpretation running from Theal through Macmillan to Omer-Cooper and beyond. As these historians in fact advanced vastly different interpretations, we must ask why the suggestive insights which Macmillan and De Kiewiet made in the 1920s and 1930s were not followed up. The loss of the Philip papers in the fire at Wits in 1931, and Macmillan's departure from the country – De Kiewiet had already left – is part of the explanation. Macmillan and, to a lesser extent, De Kiewiet were regarded as radicals, and their work was marginalised within the country because it was viewed in ruling circles as politically dangerous. But there are also other reasons. The very few leading South African professional historians of the 1940s and 1950s believed precolonial history was appropriately the terrain of anthropology, and devoted their attention to more traditional themes for historians, such as the imperial connection and constitutional issues.³³ Such graduate students as there were in those decades were directed to similar topics. No one did significant work on the Mfecane.

What of Cobbing's claim that the idea of 'cataclysmic black-on-black destruction' was an 'alibi'? He speaks of historians attributing 'the land distribution of 1913 . . . to a black-on-black holocaust in the period 1815–35', and continues: 'Since the Second World war, the stress of the alibi has been on the natural "pluralism" of black societies and how they self-sequestered themselves into proto-Bantustans in the era of Shaka, leaving the whites merely the task of surveying and recognition.' The Mfecane was 'a characteristic product of liberal history used by the apartheid state to legitimate South Africa's racially unequal land division'.³⁴ This is a serious charge against the liberal historians.

Macmillan was in fact a leading critic of the unequal distribution of land, and of racial segregation in general. His first public statement on African affairs, made to a Dutch Reformed Church conference in 1923, started with a critique of the 1913 Land Act and its effects.³⁵ Macmillan was also firm in his rejection of any idea of a separate African history. De Kiewiet did not return to South Africa in large part because of his opposition to racial segregation, and Walker actively campaigned against Hertzog's franchise and land policies before he left the country in 1936. In their writings, Macmillan and De Kiewiet wrote much about the hardships brought by colonial penetration. Indeed, few since have written more eloquently than De Kiewiet about the consequences of conquest and dispossession.³⁶ While what the early liberals wrote had numerous shortcomings, and must be seen in the context of the time, their work did not defend segregation. And the liberal Africanists of the 1960s, whom we will now consider, were fundamentally opposed to the apartheid state and what it stood for.

Omer-Cooper and Others

In 'The Mfecane as Alibi' Cobbing fails to bring out the great change in attitude among historians that became evident about 1960 and flowed from the revolution in African historiography that occurred as the countries of tropical Africa moved to independence.³⁷ For those who identified with that 'Africanist revolution', the Mfecane was now reinterpreted as primarily constructive and creative. These writers wanted to show that Africans had acted with initiative, and positively. The destructive aspects of the Mfecane and European influences were both downplayed, though neither was ignored altogether. Omer-Cooper's eastern Cape roots, which Cobbing regards as significant to his view of the Mfecane,³⁸ were a much less important influence on his work than the fact that he taught at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria while he was writing his seminal book, The Zulu Aftermath: A Nineteenth-century Revolution in Bantu Africa (1966). It was at Ibadan that he was exposed to the new thinking on African history, which in the West African case argued convincingly that the European role had been grossly exaggerated in previous histories.

The Zulu Aftermath was a pioneering work of synthesis and interpretation which told the history of a 'socio-political revolution' beginning in South Africa and reaching to 'the southern shores of Lake Victoria'. Omer-Cooper saw this revolution as 'independent of European influence in origin', but though he wished to stress that the Mfecane was the result of internal rather than external forces, he did add that as it developed, it 'interlocked with expanding European activity affecting and being affected by it'.³⁹ His main theme was state building, with the movement of people over vast distances a secondary positive development. Besides the Zulu, the other states whose history he summarises were seen as reactive states, created in response to the raiding to which they were subject. In his relatively brief chapter on the Zulu kingdom, Omer-Cooper accepted the importance of Shaka, but also recognised that the process of change had begun before, and therefore independently of, Shaka. The argument for a lengthy process of change, which at least implicitly plays down the importance of the 1820s in the state-building process east of the Drakensberg, has a long pedigree.⁴⁰

Omer-Cooper's general synthesis was soon followed by the completion of more detailed research, especially on the area west of the Drakensberg. This was because Leonard Thompson, who began teaching African history at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), in the early 1960s, at a time when there was a great expansion in doctoral programmes in African studies, started to direct doctoral students to the topic. Thompson had decided to write a major biography of Moshoeshoe, and wished the highveld background explored. He himself wrote about the Mfecane, in similar vein to Omer-Cooper, in his chapters for the first volume of The Oxford History of South Africa (1969), and then in his Moshoeshoe book (1975).⁴¹ The students of his who worked on aspects of the topic included William Lye, Martin Legassick and Alan Smith.

For Lye, a Mormon, the many migrations of the 1820s and 1830s, white and black, could be compared to the Morman trek, as Eric Walker had suggested in his history of the Great Trek.⁴² Lye could build on some revisionist work done by non-historians on one part of his topic: in his edition of the journals and letters of the London Missionary Society missionary Robert Moffat (1951),⁴³ the anthropologist Isaac Schapera had shown that 'MaNthatisi's Tlokwa had never been anywhere near Dithakong, and a fuller discussion followed from Marion How, who, like Cobbing later, found an alibi, though of a very different kind: hers was for the Tlokwa ruler 'MaNthatisi.⁴⁴ In a paper presented at the conference on 'African Societies in Southern Africa' which Thompson organised at the University of Zambia in 1968, Lye offered 'a corrective' to the view of massive social destruction on the highveld: in place of devastation and depopulation, he showed – this time through a detailed examination of the evidence – that there had only been displacement.⁴⁵ And in his thesis, Legassick pointed to the importance of Griqua raiding in the history of this period,⁴⁶ a theme Cobbing was to take up almost two decades later, with the new hypothesis that their raiding had been for slaves. In another dissertation completed at UCLA after Thompson left, R. Kent Rasmussen explored the history of the Ndebele state south of the Limpopo River, a central aspect of the Mfecane,⁴⁷ showing that the Ndebele had not been forced out of the trans-Vaal by the Zulu, but by Griqua and later Boer attacks, and in the process uncovering many errors in previous work, such as Lye's uncritical use of the account of Ndebele raids in Alfred Bryant's Olden Times in Zululand and Natal (1929).⁴⁸

No work of comparable depth was completed in the 1960s or early 1970s on the Zulu in the Shakan period. Alan Smith investigated trade at Delagoa Bay, concluding that the slaves exported from there did not come from the south and were not significant in number before the 1820s.⁴⁹ Shula Marks wrote a short survey of 'The Rise of the Zulu Kingdom' and presented a critique of Bryant's work to the Lusaka conference, but did no further work on the topic.⁵⁰ Among her doctoral students at the University of London, Jeff Guy and Philip Bonner both moved in their work from the Mfecane period to later ones, and neither David Hedges's highly speculative thesis, completed in 1978, on 'Trade and Politics in Southern Mozambique and Zululand in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century', nor Henry Slater's at Sussex, tackled the overall concept of the Mfecane.⁵¹

Meanwhile, Floors van Jaarsveld, the eminent Afrikaner historian, and other apartheid-apologists writing in the 1970s drew upon the new liberal Africanist work by Omer-Cooper and Thompson in the Oxford History to suggest that the Mfecane had created a pattern of settlement which formed the basis for the Bantustans of grand apartheid policy. Such writers also now used the Mfecane to justify the white seizure of land.⁵² Omer-Cooper and Thompson were appalled when they found their work so used by apartheid apologists, for The Zulu Aftermath and the Oxford History were written to begin the task of restoring Africans to history as active agents and not just victims, and so to help undermine apartheid.⁵³

From the mid-1970s Africanist work began to flourish in South Africa, with workshops being held at the National University of Lesotho in July 1976 and August 1977, at the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg in October 1977,⁵⁴ and at Rhodes University in mid-1979. But in none of this work, much of it heavily rooted in materialist theory, was there a general critique of the concept of Mfecane.⁵⁵ In his introduction to the published collection of papers presented at the Rhodes Nguni workshop, J.B. Peires began by saying that Omer-Cooper's Zulu Aftermath 'firmly established the Mfecane as a central event in the history of Africa, a revolutionary process of change spreading from a single centre'. He went on to say that the Mfecane had, as a result of recent work, to be seen 'as a social and economic revolution rather than as a military upheaval', but he did not question the idea of the Mfecane.⁵⁶ Nor did Cobbing at that time; his contribution to the Nguni workshop volume accepted that Mzilikazi 'was one of the greatest figures thrown up by the mfecane'.⁵⁷

In 'The Mfecane as Alibi', Cobbing said that the earliest criticism of the Mfecane he had traced was that in Marianne Cornevin's Apartheid, Power and Historical Falsification ( 1980).⁵⁸ Her discussion of the topic in that book on apartheid historical myths was brief and not entirely accurate;⁵⁹ many South African historians probably shared Peires's view that she had said nothing new.⁶⁰ The first general and detailed critique of the prevailing view of the Mfecane came in fact from the pen of Hosea Jaffe, amateur historian and Unity Movement activist. In Three Hundred Years: A History of South Africa, published as early as 1952, he had very briefly introduced the idea of a colonial vice to explain what happened to African societies in the early nineteenth century, referring to 'the southward influence of the Portuguese and the northward influence of the British', and relating the Portuguese role to the Delagoa Bay slave trade.⁶¹ In the early 1980s Jaffe prepared a History of Africa in which he wrote of 'a legend of a "Mfiqane" or "destruction of the people" by Tshaka'sZulus, to cover up the colonial Mfiqane . . . of Boers, British and Portuguese between whom the Zulus were trapped'.⁶² Not knowing that in Grahamstown Cobbing was beginning to elaborate his own critique of the Mfecane, Jaffe, who was based in London and Italy, sent to the Cape Town-based Educational Journal an article entitled 'The Difaqane: Fact vs Fiction' specifically challenging what historians, especially Thompson in The Oxford History, had written about the Mfecane. In this article, published in September 1983 under the pseudonym V. E. Satir, an anagram of 'Veritas',⁶³ Jaffe discussed the process of colonial dispossession, and concluded as follows:

the Liberal-manufactured accounts in their histories would have us believe that the Mfecane took place in a vacuum; that the sole agency for these events, the only actor on the stage, was the Zulu Tshaka, who chased the tribes into the wilderness. The Boers, the British colonists and the Portuguese were innocent, disinterested onlookers, playing no part at all.

The myth of the Mfecane or Difaqane was fabricated by the Boers and the British to disguise and justify their land-robbery and to whitewash their own genocidal Mfecane . . . [their] crushing of peoples by slave-running . . . [and] chasing out of the peoples whose land they wanted to grab.⁶⁴

Some months before the appearance of Jaffe's article Cobbing presented his first version of his critique – 'The Case Against the Mfecane' – at a seminar at the University of Cape Town.

Conclusion

Until relatively recently, historians who wrote about the Mfecane either merely repeated what others had said or offered speculations without having done detailed research. Though, as we have seen, all historians by no means presented the same views, they were too ready to link an explanation for the process they described to the Zulu, and Shaka in particular. When detailed work was undertaken, from the 1960s, it was narrowly focused; Jaffe and Cobbing were the first, in 1983, to begin to present detailed critiques, in which the 'Mfecane' was both disaggregated and presented as a myth, distracting attention from the main cause of the upheaval, slaving and colonialism.

Fundamental problems relating to the evidence for this interpretation remain. On many aspects it is unlikely that we shall ever be able to say for certain what happened. We can see now that Rasmussen went too far when he asserted that there are 'simply not sufficient data to support intelligent discussion of most issues' .⁶⁵ But what Macmillan wrote with reference to this topic is still relevant: 'History, for want of serious and sufficient documentary evidence, must walk warily.'⁶⁶ His caution will have to be borne in mind by anyone bold enough to attempt the 'new and integrated conceptual framework for analysis of the period' which Wright and Hamilton have recently called for.⁶⁷ Any such framework will have to rest on detailed, careful checking of the available evidence, the kind of analysis which Cobbing himself employed when in the 1970s he subjected the arguments in Terence Ranger's Revolt in South Rhodesia to criticism.⁶⁸

Cobbing's presentation of his case against the Mfecane since 1983 has not only been marred by inaccurate references to the historiography – as shown above – but also by overstatements, exaggerated claims and a selective use of evidence, examples of which are cited elsewhere in this book. Nevertheless, his achievement remains: to have challenged old ideas, destroyed the concept of an upheaval that was solely Zulu-inspired, and generally to have stimulated new interest in, and research on, central themes in early nineteenth-century South African history.

Acknowledgement

I wish to thank Pam Scully for her comments on a draft of this paper.

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

2.In his unpublished papers 'The Case against the Mfecane', seminar paper presented to the Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town, 1983; and 'Jettisoning the Mfecane (with Perestroika)', seminar paper presented to the African Studies Institute, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 1988, Cobbing did devote more attention to the historiography than in 'The Mfecane as Alibi'; I here concentrate on his published paper.

3.E. g. Cobbing, 'The Mfecane as Alibi', 519. Similarly, he is too ready to accept that James Stuart shared the racist views of his fellow magistrates: cf. J. Cobbing, 'A Tainted Well: The Objectives, Historical Fantasies and Working Methods of James Stuart, with Counter Argument', Journal of Natal and Zulu History, 11 (1988) and C.A. Hamilton, '"The Character and Objects of Chaka" A Reconsideration of the Making of Shaka as "Mfecane" Motor', in this volume, pp. 183–211.

4.E.g. G. M. Theal, The Republic of Natal. The Origin of the Present Pondo Tribe, Imperial Treaties with Panda and Establishment of the Colony of Natal. . ., Cape Town, 1886, 1.

5.E.g. W.C. Holden, The Past and Future of the Kaffir Races, London, 1866, ch.2. This book, by a Wesleyan missionary, was written in the early 1850s and published in 1866. The comparison between Shaka and Napoleon Bonaparte continues down to the present day; for one recent example, see B. Magubane, The Politics of History in South Africa, New York, 1982, 17.

6.As suggested in e.g. J. B. Wright, 'Political Mythology and the Making of Natal's Mfecane', Canadian Journal of African Studies, 23, 2 (1989), 278–9.

7.J.D. Omer-Cooper, The Zulu Aftermath: A Nineteenth-century Revolution in Bantu Africa, London, 1966,5.

8.Cobbing, 'The Mfecane as Alibi', 517.

9.G.M. Theal, History of South Africa from 1795 to 1828, London, 1903, 389.

10.Heinrich Vedder had the same purpose in his history of precolonial Namibia, published in German in 1934 and in English in 1938 as South West Africa in Early Times; see B. Lau, '"Thank God the Germans Came": Vedder and Namibian Historiography', in University of Cape Town, Centre for African Studies, African Seminar, Collected Papers, vol.2, ed. by K. Gottschalk and C. Saunders, Cape Town, 1981.

11.G.M. Theal, History of South Africa, 1891 ed., quoted in Cobbing, 'The Case Against the Mfecane', 7.

12.G. M. Theal, Compendium of South African History and Geography, Lovedale, 3rd ed., 1877, 198.

13.G.M. Theal, History of South Africa from 1795–1872, vol. 1, 4th ed., London, [19161, chs. 19 and 20.

14.G.M. Theal, South Africa, London, 1894, 170–1.

15.This map is reproduced in T. R. H. Davenport, South Africa: A Modern History, Johannesburg, 3rd ed., 1987, 14. It was omitted from later editions of Theal's History.

16.P. Mhlanga, 'A Story of Native Wars', Cape Monthly Magazine, New Series, 1 4 , 84(1877)248–52; Moloja, of Jozani's Village, 'The Story of the "Fetcani Horde" by One of Themselves', Cape Quarterly Review, 1, 2 (1882), 267–75.

17.J.C. Chase, The Cape of Good Hope and the Eastern Province of Algoa Bay, London, 1843, 1. Cf. W. Lye, 'The Distribution of the Sotho Peoples after the Difaqane' in L. M. Thompson, ed., African Societies in Southern Africa, London, 1969, 192 and n.l. If Theal did use Theophilus Shepstone's 1875 paper on early Natal, 'The Early History of the Zulu-Kafir Race' reprinted in J. Bird, ed., Annals of Natal, vol.1, Pietermaritzburg, 1885, as suggested by J. Raum in 'Historical Concepts and the Evolutionary Interpretation of the Emergence of States: The Case of the Zulu Reconsidered Yet Again', Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 114 (1989), 127 and n. 2, one wonders why he did not repeat the story of Dingiswayo going to the Cape.

18.G. Theal, comp., Records of the Cape Colony, vol.22, London, 1904, 433.

19.G. Cory, The Rise of South Africa, vol.2, London, 1913, 231.

20.E.A. Walker, A History of South Africa, London, 1928, 210 n.2, 182–3. Though he does not use 'Mfecane' in his discussion on pp. 182–3, it is clear that he viewed 'Mfecane' as a general term for this upheaval: cf. the sub-head on p. 164. 'Fetcani' was much used in the 1820s and 1830s, and after, for refugees who entered the trans-Keian region: see e.g. Cory, Rise of South Africa, vol.2, 236.

21.Not Zulu, as claimed e.g. in D. Denoon and B. Nyeko, Southern Africa since 1800, London, 1984, 25.

22.Walker, History of South Africa, 182, n.l.

23.Walker, History of South Africa, 2nd ed., London, 1940, 18. Cobbing is, I think, wrong to suggest that Walker is here using Mfecane in a broader sense than he had in 1928, and therefore wrong to link a broader usage to the rise of Nazism in Europe: Cobbing 'The Case Against the Mfecane', 8–9.

24.Walker, History of Southern Africa, 3rd ed., London, 1957, 175–6.

25.Davenport, South Africa: A Modern History, 4th ed., Johannesburg, 1991, ch. 1; L.M. Thompson, A History of South Africa, New Haven, 1990, 80–7.

26.R. Elphick and H. B. Giliomee, eds., The Shaping of South African Society, 1652–1820, Cape Town, 1979. In reviews of both editions I was critical of the title of the book for this reason. In the second edition, The Shaping of South African Society, 1652–1840, Cape Town, 1989, J. B. Peires 'The British and the Cape', refers to the Mfecane as 'a series of wars set in motion by the Zulu king Shaka', 486.

27.Macmillan referred to William Stubbs's Select Charters and Other Illustrations of English Constitutional History from the Earliest Times to the Reign of Edward the First, one of the setworks he had studied as an undergraduate at Oxford.

28.W.M. Macmillan, Bantu, Boer, and Briton, London, 1929, 19.

29.Macmillan, Bantu, Boer, and Briton, 18–20.

30.W.M. Macmillan, 'The Frontier and the Kaffir Wars, 1792–1836', in A. P. Newton and E. Benians, eds, The Cambridge History of the British Empire, vol.8, Cambridge, 1936, 301.

31.C. W. de Kiewiet, 'Social and Economic Developments in Native Tribal Life', in Cambridge History, vol.8, 808–9; A History of South Africa: Social and Economic, Oxford, 1941, 50.

32.Cobbing, 'The Mfecane as Alibi', 489.

33.For elaboration see C. Saunders, The Making of the South African Past, Cape Town, 1988.

34.Cobbing, 'The Mfecane as Alibi', 518–9.

35.Cf. W.M. Macmillan, My South African Years: An Autobiography, Cape Town, 1975, 181.

36.Especially De Kiewiet, 'Social and Economic Developments'; cf. C. Saunders, C. W. de Kiewiet: Historian of South Africa, Cape Town, 1986.

37.In his earlier, unpublished papers, Cobbing did take note of this change. Cf. n. 2 above.

38.Cobbing, 'The Mfecane as Alibi', 487 n.3.

39.Omer-Cooper, The Zulu Aftermath, 2 and 7.

40.Cobbing does not provide evidence for his statement ('Jettisoning the Mfecane', 16) that 'the tea room at UCT' was important in the development of the overpopulation hypothesis; in discussions on this subject in the African Studies tea room there, Monica Wilson stressed the Delagoa Bay trade hypothesis. The case for a long process of change has been advanced recently for the Phongolo-Mzimkhuku region by John Wright and Carolyn Hamilton, 'Traditions and Transformations: The Phongolo–Mzimkhulu Region in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries', in A.H. Duminy and B. Guest. eds, Natal and Zululand from Earliest Times to 1910: A New History, Pietermaritzburg, 1989, ch.3.

41.L.M. Thompson, Moshoeshoe of Lesotho 1786–1870, Oxford, 1975.

42.E. A. Walker. The Great Trek, London, 1934, 7–8.

43.Robert Moffat and Mary Moffat, Apprenticeship at Kuruman: Being the Journals and Letters of Robert and Mary Moffat 1820–1828, ed. by I. Schapera, London, 1951.

44.M. How, 'An Alibi for Mantatisi', African Studies, 13 (1954), 65–76; and see the discussion in W.F. Lye, 'The Difaqane: The Mfecane in the Southern Sotho Area, 1822–24', Journal of African History, 8 (1967), 109 and n.5.

45.Lye, 'The Distribution of the Sotho Peoples' and Thompson's summary of Lye's chapter in African Societies, 15.

46.M. Legassick, 'The Missionaries, the Griqua and the Sotho-Tswana: The Politics of a Frontier Zone', Ph.D. thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, 1969.

47.R. K. Rasmussen's thesis was published as Migrant Kingdom: Mzilikazi's Ndebele in South Africa, Cape Town, 1978. The history of the Ndebele north of the Limpopo was written by J. Cobbing, then in Zimbabwe, for a Lancaster University doctorate entitled 'The Ndebele under the Khumalos, 1820–1896', 1976. Thompson's post at the University of California, Los Angeles had gone to Terence Ranger, whose main interest was Zimbabwe history.

48.Rasmussen, Migrant Kingdom, esp. 202 and n.96. Cf. J. Wright, 'A.T. Bryant and "the Wars of Shaka" ', History in Africa, 18 (1991), 409–25.

49.A. Smith, 'The Trade of Delagoa Bay as a Factor in Nguni Politics, 1750–1835', in L.M. Thompson, ed., African Societies. Smith's thesis, completed in 1970, was, like Lye's, never published.

50.S. Marks, 'The Rise of the Zulu Kingdom' in R. Oliver, ed., The Middle Age of African History, London, 1967; 'The Traditions of the Natal "Nguni" ', in Thompson, ed., African Societies in Southern Africa. Marks was at the time completing what became Reluctant Rebellion: The 1906–8 Disturbances in Natal, Oxford, 1971, a history of the early twentieth-century Bambatha rebellion.

51.The theses by Guy and Bonner were published as J. J. Guy, The Destruction of the Zulu Kingdom: The Civil War in Zululand, 1879–1884, London, 1979; and P. Bonner, Kings, Commoners and Concessionaires: The Evolution and Dissolution of the Nineteenth-Century Swazi State, Cambridge, 1983. D. Hedges, 'Trade and Politics in Southern Mozambique and Zululand in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries', Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 1978; and H. Slater, 'Transitions in the Political Economy of South-East Africa Before 1840', D.Phil. thesis, University of Sussex, 1976, were not published.

52.Cf. e.g. F. van Jaarsveld, Van Van Riebeeck tot Vorster, Johannesburg, 1975. Such ideas were taken up and further elaborated in such publications as the official South Africa 1977, which M. Cornevin criticised in Apartheid, Power and Historical Falsification, Paris, 1980, and in school textbooks.

53.Thompson's response appeared eventually in The Political Mythology of Apartheid, New Haven, 1985; Omer-Cooper's, in a paper presented to the Australian African Studies Association in 1981, was never published.

54.E.g. J.J. Guy, 'Production and Exchange in the Zulu Kingdom', Mohlomi, 2 (1978), 96–106 (and in J.B. Peires, ed., Before and After Shaka: Papers in Nguni History. Grahamstown, 1981); 'Ecological Factors in the Rise of Shaka and the Zulu Kingdom', in S. Marks and A. Atmore, eds, Economy and Society in Pre-Industrial South Africa, London, 1980; J.B. Wright, 'Pre-Shakan Age-Group Formation among the Northern Nguni', Natalia 8 (1978) 23–9. Cf. a paper which has appeared since this essay was written: J. Peires, 'Paradigm Deleted: The Materialist Interpretation of the Mfecane', Journal of Southern African Studies, 19, 2 (1993), 295–313.

55.James O. Gump's doctoral thesis at the University of Nebraska on 'Revitalisation through Expansion in South Africa c. 1750–1840: A Reappraisal of the "Open" Mfecane', 1980, was centrally on the Mfecane. Its first chapter offered a critique of the materialism of, for example, John Wright's article on 'Pre-Shakan Age-Group Formation', and instead proposed a cultural explanation, suggesting parallels between Shaka and Hiawatha.

56.Peires, Before and After Shaka, 1 and back cover.

57.J. Cobbing, 'The Ndebele State', in Peires, Before and After Shaka, 160.

58.Cobbing, 'The Mfecane as Alibi', 487, n.5.

59.E.g. she lumped together Cory, Walker and Macmillan, and said that all Theal's works are characterised by a profound contempt for blacks: Cornevin, Apartheid, Power and Historical Falsification, 103.

60.See his review in Social Dynamics, 6 (1980), 89–90.

61.'Mnguni' [H. Jaffe], Three Hundred Years. A History of South Africa, Cape Town, 1952, 90–1. While Jaffe stressed colonial dispossession above black self-destruction, his colleague Dora Taylor [N. Majeke] wrote of the 'chaos of tribal warfare', The Role of the Missionaries in Conquest, Johannesburg, 1952.

62.H. Jaffe, A History of Africa, London, 1985, 67, n.36.

63.H. Jaffe to C. Saunders, 9 October 1991; interview with H. Jaffe, Cape Town, 16 January 1992.

64.V.E. Satir [H. Jaffe], 'The Difaqane: Fact vs Fiction', The Education Journal (September 1983), 10.

65.Rasmussen, Migrant Kingdom, 3; W. F. Lye, 'The Difaqane: The Sotho Wars in the Interior of South Africa, 1822–1837', Ph.D. thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, 1969; 'The Ndebele Kingdom South of the Limpopo River', Journal of African History, 10 (1969), 87–104.

66.Macmillan, 'The Frontier and the Kaffir Wars', 301.

67.Wright and Hamilton, 'Traditions and Transformations', 69.

68.J. Cobbing, 'The Absent Priesthood: Another Look at the Rhodesian Risings of 1896–1897 ', Journal of African History, 18 (1977), 61–84. I thank Nigel Penn for this point.