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Language and Assassination

Cultural Negations in White Writers ' Portrayal of Shaka and the Zulu

DAN WYLIE

The range of attitudes towards Shaka in 'colonial' writing is wide and tangled, but the strongest and most consistent has undoubtedly been one of 'character assassination'. This has varied from the openly vicious (Nathaniel Isaacs and Elizabeth Watt) through the jarringly ambivalent (A.T. Bryant and E.A. Ritter) to the concealed (J. Omer-Cooper and L. Thompson). It runs counter to, and often in confused company with, the tendency to lionise Shaka; it permeates even the most recent historiographical efforts to assess him 'objectively'.

This essay is concerned with recognisable patterns of language-use in the Shakan literature through which some common 'assassinatory' attitudes are expressed. Virtually all cross-cultural attempts to convey the Zulu 'reality', inevitably inscribe the individual and cultural identity of the writer as powerfully as they describe the subject. More accurately, what is inscribed is a certain perception of the subject, a mode of thinking about it, which is discernible in the manner in which words are chosen, juxtaposed or deployed in argument. I take it as axiomatic, then, that style, or rhetoric, is a seamlessly integral part of any portrayal of 'Shaka', and that any assessment of our primary or secondary sources depends in large part on an assessment of the heritage, resources and implications of their rhetorical choices.

There is no unmediated historical documentation of Shaka's reign. This is as true of the earliest eye-witness accounts¹ as of James Stuart's oral traditions or of the latest research. 'Shaka' is in every sense a 'verbal construct'. His 'history' consists very largely of legends, or anecdotes, or lies, or inventions, rather than what we conventionally think of as 'historical evidence' (i.e. statements which we can unproblematically assume to have a direct representational relationship with 'what happened'). His portrayal is conditioned by a plethora of Eurocentric prejudices, inherited concepts and narrative conventions; his is a 'literate' mythology, whose selection of words (and by extension, selection of allusion, metaphor, sentence structure, tense, narrative strategy, even genre) has so far hardly been examined.²

An example will sharpen the point. In almost all works on Shaka, the origin of his name is discussed, operating as a kind of synecdochal lens through which the question of Shaka's own origins – his birth, exile and accession to Zulu chieftainship – is refracted. A 'folk etymology' is used to support or crystallise the story. In each case the name 'Shaka' is translated, and into the gap between original word and interpretative translation the writer's predilections are inserted (this happens with many words, such as 'Zulu' and 'Bulawayo' and even, a more general case examined by Christopher L. Miller, 'Africa' itself).³ This is, in effect, a microcosm of the process which occurs in all transcriptions of the reality of one culture into the discourse of another, or of the past into the present.

An ambivalence in the translation of Shaka's name is present from the beginning. Nathaniel Isaacs, without mediating comment, gives two versions. In one he derives it from 'Chekery or dysentery', which (the story goes) Shaka's mother, Nandi, was said to have contracted, in order to conceal her pregnancy. This crystallises the notion of Shaka's illegitimacy, which itself, as William Wörger wrote, 'forms, and becomes an emblem of, the man';⁴ it is also echoed by Isaacs's allusions to disease and insanity in his descriptions of Shaka's 'symptoms'⁵ and the repulsion informing his innumerable epithets of 'inhuman', 'insatiable', 'detestable' and so on. In the second, Isaacs connects the name with the word, 'in Sichuana at least', for 'battle-axe'.⁶ This carries the obvious connotations of insatiable warfare; it also, incidentally, demonstrates the ease with which early travellers transferred information from one 'tribe' to another, tending to see them as essentially undifferentiated. Both etymologies are implicitly jettisoned, without comment, when Isaacs avers that the name was changed from Checker to Chaka.⁷

Except for the plagiarism by D.C.F. Moodie (1888), Isaacs's interpretations vanish from the literature. So does fellow eye-witness Henry Francis Fynn's more plausible derivation of 'looseness of the bowels' – with the exception of J.D. Omer-Cooper.⁸ Both were overtaken by a more colourful explanation: that of the 'intestinal beetle'. This only appears in the literature (as does so much else) with A.T. Bryant's Olden Times in Zululand and Natal (1929), a century after Shaka's death. In virtually every subsequent account,⁹ and in conjunction with the 'stunted penis' story (also started by Bryant), it is utilised to support new, crudely Freudian explanations for Shaka's violence: his childhood of belittlement, implied in the 'beetle' appellation, fuels vengeance and ambition. Thus Huntly Stuart (nephew of James), in his play 'Shaka' ( 1981), has Dingane mock his predecessor with his 'royal BEETLE power . . . royal beetle authority'; and Lynn Bedford Hall's children's account (prudishly?) suppresses the illegitimacy-connection and has Shaka's young bullies use the term 'beetle' merely as insult.¹⁰

The importance, in this context, is not in the truth of the epithet but in how it is used. Thus Charles Ballard, in The House of Shaka (1988), wishing to lionise the man, evades the connotations of both the ludicrous and the Freudian in the 'beetle' story and gives the meaning of the name as 'break of day', 'fury', or possibly 'firebrand' (citing no source, but presumably resurrecting the obscurer derivation of the Revd J.L. Dönne and William Holden).¹¹ Accordingly, Ballard suppresses the illegitimacy issue, asserting that Senzangakhona 'officially' received Shaka as his 'legitimate son and heir designate by adoption', and has Shaka assume the Zulu chieftainship as 'his birthright', rather than by murder.¹² In effect, given the tenuousness of the evidence, this tells us more about Ballard than about Shaka; it is of a piece with Ballard's overriding concern to place himself on the right side of the modern political fence, to align himself in a kind of 'affirmative action' with emerging Zulu power: 'I sincerely hope,' he writes in his Acknowledgements, 'that the interpretation rendered in the following pages lives up to Chief Buthelezi's expectations of a work that embraces a Zulu perspective of the Zulu monarchy.'

I have dwelt on this to highlight the manner in which a single lexical choice can be incorporated into the writer's ideological stance, personal affiliation and awareness of audience. This process of translating a single Zulu word into the icon of an essentially Eurocentric posture is a microcosm of the processes involved in most European inscriptions, whether fictionally empathetic or historiographically explicatory, of 'the other culture'. It is some broader patterns of these processes I want to deal with.

The aim here is to propose a tentative terminology for those textual expressions of attitude, perhaps best termed gestures, which are most often repeated in the Shakan literature. I isolate three such gestures, for which I have coined the terms enterrment, layback and deadlighting. Such a 'synchronic' terminology, which to some extent overrides 'diachronic' historical variation, is justified, I think, by the exceptionally high degree of incestuous plagiarism, paraphrasing and unquestioning repetition which characterises so much of the Shakan literature.¹³

Because I am viewing these works in a strong sense as documents of a culture, the gestures I delineate here recur in other colonial literatures, though I will not attempt a comparative perspective here. However, I do not offer my terms as being comprehensive, or conceptually omnipotent or normative; rather, they should be viewed as momentary crystallisations of cultural gestures which by nature are fluid, protean and subject to manifold qualification. Hence I will range freely over the genres of 'history', 'fiction', 'poetry', to focus on gestures common to all of them.

Enterrment

By the term enterrment – en-earth-ment – I denote very broadly a gesture of derogation, of dismissal or suppression, which is expressed by aligning Shaka and his Zulus with the earth, that is, positioning them on a 'lower' rung of an implicit or explicit hierarchy.

The manifestations are many-layered. Europe's intellectual heritage of the 'Great Chain of Being' and, later, popularised forms of Darwinism, polygenist anthropology and literate history, combined in various ways with the practical superiorities of numerate commerce, firepower and progressionist technology to rejustify the ancient imageries. Blacks were easily assimilated to ingrained symbolisms of darkness 'below' enlightenment; lack of 'enlightenment' is easily expressed in terms of the earth-bound – the static, the animal, the 'natural', the sensual; the sensual is readily subsumed by a puritanical evangelism in the Satanic, and hence the unrestrained, the insane and the simply unintelligible.

An extract from a clumsy 'epic poem' by D.J. Darlow (1937) exposes the coalition of these sub-gestures with startling clarity:

What words are there to tell of deeds of blood?

Like a great torrent after weeks of rain

The Zulu army swept across the land,

A ruthless desolation. Those who fled,

In earnest of the flood worked their revenge

On who withstood them; ruin everywhere;

Behind the host the wolves devoured the slain,

Dogs that trotted at their masters' heels,

Hounds of Hell obedient to fiends,

Ranging th'Inferno slavering with joy.¹⁴

The comparison with uncontrollable animals and attendant passions is the common stuff of racism everywhere, and need not detain us here. Worthy of more note is the identification of Zulus with natural forces: flood, fire, deluges and storms are the most common. Isaacs, for instance, states that 'After a form of government had been established [by Shaka] recognising all these barbarities, a calm ensued, not unlike that which intervenes between the first and last shocks of an earthquake . . .' .¹⁵ Holden put it even more hyperbolically: 'As the raging volcano vomits forth from its fiery crater smoke, and ashes, and burning lava . . . entombing villages and cities at its feet, spreading dismay, destruction and death around; so, from the mouth of this despot a stream of fire was vomited forth . . .'.¹⁶ This is not, at bottom, much different from Nickie McMenemy's characterisation of Shaka, hovering between dread and admiration, as 'a most magnificent product of nature', a 'personification of the darkness of earth, of the imperturbability of air in which silver lightning sets the sky ablaze, of the revivifying, malleable, fertile-making power of water, and the triumphant, unsubduable, all-changing potency of fire'.¹⁷

These are not isolated examples; and the metaphors persist into the mainstream histories. Thus Shaka unleashes a 'wave of bloodshed' (Cory),¹⁸ or becomes the 'storm-centre' of the 'mfecane' (Eric Walker; Omer-Cooper);¹⁹ the 'upheaval' and 'turbulence' caused by a 'galaxy of leaders' (Omer-Cooper)²⁰ is 'cataclysmic' (Davenport),²¹ an 'eruption' (Ballard).²² In this way the central idea of the revolutionary and irresistible power of the Shakan state is built into assessments otherwise quite different from each other. Similarly, even Omer-Cooper, despite his project of putting a positive gloss on Shaka's nation-building project, reveals a palpable repugnance in his diction of predation, rape and aberration: 'ravenous hordes of pillagers' throw 'peaceable tribes' into 'turmoil and confusion', 'accompanied by carnage and destruction on an appalling scale' in which 'whole tribes were massacred', and Shaka's armies 'ravished' others' territories and inflicted 'monstrous sufferings' on his own.²³

More important is Darlow's assertion of linguistic inadequacy in the face of 'savagery'. It is the same kind of alleged inadequacy embodied in the language of the clichéd, formless, exaggeratedly violent popular literature to which Shaka has always been confined (in this sense, the choice of genre itself is a form of enterrment). Elizabeth Paris Watt's historical novel Febana (1962) is paradigmatic:

All the torture and damnation of hell itself rent the shuddering night as human flesh and blood in searing anguish ran this fearful race of death . . . No words at the command of civilized man could describe the horror of all that followed . . . the awful bloodshed, the wild mingling of battle-cries, the screams of hate and fury, the groans of anguish, the massacre and revolting mutilation.²⁴

This kind of dismissively unindividuated description still echoes through the histories: in Leonard Thompson's A History of South Africa women and children are 'massacred' with 'unprecedented ferocity' in a 'reign of terror', the landscape 'littered with human bones' in the Zulus' 'zeal for conquest'.²⁵ Thompson's 'despotic and capricious' Shaka is still the centrepiece of this 'internal' development. The characterisation is here also intimately related to the deepest possible enterrment, that of relegating the Zulus to the underworld. In Watt, Shaka is 'Satan himself hearing the hiss of hell's flames and the dying agonies of the damned',²⁶ echoing Isaacs's duplicitous 'giant without reason'²⁷ and Bryant's 'Satanic majesty', 'devil', and 'arch-demon of iniquity'.²⁸

Like Darlow, Watt explicitly states the incapacity of her 'civilized' language to accommodate the Zulu reality – hence the resort to cliché. As Russell Martin has noted, this syndrome begins with Isaacs's struggle 'to devise a suitable language that will convey his apprehension of an historical figure and a society, utterly outside his own and his audience's experience and understanding'.²⁹ Hence, for instance, Isaacs's statement that Shaka 'finally succeeded in establishing a sort of Zoolacratical form of government (if I may so term it, for I do not know of anything resembling it in either ancient or modern history), a form that defies description or detail',³⁰ and his more ambivalent withdrawal from the effort to describe Shaka's atrocities 'too harrowing to be narrated'.³¹ Similarly, Holden noted that 'those who have written about [Shaka] have laid the English language under contribution in order to find suitable epithets to describe his horrible and revolting conduct',³² adding, 'No language can describe the frantic joy of the conquerors: their hideous yells, their vociferous songs, their savage delight, exceeded all bounds.'³³ George McCall Theal lamented Shaka's career of 'such cruelty as is hardly comprehensible by Europeans'.³⁴ This is echoed half a century later by Edgar Brookes and Colin Webb, for whom the suffering caused by Shaka is 'almost indescribable'.³⁵

In effect, language-use enacts those 'bounds', constitutes a 'pale' beyond which Shaka and the Zulu are linguistically banished, in its extreme form to a realm of utter incomprehensibility. The Zulu are reduced to a 'blank darkness', to use Miller's title, the ultimate form of the negatives so commonly employed – unrestrained, irredeemable, insatiable, inhuman, and so on. This is one of the conceptual preconditions developed for white narratives of Africa, as Edgar Wallace wrote: 'There are many things that happen in the very heart of Africa that no man can explain . . . a story about Africa must be a mystery story.'³⁶ Thus, for Bryant, 'The Bantu character is one to us not easily analyzed. It is largely a study in contrasts; one may say, even in paradoxes.'³⁷ Shaka is the epitome of this indecipherability: 'But who shall fathom the devious ways of Shakan diplomacy?'³⁸ His 'caprice' and 'deviousness' is thus seen as iconic of a general incomprehensibility inherent in 'the Bantu character' (itself a reification which writers 'observe' and 'study' while simultaneously inscribing its impenetrability); this caprice serves as a cornerstone of historical explanation right up to, as already noted, Leonard Thompson. Brookes and Webb, again, attribute to Shaka 'complete unpredictability', then in order to circumnavigate the threat to a logical historical explanation that this poses, resort to a neat tautology: 'To reconcile these conflicting qualities is difficult except by the assumption that Shaka, like Napoleon, considered himself above morality, responsible to none, and free from ordinary restraints.'³⁹ This is the historiographical version of McMenemy's fictional gesture of simultaneous repulsion, mystification and enterrment: Shaka is finally 'neither good not evil; more, he was a personification of that affliction which life produces now and again, an impersonal product of nature'.⁴⁰

The impulse to associate the Zulu with raw nature is often entangled in another gesture of enterrment: the embedding of the people in the landscape. This usually occurs within the ethos of a kind of qualified 'Edenism' – qualified because it is not an Eden in which the white writer actually finds participation possible. J.M. Coetzee has argued that a pure Eden-myth failed to take hold of the South African literary imagination as it did the American: the white settlers in the former were rather 'apprehensive that Africa might turn out not to be a Garden but an anti-Garden, a garden ruled over by a serpent, where the wilderness takes root again in men's hearts'.⁴¹ Shaka is the symbol of that fear.

A.T. Bryant puts it this way in A History of the Zulu:

Out on the grassy plain, amidst the blue forget-me-nots and the pink gladioli, placidly moved the grazing herds, while groups of merry herdboys, clad only in the sheen of the setting sun, fluted plaintively on their panpipes hard by, as though to say, 'Sun! goodbye! goodbye!' Away in the distance, circles of grass brown huts, each with its attendant patch of waving millet, were scattered here and there where, had we approached, we should have found the elder folk peacefully assembled – busy women in their leathern kilts and swarthy damsels in their girdles of fringe, moving artlessly to and fro, while the men squatted leisurely about, plying their simple trades of wood-carving or basket-making, little knowing that the angel of death even then hovered above them.

Such was the pleasing idyll that everywhere rejoiced the traveller's gaze as he passed through the breadth of Lalaland betwixt the Tukela and Mngeni in the year 1810. And with the dawn all this picture of living loveliness was to be blotted out. The reign of Appollyon [Shaka] would enter in the night and this happy spot would become the Armageddon on which the corpses of the wood carvers and basket makers would be strewn o'er the plains. Infants would be pinned to the backs of their slaughtered mothers, tender trembling children would be struck down in their homes, cattle and panpipes would be swept furiously from the hillside – bloody devastation would stalk triumphant through the land and beautiful peace would die a violent death.⁴²

Romantic language of sensual indolence and music in a Georgian landscape of levelled, floral luxuriance, in which nakedness is unabashedly paraded and labour is blissfully aimless, is reinforced by a sequence of gently tumbling relative clauses, present participles and archaisms, evoking a timeless idyll of humans in harmony with nature and each other.

Superficially, this is not a gesture of enterrment, appearing more positive than derogatory. But Bryant deliberately distances the scene: it is panoramic rather than insightful; some things we would observe only 'had we approached'; the traveller remains a hypothetical one, despite the spurious specificity of '1810'; the views of boys 'clad only in the sheen of the setting sun' and of 'swarthy damsels' are distinctly voyeuristic. The anachronisms ('panpipes'), clichés and stereotypes (the 'corpses . . . strewn o'er the plains' is a staple of Shakan literature from Fynn and Isaacs onwards) also serve to dislocate the scene from a reader's involvement; this is a world altogether whimsical and in any case destined to vanish. A taint of melancholy, as in the 'plaintive' music and 'Sun! goodbye! goodbye!', presages the drum-beat of 'would' verbs that enact the violence and, supported by the biblical millenialism of 'angel of death' and 'Armageddon', imply an inescapable fatedness.⁴³ The apparent approbation of the idyll, in short, is enclosed in a lexical and stylistic envelope which verbalises a dismissal, a burial and a vicarious nostalgia for a world which was not, in any case, the writer's own.

Similarly, in his magnum opus, Olden Times in Zululand and Natal, Bryant uses the stereotypical language of popular fiction to enliven an alleged incident of Shaka's reign, in which 'natural' sensuality is murderously punished:

One hundred and seventy boys and girls caught in the height of their merriment, were hurdled like sheep for the slaughter within the cattle-fold, tremblingly awaiting their doom. Nor needed they wait long. His majesty, the personification of death, appeared at the gateway like an awful spectre, picked out several fine lads, 'the worst', ordered their necks to be wrenched by their own 'brothers', then be dragged away and beaten by sticks until life became extinct. After this fiendish prelude, a general and indiscriminate butchery followed . . . a happy spot on God's earth, a moment before sparkling with youthful vivacity, became at once transformed into a hell of moaning and pain; and with the golden sunshine as their pall, one hundred and seventy battered children, like withered wild-flowers from the veld, were cast away on the green.⁴⁴

Again, a paradisaical 'happy spot' is exploded by the implacable doom of an apocalyptic bearer of death, here even more explicitly associated with the fiendish and with Hell; again, the theme of an idyllic innocence of the young is ruptured by sibling-murder;⁴⁵ and again, the very language, the saccharine hyperbole of the closing metaphors, serve to insulate us from real sympathy.

Bryant's enterrment of the people, as opposed to the place, is more clearly revealed in another description of the rape of Paradise:

The Bantu on the whole are tame and genial savages. But there are fighting-cocks amongst the hens, who now and again, here and there about the continent, grow fitfully gamy and make the feathers fly. Among such game-cocks our Nguni folk were numbered. Those halcyon days of the Golden Age ere Dingiswayo first disturbed the idyllic peace marked but an interval wherein the aggressive, plundering spirit of the race lay for the moment torpid. Once the ancient fire had been by Dingiswayo re-kindled, then fanned by Shaka to roaring conflagration, there was no longer any power to stay the natural impulse of the race. One after another wild spirits emerged among the clans, and led forth, north and west and south, fierce blood-thirsty hordes, revelling in slaughter and destruction . . .⁴⁶

Here the people as a whole are animalised, their attackers simply more so; Shaka is seen merely as one form of animal life predating another, a 'wolf',⁴⁷ the 'king of beasts',⁴⁸ a 'wild animal',⁴⁹ a 'hyena'.⁵⁰ The derogation of these 'natural impulses', moreover, is delivered in a rhetoric of classical elevation, syntactic inversions and vocabulary of ponderous dignity, with an effect almost parodic; the prose itself enacts the elevation of reader above subject, and thus functions as a screen of formality.⁵¹

The 'pre-cataclysmic' 'Golden Age' evoked in the first two descriptions quoted above is, Bryant reveals in the third, seen merely as a temporary hiatus, a period of repression of innate ferocities which are capable of exploding anywhere on 'the continent' and in any direction. This is surely an expression of projected fears of a resurgence of African rebellion, such as that of 1906, through which Bryant himself had lived, and of which, again, Shaka is the most prominent and vivid icon. More accurately, Bryant invokes a myth of an Edenic state only opportunistically to reinforce a notion of revolutionary change, impelled by Shaka's personal violence.⁵² Indeed, true paradise has no (indigenous) men in it at all: the many battles 'pollut[ed] the virgin sward with gore and putrid corpses . . . Such was the coming of man into this hallowed paradise where heretofore nature had luxuriated undefiled in unruffled bliss'.⁵³ Happily, the blacks' inveterate, autophagous violence, here expressed in the metaphors of disease, creates a 'No-Man's-Paradise'⁵⁴ into which the white man opportunely arrives:

anon this most beautiful and fertile garden in all South Africa, this Black Man's arcady smiling, century long, in the joy of peace and plenty and perpetual sunshine, had become transformed into a sullen and desolate waste; and into this wilderness, in the nick of time, two streams of colonizing Whites, from east and from west, had as suddenly walked, and taken possession.⁵⁵

Arguably, Bryant is here turning his characteristic sarcasm against the whites: the 'No-Man's-Paradise' is 'all a mirage, an illusion', the thousands of inhabitants were 'in being all the time, unseen, in hiding or in captivity', and soon making their unwelcome presence felt.⁵⁶ Bryant is not above pouring vitriol on his own party – within limits:⁵⁷

The history of modern European colonization among primitive peoples has proven beyond all gainsay that, where the White man wills he goes; that with him still might is right . . . this arrogant, greedy, lawless element struts over the face of the globe, disturbing all, molesting everybody, in its insatiable lust for further lands and further wealth.⁵⁸

This sounds precociously 'liberal', but it is framed as a tentative hypothesis ('something of the Black man's criticism . . . might run somewhat on these lines'), and quickly slips into a revelation of Bryant's underpinning hierarchy:

To be sure, the Black man is not one whit better; but when the White man descends to do as the Black man does, he thereby lowers himself to the Black man's level and can claim no other justification for his deeds than that conferred by the Black man's sanctions. For, after all, that might is right is a law of nature; but of nature at its lowest, brutish stage, not of that higher and nobler nature which is enlightened by reason, guided by conscience, and ruled by a recognition of altruistic duties and responsibilities.⁵⁹

This invokes the threat of 'going native' – the derogation of which is another gesture of enterrment – of becoming, like Shaka, 'arrogant, greedy, lawless'. Shaka is that man 'reverted not to the savage, but to the brutish stage' ,⁶⁰ the real propagator of imperialistic violence. So Bryant goes on ingenuously to exonerate the Natal whites altogether:

The acquisition of Natal by Briton and Boer was not, we are happy to state, accomplished by such methods – in the last instance . . . The Natives of Natal lost their fatherland largely owing to a misunderstanding and a mischance [!].⁶¹

Bryant continues to place himself and his culture on the moral high ground, so enterring 'the Other' with a palpable defensiveness. In effect, he postulates a kind of 'reconstructed Eden', built by hard European work and suffused with Christian values.⁶²

Bryant's propagation of those values, like Watt's, involves a withdrawal from insight and empathy, which in turn is the foundation of the language of clichéd, formless, exaggerated violence with which he describes the Zulu. In contradistinction, a certain type of discourse is being more or less explicitly privileged, one framed by a distinctively Western logical structure of cause and effect, classification, judgement.

This is inscribed, for example, in Isaacs's faintly ambivalent condemnation of Shaka as a 'giant without reason'⁶³ – a judgement consonant with and dependent on the views expressed in his Introduction. There, Africa is characterised as 'vast', 'trackless' and 'impenetrable', full of 'wild', 'noxious' and 'ignorant' people; Isaacs's ideal explorer's task is to achieve an Africa 'accurately described', 'delineated' and 'minutely investigated' by a 'general and comprehensive' mind, resulting in a 'stock of information' 'elaborately and clearly laid down' :⁶⁴ the reconstructed Eden, again. This is the kind of late Enlightenment discourse privileged by Bryant, who repeatedly relates oral traditions in a wickedly sarcastic vein, only to revert triumphantly to his own conception of adequate historical explanation. The same is true of Watt's novel, in which a good deal of very precise documentary research into the whites' activities, expressed in the unvarnished style of the serious researcher, is dramatically juxtaposed with the virulence of the Zulu scenes.

Some implications of these interlocking and mutually reinforcing sub-species of enterrment may be drawn on two roughly congruent, superimposed planes. On one plane, a complex European mythology of an ambivalent 'Edenism' permits the use of a particular iconography of suppression which is essentially a psycho-cultural attitude towards the Zulu; it is the kind of iconography which has always been used by colonials in everyday life to justify and empower the practice of political control. The animal, the demonic, the lazy, the static, the irrational and the incomprehensible are categories everywhere used to establish the overlord identity of a people wishing to project themselves as humane, pious, vigorous, progressive, rational and knowledgeable.

A second plane is the linguistic manner in which that stance is described: the same broad division is re-enacted in the styles and structures of literary works. For instance, in virtually every historical work on Shaka's reign, the account begins with a more or less static description of 'Nguni society' as it 'stood' before the Shakan 'revolution' ; then 'history' proper begins, coinciding, of course, with the advent of written records and the possibility of reconstructing a sequence of explicably linked events. This is the case even with recent works deliberately aimed at rehabilitating Shaka, such as Louis du Buisson's The White Man Cometh and Charles Ballard's The House of Shaka. Of course the lack of written records is in part responsible for this, given that explicable sequence is just what 'history' has come to comprise. But there is a dearth of written records for the 'state' of Shakan society, too, and I suggest that the stylistic and structural antinomies are equally the result of the received, centuries-ingrained 'iconographies of enterrment'.⁶⁵

A final knot of examples will illustrate this. A structural partition between 'ethnographic observation' and 'historical narrative' begins with Isaacs, who, in the convention of the day, appended his notes on customs and practices to the end of his work. Notable is his intensive use of stative verbs and possessives:

They are, doubtless, the most extraordinary people in existence, if we look into their peculiarities of character, and it is difficult to determine whether we should pity their ignorance or guard against their duplicity; for although they are proverbially in a state of perfect simplicity, yet there is a cunning about them, and an irrevocable desire for indulging in all their savage propensities . . .⁶⁶

This is a good example of what Johannes Fabian has termed 'the ethnographic present'. As Fabian points out, this is another form of distancing, since the use of the present tense strongly implies a present speaker and hearer, a 'dialogic situation' from which the subject (here the Zulus) are in effect excluded; they are denied both 'personness' and an evolved and evolving position in time. Furthermore, the ethnographic present 'presupposes the givenness of the object of anthropology as something to be observed'.⁶⁷ 'Anthropological knowledge' is privileged; the Other is enterred.

Similar traces of this structurally differentiating gesture of enterrment can be found in the mainstream histories, even one like Omer-Cooper's The Zulu Aftermath, which explicitly states that the pre-Shakan world was 'far from idyllic' .⁶⁸ Times were still 'relatively peaceful', by contrast with the 'anarchy' which Shaka, working with 'forces which had been gathering strength over centuries', unleashed in the 1810s. While Omer-Cooper's historical explanations are certainly more sophisticated than most of his predecessors', he still demonstrates a tendency to attribute an essential stasis to pre-Shakan society: 'the southern sub-continent seems usually to have evolved at a slower pace than the res'.⁶⁹ This more muted manifestation of the Edenic is inscribed in what might be termed an 'ethnographic past':

Administrative authority in the tribe was distributed between the chief and a hierarchy of subordinates. Depending on its size, the tribal territory was divided into a number of sub-divisions, provinces and districts. Each of these was under the authority of a sub-chief and where the tribe was large there might be a two-tier system . . . All the important subordinate chieftaincies were normally held by close relatives of the chief.⁷⁰

Phrases such as 'there might be' and 'normally' admit of the possibility that 'exceptions to this might arise', but essentially this is the language of Western categorisation and normative anthropology which would regard any deviation from it as aberrant. The use of the preterite, effectively distancing the subject, thus comes close to that 'narrative past' characterised by Roland Barthes as 'part of a security system . . .one of those numerous formal pacts made between the writer and society for the justification of the former and the serenity of the latter'.⁷¹ This same gesture, as Shula Marks has pointed out, commands the account in The Oxford History of South Africa, in which the 'pre-colonial history of the black man has been relegated to an anthropologist [Monica Wilson], and is handled in wholly static, a-historical terms':⁷² Wilson states, for example, that 'the manners of 1686 are those of the same countryside nearly three centuries later' .⁷³

Two final points can be made. Firstly, the whole concept of the 'mfecane' – as a kind of subcontinental, endemic autophagia⁷⁴ – is, in this perspective, as much the result of the myth of a destroyed paradise, constantly reinforced by the fear of renewed destruction of the reconstructed idyll, as it is the result of actual evidence. This is inscribed in numerous ways in the language of the overlord's judgementalism (enterrment). Secondly, of course, the concept itself (and whatever concept may arise to replace it, including any in the present study!) is the inscription of that logician's discourse of cause-and-effect, explication, categorisation and the representational word which, in the end, may conceal as much as it reveals.

Layback

When Nathaniel Isaacs, in a rare moment of self-reflection in his Travels, acknowledges his 'anomalous description of Zoolas – savage yet hospitable',⁷⁵ he is not merely balancing two irreconcilable facets and leaving the judgement to his narratee. Embedded in massive derogation and undisguised Eurocentrism, this momentary 'admission' is more likely to be just another reification of the incomprehensible. This is not to deny that there is a genuine inner tension here, but the actual manifestation of the tension, when placed in context, serves primarily to reinforce the Eurocentric foundation of the discourse itself.

The Shakan literature is riddled with ambivalences, contradictions and paradoxes: admiration vies with repulsion, derogation with lionisation, ethnographic insight with Eurocentric judgement, assiduous fascination with practical oppression. Doubtless much of this is unavoidable in any kind of cross-cultural discourse. Some of it, however, like this example from Isaacs, is more than simple equivocation; it actually functions, in a more backhanded way than enterrment, to promote the interests of the writer and his group. For this gesture I offer the term layback.

The word is derived from rock-climbing; it describes a technique used to climb a vertical crack in a chimney, in which the feet are placed against the rock and push outwards, while the hands, inserted in the crack, pull inwards; by the friction and tension thus achieved progress is made upwards. In the textual context to which I now transfer it, it denotes an inner tension or ambivalence, used within a single narrative gesture to reinscribe an aspect of Eurocentrism; for this reason I will isolate it largely among stories told of Shaka (stories of which even the 'history', or perhaps more accurately, the 'biography' of Shaka almost wholly consists).

The layback gesture is frequently made quite plain. For instance, when Viola Ridgway characterises Shaka in her novella as 'the cruel Brave', this is not merely the inscription of an unresolved paradox. It is already the distillation of numerous illustrative anecdotes; the adjective 'cruel' has already been laden with judgement. In its context, the epithet serves as the touchstone for the assertion of the writer's own values, which are kindness, even-handed justice, restraint. Much the same can be said of the antithetical motion of approbation contained by 'Brave'. Ridgway 'happens' to make this explicit in her very next lines:

If these stories from the life of Shaka have softened the old ideas of this great leader, and brought the reader a deeper understanding of his faults and his greatness, they will not have been written in vain. Perhaps, some day, there will be another leader among the black men, with Shaka's genius for leadership and organization, tempered with the democratic ideas of the white man for trade, scientific cultivation of the soil and development of the wonderful inventions of the modern world, a leader who will believe in the doctrine of 'Live and let live,' with mercy and justice for all.⁷⁶

The echoes of Isaacs's agricultural Eden and the missionary stance of the nineteenth century are clear here: 'leadership and organization' are primary virtues, structured by science, technology and the tolerance of a democratic judiciary. The 'deeper understanding' of Shaka, ostensibly Ridgway's objective, is not in fact a resolution or explanation of the antinomy of 'cruel Brave', but an exploitation of it in the inscription of a European world-view. Neither the Zulu chieftain nor his people are viewed as whole or are accorded their own voice; instead, approved aspects – 'the one who never allowed a worthy man to go unrewarded', the 'genius', and so on – are split off, while the condemned aspects are attributed to, say, an unexplained 'madness'.⁷⁷ This schizoid quality, it needs hardly be added, arises from an interpretation founded on a writer-centred adherence to values irrelevant to the Zulus themselves: the split attributed by Isaacs and his numerous clones to the Zulu character and thence epitomised by Shaka is inherent not in the Zulu but in the colonial mind, in what Abdul JanMohamed has termed a 'Manichean allegory'.⁷⁸

Few writers, especially the more recent, are so blatant. But the tension of this kind of layback and its schizoid undercarriage is present in, for instance, Brookes and Webb's History of Natal: 'the qualities of the Zulu at his best are the qualities so fearfully taught in Shaka's blood-stained school – submission to authority, obedience to the law, respect for superiors, order and self-restraint, civic duty'.⁷⁹ Terror and blood as instruments of this education are condemned, but the values attributed to it are precisely those 'taught', by precisely this process of fear and bloodshed, to the subject black peoples by white authorities.

A particularly common species of anecdote which embodies the notion of layback involves the meeting of Shaka with items of European technology. There are numerous stories (many common to all colonial literatures), involving mirrors, medicines, Mr Petersen's music-box, the figurehead of the wrecked vessel Mary, firearms, writing, a knowledge of astronomical phenomena, and so on. In almost all cases, what is superficially told at the expense of the white man reveals an inner tension which, on examination, rebounds to promote the white over the black.

Almost all these gestures of layback are underpinned by the promotion of particular species of logic, of the 'scientific' thought-processes and modes of expression which are by definition opposed to irrationality, 'superstition' or unintelligibility. This attitude is unconcealed in the earlier texts. Isaacs, for instance, makes no effort to hide his derision even when apparently bettered in argument, as in this exchange between Isaacs, Shaka and a Portuguese man:

[Shaka] then asked me to fight with the Portuguese, but I told him that, although our nation had conquered the Portuguese, we were now not only at peace with them, but were by treaties their protectors . . .

'Well,' said he, 'what need you care? You have once conquered, and may conquer again.' My Portuguese new acquaintance sat all this time and heard our conversation with concealed chagrin, and swelling with rage; but when we had left the presence of Chaka, we both laughed at the vanity of the savage.⁸⁰

The implicit agreement between writer and narratee in this telling is that open derision is as acceptable to the narratee as it was to the white protagonists. The story is really designed to reassert the superiority of European morality over Shaka's unbridled violence. The same comfortable contempt informs Isaacs' s other stories of Shaka's encounters with medicines, firearms and mirrors,⁸¹ which became staples of the dramatisation of this particular culture-contact.

Similar, though less arrogant, is Fynn's story, also frequently repeated, of Shaka's encounter with purgatives supplied by Petersen, one of the whites' financial backers:

During my [Fynn's] absence Mbikwana informed Shaka that Mr Petersen also had medicine. Mr Petersen was requested to produce it and state its virtues. He produced a box of pills which he said were good for all diseases and strongly advised Shaka to take two. The King took four and giving one each to four chiefs, made them swallow them. Mr Petersen was also desired to take four. Mr Petersen after vainly endeavouring to convince the King that four were too much for one person was reluctantly compelled to swallow the four . . . The King now swallowed two and ordered Mr Petersen to keep him company. This Mr Petersen peremptorily refused to do, but the King insisting, and the chiefs adding the pressure of the argument that one who recommended medicines should not refuse to take them himself, Mr Petersen was compelled to swallow two more, that is, six in all. The consequences of this to a person of 63 does [sic] not require to be explained in detail.⁸²

All the elements of subsequent stories of Zulu encounters with white technology are present here. Fynn laughs at his companion's predicament; the white man is apparently overcome by 'native logic'. But throughout there persists an awareness that it is Shaka who is misinterpreting the nature of the medicine, is being characteristically unrestrained; comment on the purgative's effects on Shaka himself is conspicuous by its absence; and Fynn suggests in an alternative version that it was 'fear', rather than logic, which forced Petersen's hand.⁸³

Other stories, such as that of Shaka besting Francis Farewell's carpenter by forcing him to bend his house-building nails on a piece of ironwood, or demonstrating the impossibility of a round world by showing how pips fall off a turning pumpkin,⁸⁴ also momentarily demonstrate the efficacy of Shaka's 'native logic' within the confines of his own paradigms; but they inevitably carry the layback dimension of exposing limitations to those paradigms, so promoting the whites' wider ones.

The incident of Shaka's encounters with a meteor or eclipse (another perennial of colonial fictions),⁸⁵ has similarly been used to assert the expertise of the white man. It is presumably derived from a brief note in Fynn's Diary: 'On Shaka's preparing to attack the Ndwandwes, a meteor appeared which detained him some time from proceeding until perceiving it throwing its meteoric sparks in that direction announced a favourable issue, it being a sign that the enemy would be entirely defeated, which was verified [by the outcome of the battle]'.⁸⁶ Though Fynn is largely free of Eurocentric sneering here, there is no doubt that he disbelieves this explanation himself, and regards it as an ethnological curiosity symptomatic of 'the uninformed and unenlightened state of minds, the result of ages of the grossest ignorance' which make the Zulu, 'feeling conscious of existing superior powers, endeavour to supply that deficiency by invention from their own limited ideas'.⁸⁷

It is worth touching on one retelling of this story which is not a layback, in order to sharpen my definition. In Elizabeth Paris Watt's account in Febana, Shaka is depicted as 'petrified, the victim of his own superstitious fears' and 'desperate that [the comet] might be subject to the influence of the white men'. The hero Francis Farewell, of course, is 'astronomer enough to know' when the comet will disappear, and turns this to advantage. The inevitable 'verification of [Farewell's] prophecy earned Frank a veneration which secretly amused him' – and which, by virtue of this privileged insight into Farewell's mind, less secretly amuses Watt and her narratee, at Shaka's expense.⁸⁸ The derogation of Shaka's fear and 'superstition' and promotion of 'science' is totally undisguised here: hence it does not qualify as layback. Where Fynn, or rather his editor, James Stuart, relegated the incident to the 'ethnographic' back pages, Watt transforms it into a turning-point of the plot, a hinge of 'historical' efficacy: such is the empowerment of logographic discourse.

A different, and subtler story of Shaka's reaction to a similar celestial phenomenon, an eclipse, is related by E.A. Ritter. There are no white characters involved here, and it is Shaka's stature which apparently is elevated, in accordance with Ritter's general lionising project. But there is a layback gesture involved nevertheless. Ritter portrays the Zulus as terrified, Shaka as calm but disturbed, 'mutter[ing]'; he is handed some medicine by one Mqalane, to spit at the sun, 'commanding it to return'. This Shaka does, the sun duly returns; Shaka's 'commanding figure seemed to be magnified to majestic proportions in that weird and unreal light'; and 'like Joshua of old, Shaka continued to exploit the dramatic possibilities of the situation', until, the eclipse over, 'there was one continuous roar of victory, which continued in triumphant waves of adulation for the all-powerful Warrior-King who had saved the nation' .⁸⁹

This may or may not be tolerably close to how the Zulus might have seen it, but it is certainly not how Ritter sees it, or expects his readership to see it. It is, in Ritter's own, only partially concealed, view, no more than a 'dramatic' situation of which Shaka can shrewdly take advantage; he only 'seems' to be magnified; and the medicine is shown to be really beside the point, the 'saving of the nation' in some sense spurious. In the commandeering of a 'superstition' to a political stratagem, Shaka is seen to exploit the Zulu people's 'credulity'; but the credulity is also being exploited by Ritter. While there is a stated admiration for Shaka's self-control and shrewdness, the final flow of sympathy is in fact against Shaka, since Ritter (and, he assumes, his narratee) still knows better; were it not for the implicit gap between species of knowledge, of which the European is clearly seen as the superior, this story would not have been told at all. Hence, Ritter manipulates narrative 'suspension of disbelief up to a point at which, in this and numerous other cases in Shaka Zulu, he interrupts with an explicatory comment which reasserts the primacy of European paradigms of logic or historical perspicacity: 'It is appropriate at this point to note that Shaka was far too wary to engage in the very uncertain business of rain-making, which all other chiefs, and kings, dabbled in'.⁹⁰ Ritter's contempt is evident in the word 'dabbled', and here Shaka is commandeered to support him; Shaka's stature in the novel, in the end, depends upon his being crafted to conform with Ritter's own values. Like Viola Ridgway, Ritter cannot resist making these values plain:

One outstanding fact, however, emerges and stands forth like a shining beacon above the haze of time and controversy, and that is that the White men had some dominant quality even when in rage which compelled the black men to regard them as their superior. Shaka not only recognised this but had it proclaimed to all his nation. It had nothing to do with sky-rockets or horses or firearms, for these had been met with in the hands of Portuguese half-castes, and of the White men's Hottentots who were regarded with contempt. No! the root of the European's superiority lay in his possession of ubu-kosi – the quality and air of chieftainship – for which only the Zulu language has a single word which fully defines that otherwise indefinable aristocratic ascendancy which radiates authority without any apparent effort.⁹¹

At least part of Shaka's stature in Ritter's eyes depends on Shaka's 'perception' in the whites of precisely the quality which Ritter has projected on to the Zulu chief in the first place; thus Shaka is, at best, admired for his 'white' traits, and at worst, positively overshadowed. Moreover, it is a Zulu word which is invoked as most adequately descriptive of this quality, a quality 'instantly and instinctively recognized by every Zulu' ; a Zulu perspective is domesticated in order to justify the white assumption of superiority; the Zulus, in effect, are obliged (textually) to connive at their own subordination. In this textual acquisition of a 'Zulu point of view', layback overlaps with what I call deadlighting, which I will treat shortly.

One final example will serve. A crucial question which lurks behind a great deal of the writing on Shaka is the question of what light to judge his actions in. From the beginning the whites have with varying degrees of fervour condemned Shaka's alleged atrocities, even inventing increasingly dastardly deeds with which to 'assassinate' him. Isaacs almost certainly projected a great deal of his own violence on to Shaka. Some, like Holden, try to assimilate the atrocities into God's plan for the world. Some attempt in various ways to explain Shaka's violence in terms of practical politics: Lewis Grout, for instance: 'Cruel and bloody as this mighty African conqueror is reputed to have been, or as he really became in the progress of his triumphs, his policy, especially at first, was not so much the utter destruction of the neighbouring tribes, as to subdue, and incorporate them with his own.'⁹² However, Grout adds delicately, in Shaka's final years 'his own mind seems not to have been at rest' ;⁹³ there are hints here of the fast-developing idea, which would be carried by Bryant and Ritter in particular into the later histories, that after the death of his mother Nandi he went distinctly insane. Once again, Western logic seems determined either to dragoon Shaka into the realm of the perfectly logical, or utterly to banish him beyond it.

But a more subtle tack has been to compare Shaka's policies to those pertaining to the England of the time. This has been hinted at in numerous instances since Isaacs and Fynn related how horrified Shaka was at hearing of the practice of imprisonment. There appears to be a kind of irrefutable logic to the Zulu's argument in favour of the death sentence, and the white men are, again, momentarily bested in the exchange. But there is no question that Fynn believed, on moral grounds, that imprisonment was preferable to the atrocities which he and Isaacs repeatedly condemn in Shaka. Here again we see the gesture of layback.

Louis du Buisson's The White Man Cometh is a more recent representative. The opening paragraph of Du Buisson's Foreword is:

It was a savage age. In England, the most 'civilised' nation in the world, boys were sent to sea at the age of six, children were made to labour for sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, in mines and cotton mills. In London, Mondays were still public hanging days.

Du Buisson then quotes A. K. Millar on the 'heartless' customs of the English, with 'no fewer than two hundred offences for which death by hanging was the prescribed punishment', and notes that in North America 'Europeans were systematically exterminating the natives and the animals and taking over their land', and doing the same in Africa with the pernicious addition of taking slaves.⁹⁴ This appears a useful reminder that, after all, Shaka's atrocities were not unusual. But Du Buisson fails to press the point, continuing:

1815. Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice topped the bestseller list, Beethoven's Fidelio was first performed in Vienna, the waltz was all the rage in the ballrooms of Europe, Napoleon Bonaparte faced his Waterloo and President John Madison unveiled America's latest weapon, the USS Fulton, the world's first steam-powered warship. And in a grass-hutted village on the south-east coast of Africa a young Zulu invented the stabbing-spear. In the context of time and place he might as well have invented gunpowder. By the end of that year with the great European star of Napoleon in its final eclipse, a new star was rising in Africa. Shaka.⁹⁵

Du Buisson's purpose becomes immediately obscure. Is he merely setting the scene? But the juxtaposition of hanging-days and Austen is disconcertingly abrupt, even irrelevant, inviting awkward comparisons. The 'invention' of the stabbing spear is manifestly overstated, the tone of the passage melodramatic. This is a cinematic list of items designed for the Eurocentric reader, and whatever Du Buisson's stated purpose, 'grass-hutted' sounds either condescendingly 'natural', or slightly pathetic, against 'ballrooms', 'stabbing spear' frail against 'warship' and 'gunpowder'. It seems that something of Europe is meant to rub off on this Shaka, particularly something of Napoleon (I will have more to say on this gesture under 'Dead-lighting'). It is by no means clear whether we are to read this warship as iconic of laudable industry, or (rather indirectly) of the threat of the white man, or (perhaps unconsciously) of a belittlement of the Zulu. And it is by no means clear whether Du Buisson intends a defence of Zulu, alongside his condemnation of nineteenth-century English punishments, or to include Shaka in this 'savage age' and condemn both. In either case, the lens through which we are initially introduced to Shaka here is undeniably European; so, presumably, is the concept of justice which we are invited to bring to bear. Du Buisson goes on:

Fynn and Isaacs ... professed themselves horrified that condemned criminals were dragged out of the [Zulu] capital and clubbed to death. But then king Shaka was equally horrified that Europeans should deprive people of their freedom for ever, something he considered more inhuman than the death penalty.

. . . It is . . . true that the Zulu monarch's power was absolute and that life was cheap. Yet in the Cape, during king Shaka's lifetime, executions were still public affairs and accompanied by hair-raising brutality . . . Isaacs was aware of this.

'In such a rude state of society,' he wrote, 'the death penalty for crimes of a capital nature does not differ from more civilised nations, but the execution is exceedingly revolting and only to be found amongst barbarous hordes.'

Yet, curiously, when 'king' Henry Fynn of Natal and his chief legislator Nathaniel Isaacs set up their own government and began meting out death sentences, their victims were executed in the traditional Zulu manner – by clubbing! Isaacs crowned his own duplicity with the following comment: 'These executions contributed not a little to enlighten them and prepare them for receiving those more important blessings which civilisation brings.'⁹⁶

Several ambivalences are tangible here. Firstly, Du Buisson seems concerned to damage the credibility of Fynn and Isaacs: his insinuation is that they were not actually horrified by Shaka's misdeeds – but Shaka was 'equally horrified' by theirs. Shaka is at least honest, it seems – or equally dishonest – even if, for him, 'life was cheap'. Not only does Du Buisson appear to accept the picture of Shaka as violent despot, he also implicitly agrees with Isaacs's judgement of 'exceedingly revolting', while simultaneously attacking Isaacs for his 'duplicity'. The final sentence here seems less an example of duplicity than of sheer, if defensive, Eurocentric arrogance; and one wonders why the contradiction between Isaacs's revulsion at Zulu executions and the meting out of his own should be merely 'curious'. 'Curiously' signals Du Buisson's hesitancy, evident throughout his book, adequately to press his conclusions; in this passage he fails to address the question of why, if Fynn and Isaacs really were not horrified, they 'professed' to be; or why, if everybody were living in a 'savage age', they thought their moral outrage should have had any effect. Behind these inner tensions, the layback gesture is visible: Du Buisson contextualises Shaka's world both against and within a European value-system which is equally distant; the nineteenth-century English being as 'other' to Du Buisson as the Zulu, he effectively inscribes his own, late twentieth-century morality over the heads of both.

In sum: once again, this is not a matter of mere fictions which may be discarded. The same impulses operate in historiographical texts, too: the crucial stories of Shaka's encounters with firearms and of his alleged land concessions are among those in the telling of which evidence is skewed or suppressed by deep-seated gestures of cultural negation.

Deadlighting

A third narrative gesture, closely related to layback, I term deadlighting, which I take from the nautical term for a stormshutter which is dropped over a cabin window or cannon-port. By it I denote a gesture by which the writer claims to 'shed light' on the Other, but inadvertently hides more than he or she reveals. There is often a certain defensiveness about this manoeuvre – a desire to conceal the writer's own predilections, or a lack of real knowledge, or a quiver of 'colonial guilt' – which the image of the deadlight also catches.

An extremely common gesture of deadlighting involves the comparison of the Other with something or someone European. This is a natural enough reaction for anyone trying to make sense of the culturally different; the Other is appropriated to, or domesticated by assimilation into, a familiar metaphor or figure. Essentially, this is a defence against the threat of the absolutely Other, an attempt to explain (and 'explanation' is the psychological cornerstone of a great deal of colonial discourse) what might otherwise be unassimilable, thus uncontrollable. The effect of this assimilation is to create a new, metaphorical 'reality' – here, a new, textual 'Shaka'.⁹⁷

A particular instance will demonstrate how this works. The comparison of Shaka to other 'tyrants' – Attila, Napoleon, Alexander and so on – has become almost a reflex, so ingrained a gesture that it earns a term of its own: vindice. This I have taken from the character in Cyril Tourneur's play The Revenger's Tragedy, in which Vindice induces the Duke to selfdestruct by kissing a poisoned skull disguised as his lover. This is, in effect, what happens to Shaka; he is poisoned (or at least violently misrepresented) by being juxtaposed with another autocrat or general with whom he is supposed to have affinities. This is frequently linked to a defensive admission that Europe has also had its tyrants and its injustices;⁹⁸ the term vindice thus appropriately carries the twinned connotations of vindictiveness and of vindication (either of Shaka, or of the writer's condemnation of him, or of the condemnation of his own society: the ambivalences here, as we have seen with Du Buisson, are multiple).

Once again, an example from Bryant will clarify these points. He writes: 'One judges the worth of an object by its contrast with the rest of its class. And one can gauge the true worth of Dingiswayo's character only by comparing him with other men of his position whose greatness is universally acknowledged.'⁹⁹ The first sentence here demands judgement by intra-cultural contrast (the epitome is Bryant's characterisation of Shaka as the 'active doer', utterly distinct from the rest of the Nguni). The second, which Bryant in fact proceeds to follow, proposes assessment by cross-cultural similarity. Bryant then gleans examples of 'the outstanding political geniuses of the ancient Mediterranean and Oriental world' to demonstrate 'how identical were the mental characteristics which drove these men to such glorious deeds'. Significantly, Bryant chooses models from '5,000 or more years ago', assuming that this is bound to be equivalent to the present African 'stage' of development. He also selects foreign (i.e. non-British) examples, even as he argues that these were 'the founders of our own civilization': a necessary defence to accommodate his own clear preference for enlightened European advancement. Thus he goes on to argue that Dingiswayo's talents 'were buried in a field whereon the light of knowledge had never shone, and whereto the fertilizing waters of foreign intercourse never penetrated', but these abilities were fortuitously liberated by his momentary contact with a white man or men (a legend if ever there was one). After several pages, in which Bryant provides more information on other leaders than he is able to provide on Dingiswayo himself (one of the primary impulses behind the vindice gesture is to compensate for the extreme paucity of concrete evidence), he concludes that 'If Shaka was the Timur and the Attila of his race, Dingiswayo was its Menes and its Alfred the Great.'¹⁰⁰

At least part of this contrast derives from, and is designed to reinforce, the notion of Shaka's revolutionary violence and unnatural cruelty. Two further points need to be stressed. The first is the non-Britishness of the vindice comparison: in Bryant, it is Attila, Napoleon, Caesar, the Spartans, Timur. While the gesture is occasionally in praise (particularly with Napoleon), the figure is at best ambivalently heroic. The second point is to note the way in which the vindice gesture is constantly updated, warning us again that we are dealing with Eurocentric projections. Russell Martin detects a shift from the Attila comparison to Napoleon as Shaka becomes gradually less monstrous (though the Attila comparison persists sporadically right up to the 1986 South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) television series); Alexander the Great also becomes more common in the twentieth century, where Nero was more popular in the nineteenth. After the Second World War, Hitler and the Nazis are invoked; after the 1960s, Stalin. Leonard Thompson summons 'Robespierre, Stalin, Mao Zedong' to illuminate the process whereby the rule of 'revolutionary leaders' 'degenerated into a reign of terror' (this last phrase, like 'cohorts', 'legions', 'Golden Hordes', even 'regiments', is itself a kind of vindice).¹⁰¹

The effect of this is surreptitiously to associate Shaka with better-documented examples of genocide, the evidence for which in the Zulu case is extremely shaky, to reproduce the undocumented prejudice evident in the earliest comparisons with Nero and Tamurlaine, to obscure the individuality of Shaka's reign, and by proxy and proximity, rather than by evidence, to exaggerate the extent of Shaka's conquests and depredations. After all, Shaka could not possibly have conquered as much territory as Napoleon did, or murdered as many people as Hitler or Stalin.

Writers are sometimes aware of the potential absurdity; and so insert a counterbalancing (additional, not replacement) argument that Shaka had as dramatic an effect in his smaller, more primitive, less technological world as these other dictators had in theirs. This is to introduce a slightly different species of cross-cultural comparison, the difficulties of which Bryant almost inadvertently lays bare:

In writing or reading of the rulers of simple, primitive tribes, we are wont to use the grandiloquent terms and to imagine the magnificent state appropriate to our modern European royalties. We assume that our reader possesses the ability to visualize things in their proper perspective and to realize that, though the events herein recorded occurred but one short century back, the conditions under which they occurred were those of many thousands of years ago. Yet it is not easy for everyone to place himself mentally two or three thousand years back in the days when our own 'kings' wore raiment and ate food and dwelt in habitations we would now not offer to a beggar, and ruled over 'peoples' too few to run a modern factory. We call wretched and unsavoury grass hovels 'palaces,' and speak of 'great battles' and 'conquests' fought and won where the combatants were a couple of score a side . . . The general idea of presenting history in this fashion, is, of course, to create a proper atmosphere around the reader, to produce in his mind a relatively accurate impression by transporting him into the 'other people's' place and so enabling him to regard things as they appeared to, or were felt by them.¹⁰²

Bryant shows himself keenly aware of the problem of the cross-cultural translation of terms, concepts and categories, and subsequent historians might have done well to take fuller heed of his initial warning. But Bryant himself continues the practice in the service of creating a 'proper atmosphere', that is, making the imaginative leap into the mind-space of the Other, producing a 'relatively accurate impression'. The word 'relatively' has an interesting double entendre: Bryant surely means it in the sense of 'more or less', allowing that the impression is bound to be no more than an approximation; but it also invokes the 'relativity' of the writer/reader's culture to that of the subject. Bryant seems to intend that when his narratee reads 'king' in Olden Times he is to imagine a man who, however undistinguished his accoutrements or 'relatively' mean his principality, commands a reverence from his subjects analogous to that accorded a European 'king'. But this importation of a European terminology functions as much to obscure the Zulu reality as to illuminate it. Instead of gaining insight into the individual particularity of the Zulu experience, the narratee in fact constructs a mental image relative to the European experience; instead of difference being inscribed, and the narratee carried over the cultural boundary into that difference, in this conceptual overlay (of 'kingship', say) the two cultures are effectively conflated. The use of Eurocentric terminology, in other words, embodies an implicit agreement between writer and narratee that the European concepts will finally dominate. The distortive effects of this are dramatically evident in the SABC TV series, in which costumes and 'palaces' are absurdly exaggerated, precisely to cater, not for the Zulu reality, but for the potential viewers' Eurocentric preconceptions.

Probably the commonest deadlighting gesture of this kind is the ostensible assumption of the 'Zulu point of view'. In this essentially fictional, cross-cultural foray of the white writers ' imagination into the mindset of the world of the Other, an attempt is made to reproduce the Other's 'authentic' voice. I am far from arguing that such imaginative leaps and transcriptions should never be attempted; it is probable (following Schopenhauer) that no communication whatever can take place without some such empathetic effort, a temporary shedding of self-consciousness. However, these leaps – the diametric opposite of the logical imposition of more 'scientific' discourses noted earlier – are themselves fraught with the dangers of false transpositions or distortive translations, and in a number of cases they undoubtedly 'deadlight' more than they enlighten.

The most immediately accessible example of this is the 'quotation', more often invention, of the 'voices' of Zulu people themselves. This occurs from the so-called eyewitness accounts onwards. Fynn generally refrains from making direct quotations – with good reason, since he was writing in retrospect. His accounts of discussions with Shaka are almost wholly in reported speech; he simply summarises verbal exchanges, and there is no pretence to be giving the precise words. On three significant occasions, however, he departs from this practice. On the first occasion, he records one of his earliest conversations with Shaka in the form of a drama, with a touch of annotation stylistically more appropriate to the novel:

'I hear you have come from umGeorge, is it so? Is he as great a king as I am?'

Fynn: 'Yes; King George is one of the greatest kings in the world.'

Shaka: 'I am very angry with you,' said while putting on a severe countenance. 'I shall send a messenger to umGeorge and request him to kill you. He sent you to me not to give medicine to my dogs.' All present immediately applauded what Shaka had said. 'Why did you give my dogs medicine?' (in allusion to the woman I was said to have brought back to life after death).¹⁰³

And so on. There are several difficulties with this. Its unembellished format signals an attempt to erase bias, to reduce the event to its essentials, to position the narratee himself, as it were, within earshot; the purely 'auditory' quality of the recording is aided with a minimum of interpolation. But this very paring down to 'pure' audition itself necessarily excludes a multiplicity of factors that may have coloured the situation. What, for instance, happened in the unsettling shift of subject from king George to Shaka's anger with Fynn's medical activities: did Shaka simply ignore Fynn's reply about George, show disbelief or embarrassment, unaccountably switch topics, displace unexpressed anger? And how did the process of translation progress, when by all accounts, 'Jacob' the interpreter was hardly a fluent speaker of English – nor perhaps of Zulu – and Fynn himself characterises him as untrustworthy? Furthermore, if James Stuart's annotation is correct,¹⁰⁴ this account was written up from memory in 1854, that is, thirty years later, and it is highly unlikely to have been recalled with the accuracy that its presentation is designed to suggest.¹⁰⁵

Fynn's second deviation from the recorded-speech form is presented as the oration of Shaka's induna Ngomane:

The tribe had now lamented for a year the death of her [Nandi], who had now become a spirit, and who would continue to watch over Shaka's welfare. But there were nations of men, inhabiting distant countries, who, because they had not yet been conquered, supposed that they never should be . . .¹⁰⁶

The implication of the textual presentation of this as direct speech is that Fynn is reiterating, presumably as closely as his translation will allow, Ngomane's actual words. But the displacement of the tenses from, for instance, 'have' to 'had', in fact inscribes Fynn's own distance from the original delivery of the speech; while we have no evidence to maintain it does not capture the gist of the original, it is certainly not the speech itself. That this hybrid of direct and indirect speech was conventional at the time – Isaacs also uses it¹⁰⁷ – only reinforces the point: what we are reading is a twice-, perhaps three-times, veiled shadow of an original, for the veracity, even the occurrence, of which we have no external evidence.

Historiographically, this is no trivial point, for Ngomane's reported speech concerns the 1828 Zulu attack on the Mpondo and its aftermath along the eastern frontier of the Cape colony – an attack in which Fynn himself was involved, may even have engineered, and which he has in this text therefore every reason to conceal. It is quite possible, if unprovable, that Ngomane's speech is a fictionalised attempt to authenticate with a 'genuine Zulu voice' a story which may well be an alibi.

The same reservations affect a reading of another 'quotation' of Fynn's: a song, said to have been composed by Shaka and sung on the return of the izimpi from the Mpondo raid, and Fynn's exegesis of it.¹⁰⁸ It is perhaps significant in this context that virtually the only instance in which Fynn 'quotes' Shaka's actual words – my third instance – is also during an argument about the Mpondo campaign. Fynn buttresses his personal defence by arguing that he attempted to dissuade Shaka from an attack too close to the colony; his account slips abruptly from a consideration of practical politics to a display of Shaka's innate violence: according to Shaka, 'Black people who had committed an offence should not be talked to but killed':

'How is it,' he observed, 'they attempt to play on your superiority of force and arms? You know they steal your cattle and kill your countrymen. By destroying a tribe entirely, killing the surviving chiefs, the people would be glad to join you on your own terms . . .'¹⁰⁹

Apart from this sounding rather like a justification for what the whites did on the eastern frontier – and perhaps for what Fynn was trying to do himself – this bears all the hallmarks of a fictional invention.

The attribution to Shaka of such speeches, of course, tends to be substantial in the novels and to be leached from the histories. A.T. Bryant hovers over the ill-defined ground between the two; thus, into his chapter 'Shaka's Home-life at Dukuza: Its Dreams and Realities', which wavers between the sensationalist and the ethnological, he inserts this anecdote:

On one very rare occasion Shaka became – in a way suddenly humane: he abrogated the law prohibiting courting – for one night only. Towards evening, being in a playful mood, he popped his head above the isiGodhlo fence and bellowed out the general order, 'Proclaim to the izimPohlo hoys that they dress and be off to soma (have intercourse with girls)'; then as suddenly vanished. This was indeed an equivocal pronunciamento. But none awaited further explanation; dressed or undressed, they were off in a jiffy. After a while Shaka affected great surprise. 'Dear me!' quoth he, 'things seem very still in the barracks tonight. Where are they gone?' 'Insooth, sire,' replied an attendant, 'there is not a soul in the kraal.' 'So, then, they heard that word of mine, and went? I have given them an evening out; but do they really then so like the girls?' – which, indeed, was what he wanted to discover. 'Most obviously, baba; not one of them not gone.' 'Well, call out the emBelebele brigade, and let them go and confiscate all izimPohlo cattle.' Thus was it that the izimPohlo boys got the girls for once, but lost their cattle for ever. They can't have their bread jammed on both sides, thought Shaka.¹¹⁰

Whether or not this is extrapolated from a genuine tradition, it is very clearly cast as a fiction, is a logographia; the tone of derision dismisses any idea that it might be intended as a genuine attempt to elucidate the Zulu mind or mores. The concentration is on Shaka's caprice; Bryant playfully colludes with his character (and with his narratee) in making the boys the butt of an obliquely lubricious jest: 'Of course, it was very wicked of Shaka to encourage vice in this wholesale fashion – if, indeed, vice there be in Nature's dictates.¹¹¹ A strange statement for a priest to make, this verbal indulgence towards Africans' apparently liberated sexuality is characteristic of white writers' mingled envy and defensiveness towards a perceived threat to their own moralities. More important in the context of deadlighting is the way in which an absurd levity and contrived archaism ('quoth he', 'insooth', and so on) serve not to clarify the reality of Shaka, but to distance it. In the sentence in which Bryant pretends to 'quote' Shaka's actual thoughts (a technique possible only in a fictional, not an historiographical context), the 'light' is effectively extinguished by the trivialising anachronism.

Archaisms of language are frequent in the literature, particularly in direct speech. Probably Rider Haggard was the primary exponent of this 'imaginative, pregnant, compressedly aphoristic way [of speaking] which later writers have taught us to think typical' of 'natives', largely a legacy of Macpherson's Ossian, Hereward the Wake, and the colonial literature of the Amerindians.¹¹² This combines with the hierarchic thought-patterns touched on earlier. Colonial writers' cross-cultural imaginative forays tended to be predicated on interwoven hierarchies of technological, religious and societal or political development, at the pinnacle of which the European, and his current modes of expression, was perceived to stand. As with Bryant's injunction to step back '5,000 years', the perception of a temporal or evolutionary progression is transposed to the immediate spatial, social and racial differentiations of actual contact, and the difference expressed in a 'speech of temporality'; that is, 'primitives' were accorded the modes of expression thought appropriate to a much earlier stage of European development.

Archaic language is, ostensibly, intended to display with greater veracity the 'feel' of primitive society; in fact it banishes understanding in favour of logographic sensationalism. The Zulu world is portrayed as being as different as possible from that of the European writer. As Georg Lukacs writes of the historical novel: 'it is a present-day story-teller who speaks to present-day readers of [the past] . . . It follows therefore that archaism must be ruled out of the general linguistic tone of the historical novel as a superfluous artificiality. The point is to bring a past period near to a present-day reader.'¹¹³ Lukacs is being prescriptive in terms of his Marxist framework, but his perception is accurate that the true ideological purpose of such popular novels and stories is often not to bring this particular past closer, but defensively to defuse it with varying admixtures of derision, improbability and voyeurism, to make it into a harmlessly bloodthirsty object of entertainment. This distancing, this spatialisation, is no different in its roots from that which impelled the pragmatics of apartheid.

Haggard's Nada the Lily was among the earliest of many stories ostensibly delivered by a Zulu narrator, among them W.C. Scully's poem 'Aceldama' (1892),¹¹⁴ P.A. Stuart's An African Attila (1927), Geoffrey Bond's Chaka the Terrible (1960), and Cecil Cowley's Kwa-Zulu: Queen Mkabi's Story (1966). Even some third-person narratives claim to give 'a picture of Zulu life before the coming of the white man'. P. J. Schoeman considers it 'of vital importance that we as whites should have a deeper knowledge of "the man behind the black skin" and a thorough knowledge of his past, before he was influenced and perhaps contaminated by western civilisation', and his novel claims to deliver that knowledge. ¹¹⁵ This tendency is by no means confined to self-confessed fiction: several 'histories' also claim to be offering the Zulu point of view, including Bryant, Ritter and Ballard.

Probably the majority of Shakan works, from novels to theses, invoke the 'genuine' Zulu voice in another way: the appeal to 'oral tradition'. Again, it began with Fynn and Isaacs; subsequently William Holden claimed the authority of oral accounts to counter some of their assertions: 'I have been brought into contact with some of the oldest and most intelligent natives themselves, enabling me to look at what transpired from their own stand-point, and record events in the light in which they beheld them' .¹¹⁶ Yet Holden's account alters little of substance, and even the appeal to the testimony of Shaka's nephew, 'Abantwana', is literally buried in Eurocentric comparisons and judgement. Shaka is appropriated to the Christian mythography, the Zulu said to be of 'Ishmaelitish descent',¹¹⁷ and so on. Nowhere is 'Abantwana' quoted, even explicitly paraphrased. The essential defensive dead-lighting of this stance is finally made clear:

We know 'how great a matter a little fire kindleth' sometimes among civilized nations; but among barbarians a single spark has been deposited in the heart, which lies smouldering for years, and then in some unexpected moment, without any apparent cause, has burst forth into a mighty flame, consuming all within its reach.¹¹⁸

This is the Shakan 'revolution' generalised; the fear of its resurgence – once again, capricious and mysterious – haunts almost all the white literature, often explicitly. Thus John Colenso wrote, with good reason: '[If the] tide of passion [remains p]ent up within the bosom of the [Zulu] race, they will either stagnate in sullen hatred, or burst forth again ere long in another terrible outbreak.'¹¹⁹ The worry persists long after 1879, as the figure of John Laputa in Buchan's Prester John (1910) attests, and even longer after 1906. D.J. Darlow ended his epic poem:

Where is the Thing

That shook the hosts of men and made them cringe,

The Thing that hurled them prostrate at his feet

And bent their hearts to fervent loyalty?

Perchance 'tis fleeing from the Hound of Heaven,

Or else, maybe, it ever rests and broods

Undaunted in the Amazulu hearts.¹²⁰

The same formless fear shadows Viola Ridgway's pious hope, offering sentiments no different from those of Isaacs a century before: 'Perhaps some day the Zulu nation will rise again and, with the help of education, that fine spirit that existed under Shaka will find expression in usefulness and so tread the paths of peace and be a blessing on the world ! '.¹²¹ Even more recently, Sir Rex Niven, drawing closer to the ideological facets of the resurgence-fear, asked: 'Is it Chaka and his successors on the Zulu throne who are the real authors of Apartheid? Is it the unspoken fear of the great Chaka's spirit that forces the South African Government to take the line that has made them so unpopular abroad?'¹²² More recently still (1986), the narrator of the SABC TV series asserts that the Zulu 'can and will rise again'. Perhaps here lies, in the ambiguously fearful and deeply guilt-ridden situation out of which colonial writers have attempted to write themselves, the root of the ambivalences perceptible in their rhetoric – the fascination and the revulsion, the liberalism and the derogation, and the inability to transcend the limitations of their own language.

Conclusion

Two deep, contrary problems run beneath this essay. One is the possibility that the logical structures of our historiography are a gesture of implicit enterrment, that they fail to capture the reality of Zulu dynamics (how many modern histories integrate Zulu spiritual beliefs as historical cause?); more, that history itself is a form of oppression, is part of the armature of what Edward Said calls a 'saturating hegemonic system' which is 'predicated upon exteriority'.¹²³ The second is the possibility that the opposite alternative, the 'nonethnocentric, nonprojective' imaginative leap into the Other's Weltanschauung, is itself doomed to failure, an endeavour which 'will remain both indisputably desirable and ultimately unattainable'.¹²⁴ Both impulses are embedded and at war within our colonial narratives, producing the protean gestures of layback and deadlighting. It is simply a greater awareness of this war I have attempted.

At no point in this essay have I attempted to argue the historical, representational truth or untruth of any of these many texts' assertions. Without doubt my tentative terms will bear a great deal of refinement; a considerable amount of work remains to be done on distinguishing the numerous influences of mythologies and their attendant rhetorical tropes on the deployment of historical evidence. The two are certainly inseparable – mythologies suffuse evidence, the way the evidence was recorded and has been preserved, and even what we choose to stand as evidence; most of all the way we embed that evidence in narratives of our own.

It may be I am working here with nothing more exciting than a worn tautology: writers from one culture write about another culture; they are very different and we can see this difference in their writing. But in South Africa the inscription of difference has too often been turned to pernicious ends; we need to be intensely aware, I think, not only of what we write, but how.

1.For a more detailed examination of Nathaniel Isaacs's account, for example, see D. Wylie, 'Autobiography as Alibi: History and Projection in Nathaniel Isaacs's Travels and Adventures in Eastern Africa (1836)', Current Writing, 3 (1991), 71–90.

2.Unlike some other disciplines, South African historiography has been generally dilatory in coming to a full awareness of its rhetorical practice. See, for instance, J. Clifford and G. E. Marcus, eds, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, Berkeley, 1986; and Paul Atkinson, The Ethnographic Imagination, London, 1990. For a rare South African foray, see C. Saunders, 'Our Past as Literature: Notes on Style in South African History in English', Kleio, 8 (1986) 46–55. For a methodology which could be fruitfully applied in this field, see A. J. Woodman, Rhetoric in Classical Historiography: Four Studies, Portland, 1988.

3.For example, the usual translation of 'Zulu' as 'sky' or 'heavens' can thus be negatively associated with overweening ambition (as in S. Kay, Travels and Researches in Kaffraria, London, 1833, 402), or positively read as 'a proud title, equalled only by the Chinese' (W. Holden, The Past and Future of the Kaffir Races, London, 1866, 8). Similarly, the place-name 'Bulawayo', negatively translated in most works as 'Place of Killing', alluding to Shaka's personal brutality, in a more approbratory account is rendered as ' "The Place of the Ill-Treated Man", for Shaka considered himself to have been much afflicted in former years by ill-treatment and persecution' (T. V. Bulpin, Shaka's Country: A Book of Zululand, Cape Town, 1952, 15). C. L. Miller, Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French, Chicago, 1985, 10–11.

4.W. Wörger, 'Clothing Dry Bones: The Myth of Shaka', Journal of African Studies, 6, 3 (1979), 147. A pioneering but, through neglect, not yet seminal essay.

5.N. Isaacs, Travels and Adventures in Eastern Africa, vol. 1, reprint ed. by L. Hermann, Cape Town, 1936, 264.

6.Isaccs, Travels and Adventures, vol. 1, 45.

7.Isaacs, Travels and Adventures, vol.1, 269.

8.D.C.F. Moodie, The History of the Battles and Adventures of the British, the Boers, and the Zulus vol. 1, Cape Town, 1888, 395; H.F. Fynn, The Diary of Henry Francis Fynn, ed. by J. Stuart and D. McK. Malcolm, Pietermaritzburg, 1950, 12; J.D. Omer-Cooper, The Zulu Aftermath: A Nineteenth-century Revolution in Bantu Africa, London, 1966, adds, without explaining: 'This name which came to be attached to the boy is symbolic of much in his life and character', 29–30.

9.A.T. Bryant, Olden Times in Zululand and Natal, London, 1929, 48. See also V. Ridgway, Stories from Zulu History: Izindaba zakwaZulu, Pietermaritzburg, 1946, 40; S. G. Millin, The King of the Bastards,London, 1950, 125;E.A. Ritter, Shaka Zulu, London, 1955, 1 6 ; J. Michener, The Covenant, New York, 1980, 539; P. J. Schoeman, Pamphata: The Beloved of King Shaka, Cape Town, 1983, 17; W. Faure, director, Shaka Zulu, South African Broadcasting Corporation, Television Series, part 1, 1986; L.B. Hall, Shaka: Warrior King of the Zulu, Cape Town, 1987, 2. To judge by the testimonies in C. de B. Webb and J. B. Wright, eds, The James Stuart Archive, 4 vols., Pietermaritzburg, 1976–86, the 'beetle' story did exist before Bryant's popularisation of it (vol. 1, 179); but cf. vol. 1, 5, 188; vol.2, 230, 246; vol.4, 198, 202, 213, 202. Cetshwayo asserted in 1880 that Shaka meant 'bastard', C. de B. Webb and J.B. Wright, A Zulu King Speaks, Pietermaritzburg 1987, 3 and 3n.

10.H. Stuart, unpubl. play 'Shaka', first performed at the Foundation Theatre, Durban, 7 July 1981, with Henry Cele as Shaka; ms. in Killie Campbell Africana Library, Durban, James Stuart Collection, 38. Hall, Shaka: Warrior King of the Zulu, 2.

11.C. Ballard, The House of Shaka, Durban, 1988, 15. Cf. J.L. Döhne, A Zulu-Kafir Dictionary, Cape Town, 1851, xiv (this etymology is supported by nothing in the body of the dictionary); Holden, The Past and Future of the Kaffir Races, 9.

12.Ballard, The House of Shaka, 16.

13.I have dealt in more detail with some of the 'diachronic' gestures in a revised 1990 Natal History Workshop paper, 'Textual Incest: Nathaniel Isaacs and the Development of the Shaka Myth', History in Africa, 19 (1992), 411–33.

14.D.J. Darlow, Tshaka: King of the Amazulu, Lovedale, 1937, 40–1.

15.Isaacs, Travels and Adventures, vol. 1, 269.

16.Holden, The Past and Future of the Kaffir Races, 25.

17.N. McMenemy, Assegai!, London, 1973, 62, 66.

18.G. Cory, The Rise of South Africa, vol.2, London, 1913, 230.

19.E. Walker, A History of Southern Africa, London, 1928, 182; Omer-Cooper, The Zulu Aftermath, 2.

20.Omer-Cooper, The Zulu Aftermath, 6.

21.T.R.H. Davenport, South Africa: A Modern History, 3rd ed., Johannesburg, 1987, 15.

22.Ballard, The House of Shaka, 16.

23.Omer-Cooper, The Zulu Aftermath, 3–4, 41.

24.E.P. Watt, Febana, London, 1962, 128.

25.L.M. Thompson, A History of South Africa, New Haven and Sandton, 1990, 83–86.

26.Watt, Febana, 130.

27.Isaacs, Travels and Adventures, vol. 1, 281.

28.A.T. Bryant, A Zulu-English Dictionary, Pinetown, 1905,49; Bryant, OldenTimes, 532; A. T. Bryant, A History of the Zulu and Neighbouring Tribes, Cape Town, 1964, 98.

29.S.R.J. Martin, 'British Images of the Zulu c.1820–1879', Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge, 1982, 51.

30.Isaacs, Travels and Adventures, vol.1, 269.

31.Isaacs, Travels and Adventures, vol. 1, 266.

32.Holden, The Past and Future of the Kaffir Races, 9.

33.Holden, The Past and Future of the Kaffir Races, 23.

34.G.M. Theal, History of South Africa from 1795 to 1872, vol. 1, London, 1915, 438.

35.E.H. Brookes and C. de B. Webb, A History of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 1965, 8.

36.Quoted in D. Hammond and A. Jablow, The Africa that Never Was: Four Centuries of British Writing about Africa, New York, 1970, 107.

37.Bryant, Olden Times, 156.

38.Bryant, Olden Times, 219.

39.Brookes and Webb, A History of Natal, 11–13.

40.McMenemy, Assegai!, 73.

41.J.M. Coetzee, White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa, New Haven, 1988, 3. Cf. Isaacs, Travels and Adventures, vol. 1, 8, 2 0 , 58; also W. F. W. Owen, Narrative of Voyages to Explore the Shores of Africa . . ., London, 1833, 7. An unnamed officer of Owen's, writing as early as 1823, was perhaps the first to characterise Shaka as disruptor of a paradisal land, a 'tyrannical monster' whose 'bloody proceedings promised soon to leave the whole of this beautiful country . . . totally desolate'. But his practical experiences prompted him to scorn the Romantics' vision of beneficent primitivism:

The state of these countries, which have scarcely had any intercourse with civilised nations, is a direct proof in refutation of the theories of poets and philosophers, who represent the ignorance of the savage as virtuous simplicity – his miserable poverty as frugality and temperance – and his stupid indolence as a laudable contempt for wealth. How different are the facts! We ever found uncultivated man a composition of cunning, treachery, drunkenness and gluttony.

42.Bryant, A History of the Zulu, 74.

43.This is strongly reminiscent of another missionary's view that Shaka was a 'scourge of God', an integral part of His plan to 'desolate nations, and pour out the vials of his wrath upon offending men', Holden, The Past and Future of the Kaffir Races, 42. This of course was part of Holden's justification for his own Salvationist project, very like the kind of 'theodicy of occupation' which informed both the 'mfecane' concept and the pragmatics of apartheid.

44.Bryant, Olden Times, 640. Doubtless Bryant is also indulging here in a kind of logographia – a term I take from Thucydides, meaning a compilation 'aimed at audience entertainment rather than truth' (Woodman, Rhetoric, 8) – which permeates all narrative history (see D. Wylie, 'Textual Incest').

45.This also originates with Isaacs, Travels and Adventures, 269; it is implicit in this description of the 'faulty Paradise' in C. Eden's 1871 novel, An Inherited Task, or, Early Mission Life in Southern Africa, Oxford, which functions as a prelude to Shaka's own predations:

The scene was indeed most attractive. The swallows skimmed the surface of the lake; flocks of guinea fowl . . . sought refuge from the heat of the plains . . .; the ravens croaked from the pliant boughs of the weeping-willows; hawks and vultures poised themselves in mid-air, swooping down with lightning rapidity on the young duckling incautious enough to stray from its mother . . .; the green serpent ascended the trees to suck the eggs and devour the young, while the parent birds, uttering piercing cries, fluttered round the enemy . . . (40–1).

46.Bryant, Olden Times, 446.

47.Bryant, Olden Times, 128.

48.Bryant, Olden Times, 477.

49.Bryant, Olden Times, 537.

50.Bryant, Olden Times, 637.

51.I am grateful to Malvern van Wyk Smith for this insight.

52.Elsewhere, contradictorily, Bryant adulates Dingiswayo for bringing peace to a far-from-Edenic 'tumultuous and disintegrated mass of humanity' who are 'powerless and unproductive, because of continuously wasting their thought and energy on fighting each other', Olden Times, 96–7.

53.Bryant, Olden Times, 380–1.

54.Bryant, Olden Times, 237, 390.

55.Bryant, Olden Times, 236–7.

56.Bryant, Olden Times, 237.

57.For example, Olden Times, 78, 162, 297, 300, 563, 580.

58.Bryant, Olden Times, 235.

59.Bryant, Olden Times, 235.

60.Bryant, Olden Times, 648.

61.Bryant, Olden Times, 236.

62.This was Isaacs's view, too, as evidenced by his repeated assessments of the landscape in terms of its agricultural potential, 'rich in verdure and lack[ing] only the art and industry of civilized man' (Travels and Adventures, vol. 1, 26; cf. 57, 111, 149 etc); the remedy 'prescribed against Africa's insidious corruptions was cheerful toil' (Coetzee, White Writing, 3).

63.Isaacs, Travels and Adventures, vol. 1, 269.

64.Isaacs, Travels and Adventures, vol. 1, xxiv–xxxii.

65.Thus Louis du Buisson, The White Man Cometh, London, 1987, 17 writes:

Zululand was a vast natural paradise, one of the most fertile on earth . . . a country with a gentle, generous climate devoid of extremes and with all the animals of creation intact, pursuing their own evolution. Including homo sapiens.

. . . Unwarlike, fun-loving and hospitable, they lived in harmony with their neighbours and when conflicts arose they were settled in the gentlest possible way.

Cf. also P. Becker, Path of Blood, Harmondsworth, 1962, 22–7; D. Morris, The Washing of the Spears, London, 1967, 22–39 ('These, then, were the Kaffirs . . . an aimless people, happy and careless, with little sense of time and less of purpose'); Ballard, The House of Shaka, 13–14. For a survey of more recent blurrings and transcendences of these attitudinal rifts, see J. de Bruyn, 'The "Forgotten Factor" Sixteen Years Later: Some Trends in Historical Writing on Precolonial South Africa', Kleio, 16, (1984), 34–45.

66.Isaacs, Travels and Adventures, vol.2, 243, my italics.

67.J. Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object, New York, 1983, 80, 87.

68.Omer-Cooper, The Zulu Aftermath, 21.

69.Omer-Cooper, The Zulu Aftermath, 2.

70.Omer-Cooper, The Zulu Aftermath, 17.

71.R. Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, New York, 1968, 32.

72.S. Marks, 'Towards a People's History of South Africa? Recent Developments in the Historiography of South Africa', in R. Samuel, ed., People's History and Socialist Theory, London, 1981, 300.

73.M. Wilson and L. M. Thompson, eds, The Oxford History of South Africa, vol.1, Oxford, 1969, 129.

74.I am reminded irresistibly here of Gillray's 1790s cartoon of cannibalistic French revolutionaries (echoing the many, probably apocryphal but widely-repeated stories of Zulu-induced cannibalism; see e.g. Thompson, A History of South Africa, 85). Such imagery cannot circulate without an ambience of extreme xenophobia and 'superiorist' revulsion.

75.Isaacs, Travels and Adventures, vol.2, 102.

76.Ridgway, Stories From Zulu History, Pietermaritzburg, 1946, 95. A Bryant clone.

77.Ridgway, Stories From Zulu History, 95, 87, 89.

78.A. R. JanMohamed, 'The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature' in H.L. Gates Jr, ed., 'Race', Writing and Difference, Chicago, 1985 78–106. 'We can better understand colonialist discourse, it seems to me, through an analysis that maps its ideological function in relation to actual imperialist practices. Such an examination reveals that any evident 'ambivalence' is in fact a product of deliberate, if at times subconscious, imperialist duplicity . . .' (80).

79.Brookes and Webb, A History of Natal, 14. This is plagiarised almost verbatim from Bryant, Olden Times, 641 : 'Strange, but true, this Shaka was as sublime a moral teacher as martial genius. Submission to authority, obedience to the law, respect for superiors, order and self-restraint, fearlessness and self-sacrifice, constant work and civil duty, in a word, all the noblest disciplines of life were the very foundation-stones upon which he built his nation. So rigorously enforced was the life-long practice of all these excellencies, that he left them all a spontaneous habit, a second nature, amongst his people'.

80.Isaacs, Travels and Adventures, vol. 1, 60.

81.Isaacs, Travels and Adventures, vol. 1, 90, 93, 236.

82.Fynn, The Diary, 79n.

83.Fynn, The Diary, 79.

84.Fynn, The Diary, 90; Ritter, Shaka Zulu, 300.

85.See, for example, R. Haggard's, King Solomon's Mines, 1895; B. Mitford's, John Ames, 1900; C. Gilson's, In the Power of the Pygmies, Milford, 1919; P. White's Voss, 1957.

86.Fynn, The Diary, 317.

87.Fynn, The Diary, 267.

88.Watt, Febana, 94.

89.Ritter, Shaka Zulu, 272–3.

90.Ritter, Shaka Zulu, 274.

91.Ritter, Shaka Zulu, 268.

92.L. Grout, Zulu-land; or Life among the Zulu-Kafirs of Natal and Zulu-land, South Africa, London, 1862, 7 2 .

93.Grout, Zulu-land, 74.

94.Du Buisson, The White Man Cometh, 1.

95.Du Buisson, The White Man Cometh, 2.

96.Du Buisson, The White Man Cometh, 8–9, cf. 121.

97.See G. Lakoff and M. Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, Chicago, 1980, 117, 156–8: 'metaphors allow us to understand one domain of experience in terms of another . . . [They] can . . . define reality . . . through a coherent network of entailments that highlight some features of reality and hide others . . . Such "truths" may be true, of course, only relative to the reality defined by the metaphor.'

98.Bryant, Olden Times, 699.

99.Bryant, Olden Times, 168.

100.Bryant, Olden Times, 171.

101.Martin, 'British Images of the Zulu', 152–3. Cf. for example: H. Tracey, Zulu Paradox, Johannesburg, 1 9 4 8 , 21 ; Millin, The King of the Bastards, x; R. Niven, Nine Great Africans, London, 1964, 81; E.V. Walter, Terror and Resistance, New York, 1969, 127, and reprinted in F. Chalk and K. Jonassohn, eds, The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies, New Haven, 1990, 225. For Stalin, see M. de Villiers, White Tribe Dreaming, New York, 1987, 109; and Thompson, A History of South Africa, 85. J. M. Coetzee, Age of Iron, New York, 1990, 150 has his white heroine say to a black man: 'The Germans had comradeship, and the Japanese, and the Spartans. Shaka's impis, too, I am sure. Comradeship is nothing but a mystique of death, of killing and dying . . . '

102.Bryant, Olden Times, 319.

103.Fynn, The Diary, 76.

104.Fynn, The Diary, 58n.

105.For the high degree of inaccuracy contained in even eyewitness accounts, see R. Buckhout, 'Eyewitness Testimony', Scientific American, 231, (1974), 31–2; and A.J. Woodman, Rhetoric, 12–23.

106.Fynn, The Diary, 139.

107.For example, Isaacs, Travels and Adventures, vol. 1, 240.

108.Fynn, The Diary, 149–51.

109.Fynn, The Diary, 146.

110.Bryant, Olden Times, 641.

111.Bryant, Olden Times, 641.

112.H.N. Fairchild, The Noble Savage: A Study in Romantic Naturalism, New York, 1961, 92. In Rider Haggard's, Nada the Lily, London, 1895, 63 the narrator Mopo confronts Shaka:

Chaka drew near, and looked at the piled-up heaps of the slain and the cloud of dust that yet hung over them.

'There they lie, Mopo,' he said. 'There lie those who dared to prophesy falsely to the king! That was a good word of thine, Mopo, which taught me to set the snare for them; yet methought I saw thee start when Nobela, queen of the witch-doctresses, switched death on thee . . . '

Haggard weaves an envelope of occult spirituality, heroism, weapons with legendary names, and neo-lycanthropy which is more Nordic than Zulu in its mythic atmosphere, with an anti-mercantilism expressed as atavistic medieval chivalry. Within this, both the narrative and the direct speech are delivered in orotund archaisms, a simplified vocabulary and sentence structures, uncomplicated cause and effect, and stark contrast. Intellectualism, subtlety, and qualification are thereby excised.

113.G. Lukacs, The Historical Novel, London, 1962, 232.

114.Curiously, the only full works which pretend to be delivered in Shaka's voice are poems: Scully's successors are F.T. Prince, 'Chaka' in Poems, London, 1938, and S. Gray, The Assassination of Shaka by Mhlangane, Dingane and Mbopa on 22 December 1828 at Dukuza by which Act the Zulu Nation First Lost its Empire, Johannesburg, 1974.

115.E. Roberts, The Black Spear, London, 1950, 8; Schoeman, Pamphatha: The Beloved of King Shaka, Preface.

116.Holden, The Past and Future of the Kaffir Races, 7.

117.Holden, The Past and Future of the Kaffir Races, 2.

118.Holden, The Past and Future of the Kaffir Races, 33.

119.J.W. Colenso, Ten Weeks in Natal, Cambridge, 1855, xxxi.

120.Darlow, Tshaka, 48.

121.Ridgway, Stories from Zulu History, 90.

122.Niven, Nine Great Africans, 103.

123.E. Said, Orientalism, Harmondsworth, 1978, 14, 20.

124.C. L. Miller, 'Theories of Africans: The Question of Literary Anthropology', in Gates, 'Race', Writing and Difference, 282.