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PART TWO

The South - Eastern Coastal Region

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.