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Beyond the Concept of the 'Zulu Explosion'

Comments on the Current Debate

JOHN WRIGHT

Since the mid-nineteenth century, writers on the history of southern Africa in the early part of that century have seen the period as one in which an outburst of violent conflict swept through African communities across the central and eastern regions of the subcontinent. Few historians today, if any, would deny that the decades of the 1810s, 1820s and 1830s were a time of widespread upheaval in these regions, but in the last few years a number of commentators have begun to challenge the long-accepted explanation of its primary causes. They have stimulated a debate which has major implications for the way in which historians have so far portrayed the history of southern Africa before the mining revolution of the late nineteenth century. This essay seeks to contextualise a number of contributions to the debate in so far as they are concerned with the region which extends from the area which became Natal to the eastern Cape, and from the Indian Ocean to the basin of the Caledon River.

The north-eastern part of this region, i.e. the area which in the 1820s formed the core of the early Zulu kingdom, has almost universally been seen as the centre of the upheavals referred to. Until very recently these conflicts have generally been regarded in the literature as a consequence of the supposedly explosive expansion of the Zulu kingdom under the ambitious and ruthless leadership of Shaka. A full history of the development of this idea still needs to be written: all that can be said here is that it was the product of a complex interaction between white and black intellectuals, inside and outside southern Africa, that began in the mid-nineteenth century, if not earlier, and has continued to the present day.

The generally accepted view is that the upheavals of the early nineteenth century (which, since the publication of John Omer-Cooper's The Zulu Aftermath in 1966, have been known as the 'mfecane') began in the Thukela–Phongolo region in the 1810s with the rise of Shaka and the Zulu kingdom. Zulu depredations into the surrounding territories then set in train a number of separate sets of migrations, which in turn touched off further cycles of violence. In the region under study in Part Two, the Zulu supposedly devastated Natal south of the Thukela River, sending hordes of refugees fleeing southwards into the frontier regions of the eastern Cape, where they came to be known as amamfengu or Fingo. The Zulu are also widely held to have been responsible for driving the Ngwane across the Drakensberg into the Caledon Valley, thus supposedly setting in train the series of conflicts and migrations which have commonly been called the 'difaqane'.

In the 1970s and 1980s, academic historians began opening up fruitful new lines of enquiry into the origins and early history of the Zulu kingdom, the supposed 'engine' of the mfecane. But virtually none of this work was concerned explicitly to confront the long-established notion that the upheavals of the 1820s and 1830s were primarily the product of a 'Zulu explosion'. It was not until the late 1980s, when the whole concept of the mfecane began to come publicly under fire, that historians began to reconsider the nature of these upheavals and the role played in them by the Zulu kingdom.

Slavers and Alibis

As is now well known, the first historian to mount a comprehensive critique of the concept of the mfecane was Julian Cobbing. In his controversial article of 1988, 'The Mfecane as Alibi: Thoughts on Dithakong and Mbolompo', he rejected the long-established idea that an internally generated process of political change, which had culminated in the so-called Shakan revolution, underlay the wars and migrations of the 1820s and 1830s.¹

Instead, he argued that they had been caused primarily by an escalation in the demand for African slave labour on the part of European traders and settlers. From Delagoa Bay on the east coast, Portuguese slavers and their African allies were raiding further and further afield after 1810 in response to a rapidly rising demand for slaves in Brazil. To the south, in the frontier regions of the Cape colony, settler demands for locally acquired forced labour were increasing after Britain's abolition of the slave trade in 1807. Bands of white frontiersmen, Griqua, Kora and others were raiding deeper and deeper into the interior of the subcontinent to seize slaves and cattle to sell in the colony. Certain colonial officials, missionaries and army officers connived at their activities, and on occasion conspired in the organising of what were in effect semi-official slave raids.

By the late 1810s and early 1820s the expansion of raiding activities from these two centres of violence was subjecting the African societies of the interior to unprecedented pressures. Some, like the Zulu, consolidated into defensive states. Others fled or were driven out of their territories, carrying conflict across a wider and wider region. Contrary to the stereotyped view, Cobbing argues that the role played by the Zulu in these events was minimal. The emergence of the Zulu kingdom was not so much the cause as a product of the period of upheavals. In the 1820s and 1830s the kingdom was simply one of many political actors on the southern African scene. The notion that it was responsible for the upheavals was an 'alibi', the product of attempts made by settler writers to cover up the destructive impact of white slave-raiding by pinning the blame for its violent consequences on the Zulu. Later historians continued to reproduce the myth of the 'Zulu wars' as a means of explaining the apparent depopulation of much of the interior of southern Africa which, from the 1830s on, had supposedly enabled advancing white settlers to occupy what were mainly empty lands. From Cobbing's perspective, then, the term 'mfecane' refers not so much to a set of events that took place in the 1820s as to a set of colonial-made ideas about the causes of those events.

From a broad critical perspective, Cobbing's arguments point decisively, in my view, towards the need for a fundamental re-examination of the history of the whole eastern half of the subcontinent from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Most importantly, they reassert the need to see the history of African societies in this period as having been increasingly influenced, from at least the mid-eighteenth century onwards, by the activities of European raiders, traders, and settlers. Other historians have pointed to this need often enough before, but nearly always in the context of relatively narrowly focused studies of particular societies or regions.²

Very few have attempted an integration of the history of precolonial African societies across southern Africa with that of intruding European communities. A basic conceptual obstacle to this exercise has been the notion of the mfecane, which has served largely to segregate the histories of Africans and Europeans in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. What Cobbing terms 'mfecane theory' rests on the assumption that, outside the Cape colony, the expansion of Europeans into southern Africa had little effect on African societies until the so-called Great Trek of the later 1830s. Cobbing's achievement has been to call this notion seriously into question, and to open the way towards rethinking the subcontinent's history in the period 1750–1850 in very different terms.

But if Cobbing succeeds in establishing the outlines of an alternative grand hypothesis, his attempt to put empirical flesh on its bones is in many respects badly flawed. Too often he seeks to make his case through a process of assertion rather than of argumentation; too often he makes sweeping judgements on the flimsiest of evidence; too often he overbalances in arriving at conclusions. For instance, in drawing attention to the development of the Delagoa Bay slave trade, he has made an original and important contribution to the debate on African 'state-formation' in the region. But in my opinion he puts too much weight on the trade as a factor for political change in the Delagoa Bay hinterland in the 1810s and early 1820s. Concomitantly, he does not give enough attention to the expansion of the ivory trade which had begun in the 1760s and 1770s, and which has long been seen by a number of historians as one of the causes of the intensified conflicts which were beginning in the region several decades before the 1810s. The size of the slave trade in the 1810s is not the issue here: the point is that by presenting the impact of this trade as suddenly originating widespread and dramatic political change, rather than as feeding into ongoing processes of change, he distorts its probable historical role. Africans emerge as victims of the European presence rather than as actors capable of shaping their own responses to it.

Cobbing injects another important element into the debate by reviving and carrying further the arguments put forward by Martin Legassick more than twenty years ago about the role of Griqua, Kora and other raiders on the Cape northern and north-eastern frontiers in destabilising the highveld region in the early nineteenth century.³ He also forces us to look in a new light at the historical significance of the European settler demand for African labour in the eastern Cape. But in arguing that missionaries like Robert Moffat and officials like Sir Richard Bourke were involved in conspiracies to raid slaves he is straining the evidence to the point where he risks undermining his whole thesis. The expeditions which led to the massacres at Dithakong ( 1823) and Mbholompo ( 1828) which feature in the title of his article may very well have provided the opportunity for some of the victorious parties to seize slaves from among the defeated. It is perfectly likely that this was all along the aim, if an unstated one, of some of the participating groups, Griqua in the one case, colonial settlers in the other. But to say this is very different from implying that the expeditions were from the start deliberately planned as slave-raids by government officials and missionaries. Conspiracy theories of this kind are usually bad history in that they are prone to lump together into a single, undifferentiated category of actors groups with widely differing aims and interests, and to see the outcome of events as preordained in their causes.

The same point can be made with regard to Cobbing's treatment of the way in which white writers since the 1820s and 1830s have presented the upheavals of the period as the product of Zulu rather than European expansionism. I would agree that, as used by historians, the concept of the 'Zulu wars', or mfecane, has over the years often functioned as an 'alibi' by serving to deflect attention away from the role played by Europeans in stimulating the conflicts of the early nineteenth century, and to justify European land-grabbing later in the century. But this is not the same thing as implying, as Cobbing does, that white historians deliberately invented the concept as an alibi in the mid-nineteenth century, and have continued consciously to use it as one ever since. As Carolyn Hamilton argues in detail in her essay in this volume, this kind of reductionist argument distorts the processes in which the history of the 'Zulu wars' has been constructed.

The Natal Region: Reconsiderations

Soon after the publication of Cobbing's seminal if lopsided article, my own research into the precolonial history of the Natal region reached the point where I was able to enter the emerging debate on the mfecane with an article which in certain respects lent support to his critique.⁴

In reviewing the secondary literature on the subject, I argued that the entrenched view that Zulu armies had 'devastated' and 'depopulated' Natal south of the Thukela River in the 1820s was based not so much on empirical evidence as on the uncritical repetition by generations of historians of a stereotype whose origins date back to the writings of European traders and settlers in the 1820s and 1830s. Hamilton has rightly criticised this article for taking little account of the role played over time in the development of this view by African intellectuals, both literate and non-literate.⁵ But this criticism does not alter my conclusion that there is little evidence to show that the Zulu played the exclusively destructive role usually ascribed to them in what I have called the 'prototype of all other regional mfecanes'.⁶

I followed up with an article in which I examined the presentation of the history of the region south of the Thukela in what has long been the standard source on the history of the Natal–Zulu kingdom region before the advent of Europeans, A. T. Bryant's well-known Olden Times in Zululand and Natal.⁷ Most later writers have usually assumed that much of this work is based on oral traditions collected by the author. My investigation showed that his account of the upheavals of the early nineteenth century south of the Thukela was in fact based on an uncritical reading of the works of earlier writers, and could no longer be regarded as reliable.⁸ The idea, which Bryant developed in some detail, that in the late 1810s and early 1820s Natal south of the Thukela had been devastated by four successive waves of refugees fleeing from the Zulu, and then by a series of Zulu invasions, was shown to have very little foundation in the sources which he had used.

In a third contribution, 'Political Transformations in the Thukela–Mzimkhulu Region of Natal in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries' (pp. 163–81 in this volume), I present in outline a new interpretation of the existing evidence on the political history of Natal south of the Thukela during this period. My main findings can be summarised under four heads: first, that discernible political changes in the region began half a century before the emergence of the Zulu kingdom; second, that though the region as a whole experienced considerable political upheaval in the 1820s, it was not subject to wholesale devastation or depopulation by the Zulu or anyone else; third, that the Zulu kingdom under Shaka did not have the military or the political capacity to establish direct rule over the region south of the Thukela; fourth, that there were other important agents besides the Zulu in bringing about the complex series of changes that took place in the region in the 1820s. The concept of the mfecane finds no empirical support in the evidence on the history of the territories south of the Thukela: in effect it dissolves away.

Cobbing's 1988 article has provided a departure point for three further contributions, in the form of the chapters in this book written respectively by Elizabeth Eldredge, Carolyn Hamilton and Jeff Peires, which bear directly on the concerns of the present essay.⁹ For her part, Eldredge accepts the essence of Cobbing's argument that the Zulu were not responsible for most of the conflicts of the 1820s and 1830s. She concurs that the slave trade across the Cape frontier was an important cause of conflict on the highveld. But she rejects Cobbing's arguments about the involvement of missionaries in the slave trade in the interior. She regards as a retrograde step his depiction of African societies as simply 'reacting' to the European presence rather than as having aims and objects of their own: as she says, twenty years of Africanist historical scholarship in southern Africa is thereby disregarded. And, in a reappraisal of the evidence on slaving at Delagoa Bay, she argues that the trade there was of no significance before the early 1820s: Cobbing's thesis that intense conflict was set in motion by the expansion of the slave trade in the later 1810s is therefore without foundation.

As indicated above, my own opinion is that Cobbing puts too much explanatory weight on the slave trade as a factor in the conflicts of the pre-1820 period, and there seems little doubt that he has exaggerated its size in this period. But by the same token I think that some of the sources of evidence cited by Eldredge are more ambiguous than she allows in her argument on the timing and dimensions of this trade. Given that the slave trade from south-east Africa to Brazil was rising rapidly after 1810, and given that at the same time smuggling of slaves from south-east Africa to Mauritius and Réunion was taking place, it remains a possibility that the trade from Delagoa Bay was beginning to develop before the early 1820s. If this was so, it may help to explain the intensification of political conflict which took place, in the late 1810s it seems, in the region south of the bay.¹⁰

I say 'it seems': a feature of Eldredge's otherwise measured and carefully constructed argument that I would query is her retention without explicit justification of a number of conventional 'mfecane' datings. Do we have enough evidence to say that conflicts in the Phongolo–Thukela region broke out precisely in 1817, or that the Hlubi attacked the Tlokwa precisely in 1822, or that the Hlubi and Ngwane fought a decisive battle precisely in 1825? Much of the chronology of the conflicts of the 1810s and 1820s still needs to be properly researched: until this is done, and the results published, writers on the period should treat many accepted datings with circumspection.

Eldredge's essay is not simply a reaction to Cobbing's article of 1988. She also has some important things to say about the connection between environmental and demographic forces and political conflict in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Although it is not always clear from her argument whether she sees these forces as primary causes of 'the dramatic sociopolitical changes of the early nineteenth century' (p. 150), or simply as contributory to them, her points about the differences in the ways in which different social categories in African societies were affected by drought take current debates an important step forward. The useful references which she cites on the occurrence of drought in south-east Africa in the early nineteenth century remind us that a thoroughly researched study of this topic is still badly needed.

Like much of Eldredge's contribution, Hamilton's essay is also a 'reconsideration' of aspects of Cobbing's thesis. While expressly stating that she is not making a case for the mfecane, she takes Cobbing vigorously to task for the reductionism of his argument that the roots of modern mfecane theory are to be found in depictions of Shaka as a tyrant and monster produced by British traders at Port Natal in the 1820s. She puts forward two main sets of criticism. In the first place, she argues in detail that Cobbing has failed to look at the evidence which indicates that before 1829 the traders were not generally concerned to represent Shaka in pejorative terms. Different groups among them had different views of him which changed over time. In the second place, she argues that the unfavourable image of Shaka which was developed by European writers from the 1830s onward was in fact taken up from images originally produced by some of his own subjects. In the same way as Cobbing allows Africans no autonomous role as actors in the upheavals of the early nineteenth century, so he permits them no role in constructing the history of the period. The processes involved in the making of the historical images of Shaka, and of the concept of the mfecane itself, have been much more complex than Cobbing makes out.

Some elements of the empirical argument which Hamilton puts forward about the aims and activities of the British traders at Port Natal in the 1820s can be queried. It could be argued, for instance, that the traders were rather more concerned to engineer official British intervention in the Port Natal region than she allows for. And the nature of Shaka's policies towards the British in the Cape remains something of a puzzle. But her fine-grained article serves as a sharp reminder to historians who are seeking to move beyond the mfecane of the importance of grounding their arguments firmly in the available evidence. She also points to the need to develop a much more nuanced understanding of the relationship between history and ideology than is to be found in Cobbing's argument. This she directs particularly at students of the ways in which the concept of the mfecane has come to be so widely accepted.

The Career of Matiwane

Misuse of sources is also the main theme of the criticisms which Jeff Peires levels against Cobbing. He focuses specifically on Cobbing's handling of the career of Matiwane kaMasumpa, chief of the Ngwane and, according to mfecane historiography, one of the central figures in the history of the southern highveld in the 1820s. The conventional view is that the Ngwane were driven out of the Natal region by Shaka in the early 1820s, and spent several years raiding and fighting on the highveld. After being attacked either by the Zulu or the Ndebele, they moved away south and south-east into the country of the Thembu. In 1828, in the battle of Mbholompo, they were defeated and broken up by a combined army of Thembu, Gcaleka and Mpondo assisted by a British force from the Cape frontier. This latter had been sent out to repel a threatened Zulu invasion, and ended up attacking the Ngwane in the belief that they were Zulu.

Cobbing argues by contrast that the Ngwane were driven out of the Natal region either directly or indirectly by slave raiders from Delagoa Bay. On the highveld they fell victim to attacks by Griqua raiding for slaves and cattle, and were driven across the Drakensberg into Thembu territory. The main aggressors at Mbholompo were the British, whose prime aim was to secure labour for the eastern Cape settlers.

In a detailed response, Peires maintains that there is little in Cobbing's interpretation of the history of Matiwane and the Ngwane which can stand up to close scrutiny. He accuses Cobbing of concealing the existence of five African accounts which depict a quite different scenario. These sources indicate clearly, in Peires's view, that the Ngwane left the highveld not because they were attacked by the Griqua but because, after defeats at the hands of the Zulu, the Sotho and the Hlubi, and after a rebellion by his followers against his authority, Matiwane felt that the only means of reasserting his leadership was to make 'a brand-new start in a brand-new country' (p. 221). In his assessment of the events leading up to Mbholompo, Peires rejects Cobbing's argument that the British expedition was sent out specifically to acquire labourers. In his view the established explanation of the battle is correct. The capture of Ngwane refugees by the British was a by-product of the encounter, not its main purpose.

In sum, Peires concludes, Cobbing's account of Matiwane's history is based on misrepresentation of the evidence. He feels that the same is likely to be true of what he sees as the other two bases of Cobbing's hypothesis: that the Delagoa Bay slave trade was of central importance in stimulating intra-African conflict in the 1810s, and that the battle of Dithakong in 1823 was the culmination of a slaving expedition largely planned by officials and missionaries. The new paradigm which Cobbing is putting forward has no evidence to support it; the old paradigm of the mfecane should be retained until more convincing reasons for discarding it have been put forward.

I have indicated above my own opinion that Cobbing's portrayal of the British expedition which culminated in the battle at Mbholompo as an officially sanctioned labour-raid is intrinsically unlikely; on this score I agree with the thrust of Peires's argument. In fairness it should be pointed out that since the publication of his 1988 article Cobbing has modified his argument to take account of the differences of interest which existed in the 1820s between the colonial administration in Cape Town and the eastern Cape settlers and military.¹¹ This is something that Peires needs to make more of: he is correct to insist that by this time British capitalism 'had long outgrown the smash-and-grab phase of primitive accumulation' (p. 227), but the same can hardly be said of embryonic settler capitalism on a remote African frontier. 'The capture of refugees by Colonel Somerset was a by-product of the battle rather than its cause,' Peires argues of Mbholompo. Yes, if Somerset is seen as representing the interests of the Cape administration, but a decided no if he is seen as representing the interests of the eastern Cape settlers. Peires himself states that it was Somerset's practice (as it was no doubt the practice of many other frontier officials) 'to entice Boer volunteers to military service with easy pickings in cattle and child servants' (p. 236). Mbholompo was not the product of an official labour-raid, but it certainly seems to have been the product of an officially sanctioned 'rescue' operation which, like many other official operations on colonial frontiers everywhere, was hijacked by ambitious soldiers and labour-raiding settlers.

As for the flight of the Ngwane from the highveld, we will not be in a position to understand this more clearly until we have a much more substantial account of highveld politics in the troubled times of the 1820s than either Cobbing or Peires has given us. I find Cobbing's hypothesis about the role played by the Griqua, Kora and other trans-frontier raiders highly suggestive: it is a factor which has been badly overlooked in conventional accounts. But, like Peires, I find it difficult to conceive of groups like the Ngwane simply as victims of slave-raiders: intra-African politics in the region need much closer attention than Cobbing is prepared to give them. Peires, for his part, makes a mistake, I think, in trying to argue away the role of the Griqua: the practice found in most mfecane historiography of treating the history of the southern highveld in the early nineteenth century in isolation from the history of the Cape colonial frontier to the south and the Griqua-Kora frontier to the west is an obstacle to a potentially fruitful line of historical enquiry.