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Acknowledgements

The production of a book which is focused on a set of debates poses many problems. The original dialogue on the conference floor was frequently heated and tense. The contributors to this book fail to agree on, indeed, they passionately contest, the orthography of the subject of the book (is it 'The Mfecane', mfecane or 'mfekaan'), not to mention their disagreements over the meaning of the term. Under such conditions, an editor treads a potentially treacherous path. The contributors to this book have, however, given me an easy passage, graciously agreeing to the compromises which I have proposed. They have also demonstrated enormous patience with the delays and rearrangements which were a consequence of the restructuring of the book to accommodate the absence of a contribution from Julian Cobbing.

The book's content covers a number of specialist areas, and the various contributors represent a range of perspectives. Alone I could not have hoped to contextualise the varied offerings adequately and fairly. In this task I have been skilfully assisted by Norman Etherington, John Wright and Neil Parsons who each undertook to provide a contextualising essay on an area of the debates in which each is expert. Readers of the book will doubtless be as grateful as I am for their efforts.

It has been a great pleasure to work with the highly experienced Africana librarian, Yvonne Garson, who is responsible for the consolidated bibliography. Yvonne began the work of creating the bibliography from the footnotes to the various essays, and rapidly exposed the deficiencies of even the most meticulous citations. As many of the debates which arise in this book are located in the way sources are read and cited, a definitive bibliography of the kind compiled by Yvonne is invaluable.

There are many more debts of gratitude. I am grateful to Professors Patrick MacAllister and David Hammond-Tooke for encouraging me to go ahead with the colloquium. Professor Hammond-Tooke gave his permission for the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand to host the event and the Research Office of the same university provided the initial funds which made the colloquium possible. Permission from the Journal of African History to reproduce articles by E. Eldredge and C. Hamilton is gratefully acknowledged. Lastly I would like to thank the co-publishers, Wits University Press and the University of Natal Press for all that they have done to bring this complex work to completion. In particular I am grateful to Margery Moberly of the University of Natal Press who rescued this book from the nightmare of its own internal controversies, and provided crucial support and guidance, both practical and moral.

CAROLYN HAMILTON