The recent news that
an alleged Brazilian drug-smuggling kingpin has been finally arrested in a posh
Maputo hotel coincided with my receiving a new article on the
nineteenth-century slave trade out of that same port. Like many ports, then, a
den of iniquity and illicit trade, not much changing over the centuries.
The new article, in
the prestigious Journal of African
History, is by Linell Chewins and Peter Delius of Wits University. Chewins
is working on a PhD; Professor Delius is well-known for his work on the history
of the Pedi people. The article carries the ponderously informative title, “The
Northeastern Factor in South African History: Re-evaluating the volume of the
slave trade out of Delagoa Bay [Maputo] and its impact on its hinterland in the
early nineteenth century.”
I read it with great
interest, since it promised to cast some light on one of the many puzzlements
of Shaka’s reign: his relations with the Portuguese and their slaving
activities out of the Bay. As noted by Chewins and Delius (let’s call them C&D
for short), South African historians of this area of inquiry have been almost uniformly
English-speaking. They have therefore been unable (or “unwilling”, C&D
allege) to utilise Portuguese archival sources (though a few items were
available in translation). In any case, they tell us, the Lisbon maritime
records were until very recently in chaos, and hard to sort through. As it was, myself and colleagues indeed had
to work with “fragmentary and circumstantial” evidence from which to draw some
inevitably tentative conclusions. Now, C&D have scoured those Portuguese
archives in order to throw further light on the impact of the slave trade on
the peoples of what is now southern Mozambique and Kwazulu-Natal.
All terribly
specialised. I need to backtrack a bit.
In 1988, Julian
Cobbing of Rhodes University began challenging the accepted accounts of the
Shakan period (roughly 1780-1828). Drawing on some tantalising hints by
previous historians, he put together a series of papers, building a case that
caused what C&D call an “intemperate” debate – actually the most exciting
upheaval in South African historiography in years. Essentially, Cobbing argued
that, contrary to the usual mythology, a perceived wave of violence spreading
across the subcontinent in the early nineteenth century was not to be
attributed solely to the manic imperial ambitions of one Shaka and the Zulus.
Rather, he suggested, a crucial, if not the primary, source of regional violence
was a growing slave trade at Delagoa Bay. Indeed, the ripples may have played a
part in the surge towards ‘state formation’ by the Ndwandwe, the Mthethwa, the
Zulu and others. In that 1990s ‘Africanist’ phase of historiography, there were
howls of protest that this implied that African states couldn’t form
themselves, but had to be dependent on some outside force. But Cobbing’s major
contribution was that, instead of “South African” and “Zulu” and “Mozambican”
history being pursued in different ‘nationalist’ boxes, he insisted on seeing
the whole region as seamless and interlinked. This was later reinforced by
Australian historian Norman Etherington, whose book The Great Treks (2001) did exactly that, in more detail, and it’s a
perspective rightly endorsed by Chewins and Delius.
C&D do not give
Cobbing remotely sufficient credit for launching this perspective. They mention
only his earliest, most exploratory paper, rather than a series of later, more
finely detailed and rigorous ones. Some of those, to be fair, were not formally
published but circulated in sort of samizdat copies. Cobbing was nevertheless somewhat hobbled by
the lack of access to Portuguese sources (not to mention Dutch, French and
American ones – they were all slaving). So was I (hobbled, that is, not
slaving), when following up on Cobbing’s work in my own study of Shaka, Myth of Iron (2006). I demurred from
Cobbing in various ways, and in writing the book tried to evaluate the
available evidence independently and on its own terms. In the end, though, I
came round to presenting a rather similar view.
Still, here was the
main sticking-point: there was simply too little direct evidence of the scale of slaving in the crucial periods –
that is, prior to 1815, round about when Shaka assumed the chieftainship of the
still-small Zulu people; and then during Shaka’s reign itself. Slaving from Delagoa
Bay was unquestionably afoot, and expanding, but was there enough slaving to stimulate the kinds of change visibly happening
in the interior: violent movements and consolidations and varieties of militarisation?
I looked excitedly to C&D’s new research to bring us closer to certainty,
if not clinch the matter. (As Jeff Peires reminded me the other day, no
conclusion is ever reached in history.)
I was doomed to be a
little disappointed. Not because of the quality of the research, so much as because
the Lisbon archives apparently can’t offer much more than what we already
surmised. We already knew that slaving appeared, relative to that further
north, subdued in the Bay area prior to about 1810. Was this due to a lack of
slaving, or just a lack of documentation? Despite their access to the Lisbon
records, C&D are obliged to find pre-1820s slaving “as-yet unquantifiable”.
In the early 1820s, Brazil (alongside
other operators and destinations) took further advantage of loopholes in the unfolding international
slaving ban to start shipping out several thousand slaves a year, continuing well
into the 1830s. But C&D’s tabulated figures for slaves offloaded from the
Bay begin only in 1829 (the year after Shaka was assassinated by Dingane). Those
figures are themselves bound to be underestimates, and before that date numbers
of a deeply clandestine trade simply don’t appear to exist. Whatever C&D
can postulate about the earlier era is, they admit, as fragmented and “circumstantial”
as ever – little more than “a hint” (97).
The primary
questions (or at least my questions) remain: did slaving crucially stimulate
state consolidation among the Zulus and others? And did, in that process, Shaka
himself eventually participate in the slave trade? The first question, C&D point
out, couldn’t be treated “satisfactorily” within the scope of the article,
which focuses on the late 1820s onwards. That’s fair enough. They do show that
Dingane, Shaka’s successor, was quite deeply involved in various trades at the
Bay, including at times slaves. Was Shaka, too? C&D offer a couple of
tantalising clues, but no more than, as they say, a “probability”.
A crucial issue,
which they discuss in some detail, is identifying exactly who was doing what in the vicinity of the Bay. The Portuguese
themselves raided and fomented local wars to generate captives, but there were
also groups marauding further inland, sometimes with extreme violence, feeding
victims into the slaving network. (It’s an uncomfortable truth, that some
Africans – from Sierra Leone to Somalia and Angola – were willing to sell other
Africans into slavery, but so it is.) The marauders in question were variously
described by the Portuguese and English visitors to the Bay as Vatwas, Vatuas,
Bathwa, Zwietes, Switis, Hollontontes, Mapsitas, and Zoolas. It was very
confused. The same name was often applied to quite different entities. I
discussed this in considerable detail in Myth
of Iron (pp.240-52), presenting and evaluating such snippets as I could
find. C&D omit some of mine, and add some to mine; but even a combination of
them all doesn’t cast much more light. There were several groups. Zwide’s
Ndwandwe (Zwietes) are underplayed by C&D, though as recent work by John
Wright and Carolyn Hamilton is confirming, they were palpably the most
aggressive of the inland peoples. Other groups, led by Shoshangane (the Gaza), Zwangendaba
(Jere), and Nxaba (Msane) are well documented as continuing to vigorously trade
slaves into the 1830s. These migrant polities were somewhat fluid in the first
place, identifying them from the outside tricky.
C&D want to
conflate ‘Vatwas’ with Zulus – as they were on just two documented occasions – more firmly than I think the evidence can
bear. They claim tangentially that the Zulu “army” was “in the Bay” (whatever
that means) in 1823, and that they pursued a “scorched-earth” strategy of “destructive
forays”. This seems to me to over-generalise the import of only a couple of
references; and exactly where, and upon whom, these forays were deployed is not
stated, apart from allegedly disembowelling one priest. There was some devastation: John Cane, an
Englishman camped at Port Natal (Durban) who was twice sent to the Bay by Shaka,
reported as much, but he did not attribute this to Shaka’s forces. (C&D don’t
cite this rare eyewitness testimony.) Very interestingly, they do reference a
Portuguese letter saying that Shaka established a monitoring or trading-post
100km inland of the Bay on the upper Maputa river. This is one of very few
Portuguese items they can offer: they otherwise rely heavily on the testimonies
of a British naval officer, W F W Owen – as did I. So, as Owen averred, the
links were certainly there. Portuguese were encountered at Shaka’s own capital,
way south on the Mhlatuze river, in 1824-5. There seems no reason to discount slaves as part of Shaka’s trade
dealings. It would not be a big step from inducting war captives into the
existing forms of local servitude, to releasing some of them into the
international network. But this still speculative, and C&D can still
provide no incontrovertible “smoking musket” or specify the scale.
As for the wider
implications of the impact of slaving, C&D do not engage at all with the
30-odd pages throughout Myth of Iron
in which I unpack the evidence in painstaking detail. In some ways my case was
negative or deductive. The oral records we have indicate several groups moving
wholesale away from the Bay in the period 1790-1810 (some eventually into the
arms of Shaka): why? A little further south others were consolidating
militarily and using hilltop retreats: why? I argue that some common earlier
hypotheses – blaming drought and the ivory trade, primarily – don’t make complete
sense of these dynamics. Escaping from, defending against, and/or participating
in violent slave-raids would be a more logical explanation. C&D state that
I blandly “concluded that slavery at the Bay remained a controversial subject”.
In fact, my sentence reads: “How much Delagoa Bay participated in the upsurge
remains controversial” (162). Which is what C&D are saying, too! Nor was this
sentence my conclusion, but a cautionary rider to my conclusion, which concerned Ndwandwe involvement in
particular and is clearly stated just a page later:
Zwide was almost certainly amongst those chieftains angling for a
greater portion of the expanding Bay trade. There is little question that
commerce of all descriptions was traversing the Thukela-Phongolo catchment ...
The coincidence of an upsurge in trade of all kinds, most importantly slaving,
and the increase of more violent attacks by more organised amabutho [armed units] in the immediate hinterland, is, at the very
least, deeply suggestive. ... I think it’s safe to say that slaving was the
most important factor in stimulating [those] kinds of attacks. (163-4)
C&D seem
determined to include me in a “straw man” construction of the passé historian
who needs to “pay more attention” to the “northeastern factor”, when in fact I –
and several others – have long done exactly that.
In a final odd
misreading, they state: “Historians have commonly viewed Shoshangane and Zwangendaba’s
move north to as an [sic] attempt to escape from Shaka’s violent orbit”, rather
than attracted to the Bay trade. They
cite Myth of Iron, p.245. It’s
ambiguous: do they mean that this is what I state? (As it happens, it’s true,
but I don’t say so there.) Or do they mean that I also hold that “common view”?
In fact, on p.235 I offer a more complex, push-pull interpretation: “[P]rompted
by Shaka’s growing power, Zwide’s shift northwards, and an attractive explosion
in the slave trade, they gradually moved closer to the Bay”. And on p.245 I
actually reinforce C&D’s own emphasis: “If it was not Shaka chasing the
Msane, Gaza and Jere into the Delagoa
Bay area and northwards, why did they go there? ... [T]he answer [is] quite
clear: slaves”.
One does not demand
to be agreed with, only to be read accurately.
On the whole –
though there are other details I would question – our differences are matters of nuance rather than substance. It’s good in its way to
know that this further research pretty much confirms one’s own. The paper will
certainly help revive an area of debate which, as Chewins and Delius rightly note,
has gone rather quiescent.
And if this all
sounds like minor quibbles and merely incremental advances in arcane knowledge
about one remote corner of the globe, remember that slaving is greater in
volume today than ever. There are more misbegotten people living in various
conditions of servitude than at any previous time in history – according to the
International Labour Organisation, anything between 26 and 40 million. And I
will bet my bottom escudo that some are still being trafficked through Maputo.
***