Shaka – that stubbornly
legendary Zulu founder – keeps resurfacing, drawing me back into the debates
concerning his character and times. The other day I was approached by one of
Wikipedia’s participants – or compilers, or – it’s hard to know what to call the
many non-specialists who footle about in the endless fields of knowledge trying
to make it all better, sometimes with mixed results. (I tried to refurbish the “Shaka”
entry some years ago, and haven’t had the nerve to go back to see how many
dozens of people have arbitrarily edited it subsequently, and to what.) This
particular person asked me to have a look at the Wikipedia entry for “mfecane” –
the ostensibly Zulu word, usually translated as “the crushing”, which has been
popularly used to designate the wave of subcontinental violence, scattering and
depopulation beginning with Shaka in the 1820s.
The “mfecane” entry
exemplifies many of the problems with the grand democratic enterprise that is
Wikipedia. The earliest entries on Shaka were done by someone who had no
specialist knowledge in anything, but decided he would try to fill the gaps in
the Z’s, namely Zebra, Zimbabwe, and Zulu! Predictably, all the hoary popular
legends received another shot in the arm, rather than up-to-date professional research.
The “mfecane” entry has progressed only partly beyond this state, being presently
a mish-mash of outdated myths, assumptions, and sources whose veracity has long
been doubted, uneasily shackled to spotty coverage of some recent scholarly
controversies. The accompanying “Talk page”, where one can follow some of the
conversation that feeds into reworking the entries, is equally a tangle of the
provocative, the useful, and the amusingly ill-informed.
One could start with
the entry’s map, which captures the essence of the popular idea – that is, that
a half-demonic half-genius Shaka conjured up, in under a decade, a militarised
state so powerful and predatory that it sent neighbouring ‘tribes’ scattering
in terror as far as Zimbabwe and Malawi, depopulating large areas in the
process. One of the few eyewitnesses to Shaka’s rule, Henry Francis Fynn,
estimated slaughter of up to a million; though he had no evidence for this whatsoever,
that number was uncritically repeated for decades. Only in the 1920s was the
term “mfecane” coined to describe this explosion, and it was consolidated into
an orthodoxy by J D Omer-Cooper’s book The
Zulu Aftermath in 1966.
In the early 1980s
Julian Cobbing, historian of the Ndebele and teacher extraordinaire, got me
excited about all this in his coruscating critique of the conventional picture.
In 1988 he blew the whole thing open with an article in the prestigious Journal of African History, entitled “The
Mfecane as Alibi”. He argued two main things: firstly that the regional “motor
of violence” was not Shaka, but slave-raids from Mozambique and, a little
later, Griqua raids from the west; and secondly, that the “mfecane” was
essentially a cover-up for the far greater violence of colonial invasion. As
you can imagine, there were howls of protest from the historical establishment,
for whom the mfecane was a cornerstone of the national narrative. It was as if
someone had tried to erase the Great Trek, or the Boer War.
Though aspects of
Cobbing’s intervention remain arguable, I think he achieved one great thing: he
dislodged Shaka from his iconic status as a sui
generis explosive phenomenon, and instead located him within an envelope of
forces unfolding on multiple fronts right across southern Africa. Shaka was aggressive
and a state-builder, but both violence and state-building were happening before
him and after him: colonial invasion within a decade of his death engendered
violence and population movements far more damaging than anything he could have
done. In short, a number of historians,
including John Wright, Gavin Whitelaw, Carolyn Hamilton, Norman Etherington, and
Elizabeth Eldredge – and myself in two books, Savage Delight and Myth of
Iron – expanded upon this complexity, though not always in agreement. In
short, some of us argue that the “mfecane” as a free-standing, Shaka-inspired
phenomenon simply melts away.
Most recently, John
Laband has published The Assassination of
King Shaka. Laband has devoted much of his career to the history of the
Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, but in his big book Rope
of Sand he ventured into chapters on the earlier Zulu leaders, Shaka,
Dingane and Mpande. Even in so experienced a scholar, myths have powerful hold;
though he cited my work arguing that the famous “Battle of Qokli Hill” was an
invention, he still included that battle in his narrative. Now, I’m glad to
see, he has dropped it, and in large part agrees with my view of Shaka’s
reign. He is not, he insists, writing another
biography of Shaka: “Dan Wylie stole a march on me there,” he laments in his
introduction. (Sorry, John; no malice aforethought, I was just blundering along
at my own pace.) Instead, he cleverly
refracts Shaka’s career through the perspective of his assassination at the
hands of his brothers in 1828, showing how his entire politics and situation culminated
in that fatal moment. His perspective accords on the whole with mine partly because
we both draw heavily on The James Stuart
Archive, a six-volume collection of Zulu oral histories, edited largely by
John Wright – a monumental, decades-long task of translation and scholarship.
The JSA is tricky to interpret and
use, but overall its testimonies support a narrative radically different to the
popular “mfecane”. Laband deliberately doesn’t engage in scholarly debates, as
I did, letting the story tell itself, as it were, in serviceable and readable
fashion, and more fully describing Zulu cultural mores. Though we differ in
emphasis and interpretation here and there, I think our books lie rather
fruitfully alongside one another.
Myth of Iron has provoked some other interesting
responses. One is to have had some influence on Shaka’s latest literary incarnation
– the graphic novel. (It had to happen sometime!) With Shaka Rising, Luke W Molver and Mason O’Connor with Jive Media Africa
(website here) has recently published an account of Shaka’s
accession to power in a vivacious and thoughtful way. The artwork is powerful, rendered
largely in rich ochres and reds, and the storyline is compelling – as Shaka’s
rise from obscurity to power can only be. Shaka
Rising is a fiction, of course, and some characters are conscious inventions
deployed to enliven and sharpen the narrative. Relatively little evidence is
available anywhere about Shaka’s childhood and youth, and different stories
compete in the traditions. Molver and O’Connor have chosen a version in which
Shaka goes into exile not as a child, but as an upcoming and potentially
troublesome young man, earning his military kudos under Dingiswayo of the
Mthethwa, who then boosts him into power over his brothers. (Shaka’s conflict
with, and ultimate murder of brother Sigujana is a central thread of the story.) If the images owe perhaps a little too much to
the honed physiques of Henry Cele and the 1987 TV series Shaka Zulu, and the background architecture a little too much to that
of North American stockades, it is a pretty complex and persuasive view of the
period.
Most interestingly
in the context of the “mfecane”, Shaka
Rising follows the (still controversial and unproven) view propounded by
Cobbing and endorsed, with some caveats, in Myth
of Iron – the view that a primary stimulus of violence was slaving,
crucially conducted by Ndwandwe middlemen who occupied territory between the
Zulu-Mthethwa nexus on the Mfolozi rivers and Delagoa Bay (Maputo). So, instead of the Wiki map, which has the usual
bundle of arrows shooting away from the Zulu heartland, like sparks from a
fire, in Shaka Rising we have a map
in which the arrows emanate from the Ndwandwe. This, too, may be an
oversimplification, of course, but at least it provides an alternative to the
myth. Most gratifyingly, a section at the back of Shaka Rising lays out for readers all the questions I’ve raised
here: it stresses the story’s fictionality, the possibility of other versions,
the dubious nature of many of the sources, and the existence of ongoing
controversy – inviting one into the debate, rather than closing it off.
With my Mkhize mentors, and Zihlandhlo T-shirts! |
I believe a sequel
is in the works, and I look forward to it. Zulu history before the 1879 war remains
rather neglected: we still await scholarly biographies of Dingane and Mpande,
kings just as important to the foundation of the Zulu polity as their
half-brother Shaka. I hope Zulu scholars are weighing in, though another
consequence of Myth of Iron was a
salutary reminder that university, on-paper scholarship is not the mode of
history most relevant to most people. A couple of years ago, on the strength of
my portrayal of the partnership between Shaka and his neighbouring Mkhize
chieftain Zihlandhlo, I was invited to a Zulu-Mhkize reconciliation indaba at one
of King Zwelithini’s rural palaces.
It was totally fascinating: politics in a
mode that one almost never sees in the national press, conducted entirely in
Zulu, dense with protocols and rich with undercurrents which this displaced
white Zimbo could still only guess at. Thank goodness for the lovely Mhkize
gentlemen who shepherded me through the day. It was history living into the future
in a wholly different way, in which, one could say, the truth of the present is
more important than the truth about the past – however one conceives of that.
*****