A.T. Bryant and the ‘Lala’

Abstract

For the first time in more than two decades, historians and archaeologists are beginning to research the making of collective identities in southern Africa's pre-colonial past in some detail. Long-established notions about these identities are once again coming under critical scrutiny. Building on earlier research with Carolyn Hamilton on the historical meanings of the term amalala, this article looks at how Alfred Bryant examined the idea of who the ‘Lala’ were and where they came from in a series of influential works first published in the early twentieth century. In brief, Bryant saw the Lala as a group of related tribes that constituted one of several offshoots of the ‘Nguni’ peoples who supposedly migrated from the interior of southern Africa into what are now the KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape regions after about 1500. This article argues that there was very little basis for these notions in the earlier literature, and that Bryant's ideas were mainly the product of his own particular interpretation of scrappy and contradictory information derived from conversations with unnamed Africans. Such evidence as exists on the subject today lends itself to a very different set of interpretations.