Founding and Crushing: Narrative Understandings of Political Violence in Pre-modern and Colonial South Africa

Abstract

The significance of violence in the founding of states and the quest for democracy is a basic concern not only for general and abstract political theory but also at the level of particular political discourses in their historical contexts. South Africa has had a long and varied history of political violence from pre-colonial times, through conquest, slavery and a century of frontier wars to apartheid, the liberation struggle and the violent funding of a post-apartheid democracy. Some, but by no means all, of this proliferating and destructive violence can be accounted for in instrumental or strategic terms. For the rest, though, this violent history was not understood, either at the time or in retrospect, as simply that of random violence or of endemic strife, a succession of arbitrary and irrational conflicts. Significantly, this often took the form of narratives of political violence whether at the level of oral histories, of popular legends, of partisan accounts, of official findings, of stories of nation-building or of academic histories. These diverse narratives may themselves be interrogated for the implicit understandings of the significance of political violence in the founding of political order and democracy of which they speak. Thus, at a macro-level, we may be concerned with what might be called the master narrative of violence and democratic inclusion. It is possible to discern, at least from the vantage point of the present, a certain overall shape and thrust to the sequence of violent events and conflicts which went into the making of South African history, culminating in the recent transition to post-apartheid democracy. Importantly this is not just a retrospective and, anachronistic projection of current norms and values onto the past. Rather, in one way or another something like this master narrative of democratic inclusion long informed the mainstream of anti-apartheid opposition and resistance during the modern period, both in its initial commitment to non-violent and constitutional politics and in its later turn to political violence and the armed struggle. However, this master arrative of violence and democracy is cast at a high level of abstraction and by no means subsumes or replaces more particular and micro-narratives of political violence at regional or communal levels. In local contexts and at different times not only rival versions of violent events and conflicts, but different understandings of the significance of political violence were sustained in communal memories and oral histories. Some of these were taken up in the larger narratives of the colonial state or incipient nationalist movements during the modern period of centralised state formation. Others, more especially those from precolonial and pre-modern contexts, have effectively been forgotten, though some also remain available for retrieval in later contexts, sometimes with surprising potency and force. In either case these narratives of political violence may be re-read and interpreted for what they reveal of the implicit understandings of the significance of violence by such precolonial and pre-modern communities. The following paper is concerned with two case studies of this kind, first with the stories of Tshawe and Shaka as the respective founding myths of the Xhosa and Zulu peoples, and then with the narrative understanding of the Mfecane.