Shaka Zulu Research Articles

Popular history; Cultural memory

History's critics, be it admitted, have far more to say than that suggested by Claudia Braude in cynical lead-line to her review of Negotiating Past: academics and artists have discovered memory market, a thriving area in United States and elsewhere (Johannesburg Mail and Guardian, 3-8 April, 1998:26). History as a form of popular discourse and culturally encoded group memory has usurped academic historiography because of particular conditions of production and mobilisation of knowledge of past in our divided, hybrid country, not because of derivative dominance of American intellectual trends. And so it seems that those well-intentioned radical curriculum reformers of early nineteen nineties were wasting their time--no one's going to be teaching it anyway--worrying over whether Shaka Zulu was a real life black Napoleon or a monstrous myth concocted by white missionaries and settlers as a cover for their slaving and colonial expropriation (see Hamilton 1995). The popular history and cultural memory pertinent to Zulu nationalism simply requires a Napoleonic Shaka, just as Basotho mythic charter of King Moshoeshoe I as benevolent civiliser requires real live cannibals in contemporaneous, early-19th century Lesotho (Coplan 1994:1-3). Indeed, as befits symbolisation of pre-colonial relations between these two nascent nationalities, converse heroic myths require each other, so that Basotho cultural memory has considered Shaka responsible for appearance of cannibalism in their region (Lagden 1909:46). As I hinted in my own lead line, this foregrounding of public and popular history is neither surprising nor anomalous. A host of issues of teal moment: land claims, occupancy and powers of chieftaincy, public sacralisation of historical sites, Truth and Reconciliation, restitution for injury and suffering under apartheid, building and re-building of popular identities, African Renaissance--what Graham Pechey (1993:155) calls the need for a dialogue of irreducible pluralities of imagined communities--and interbraided re-collection and comprehension of individual and collective experience; all require centering of arts and sciences of memory and testimony, of self-recognition and representation in popular genres. Without attempting air-tight categorisation (popular culture needs air), we can identify popular culture as those genres that, as Fabian insists, (1978:315) did not come about merely as responses to questions and conditions; but that ask questions and create conditions. More specific to contemporary Africa, Barber argues (1997:1-2) that popular genres do not so much hybridize static dichotomies of traditional and modern, indigenous and Western, local and global as destabilize and consume those stereotypical categories and their opposition altogether. It is these dynamic, anything goes (together) contemporary forms that engage self-expressive creativity of vast majority of people in Africa today, and that shatter common misconception that there is somewhere in West a cultural capital of global. Indeed, while majority of South Africa's dispossessed still look to modernism, not post-modernism, for a post-apartheid social narrative (Pechey 1993: 156), it is in such people's own popular genres that totalizing concepts and self-concepts of culture are disputed and falsified in intuitive experience. As Michael Chapman, who has worked to centre study of language auriture in literary studies at University of Natal argues: Our differentiated modernity, our hybrid condition should ensure that we resist splitting our story into that of Africa and West. Because of our fractured history we are under an obligation--as West no longer thinks it is--to identify potential of shared storytelling in which compelling power' of story defines us as human beings. …

Carolyn Hamilton. <italic>Terrific Majesty: The Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical Invention</italic>. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1998. Pp. xii, 278. Cloth $39.95, paper $18.95

Carolyn Hamilton. Terrific Majesty: The Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical Invention. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1998. Pp. xii, 278. Cloth $39.95, paper $18.95 Get access Hamilton Carolyn. Terrific Majesty: The Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical Invention. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1998. Pp. xii, 278. Cloth $39.95, paper $18.95. Alan R. Booth Alan R. Booth Ohio University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 104, Issue 5, December 1999, Pages 1804–1806, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/104.5.1804 Published: 01 December 1999

Terrific Majesty: The Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical Invention

Acknowledgements Orthographic and Terminological Notes Abbreviations Map Introduction 1. Painted Chests, Academic Body Servants, and Visions of Modern Airlines: Shaka in Contemporary Discourses 2. The Origins of the Image of Shaka 3. The Men Who Would be Shaka: Shaka as a Model for the Natal Native Administration 4.The Establishment of a Living Source of Tradition: James Stuart and the Genius of Shakan Despotism 5. Shaka as Metaphor, Memory, and History in Apartheid South Africa 6.The Government Resembles Tshaka Glossary Notes Bibliography Index

Shorter notice. Terrific Majesty. The Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical Invention. Carolyn Hamilton

Journal Article Shorter notice. Terrific Majesty. The Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical Invention. Carolyn Hamilton Get access R Oliver R Oliver Frilsham, Berkshire, UK Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume 114, Issue 458, September 1999, Page 1005, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/114.458.1005 Published: 01 September 1999

Shorter notice. Terrific Majesty. The Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical Invention. Carolyn Hamilton

Journal Article Shorter notice. Terrific Majesty. The Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical Invention. Carolyn Hamilton Get access R Oliver R Oliver Frilsham, Berkshire, UK Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume 114, Issue 458, September 1999, Page 1005, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/114.458.1005 Published: 01 September 1999

Terrific majesty: the powers of Shaka Zulu and the limits of historical invention

Terrific majesty: the powers of Shaka Zulu and the limits of historical invention

Terrific Majesty: The Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical Invention

Terrific Majesty: The Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical Invention

A Dangerous Admiration: E.A. Ritter'sShaka Zulu

(1993). A Dangerous Admiration: E.A. Ritter's Shaka Zulu. South African Historical Journal: Vol. 28, No. 1, pp. 98-118.

A Positional Gambit: Shaka Zulu and the Conflict in South Africa

'Shaka Zulu', the South African Broadcasting Corporation's television miniseries, premiered in South Africa in late 1986. Within a year it had been seen by a remarkable 100 million viewers in South Africa and abroad. Equally astonishing was the series' cost (24 million dollars). Hailed by some critics as a rare instance of African history from an African perspective, and slated by others as racist propaganda, the series remained in the public eye well beyond its screening times. In this article, the author examines the significance of'Shaka Zulu' through reference to the series' production history and to its political setting. She situates the miniseries within the context of the contests over the production of history in South Africa in the 1980s. She analyses the series' script, explores its'rich and awkward commotion of production', and assesses the multiple intentions of the producers and the possible ways of its reception, both in South Africa and abroad. This provides a lens through which to scrutinize the nature of hegemony and power in South Africa, and'the contests which produce, reproduce and change historical knowledge'. Notes, ref. (p. 450-454).

The Mfecane as Alibi: Thoughts on Dithakong and Mbolompo

The ‘mfecane’ is a characteristic product of South African liberal history used by the apartheid state to legitimate South Africa's racially unequal land division. Some astonishingly selective use or actual invention of evidence produced the myth of an internally-induced process of black-on-black destruction centring on Shaka's Zulu. A re-examination of the ‘battles’ of Dithakong and Mbolompo suggests very different conclusions and enables us to decipher the motives of subsequent historiographical amnesias. After about 1810 the black peoples of southern Africa were caught between intensifying and converging imperialistic thrusts: one to supply the Cape Colony with labour; another, at Delagoa Bay, to supply slaves particularly to the Brazilian sugar plantations. The flight of the Ngwane from the Mzinyathi inland to the Caledon was, it is argued, a response to slaving. But they ran directly into the colonial raiding-grounds north of the Orange. The (missionary-led) raid on the still unidentified ‘Mantatees’ (not a reference to MaNtatisi) at Dithakong in 1823 was one of innumerable Griqua raids for slaves to counter an acute shortage of labour among Cape settlers after the British expansionist wars of 1811–20. Similar Griqua raids forced the Ngwane south from the Caledon into the Transkei. Here, at Mbolompo in 1828, the Ngwane were attacked yet again, this time by a British army seeking ‘free’ labour after the reorganisation of the Cape's labour-procurement system in July 1828. The British claim that they were parrying a Zulu invasion is exposed as propaganda, and the connexions between the campaign and the white-instigated murder of Shaka are shown. In short, African societies did not generate the regional violence on their own. Rather, caught within the European net, they were transformed over a lengthy period in reaction to the attentions of external plunderers. The core misrepresentations of ‘the mfecane’ are thereby revealed; the term, and the concept, should be abandoned.

Shaka Zulu

Shaka Zulu Get access Shaka Zulu, by E. A. Ritter. Longmans, Green. 21s. J.P. J.P. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar African Affairs, Volume 54, Issue 217, October 1955, Pages 318–319, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.afraf.a094344 Published: 01 October 1955