Zulu Kingdom Research Articles

The Relationship between Trade in Southern Mozambique and State Formation: Reassessing Hedges on Cattle, Ivory and Brass

For the past 37 years, David Hedges’ cattle trade theory has dominated the historical analysis of state formation in southern Africa during the 19th century. This theory centres on a cattle trade that came to replace the ivory trade from the late 18th century onwards, and was based on the demand for fresh meat by whalers. In the view of Hedges, the increased cattle trade placed considerable pressure on societies to replenish herds, given the socially and politically important role that cattle played in southern African societies. And since this change coincided with a severe and prolonged drought, it necessitated the restocking of cattle herds through the systematised military raiding of cattle, which, in turn, required a centralised government. In reviewing the evidence for shifts in the patterns of trade at this time, during which whalers called at Delagoa Bay to hunt, discrepancies in Hedges’ analysis came to light.The Portuguese ivory trade at Delagoa Bay started in 1545, when a sporadic trade based on the monsoon seasons laid the foundation for the export of ivory that would boom in the latter half of the 18th century. This trade has been a key element in the dominant explanations offered for accelerated processes of political centralisation in northern Kwazulu-Natal, which culminated in the rise of the Zulu kingdom. David Hedges developed the most influential and enduring of these arguments in his doctoral dissertation in 1978. He argued that it was a sharp contraction of the ivory trade in the last two decades of the 19th century that was a major cause of conflict and state formation. This article reviews the evidence and arguments presented by Hedges and suggests that while his work has provided an important contribution to the debate, elements of his argument need substantial revision.

Introduction: Jeff Guy and Norman Etherington

Introduction:Jeff Guy and Norman Etherington Gerhard Maré (bio) Jeff Guy died in December 2014. He was on his way back to Durban, South Africa, from the UK, after speaking at a conference commemorating the life of bishop John Colenso. Guy’s biographic study, The Heretic, recounted Colenso’s life and work. The bishop had been a thorn in the flesh of colonial Natal and supporter of black people in Natal as well as the Zulu kingdom, during the nineteenth century. Colenso’s daughter, Harriette, became an avid anti-imperialist in her own right and was the topic of Guy’s book, The View Across the River. Another, and quite different, prominent personality of colonial Natal occupied the last seven years of Jeff Guy’s life. That book, Theophilus Shepstone and the Forging of Natal: African autonomy and settler colonialism in the making of traditional authority was published in 2013. The editors of Transformation asked historian Norman Etherington, based in Perth, to review this important book. It was an appropriate choice: Etherington is among the most important scholars of nineteenth century Natal and Zulu history. Like Jeff, he has exposed essential aspects of settler-colonial society and influenced many students and scholars. Yet, as sometimes happens with researchers who exercise dedication and who deeply care about their work, events around this request proved painful to both Jeff and Norman. The review became an exchange, one in which both parties expressed disappointment about an endangered friendship and collegiality, and even anger. Yet the exchange was far from merely ‘personal’. It also raised very important issues of historiography, methodology, interpretation and analysis, and thus itself offers an engaging contribution to researching and understanding repertoires of colonial rule, both in Natal and further afield, and its various legacies. The review Norman submitted was very long, an essay more than a review, [End Page 49] raising a number of sharp issues with many detailed examples. The editors decided that it could not be published as a usual review: meanwhile, as often happens in small circles, Jeff got wind of the review and asked to be allowed to respond and that both pieces appear together. The editors, worried about setting a precedent, initially rejected this idea, and considered that another journal might be a better forum for both pieces, where they could be run together as a debate. Yet, the journal in question then ceased to publish and Jeff’s unexpected death created a sense of further unease about how to proceed. In July 2015 I spoke to Norman at the Southern African Historical Society conference. I put to him that the debate should appear. At first we thought it should be possibly as an edited and slightly revised version from him and careful and sensitive edit of Jeff’s response–ensuring that the core issues remain for access by a wider readership. Yet, upon later reflection, it seemed important to leave the pieces as they were originally written–to allow the exchange to appear in these pages as the passionate and indeed caustic battle that it is. What are the core issues? The first, and probably most important, is that it showcases the seriousness of two scholars operating in the same field, both willing to respond to each other in terms set by disciplined scholarship and research, drawing on their own deep familiarity with sources, events, and personalities. Second, both are quite aware of the wider implications and legacies, for understanding the local as well as the wider implications of their analysis and arguments to British imperial practice. Third, it illustrates how methods and methodological approaches hold enormous implications for how arguments are constructed, and how the wider political relevance of history is at stake in how sources are interpreted. And, finally, South, southern, and African historiography more generally can only benefit from these interchanges–no matter the personal dimensions. It is also in remembrance of Jeff Guy as friend and colleague that we publish the pieces below, in the belief that those affected by him, as scholars themselves, will appreciate ‘hearing’ his voice once again. And we appreciate that Norman took his task seriously and then allowed us still to run his contribution...

The question of nationalism in Mzilikazi Khumalo's Princess Magogo kaDinuzulu (2002)

In this paper I discuss Mzilikazi Khumalo's opera, Princess Magogo kaDinuzulu (2002), composed eight years into South Africa's new dispensation. It is an opera which articulates nationalist discourses yet reflects a number of broader ambiguities relating to the country's attempts to ‘make’ a nation. The paper argues that with the theme of resistance, an anti-colonial Zulu struggle becomes a truly nationalist imaginary, yet the Princess's role is at moments central and at others spectral. The opera draws on the role of important Zulu royal women as exemplified by Magogo and attempts to find a place for them in a nationalist vision which partially works, yet is still trapped in the older paradigm of nationalism, which elides women from the main narrative by turning them into monuments or figures of sacrifice. Drawing from scholarship on nationalism and feminism, this paper explores the interplay between the music by the composer, Mzilikazi Khumalo, and the songs sung by the historical Princess in articulating moments that were of significance in pre-conquest Zulu kingdom and post-Bhambatha rebellion Zulu history, which the opera shifts with partial success to a post-apartheid national canvas.

Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century South Africa: A “usable past”?

Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century South Africa:A “usable past”? Poppy Fry Imagining the Cape Colony: History, literature, and the South African nation. By David Johnson. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011. Settler Colonialism and Land Rights in South Africa: Possession and dispossession on the Orange River. By Edward Cavanagh. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Anatomy of a South African Genocide: The extermination of the Cape San people. By Mohamed Adhikari. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011. The Farmerfield Mission: A Christian community in South Africa, 1838-2008. By Fiona Vernal. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Thomas Pringle: South African pioneer, poet and abolitionist. By Randolph Vigne. Woodbridge, Suffolk: David Currey, 2012. The Borders of Race in Colonial South Africa: The Kat River Settlement, 1829-1856. By Robert Ross. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. The rise of African history as a distinct academic discipline coincided with a shift away from formal colonial control and towards independent African nation states. It is not surprising, then, that the first generation of historians of Africa took very seriously the potential for historical narratives and analyses to produce and shape political change. The writing of Africans’ history was, to many of them, an explicitly anti-colonial act—asserting the complexity and humanity of the continents’ residents against an image of Africa as “without history.” In the early 1970s, Terence Ranger distilled this approach to two commitments: “firstly, to African agency in… historical analysis, and, secondly, to the production of ‘usable history’ for the newly independent nation states of Africa.”1 Although the imbrication of historical scholarship and nationalism proved problematic in some cases, Ranger’s invocation of a “usable past” continues to resonate, and historians of Africa continue to operate with the “added urgency” that their work must speak to the continent’s pressing concerns.2 In South Africa, in particular, it seemed obvious that historians needed to engage with the political present. The apartheid state justified its legitimacy through a particular historical narrative—the production of alternative histories was, by definition, anti-apartheid activism. Julian Cobbing’s 1988 article “The Mfecane as Abili: Thoughts on Dithakong and Mbolompo” is one of the more extreme—and influential—examples of South African historians addressing themselves as much to the contemporary political landscape as to historical events. In it, Cobbing argued that British missionaries and officials’ claims of having rescued refugees following an 1833 battle masked their actual purpose—slave raiding. He further suggested that violence in the early nineteenth-century South African interior originated not from the conquests of the Zulu kingdom (as earlier historians had argued), but from the labor-hungry machinations of Europeans—machinations which were hidden in the colonial record.3 This theory of secret interests driving conflict amongst Africans was influenced by and ultimately directed towards so-called “third force” violence in late 1980s and early 1990s South Africa, in which the apartheid state secretly funded and fomented brutal hostilities between African National Congress supporters and other black South Africans. In the end, “The Mfecane as Abili” proved to be trenchant political commentary but problematic history. In the bloody context of late-apartheid South Africa, this may be understandable. Cobbing’s account of events has not held up to scrutiny, but more than a few scholars defend, if not the specific argument of the article, the idea that political usefulness might outweigh historiographical or methodological concerns. Twenty years into the “new South Africa,” historians might be expected to take a somewhat more clear-eyed approach. Yet the question of how, if at all, the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century history of the region speaks to its twenty-first-century present and future remains a contentious one. Clifton Crais, for example, has offered increasingly explicit political critiques in his work, but he has done so by shifting his focus towards the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, examining events and trends wherein the chain of contingency and causality to the present can be more easily demonstrated. Norman Etherington, on the other hand, has argued for a “struggle history” of the early nineteenth century, framed but not determined by South Africa’s post-apartheid political and social needs.4 For better or worse...

‘Fighting Stick of Thunder’: Firearms and the Zulu Kingdom: The Cultural Ambiguities of Transferring Weapons Technology

This paper investigates the reluctance of the nineteenth-century Zulu people of southern Africa fully to embrace firearms in their war-making, and posits that this was an expression of their military culture. Not that the Zulu could not appreciate the battle-winning potential of the new military technology, or were dissuaded from increasingly determined efforts to obtain large quantities of firearms from traders. Yet, because firearms were prestigious weapons, monopolized by the elite, or professional hunters, Zulu commoners had little opportunity to master them and continued to rely instead on their traditional weapons, particularly the stabbing-spear. Even so, cultural rather than practical reasons were behind the rank and file’s reluctance to upgrade firearms to their prime weapon. Employing recorded contemporary Zulu oral evidence, praise songs, and statements of prisoners-of-war, to unpack the Zulus’ own perception of their heroic military culture, it is argued that, because of the engrained Zulu cultural consensus that only hand-to-hand combat was appropriate conduct for a true fighting-man, killing at a distance with a firearm was of inferior significance, and did not even entail the ritual pollution that followed homicide and the shedding of human blood. Only close combat was worthy of praise and commemoration.

In Response

In Response

The Other Zulus: The spread of Zulu ethnicity in colonial South Africa by Michael Mahoney, and: The Griqua Past and the Limits of South African History, 1902–1994 by Edward Cavanagh (review)

Reviewed by: The Other Zulus: The spread of Zulu ethnicity in colonial South Africa by Michael Mahoney, and: The Griqua Past and the Limits of South African History, 1902–1994 by Edward Cavanagh T.J. Tallie The Other Zulus: The spread of Zulu ethnicity in colonial South Africa By Michael Mahoney. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2012. The Griqua Past and the Limits of South African History, 1902–1994 By Edward Cavanagh. New York: Peter Lang, 2011. Identities are incredibly contingent, particularly those crafted in the midst of colonial domination, as most historians of the colonial experience would be quick to affirm. Two recent publications in South African history provide both an understanding of the incredibly localized nature of colonial identity formation, with an eye to the larger politics of settler colonialism. Michael Mahoney’s The Other Zulus: The spread of Zulu ethnicity in colonial South Africa is an ambitious yet careful study of the development of an overarching Zulu ethnic identity during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing from an extensive variety of government records, personal correspondence, and ethnographic archives, Mahoney constructs a survey of the colonial period in Natal and neighboring polity of Zululand that closely investigates the different pressures that shaped forms of tribal or inter-ethnic allegiance. For Mahoney, Africans who lived within colonial Natal in the years prior to the Anglo-Zulu War profoundly resisted identification with “Zuluness,” instead associating themselves with chieftaincies that had existed prior to the far-reaching conquests of Shaka, the first paramount Zulu ruler. Such a move found ready support with a colonial administration committed to governing on the cheap, particularly under the administration of Theophilus Shepstone, Natal’s long-serving Secretary of Native Affairs, who advocated for colonial rule that rested upon a maintained system of Indigenous governance. Mahoney argues that prior to the outbreak of war in 1879, Natal’s African population believed that their immediate interests lay not in an ethnic identification that required the recognition of a supreme and still very independent Zulu monarch north of the colony. Indeed, he asserts that the identification with local chiefdoms resulted from being situated between a colonial state “too weak to hate” and a Zulu king “too strong to love” (82). It was only after the Anglo-Zulu War that Natal’s African population, linked through a shared antipathy to rising settler power and strengthened through experiences such as those shared by young men on the goldfields of the Witwatersrand, began to look to a greatly reduced Zulu monarchy as a relatively powerless figure upon which they could project complex ideas of nationalist identification. For Mahoney, this process of new ethnic affiliation became most visible with the widespread identification of rebellious Africans with the Zulu monarch Dinizulu in 1906, over a quarter century after the defeat of the Zulu monarchy. Mahoney’s careful, detailed work is at its most effective when he examines the profound disidentification of Natal’s African population with the Zulu kingdom to the north; as he argues, “the Zulu ethnic identity of virtually the entire African population of Natal was itself not a given; it had to be established” (5). Thus begins a richly layered and source-rich description of the awkward negotiation of Africans between colonial rule and a larger Zulu identity. Likewise, by placing the focus of his study firmly in Natal, and not Zululand proper, Mahoney allows for a greater understanding of the complexities of identity formation within a (settler) colonial polity. The profound ambivalences of Africans within Natal with regard to both the Natal government and the Zulu kingdom reveal the limits of a settler state in compelling its Indigenous inhabitants and the nuanced ways in which those colonial subjects worked to articulate themselves on terms most amenable to them. Mahoney’s boldest offerings are also perhaps his most tenuous; in examining the process of African ethnic identification in colonial Natal, he offers productive challenges to the notion of colonial hegemony, particularly as it has been understood in both South African historiography and within larger British colonial history writing. For Mahoney, Zulu ethnic identification arose as a possible choice (which he terms a “moral economy”) in the midst...

The Other Zulus: The Spread of Zulu Ethnicity in Colonial South Africa, by Michael R. Mahoney

The Other Zulus: The Spread of Zulu Ethnicity in Colonial South Africa, by Michael R. Mahoney. Politics, History and Culture series. Durham, North Carolina, Duke University Press, 2012. xv, 293 pp. $89.95 US (cloth), $24.95 US (paper). In this work Michael Mahoney asks a deceptively simple question. How did so many Africans come to identify as Zulu, the single largest ethnic group in South Africa today, when so few did in the early colonial era? His answer, in this elegantly written and at times combative work, is that Africans in the British colony of Natal chose a common Zulu identity in the colonial era that they had not previously shared. Zulu ethnicity became both a means of resistance, but also a way to heal internal divisions that made them vulnerable to colonial rule. He bookends this study with two moments of violence that are well-mined by historians. In 1879 the British Empire went to war against the Zulu nation. With their substantial military advantage the English, based out of Natal, eventually emerged victorious, but not before the Zulu army badly bloodied them at Isandlwana and cemented a reputation as warriors that persists to this day. Mahoney finds it remarkable, and he is right, that many Natal Africans joined the British in this effort, volunteering their services against the Zulu state. How quickly, Mahoney notes, this turned. In 1906, twenty-seven years later, Africans in Natal, pushed to extremes by an increasingly oppressive settler government, claimed a united Zuluness and broke into a rebellion that was swiftly and brutally repressed. Colonial troops killed thousands of Africans, imprisoned and flogged thousands more, and the entire affair led to a series of laws that provided a foundation for apartheid. Why, Mahoney asks, were Africans initially willing to fight for the British, but within a generation had switched their allegiance to the very Zulu identity they had gone to war against. To answer this, Mahoney argues that the Zulu kingdom failed to integrate the many peoples it conquered during its birth in the early 1800s under Shaka, their first monarch. This was in part because the Zulu ruling class arrogated to itself many of the traditional powers long held by local headmen and chiefs. Worse, the Zulu state exacerbated natural divisions by employing excessive violence in the face of resistance to their actions. When the British established a colony in 1834 across the Tugela River in the neighbouring land of Natal, many African peoples took advantage of the opportunity and fled Zulu control. One of these was the Qwabe chiefdom, which settled just across the Tugela within sight and under constant threat from the Zulu state, and it is to their transformation that Mahoney pays particular attention. The book is at its strongest when Mahoney focuses on the Qwabe, something he does to varying degrees in every chapter. Tradition has it that the Qwabe and Zulu chiefdoms were born when two brothers feuded over their inheritance. Both emerged as independent chiefdoms reliant upon a long tradition of patriarchal lineages loosely bound together under the leadership of individual chiefs. …

The other Zulus: the spread of Zulu ethnicity in colonial South Africa

In 1879, the British colony of Natal invaded the neighboring Zulu kingdom. Large numbers of Natal Africans fought with the British against the Zulus, enabling the British to claim victory and, ultimately, to annex the Zulu kingdom. Less than thirty years later, in 1906, many of those same Natal Africans, and their descendants, rebelled against the British in the name of the Zulu king. In The Other Zulus , a thorough history of Zulu ethnicity during the colonial period, Michael R. Mahoney shows that the lower classes of Natal, rather than its elites, initiated the transformation in ethnic self-identification, and they did so for multiple reasons. The resentment that Natal Africans felt toward the Zulu king diminished as his power was curtailed by the British. The most negative consequences of colonialism may have taken several decades to affect the daily lives of most Africans. Natal Africans are likely to have experienced the oppression of British rule more immediately and intensely in 1906 than they had in 1879. Meanwhile, labor migration to the gold mines of Johannesburg politicized the young men of Natal. Mahoney's fine-grained local history shows that these young migrants constructed and claimed a new Zulu identity, both to challenge the patriarchal authority of African chiefs and to fight colonial rule.

Wiki at war: conflict in a socially networked world

Wiki at War: Conflict in a Socially Networked World By James Jay Carafano [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Dr. Carafano constructs a compelling narrative examining the implications of socially connected populations in the context of conflict and warfare. The author's general thesis is that engaging in the war online is not optional. The book begins an investigation of the history of social networking. The author takes the reader on an interesting course starting with the importance of as technology. Language provides the medium to build relationships, culture, knowledge, and as a tool to share judgments. He effectively uses vignettes to demonstrate how the legacy of tribal language formed the basis of early social networks throughout history. The intriguing stories of how language played a key role in conflict and warfare, beginning with the Mongol Empire and Genghis Khan and the great hunt or the nerge, the Iroquois League during the American Revolution, and the early-nineteenth-century Zulu kingdom in southern Africa, set the tone for the power of social networking. The journey continues to describe the power of myth and storytelling to transfer knowledge within and across social networks. The evolution of sharing information by messenger systems dating back four thousand years to the optic telegraph in the Napoleonic wars through today's digital systems revolutionized how humans communicated in peace and in war. The historical portion of the book does an excellent job establishing the importance of the message, language, and story enabled by the technology to enhance the concept of social networking. The author moves to contemporary history with a chapter describing the birth of the computer age and Web 2.0. The invention of the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENAC) by Professor John Mauchly (1942-45) was a watershed moment for the potential of social networking as well as communication in warfare. Dr. Carafano argues that the invention of the computer sets the stage for creating many kinds of machines enabling communication. Think about today's smart phones, digital music players, personal computers, and tablets. The ENAC was a key enabler to enhance the ability of humans to communicate in the context of social networking. The next piece of the puzzle was to create architecture for computers to communicate. Carafano spends time discussing the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency invention creating a communication system linking computers to share data over long distances (ARPRANET). The development of ARPRANET is a fascinating story of technological innovation that ultimately evolved into the World Wide Web. Most of us probably know the general facts surrounding the birth of the computer and the World Wide Web. This section provides a much deeper comprehension of the people and technology leading to the advanced social networking tool available today. The remaining chapters in the book travel through the implications of social networking today. The author points out that social networking and connected populations present significant challenges to senior policymakers, military leaders, and planners. The nature of the adversary online is extremely diverse. Dr. Carafano provides a useful framework to consider several varieties of adversaries. …

THE DESTRUCTION OF THE ZULU KINGDOM: THE CIVIL WAR IN ZULULAND 1879-1884

The Destruction of the Zulu Kingdom: The civil war in Zululand 1879-1884, was originally submitted as a Ph.D dissertation in History at the University of London in 1975.Professor Jeff Guy, a well known historian on Zulu history and the present head of the History Department at the University of Natal, Durban branch has divided his work into three main parts. In the first part, entitled the "Invasion" he details the foundations of the Zulu Kingdom, the political structure of the Kingdom during the reign of Cetshwayo kaMpande, the invasion of the Zulu Kingdom by the British army supported by colonial forces, and the Anglo-Zulu war which ended up with the capture of Cetshwayo, the last king of the independent Zulu Kingdom established by Shaka.

Racialised Masculinity and the Limits of Settlement: John Dunn and Natal, 1879–1883

Southeast Africa in the latter half of the nineteenth century witnessed the entrenchment of a settler colonial polity in Natal as well as the invasion and later annexation of the Zulu Kingdom by British forces. British settlers sought to make good their claims to control the land and labour of the region, particularly following the defeat of the Zulu military in 1879. Yet, these claims were frequently negotiated between erstwhile colonists and colonised peoples; such assertions of power took place in an atmosphere of constant negotiation, as evidenced in the life and career of Natal settler and ostensible Zulu chieftain John Dunn.

Ndukwana kaMbengwana as an Interlocutor on the History of the Zulu Kingdom, 1897–1903

In the six years from October 1897 to October 1903, Ndukwana kaMbengwana engaged in scores of conversations in numerous different locations with magistrate James Stuart about the history and culture of the nineteenth-century Zulu kingdom. In the 1880s Ndukwana had been a lowranking official in the native administration of Zululand; at an unknown date before late 1900 he seems to have become Stuart's personalindunaor “headman,” to give a common English translation. Stuart's handwritten notes of these conversations, as archived in the James Stuart Collection, come to a total of 65,000 to 70,000 words. As rendered in volume 4 of theJames Stuart Archive, published in 1986, these notes fill 120 printed pages, far more than the testimonies of any other of Stuart's interlocutors except Socwatsha kaPhaphu. From 1900, Ndukwana was also present during many of Stuart's conversations with other individuals.In the editors' preface to volume 4 of theJames Stuart Archive, after drawing attention to the length of Ndukwana's testimony, Colin Webb and I wrote as follows:Since these were the early years of Stuart's collecting career, it is probable that Ndukwana exercised a considerable influence on the presuppositions about Zulu society and history which Stuart took with him into his interviews. No less likely, however, is the reverse possibility that Ndukwana in turn became a repository of much of the testimony he heard while working with Stuart, and that, increasingly over the years, the information which he supplied would have been a fusion of data and traditions from a variety of sources.

Healing Traditions: African Medicine, Cultural Exchange, and Competition in South Africa, 1820-1948 (review)

Reviewed by: Healing Traditions: African Medicine, Cultural Exchange, and Competition in South Africa, 1820-1948 Jonathan Roberts (bio) Healing Traditions: African Medicine, Cultural Exchange, and Competition in South Africa, 1820-1948. By Karen E. Flint. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007. Pp. xiv+274. $55/26.95. Karen Flint's Healing Traditions is an intriguing story of the customs and practices of healing at the cultural crossroads of South Africa. The product of several years of primary research, the book is based on voluminous archival data, supplemented by oral testimonies from healers. Flint knows her topic intimately, having cultivated relationships with informants from both the rural areas of KwaZulu-Natal and the urban medicine shops of Durban. The book is divided chronologically into two parts, the first covering the Zulu Kingdom during the nineteenth century. Flint demonstrates how diverse healing ideas of the izAngoma (diviners) and iziNyanga (herbalists) from around Natal were amalgamated under Zulu rule, and how royal medicines (muthi) were deployed as a means of challenging rivals to the throne. This was a period when Zulu medical thought dominated southern Africa, and when white settlers were beholden to the interests of indigenous [End Page 533] healers and priests. The Zulu polity, from Flint's perspective, was overtly medicalized, a place where healing power intertwined with royal authority. The second part of Healing Traditions opens in 1876, with a tea party at the farmhouse of Lady Barker, a British settler in Natal. To entertain her guests, Barker invited a group of healers to dance, perform rituals, and divine the whereabouts of the missing pipe stem of one of her white guests. This is a snapshot of a time when whites regarded Zulu medicine with an exoticized respect, a status that rapidly diminished as African healers were vilified by white doctors. At the turn of the century, the British colonial government passed a series of laws restricting witchfinding and outlawing practices of spirit possession (which subsequently went underground, maintained largely by women). In the independent Union of South Africa, only registered native herbalists were permitted to practice medicine. But as Flint carefully notes, the narrative of state medical hegemony belies the healing syncretism that developed during this period. By the early twentieth century, the medical landscape of Natal was crowded with African, Western, Ayarvedic, and Islamic healing ideas. This was a period of leakage between cultural boundaries, a time when whites sought out African herbal remedies, Indians hired African diviners to cure spiritual illnesses, and Africans used Indian medicines to guard against witchcraft. From this polycultural setting emerged a number of prominent Indian and African healers, whose biographies form a key part of Flint's book. Highlighted is the life of Mafavuke Ngcobo, a wealthy herbalist in Durban who owned five muthi shops and operated a lucrative mail-order medicine business. Ngcobo ran afoul of the white medical authorities who patrolled medical traditions in Natal when he advertised himself as a "doctor." For blurring the boundaries between Western and African medicine, Ngcobo was fined £25. In protest, Ngcobo and other vendors formed the Natal Native Medical Association to define their right to practice, but, as Flint notes, the African-ness of the organization served to increase distinctions between black and white medicines. This is one example of the way Flint historicizes the promiscuous concept of the "traditional," exposing it as a discursive tool of racial ideology. The closing chapter of the book addresses some contemporary issues, including the licensing of traditional healers by the African National Congress and the story of bioprospecting for hoodia gordonii (an appetite sup-pressant) in the Kalahari Desert. These issues are somewhat tangential to the specific history of medicines in Natal. An incident that is mentioned but begs further coverage is the establishment of "Freedom Hospital" in Durban in 1996, a center for divination and herbalism founded by isangoma Queen Ntuli. Intriguingly, the clinic closed down after two years because, in Ntuli's paradoxical words, its services were "too new" (p. 196). It would be interesting to know whether Durban is becoming more or less medically hybrid in post-apartheid South Africa. [End Page 534] Flint might also have provided a more precise chronology of the...

Living in the Making of History! Two Victorian Female Travellers’ Representations of the 1879 Anglo-Zulu War

At the beginning of the twentieth century a quarter of the Earth’s surface was under British rule. Set in exotic places and recounting terrifying adventures with strange peoples, travel books enjoyed great popularity in the Victorian era and contributed to the culture of the imperial years. In 1877 the Zulu kingdom remained a major obstacle to Lord Carnarvon’s scheme to federate Natal and the Cape Colony with the Boer Republics. Two years later it was invaded and eventually annexed to Natal in 1887. In the late 1870s and early 1880s two courageous women travelled to South Africa: Mrs Louisa Hutchinson, married to an army officer, who wrote In Tents in the Transvaal (1879) and Lady Florence Douglas Dixie—the first female war correspondent—who published In The Land of Misfortune (1882). Admittedly, Hutchinson’s and Dixie’s journeys were an expression of protest and power. If the Zulus were being erased from history, their narratives, recording their experiences on the controversial terrain in South Africa, tried to prevent them from being erased by history. Evolving around the notion of threat that is at the heart of war, the unjustifiable nature of the conflict is ingeniously conveyed in its displacement and complexification.

The Transvaal Rebellion: The First Boer War, 1880-1881 (review)

Reviewed by Fransjohan Pretorius University of Pretoria Pretoria, South Africa The Transvaal Rebellion: The First Boer War, 1880–1881. By John Laband. London: Pearson Education, 2005. ISBN 0-582-77261-3. Maps. Illustrations. Notes and references. Select bibliography. Index. Pp. xii, 264. £19.99. Students of military history are well aware of the Boer War, a.k.a. the Anglo-Boer War, a.k.a. the South African War of 1899–1902. When a First Boer War of 1880–1881 is mentioned, there is some confusion. John Laband's book on the latter war has now been published to enlighten the confused. Laband, who specializes in war and society studies, is Professor of History at Wilfrid Laurier University, Ontario, Canada. He was previously Professor of History at the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. He is ideally suited to have written this book. Runner-up in competition for the coveted Sunday Times Alan Paton Award, he has published extensively on the history of the Zulu kingdom, particularly the wars of the 1870s and 1880s and knows intimately the terrain and the primary sources of this period in South African history. What is more, he reads Afrikaans and Dutch. This is what was so sorely lacking in the last attempt in English to cover this war—J. H. Lehmann's The First Boer War (London, 1972). Indeed, Laband's research is wide-ranging, thorough, and impressive. All the important British archival and secondary sources are there. The same can be said of the South African English sources, including Bridget Theron-Bushell's recent (2002) unpublished thesis at the University of South Africa on Owen Lanyon's office in South Africa, 1875–1881. Laband also made good use of the archival sources on the Boer side, and the most important Afrikaans secondary source on the military events of the war, viz. J. E. H. Grobler's unpublished thesis of 1981 at the University of Pretoria. However, there are two omissions. Although Laband consulted M. C. van Zyl's short article on the Afrikaner protests before the war, he does not refer to Van Zyl's magnum opus on this topic, entitled Die Protesbeweging van die Transvaalse Afrikaners 1877–1880 (Pretoria, 1979). Also absent is J. H. Breytenbach and J. Ploeger's Majuba Gedenkboek (Roodepoort, 1980). In 240 pages spanning eleven chapters the reader is treated to great craftsmanship in a book that strikes a wonderful balance between military and social issues. This is another new dimension to the topic, and it has been expertly done. In fact, while description and analysis of military operations are obviously integral to this study, Laband has not lost sight of the complexity of the interaction between purely military concerns and the social, ideological, economic and political issues which combined to drive forward the Transvaal crisis, to shape how it was played out in armed confrontation, and to determine its closure. [End Page 235] The stage is set with a lucid analysis of the clash of military cultures, followed by great chapters on the situation in the Transvaal before the outbreak of the war, the Boer and British military systems, the military events of the war and their interaction with social factors, peace, and the significance of the war as a preamble to the Boer War of 1899–1902. In a very balanced way, Laband also recognizes the position of Africans, what their response to the rebellion was, and how they were appalled at the retrocession—when the British government handed back the Transvaal to the Boers. In a word-thrifty book, containing clear arguments, excellent analyses, and admirable objectivity and balance, John Laband has presented us with a marvelous account worth reading and worth buying, to illustrate to all students of the discipline how history on war and society should be written.

Climate and Society

Climate, in particular rainfall, is one of the main determinants of ecological productivity, which in turn is the basis of agricultural economies. However, the distribution of rain varies enormously, not only in space, but also in time. For example, in the Sahara huge lakes have come and gone as global climate changed in the last 10,000 years (Gasse, 2000), southern Africa has experienced extended periods of both warm wet and cold dry weather over the last 1000 years (Holmgren et al., 2003) and eastern Africa has suffered severe droughts within the last few hundred years (Gillson, 2006). This variation would be expected to have a major influence on human societies (Weiss & Bradley, 2001). Indeed, drying of the Sahara from about 5300 years ago can be related to development of pharaonic civilisation on the Nile and spread of pastoralism (Kuper & Krpelin, 2006). In southern Africa, sudden collapse of the city of Mapungubwe in 1290 AD and subsequent rise of Great Zimbabwe can be linked to first drought and then wetter conditions (Holmgren & Oberg, 2006). Whilst, in eastern Africa the disastrous Emutai period for the Maasai from 1883 to 1902, when cattle disease, small pox and famine devastated the population, was associated with drought (Gillson, 2006). However, we still have much to learn about African climate fluctuations and their socio-economic effects. Firstly, just when we thought we could relate climate change in Africa to fluctuations in sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean, the so-called El Nino Southern Oscillation (Cane, Eshel & Buckland, 1994), a remarkable discovery has revealed a previously unknown climate driver, the Indian Ocean Dipole (Marchant et al., in press) which helps to explain observed divergence between ENSO activity and east African climate (Latif et al., 1999). Secondly, the relationship between society and climate is complex and unpredictable. For example the Mahlatule droughts in southern Africa in the early 19 century coincided with war, famine and dislocation amongst the Nguni peoples (p. 257 Newitt, 1995). This political instability was probably due not only to drought, but also increasing population and reliance on water-demanding maize (Holmgren & Oberg, 2006). The contrasting simultaneous rise of the Zulu Kingdom has been associated with changing environmental conditions leading to reorganisation and consolidation of control (Guy, 1980). Even more complicated, and in keeping with the principle of unintended consequences, drought-induced northward migration of the Nguni at this time into the Southern Highlands of Tanzania led to military development of the Hehe people as they coped with the incoming warlike Nguni (p. 56 Iliffe, 1979). This meant that when German colonisers arrived in Iringa at the end of the 19 century they encountered an efficient Hehe fighting force, which inflicted a famous defeat at Lugalo (p. 109 Iliffe, 1979) and which was subsequently avenged by strict German military rule. The upshot of this was massive socio-economic disruption resulting in vast tracts of unpopulated forested land which were later gazetted as forest reserves in the 1950s and as the Udzungwa National Park in 1992 (Lovett, 2003). Another interesting Tanzanian tale of the interplay between climate and politics is the strange case of the Ground Nut Scheme in the 1940s. The then British administered Tanganyika government implemented a massive public-works scheme devoted to cultivating ground nuts in a huge area of arid bush at Kongwa. The scheme was forced to end because of a drought in 1949, but not before £35,870,000 had been spent, equivalent to the total expenditure of the Tanganyika Government in the four years between 1946 and 1950 (p. 441, Iliffe, 1979). Speaking later, the Governor at the time, Sir Edward Twining, put a positive spin on the debacle: ‘‘Among the assets that the Ground Nut Scheme has left us was a great deal of knowledge of how to farm in dry areas and research work which has been of considerable value.’’ (p. 18, Twining, 1959) Correspondence: Jon C. Lovett, Centre for Ecology, Law and Policy, Environment Department, University of York, York, YO10 5DD England. E-mail: JL15@york.ac.uk

Beyond the “Zulu Aftermath”: Migrations, Identities, Histories

The notion of the “mfecane” was one that existed virtually unchallenged in the imaginations of large numbers of people, including virtually all academic historians of southern Africa, from the late 1960s to the late 1980s. It had three main components: first, that a chain reaction of wars and population movements had swept over much of the eastern half of southern Africa in the 1820s and 1830s; second, that the chain reaction had originally been set in motion by the supposedly explosive expansion of the Zulu kingdom under Shaka; and third, that from these upheavals had emerged a number of new, enlarged states which played a central role in the history of the subcontinent through the rest of the nineteenth century. These ideas had a history that went back to the times of Shaka himself and they had long since achieved the status of unquestioned fact, but they were not elaborated into a coherent book-length account until as recently as 1966. This was in John Omer-Cooper’s well-known The Zulu Aftermath: A Nineteenth-Century Revolution in Bantu Africa, in which, among other things, the plural “wars of Shaka” were relabelled as the singular “mfecane”, and so were rendered into the kind of named “event” that could the more easily be fitted into grand narratives by historians of South Africa. Over the next twenty years The Zulu Aftermath became a very widely influential work of reference. Its basic tenets remained virtually unchallenged until they were confronted head-on in a critique mounted by Rhodes University historian Julian Cobbing.1 The often fierce “mfecane debates” touched off by Cobbing’s intervention are well known and will not be rehearsed here: their main upshot was that the second of the three components identified above – that the upheavals of the 1820s and 1830s had been caused primarily by the expansion of the Zulu kingdom – came to be queried by many historians, including most of those working in the field of Zulu history. Critical engagement with the notion of the mfecane was facilitated by the publication (from 1976 onward) of a series of volumes containing the rich body of historical testimony relating to Zulu history collected by James Stuart in the period 1897 to 1922.3 Debate was further stimulated by the publication of path-breaking studies in the iconography of Shaka by Carolyn Hamilton and Dan Wylie.4 Most recently, Wylie has produced a massive study, based on a critical reading of the evidence in the James Stuart Archive, of what is known of the life and reign of Shaka.5 His findings provide firm support for the view that there is little by way of empirical evidence to support the stereotype that the upheavals of the 1820s and 1830s were caused primarily by the aggressions of Shaka and his armies. In its place is emerging the argument that the deep causes of the upheavals, and of the processes of “state-formation” which they set in train, needed to be looked for in the interactions, from at least the mid-eighteenth century onwards, between African communities and groups of Boer, Kora, Griqua, British and Portuguese traders, raiders and settlers from the Cape and from the subcontinent’s eastern coastlands.

Were There Large States in the Coastal Regions of Southeast Africa Before the Rise of the Zulu Kingdom?

The Zulu kingdom holds a special place in both popular culture and historical scholarship. Zulu—a famous name, easy to spell and pronounce—is as recognizably American as gangster rap. The website of the “Universal Zulu Nation” (www.hiphopcity.com/zulu_nation/) explains that as “strong believers in the culture of hiphop, we as Zulus … will strive to do our best to uplift ourselves first, then show others how to uplift themselves mentally, spiritually, physically, economically and socially.” The Zulu Nation lists chapters in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Washington, Miami, Virginia Beach, Los Angeles, Detroit, New Haven, Hartford, New Jersey, and Texas. Mardi Gras in New Orleans has featured a “Zulu Parade” since 1916. The United States Navy underscores its independence from Britain by using “Zulu time” instead of Greenwich Mean Time. Not to be outdone, the Russian Navy built “Zulu Class” submarines in the 1950s and Britain's Royal Navy built a “Tribal Class Destroyer,” HMS Zulu. The common factor linking black pride, Africa, and prowess in war is the Zulu kingdom, a southeast African state that first attained international fame in the 1820s under the conqueror Shaka, “the black Napoleon.” His genius is credited with innovations that reshaped the history of his region. “Rapidly expanding his empire, Shaka conquered all, becoming the undisputed ruler of the peoples between the Pongola and Tugela Rivers … In hand-to-hand combat the short stabbing spear introduced by Shaka, made the Zulus unbeatable.” In South Africa Shaka's fame continues to outshine all other historical figures, including Cecil Rhodes and Paul Kruger. A major theme park, “Shakaland,” commemorates his life and Zulu culture. A plan was unveiled in 1998 to erect a twenty-story high statue of the Zulu king in Durban Harbor that would surpass the ancient Colossus of Rhodes.

Non-combatants and war: Unexplored factors in the conquest of the Zulu kingdom

In 1879 British imperial and colonial forces invaded the Zulu kingdom and the two armies fought a number of pitched battles, amongst them Isandlwana and Rorke's drift, which have become for millions around the world emblematic representations of two fundamental aspects of imperial warfare - the superior weaponry and unflinching discipline of European troops confronting superior numbers and reckless African savagery. Ever since the 1879 invasion a voracious and uncritical reading public has consumed a vast accumulation of accounts of courageous redcoats meeting the massed Zulu charge with ranked volley-firing. Even attempts at serious analysis have failed, to my mind, to break with the imperial narrative largely because the authors are so mesmerised by the idea of men killing men that they fail to contextualise the conflict effectively. And, more recently, the imperial nostalgia which underlies conventional, histories of the invasion has seeped into the world of heritage and tourism with the result that colonial dispossession through warfare is presented as a heroic clash between the noble representatives of different military traditions, savage and civilised , which obscures with a sentimental veneer not just the brutality and injustice of the 1879 war but the fact that the invasion is a key to an understanding of contemporary misery and poverty in rural KwaZulu-Natal.