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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.