Oral Evidence in a Pseudo-Ethnicity: The Fingo Debate

1995 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 359-368 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy J. Stapleton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South African ◽  
Southern Africa ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
African History ◽  
Cover Story ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Illegal Activities ◽  
Oral Evidence

There is a disturbing trend emerging in South African history. Unquestioning acceptance of African oral tradition threatens to become a requirement of politically correct scholarship. The African voice knows all. Julian Cobbing has been sharply criticized for ignoring oral evidence in his revision of early nineteenth-century South African history. Cobbing claims that African migration and state formation in the 1820s was caused by the illegal activities of colonial slave raiders who covered up their operations by claiming that the Zulu kingdom under Shaka had laid waste to the interior of southern Africa. This cover story was incorporated into South African history as the mfecane (or crushing) and served to justify white supremacy by portraying blacks as inherently violent. Carolyn Hamilton attacks Cobbing for ignoring the African voice which allegedly supports the orthodox mfecane by placing Shaka at the center of events. In response, Cobbing claims that the largest record of Zulu oral evidence was distorted by James Stuart, the colonial official who collected it at the turn of the last century. Although Elizabeth Eldredge rejects the Zulucentric mfecane in favor of a broad compromise theory based on environmental and trade factors plus the activities of a few Griqua labor-raiders on the High veld, she accused Cobbing of developing a Eurocentric hypothesis which robs Africans of initiative within their own history. More critically, Jeffrey Peires, whose work on the Xhosa is deeply rooted in the conventional mfecane, describes Cobbing as “a reactionary wolf dressed up in the clothing of a progressive sheep” and implies that his ideas are nothing short of racist.

The Politics of Chiefs and Commoners before the 1830s

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raevin Jimenez
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South African ◽  
State Level ◽  
Temporal Context ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
African History ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Level Analysis

The field of pre-1830 South African history has been subject to periodic interrogations into conventional narratives, sources, and methods. The so-called mfecane debates of the 1980s and 1990s marked a radical departure from characterizations of warfare in the interior, generally regarded in earlier decades as stemming solely or mostly from the Zulu king Shaka. Efforts to reframe violence led to more thorough considerations of political elites and statecraft from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century but also contributed to new approaches to ethnicity, dependency, and to some extent gender. A new wave of historiographical critique in the 2010s shows the work of revision to be ongoing. The article considers the debates around the wars of the late precolonial period, including unresolved strands of inquiry, and argues for a move away from state-level analysis toward social histories of women and non-elites. Though it focuses on the 1760s through the 1830s, the article also presents examples highlighting the importance of recovering deeper temporal context for the South African interior.

THE NORTHEASTERN FACTOR IN SOUTH AFRICAN HISTORY: REEVALUATING THE VOLUME OF THE SLAVE TRADE OUT OF DELAGOA BAY AND ITS IMPACT ON ITS HINTERLAND IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY

2020 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
LINELL CHEWINS ◽  
PETER DELIUS
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South African ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
African History ◽  
Trading System ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Trading Systems ◽  
Mascarene Islands

AbstractThis article, largely on the basis of in-depth research in archives in Lisbon, provides an account of the trading systems linking Delagoa Bay to its southern hinterland. Within this framework we argue that the role of the slave trade has been previously underestimated. There is evidence that the booming demand for slaves in Brazil and on the Mascarene Islands hit this region with force. The scale of that trade is difficult to establish because it was, by and large, illicit and so not systematically recorded. There are indications of a significant trade prior to 1823 and a substantial one after that date. There is also evidence that northern Nguni groups, including the Zulu kingdom, were deeply involved in this trading system. The main sources of captives, however, were militarily weak societies, like the Tembe, which lived closer to the Bay.

Bibles and Beads: Missionaries as Traders in Southern Africa in the Early Nineteenth Century

1989 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-225 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger B. Beck
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South African ◽  
Southern Africa ◽  
The South ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Commercial Activities ◽  
Material Goods ◽  
Metal Tools ◽  
London Missionary Society

Trade across the Cape frontier in the first three decades of the nineteenth century, and government attempts to regulate that trade, cannot be understood without first considering the role of Protestant missionaries as traders and bearers of European manufactured goods in the South African interior. From their arrival in 1799, missionaries of the London Missionary Society carried on a daily trade beyond the northern and eastern boundaries of the Cape Colony that was forbidden by law to the colonists. When missionaries of the Methodist Missionary Society arrived in the mid-1810s they too carried beads as well as Bibles to their mission stations outside the colony. Most missionaries were initially troubled by having to mix commercial activities with their religious duties. They were forced, however, to rely on trade in order to support themselves and their families because of the meagre material and monetary assistance they received from their societies. They introduced European goods among African societies beyond the Cape frontiers earlier and in greater quantities than any other enterprise until the commencement of the Fort Willshire fairs in 1824. Most importantly, they helped to bring about a transition from trade in beads, buttons and other traditional exchange items to a desire among many of the peoples with whom they came into contact for blankets, European clothing and metal tools and utensils, thus creating a growing dependency on European material goods that would eventually bring about a total transformation of these African societies.

Textual Incest: Nathaniel Isaacs and the Development of the Shaka Myth

1992 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 411-433 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan Wylie
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South African ◽  
Southern Africa ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Harold Bloom ◽  
The Past ◽  
Anxiety Of Influence ◽  
Storm Center ◽  
Verbal Construction ◽  
The University

Literary practitioners have long been, often uncomfortably, aware of the ambivalently fruitful and constraining rhetorical influences of the past. Writers successively utilize or rebel against traditional tropes, poetic conventions, and narrative norms, balancing cultural depth against individualist innovation, acceptability against rejection, public intelligibility against the opacity of private connotation. By such gestures towards the traditions, literature challenges, upholds, or leaves unquestioned the moral, political, and cultural pre-suppositions of its day.South African historiography is less aware than it might be of its textuality, in this sense, of its immersion in a similar “anxiety of influence,” as Harold Bloom has termed it. Little attention has been paid to its rhetorical lineaments and heritage or to the ways historians have read, used, and departed from one another. This is dramatically illustrated by the case of the historiography of Shaka Zulu (assassinated in 1828). Nowhere else has such poverty of evidence and research spawned such a massively unquestioned, long-lived, and monolithic “history.” Only in the last decade has the legendary, verbal construction of the Shaka figure been seriously questioned; only in 1991, at an important colloquium at the University of the Witwatersrand, was something approaching an academic consensus reached that themfecane—the notion of Shaka's Zulus as the “storm-center” of a sub-continental explosion of autophagous, black-on-black violence—was no longer a credible vehicle for understanding the early nineteenth century in southern Africa.

THE GREAT DEBATE AND THE ORIGINS OF SOUTH AFRICAN HISTORIOGRAPHY

1997 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-281 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANDREW BANK
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South African ◽  
African History ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Great Debate ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Late Nineteenth

The fundamental preoccupation with race in later historical writing in South Africa has its origins in the Great Debate between liberals and their enemies in the early nineteenth century. Standard overviews of South African historiography date the emergence of racially structured histories to the second half of the nineteenth century. For Saunders, the making of the South African past and its thematic ordering in terms of race only began in the 1870s ‘when the first major historian [G. M. Theal] began to write his history’. Prior to Theal's monumental efforts, ‘only a few amateur historians had turned their hands to the writing of the history of particular areas or topics’. Likewise, in Smith's analysis, also published in 1988, the construction of South African history in terms of race is seen almost exclusively as the product of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In a very brief introductory section, Smith suggests that what little historical writing there was before the middle of the nineteenth century is scarcely to be taken seriously, and his study offers no more than a bare outline of historiographical developments before Theal and his heirs.

The Memory of Maqoma: An Assessment of Jingqi Oral Tradition in Ciskei and Transkei

1993 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 321-335 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy J. Stapleton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South African ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
African History ◽  
British Army ◽  
The Third

Dominated by a settler heritage, South African history has forgotten or degraded many Africans who had a significant impact on the region. The more recent liberal and radical schools also suffer from this tragic inheritance. Maqoma, a nineteenth century Xhosa chief who fought the expansionist Cape Colony in three frontier wars, has been a victim of similar distortion. He has been characterized as a drunken troublemaker and cattle thief who masterminded an unprovoked irruption into the colony in 1834 and eventually led his subjects into the irrational Cattle Killing catastrophe of 1856/57 in which thousands of Xhosa slaughtered their herds on the command of a teenage prophetess. Recently, the validity of this portrayal has been questioned. Alan Webster has demonstrated that, throughout the 1820s and early 1830s, Maqoma attempted to placate voracious European raiders by sending them cattle tribute. Only after the British army and Boer commandos had forced his Jingqi chiefdom off its land for the third time did this ruler order retaliatory stock raids against the colony in late 1834.

Fount of Deep Culture: Legacies of theJames Stuart Archivein South African Historiography

2003 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 87-106
Author(s):  
Benedict Carton
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
South African ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
Southern Africa ◽  
African History ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Interpretation ◽  
The Past ◽  
Deep Culture ◽  
The University

The 2001 launch of the fifth volume of theJames Stuart Archivereinforces this publication's reputation as a mother lode of primary evidence. TheArchive'sexistence is largely due to the efforts of two editors, Colin De B. Webb and John Wright, who transformed a tangle of notes into lucid text. They deciphered the interviews that Natal colonist James Stuart conducted with a range of informants, many of them elderly isiZulu-speaking men. Transcribed by Stuart between the 1890s and 1920s, these discussions often explored in vivid detail the customs, lore, and lineages of southern Africa. Although references to theArchiveabound in revisionist histories of southern Africa, few scholars have assessed how testimonies recorded by Stuart have critically influenced such pioneering research. Fewer still have incorporated the compelling views of early twentieth-century cultural change that Stuart's informants bring to a post-apartheid understanding of South Africa's past.Well before the University of Natal Press published volume 5, the evidence presented in theArchivehad already led scholars of South African history into fertile, unmarked terrain. One example of groundbreaking data can be found in the statements of volume 4's master interpreter of Zulu power, Ndukwana kaMbengwana. His observations of the past anchor recent studies that debunk myths surrounding the early-nineteenth-century expansion of Shaka's kingdom. Ever timely, the endnotes in volume 5 discuss these reappraisals of historical interpretation and methodology. Editor John Wright elaborates in his preface: “By the time we picked up work on volume 5, we were starting to take note … that oral histories should be seen less as stories containing a more or less fixed ‘core’ of facts than as fluid narratives whose content could vary widely.”

Strategic and Socio-Economic Explanations for Carnarvon's South African Confederation Policy: the Historiography and the Evidence

1986 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 13-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
R.L. Cope
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South African ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
African History ◽  
Forward Movement ◽  
Standard Work ◽  
Cape Peninsula ◽  
Black Resistance ◽  
History Of

Although Carnarvon's attempt to unite South Africa in the 1870s was a failure, the forward movement represented by his “confederation policy” marks an important turning point in South African history. The destruction of the Zulu and the Pedi polities, which resulted directly from the confederation scheme, together with the last Cape frontier war and a rash of smaller conflicts, constituted the virtual end of organized black resistance in the nineteenth century and the beginning of untrammelled white supremacy. Britain's annexation of the Transvaal in 1877, which Carnarvon had hoped would be the decisive move towards confederation, instead set the scene for the conflict between Boer and Briton which dominated the history of the last two decades of the nineteenth century in South Africa.Carnarvon's confederation scheme had important effects, but there is little agreement on its causes. The author of the standard work on the subject, Clement Goodfellow, took the view that Carnarvon's interest in South Africa arose essentially from its strategic importance within the empire as a whole. The Cape lay athwart the vital sea-route to Britain's eastern possessions, and confederation was designed, in Goodfellow's words, “to erect from the chaos of the subcontinent a strong, self-governing, and above all loyal Dominion behind the essential bastion at Simon's Bay.” This view, or some variant of it, sometimes with “Simonstown” or “Cape Town” or “the naval bases” or “the Cape peninsula” substituted for “Simon's Bay,” has been widely accepted and now appears as a matter of fact in the most recent and widely used general accounts of South African history.

An Eighteenth-Century Case of Plagiarism: William Smith's A New Voyage to Guinea

1979 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 45-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
H.M. Feinberg
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Critical Appraisal ◽  
Extended Period ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Political Organization ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
The Political ◽  
African History ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Complete Report

In the first number of History in Africa P.E.H. Hair reiterated A.W. Lawrence's plea for a “critical appraisal” and analysis of primary sources for African history. The aim of this brief note is to appraise the originality of certain of these works. The focus will be the Gold Coast, with emphasis on the book by William Smith, A New Voyage to Guinea, first published in 1744 and reprinted (without an introduction or editorial comment) by Frank Cass in 1967.The literature about the Gold Coast during the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries is rich in accounts by visitors, residents, and compilers. Dapper, Barbot, Bosman, Atkins, and Smith all provided descriptions. Only Bosman lived on the Gold Coast for an extended period of time, and the concentration of detail in his book reflects that experience. From about the 1720s to the early nineteenth century, a hiatus in the descriptive literature exists, but then Meredith, De Marree, Bowdich, and Dupuis resume the earlier tradition, so that one cannot say that the Gold Coast has been ignored in terms of European visitors or their original descriptions of the it area.However, when we look carefully at some of these narratives, we find that not all of what is written is in fact original. For example, Barbot's account of the political organization of Elmina is an exact duplicate, in translation from the Dutch, of Dapper's description. Barbot also copied his description of the “Degrees of Blacks” from Bosman. De Marree, an early nineteenth century Dutch official on the Gold Coast, included without attribution in his narrative, a complete report by Governor General Pieter Linthorst written in 1807.

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