Www.WorldHistory.Biz
Login *:
Password *:
     Register

 

4-06-2015, 10:31

Mfecane

Mfecane is a term widely used by historians from the late 1960s to the late 1980s to refer to a series of wars and population movements that took place over much of southern Africa from the 1810s to the 1830s. Before the 1960s, these upheavals had been known unproblematically in the relevant literature as “Shaka’s wars” or “the Zulu wars,” the implication being that they had originated under the explosive expansion of the Zulu kingdom during Shaka’s reign. From the late 1980s, a small but growing number of historians began to challenge this notion. It was, they argued, primarily a product of colonial historiography, and, in the light of more recent research, could be seen as outdated and misleading. Far from being the cause of the upheavals, the expansion of Shaka’s Zulu kingdom was in fact a product of them. The causes needed to be sought elsewhere.

When they were first aired in public, these revisionist views caused considerable controversy. By the later 1990s, however, as revisionist arguments became more nuanced, as well as more familiar, numbers of previously resistant historians were coming to accept that the long-established Zulu-centric explanations of the upheavals of the early nineteenth century needed to be comprehensively rethought. From being an unquestioned “fact” of history, the notion of the mfecane came to be seen as a particular interpretation of history which had outlived its usefulness.

The roots of the notion of “the wars of Shaka” go back to the izibongo, or praises, which were composed about the Zulu king by his official praise-singers during his lifetime. Versions of his praises recorded in writing in later times portray him, in terms that we can now see as highly exaggerated, as having been a great warrior and conqueror of other chiefs. After his assassination in 1828, such ideas fed into the overblown images of Shaka that were developed in books produced for European readerships by writers like Nathaniel Isaacs (Travels and Adventures in Eastern Africa, 2 vols., 1836). From the 1840s, fanciful descriptions of the might and despotism of Shaka spread widely in colonial travel writings and histories.

In the earlier literature with its strongly localized focus, Shaka’s influence was not generally portrayed as having extended much beyond what is now the KwaZulu-Natal region. It was not until the 1880s that Shaka began to be cast more systematically as the originator of a chain reaction of violence and bloodshed that had spread through African societies across much of southern Africa. The main figure in the development of this idea, as in the development of so many other colonial stereotypes of South African history, was the well-known Cape historian George Theal.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, the notion of “Shaka’s wars” was further elaborated by influential historians like D. F. Ellenberger (A History of the Basuto, Ancient and Modern, 1912), and Alfred Bryant (Olden Times in Zululand and Natal, 1929). From very different perspectives, black writers like Magema Fuze (Abantu Abamnyama Lapa Bavela Ngakona [The Black People and Whence They Came], 1922) and Rolfes Dhlomo (Ushaka, 1936) were also instrumental in purveying the notion of Shaka as a great conqueror. In the 1950s and 1960s, E. A. Ritter (Shaka Zulu, 1953) and Donald Morris (The Washing of the Spears, 1965) took advantage of an expanding Western interest in African history to produce best sellers that popularized ideas about Shaka as the founder of a mighty warrior nation.

An important shift in the packaging of this notion, though not in its basic assumptions, took place in the academic histories of Africa that began appearing in the 1960s. This was the period of decolonization, when new African nations were being formed and new views of Africa’s past were being developed. In keeping with these ideas, historians in Western Europe, North America, and the newly independent countries of Africa were recasting Shaka as a “nation-builder,” and the rise of the Zulu kingdom as the factor that had set in motion a process of nation-building among the early nineteenth-century black societies of southern Africa. The most influential work in this genre was John Omer-Cooper’s The Zulu Aftermath: A Nineteenth-Century Revolution in Bantu Africa (1966), which was primarily responsible for introducing the term mfecane into the literature in place of “Shaka’s wars.” The word, which was derived from the Xhosa word imfecane, meaning something like “landless raiders,” quickly became a widely accepted label for the upheavals of the 1820s and 1830s. Its meaning was also extended to cover a series of supposedly causative events stretching back into the later eighteenth century. By the early 1970s, inside and outside South Africa, the notion of the mfecane (or difaqane, in its seSotho form) was firmly entrenched in academic and popular histories and was making its way into school textbooks.

The consensus about the historical reality of the mfecane as a series of upheavals caused by the expansion

Mfecane.” Canadian Journal of African Studies. 23, no. 2 (1989): 272-291.

Wylie, D. “A Dangerous Admiration: E. A. Ritter’s Shaka Zulu.” South African Historical Journal. 28 (1993): 98-118.

-. “Shaka and the Modern Zulu State.” History Today. 44,

No. 5 (1994): 8-11.

. “Textual Incest: Nathaniel Isaacs and the Development


Of the Zulu kingdom was contested in 1988 by Rhodes University historian Julian Cobbing. In an article published in the Journal of African History, he forcefully argued that the upheavals of the early nineteenth century had been set in motion not by the expansion of the Zulu kingdom but by the expansion of the frontiers of European commerce and colonial settlement. The main destabilizing impact had come from slave-raiding and trading carried out by Dutch/Afrikaner and Griqua freebooters from the Cape frontier in the south and by Portuguese traders and their African allies from the Delagoa Bay region in the east. The convergence of waves of violence set in motion from these two epicenters had touched off chain reactions of conflicts among African societies on an unprecedented scale. The notion that it was Shaka and the Zulu who were to blame, Cobbing claimed, was an “alibi” made up by white colonial writers from the 1820s and 1830s onward to obscure the role played by white settlers and traders in establishing a traffic in slaves. The whole concept of the mfecane was too closely linked to simplistic Zulu-centric explanations to be salvageable: better, in his view, for historians to jettison not just the name but the very notion, and to reexamine the period afresh.

Cobbing’s provocative arguments brought an immediate reaction from numbers of other historians. Critics asserted that he had greatly exaggerated the extent of the slave trade in southern Africa, that he had seriously distorted the available evidence to make his points, and that his arguments about the historiography of “Shaka’s wars” were reductionist and simplistic. Sympathizers, on the other hand, found merit in Cobbing’s thesis that the causes of the upheavals needed to be looked for primarily in the effects of colonial expansionism, though few were prepared to uncritically accept his arguments that the main cause had been an increase in European slave-raiding and trading.

The debates sparked off by Cobbing’s intervention continue today. The main issue is not, as some commentators have thought, whether the upheavals of the early nineteenth century took place or not: it is about the nature of their causes, and the extent to which they can or cannot be seen as constituting a single historical event. Few, if any, historians would now defend the old idea that the upheavals were caused by the expansion of the Shaka’s Zulu kingdom. Many, however, still want to hold on to the term mfecane as a useful label for them, whatever their causes. Others argue that to attach a single and misleading label to a long series of complex and widespread historical processes is an obstacle to understanding their causes, and that not simply the term but the general concept of the mfecane should be abandoned altogether.

John Wright

See also: Boer Expansion: Interior of South Africa;

Difaqane on the Highveld; Natal, Nineteenth

Century; Shaka and the Zulu Kingdom, 1810-1840.

Further Reading

Cobbing, J. “The Mfecane as Alibi: Thoughts on Dithakong and Mbolompo.” Journal of African History. 29, no. 3 (1988): 487-519.

Hamilton, C. (ed.). The Mfecane Aftermath: Reconstructive Debates in Southern African History. Johannesburg: Witwa-tersrand University Press, and Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1995.

Wright, J. “A. T. Bryant and ‘the Wars of Shaka.’” History in Africa. 18 (1991): 409-425.

-. “Mfecane Debates.” Southern African Review of Books,

(September/October and November/December 1995): 18-19.

. “Political Mythology and the Making of Natal’s of the Shaka Myth.” History in Africa. 19 (1992): 411-433.



 

html-Link
BB-Link