UNIVERSITY OF THE WITWATEBSRAND
 A F R I C A N S T U D I E S I N S T I T U T E
 African Studies Seminar Paper
 to be presented in RW
 4.00pm AUGUST 1988
 Title: Jettisoning the Mfecane (With Perestroika)*
 by: Julian Cobbing
 No. 241
JETTISONING THE HFECANE (WITH P ERESTROIKAj ?
 Julian Cobbing/August 1988
 In this paper I elaborate on the argument that 'the tnfecane1 is a
 pivotal component of a 'liberal1, settler, apartheid-skeletal form a new
 analysis. The main assertion of mfecane propaganda is that a
 'Zulu-centric' revolution produced an extensive depopulation which
 explains in historiographical sequence: the flight of peoples into the
 'liberation' of the European economy, the land division of 1913, and,
 since the 1950s, the configuration of the Bantuatans. In reply, it is
 shown that the sub-continental destabilisations and transformations
 within black societies sprang from the synchronous and converging Impact
 of European penetration at Delagoa Bay, the Cape, north of the Orange,
 and Natal. In order to disguise what had occurred the whites erased
 themselves from their own impact, and retrospectively inserted Shaka and
 other victims of the process as initiators in situations where they were
 absent. The chronology is lengthened far beyond the (in this context)
 irrelevant reign of the Zulu monarch. Particular attention is paid to
 the sequences of this extended chronology and to the cross-interactions
 between the sectors of the white advance. It is not the intention to
 minimise change internal to black societies, but rather to make a call
 for this to be researched in its proper context. The huge gaps in our
 knowledge revealed by this approach ensure that this task is a
 formidable one.
 Where we are and how we got there
 The basic propositions of mfecane propaganda are blissfully simple (a
 necessary attribute of myth: Bee Barthes). The 1980s version - a
 product of the refinements of Omer-Cooper and The Oxford History - has
 an 'explosion' amongst the northern 'Nguni' triggered by overpopulation
 which (somehow) led to the hegemony of the Zulu 'empire* of Shaka. This
 uniquely revolutionary and predatory state depopulated Natal and forced
 neighbours in flight into the interior where they ?et up 'ehock waves'
 (the semiology of mfecane literature would repay a study) over half of
 Africa. The instantly 'Zulu-ised' Ndebele depopulated the Transvaal
 before being chased (by the Zulu) into Zimbabwe. Fleeing Dlamini groups
 formed Swaziland in the eastern escarpment. Gaza and Jere refugees from
 Shaka devastated the Delagoa Bay area (or perhaps the Zulu did), the
 Jere, i.e. the Ngoni, creating a Zulu-inspired havoc as far as Lake
 Nyanza. The equally Zulu-ised Ngwane of Hatiwane marauded into the
 Caledon and 'set into motion' the Tlokwa, that is Mantatees of MaNtatisi
 who, briefly Zulu-ised herself (though only for three years) depopulated
 the Orange Free State, and - either the Tlokwa or tertiary victims in
 ? The arguments in this paper are not necessarily those of John Wright.
 It is a provisional study for discussion: if you wish to quote from It
 please obtain clearance from me at Tel (0461) 26365/22033. A
 bibliographical note will be available at the seminar.
 the chain reaction such as Sebetwane's Kololo: there is no unanimity -
 were only thrown back from an attempted invasion of the Cape Colony at
 the heroic battle of Dithakong in 1823. In the Caledon Moshoeshoe
 gathered exhausted survivors and began to form Basutoland, an island of
 security in the Zulu-inspire holocaust. The Ngwane meanwhile met
 nemesis when their next proposed victims, the Tembu, called in a British
 commando to their rescue (Hbolompo: 1828). Survivors of perhaps 720,000
 (sic) peoples fleeing Shaka through and out of Natal found only brief
 respite amongst the Gcaleka of Hintsa before succumbing to new
 persecution. This necessitated the British 'rescuing them from bondage'
 in the 'war' of 1835. TheBe Fingos, transformed by their misfortunes,
 became at once ' the Jews of Kaffirland', immediately receptive to
 labour, Christianity, profit and life as peasant farmerB. Fortunately
 this holocaust (nearly two million dead) died down as quickly (and
 mysteriously) as it began. In the 1830s the whites were able to move
 into empty areas, survey the bleached bones ' in the veld, wean the
 cannibals from their habit, and provide a rallying point for the
 survivors. These, nevertheless, remained in the peripheral areas
 (shaped rather like a horseshoe) - desert, mountains, low-veld - which
 provided the original delineation of the later Bantustans.
 To laugh or not to laugh? Students are never quite sure; but the
 lecturer's cue invariably turns them straight-faced to their notes and
 exams. It is true that heavy camouflage conceals the blood-line of this
 nonsense. Still, how astonishing that it was not questioned before the
 early 1980s? The exaggerated teleology and Afrocentricism are
 noticeable, as are the pluralistic separation off of black from white
 history (to remedy thia would Justify a year's moratorium in our hiBtory
 examinations), the whites as incidental and innocent by-stenders, and
 the over-happy coincidence of the depeopling of Natal, the Orange Free
 State and the Transvaal immediately prior to the white occupation. A
 colossal, self-induced Auseinandersetzung a split-second before the
 whites arrive; as soon as eyewitnesses appear everything is quiet! A
 few writers, notably Dora Taylor, Hosiah Jaffe and, more recently,
 Marianne Cornevin, have shown how aspects of this legitimate apartheid.
 These texts, however, have not been taken seriously by the Universities.
 {My own couraa W M unanimously axed when it was seen where my thought!
 were going.) Moreover, nobody has yet questioned the mfecane as total
 concept. Modern Ph.D. students concentrate on 'manageable', i.e.
 non-controversial issues. A law not unlike that at work at Chernobyl
 has led, in short, to disaster. A far-reaching inquest is necessary.
 The 'perfection' of our mfecane is the product of much accretion, honing
 and purifying: but the main pillars of the mythology were in place by_
 the 1830s. By then the literature was already heavily contaminated with
 fantastical descriptions and fictions composed by settler propagandists
 such as Fynn, Chase and Godlonton. (The style waB typical of the
 period, but has only been exposed by Curt in in the west African
 context.) Behind this 'proto-rafecane' lay the needs to obfuscate the
 Cape's labour procurement strategies in the years after the arrival of
 the 1820 settlers, and to depict Natal as depopulated so as to encourage
 a northern extension of colonisation. The first produced the myths of
 the Mantatee and Fetcani 'hordes'; the second the fantasy of Shaka and
 the equally 'horde-ish' Zulu. Mystifications about the 'gyrations' and
self-inflicted damage of the Hantatees swelled In ratio to the growing
 amnesia about the slave trade north of the Orange in the early 1820s.
 The subsequent switch in 1828 to a 'free' labour strategy produced the
 massacres of the Ngwane in the same year, condemnation of which was
 drowned in the hypocrisies of Godlonton and his Graham's Town Journal.
 White destabilizations south of the Tugela and almost certain
 manipulation of the Zulu succession In 1828 intensified the anti-Shaka
 campaign in the early 1830s. The unfortunate timing of a yet huger raid
 on the Gcaleka for cattle and labour in 1834-5 - a year after Britain's
 abolition of slavery - was to necessitate the even more ornate fictions
 depicting Fingos as victims of the Shaka terror. In this manner the two
 originally separate sources of the mythology were fused. Host
 incredibly of all, the Kantatee 'horde' was - also in the mid-18303 -
 elided with the harmless and inconspicuous 'MaNtatiei', the mother of
 the Tlokwas leader, Sekonyela, an elision additionally connected to a
 local Caledon valley propaganda campaign of the British-backed
 Moshoeshoe against the 'villainous' Sekonyela, his regional rival.
 In the half century before 1910 there was a tension between attempts at
 a pan-South African mythology, and the particularistic local propagandas
 of the Cape, Natal and, growingly after 1868, Basutoland, a tension
 which mimicked the pushmipullu-like political tendencies of the era.
 The Cape after 'Responsible Government' concentrated on embellishing the
 story of the Fingos (this reached an apotheosis in Whiteside's History
 of the AmaHbo in 1912) and of drawing lurid portraits of Matiwane.
 Hbolompo and 'the rescue of the Fingos' became founding battles of
 Hastings for the lack of anything more appropriate. The 1840s settlers
 in Natal took up the Zulu mythology. A crescendo of anti-Zulu
 denunciation occurred to cover the land seizures, hut taxation and
 chibaro labour systems of the 1840s and 1650s; the attack on Cetahwayo's
 kingdom in 1879; and the seizure of land within Zululand itself after
 1897. Cetshwayo was sedulously cloaked in the myth of Shaka; perhaps
 more importnatly Shaka was attributed with the armies of Cetshwayo and
 Bambata. The myths reverberated back and forth across the decades,
 producing an analytical timelessness detectable in the traditions of
 James Stuart, whose Informants speak with ventriloqual voice. After
 Bryant had further worked on this it was difficult not to see the whole
 tree of South African history as predestined in the acorn that was
 Dlngiswayo. Myth crystalised not merely around the least known men (and
 women) but sprouted most luxuriantly in those geographical regions which
 were the last to be explored by Europeans. Encouraged thus, Ellenberger
 - in the same era as Stuart and Whiteside - staged his 'lifaqane' in the
 unknown Caledon of the 1620s: an alleged bloodbath between - precisely -
 1620 and 1833 organised by Mzilikazi, Matiwane, MaNtatisi and 'the
 cannibals'. In Ellenberger the hagiography of Moshoeshoe begun by the
 French missionaries in the 1830s reached a peroration. Black chiefs
 everywhere were thus sorted into ' heroes' or ' vl 1 la ins', as they had
 served, or not, white expansionism.
 C M . Theal was mainly responsible for amalgamating the sectorial myths
 to produce a pan-South African history that pre-annexed the Boer
 Republics and was the ideological facet of the drive for Union. Theal
 sculpted even more extraordinary versions on which the text-books are
 still inexcusably but logically based. Extra stress was placed on
 Mzilikasl's 'depopulation' of the Transvaal. The central chain-reaction
 of 'the mfecane'; Zulu attack HIubl/Ngwane, who attack Tlokwa (i.e.
 Mantatees), who expel Kololo, some of whom career on to Dithakong, is
 now (1880s) invented. A Zulu-inspired self-genocide of blacks put into
 'correct perspective' any damage the whites might have caused. The
 magisterial pronouncements of Theal and Cory echo around the
 deliberations of the Lagden Commission as they help themselves to 93% of
 land in the Union. Maps produced by- Theal's maia heir,_ E.A. Walker,
 splashed hatchured lines into the central Transkei and Bechuanaland
 depicting yet greater swatheB of depopulation. In 1928 only did Walker
 coin the neologism mfecane (the ltalicisation an additional disguise) to
 denote the total process; his translation, ' the crushing', despite
 pathological repetition in the text-books, has no legitimacy. The
 appearance of the Fynn 'Diary* in 1950 and of the largely fictional
 Shaka Zulu by Ritter established Shaka's world popular reputation,
 whilst Omer-Cooper's Zulu Aftermath in 1966 Improbably established 'the
 mfecane' as a centre-piece of the new 'Africanist' history. .The Oxford
 History (1969) injected all this into academic arteries world-wide in
 the early 1970s, as a comparison of text-books of that era with those of
 the 1950s will show. The further simplification and caricature of these
 versions by television and cinema, and by writers of South Africa's
 school text-books has probably ensured that this mfecane/Shaka Is
 semiologlcally Ineradicable this side of a revolution in our educational
 system. The failure to see the links between 'the mfecane' of the past
 twenty years and Verwoerd, Vorster and Both'a Bantustan strategies -
 despite its presence on the election platforms of the far right - is not
 the least of the items on the agenda of self-criticism for the
 contemporary historical profession.
 Interlude
 My attempts to teach 'the mfecane' in 1982 (as an optional third year
 course, paralleling the compulsary South African course!) turned into a
 determination to dig up by the roots and expose the very object of
 instruction. I was confronted with an ever lengthening list of errors,
 omissions of all too easily accessible evidence, and an equally
 inexhaustible list of fictional insertions and false ascriptions.
 Wherever I looked - in 'Natal', the trans-Mkuzi, or the Caledon - the
 Zulu presence vanished altogether or needed to be rewritten in Its
 correct scale and circumstance. Stuart's informants continually
 contradicted his assumptions of a depopulated Natal. No explanation
 existed for the first move of the Ndebele; whilst their subsequent
 propulsion north was arranged by the Griquas and the Boers. Nothing
 reliable existed in explanation of any of the Ngwane movements. The
 Tlokwas had never been reported out of the upper Caledon. A fog of
 hypocritical mystification surrounded the 'battle' of Dithakong. There
 wa3 a conspiracy of silence as to the events of 1828 and 1835. The
 circumstances of the 1826 events at both ends of the Transkei had been
 shredded, whilst the stories of D'Urban's military of huge migrations
 through the Transkei seemed a more than convenient alibi for
 labour-hungry conquerors. There was a resonant silence as to Portuguese
 slaving at the Bay: indeed, southern Mozambique had been snipped out of
 South African history altogether. Repeatedly there had been a
 'levelling up', so that spear was depicted as more decisive than the
 rifle, minor skirmishes between black groups as dwarfing Austerlltz,
 Borodino and 'the mfecane' as a whole approximately equal in scale to
the Napoleonic Wars. Settler propaganda had had a century and a half in
 which to manipulate, forget and rearrange the facts. The sacred texts
 of Ellenberger and Bryant contained no coherent histories at all, merely
 a bombardment of suggestion, confusingly over-complex detail,
 patronising pronouncements, chronological inversions, hundredfold
 increases or diminutions in scale, credulous speculation dressed up and
 accepted as expertise,- the repeated resort to fiction when the threads
 of evidence ran out (or were tactfully discarded), and, throughout, the
 most repellant and racist self-glorification. Nothing of any of this
 had been challenged. Stories however surreal, however absurd, had been
 humourlessly repeated by the most respected historians right the way to
 the present.
 The trouble ahead was illuminated by my failure to answer the first
 question: what was 'the mfecane'? It was, for example, impossible to
 delimit chronologically. Confusion as to the termination sent me In hot
 pursuit acrosB the borders of South African history 'proper', a
 territory where my questions were not welcomed. Did the Hbolompo
 campaign, the 'frontier war' of 1834-5 or the Zulu war of 1879 belong to
 the course on the mfecane or the one on 'South African history'?
 Attempts at arbitration evaded the real problem, the untenability of
 separating the material into two courses in the first place. As for the
 mfecane's initiation and causation, the literature was in spectacular
 disarray. The fragile attempts of Guy and Hall to provide substance to
 the somewhat desperate hypothesis of overpopulation revealed on the
 contrary its untenability. The nearly complete vacuum in knowledge
 about Shaka and his Zulu had switched attention back to Zwide in the
 1790s, and away from the Hfolosi as 'storm centre' to the Pongola. But
 Zwide's Ndwandwe were even more of a blank. Hedges attempted to replace
 the argument about excess population with one that attributed the
 initiation of structural revolution to the supplying of American whalers
 at Delagoa Bay with cattle in the 1790s. This seemed equally
 unsatisfactory. Moreover, this sort of hypothesis formed a different
 species of explanation which exploded the subject of explanation. How
 could an 'internal revolution' that was isolatedly integral to black
 societies have been caused by exogenous impacts? Even the military
 revolution evaporated on close inspection, or, rather, Omer-Cooper's
 version did. The lbutho long predated the 1790s. That it may well have
 been readapted to hunt elephants, cattle (and people?), as Hedges,
 argued very plausibly, begged a chain of questions. Assumptions about
 the short stabbing spear and 'horns and chests' tactics were amusing.
 The fixation with the 'Nguni' was a projection back of twentieth-century
 'Tsonga' and 'Sotho' societies had also
 Were the 'Nguni' predators and everyone
 else victims? My conclusion that Mzilikazi's Ndebele and Moshoeshoe's
 'Sotho' kingdoms were sister formations had been anticipated by
 Macmillan. If one brought in the 'bastard' states, the Taung, the Xhose
 bands, the raiders of Coenrad de Buys, and the constellations built up
 by Fynn" and Farewell'in' southern-Natal, not only the concept of 'tribe',
 but even that of 'race' became redundant. Uncoincidentally, this ran up
 against another of the litanies of the 'liberal* world view.
 Hedges had advanced to the brink of shattering the mfecane without
 realising it. My own 'swingeing' onslaught was handicapped by an
 initial failure to provide a coherent overview of events that had, at
 tribe-manufacture. Surely
 experienced dramatic change?
 least some of them, all too clearly occurred. The mfecane was peppered
 with buckshot, but it still lived. The missing bones which permitted a
 full restructuring of the skeleton of the real animal that had stalked
 the sub-continent were supplied by Harries who in 1981 (as spin-off from
 his Ph.D. thesis!) produced incontrovertible evidence of a flourishing
 slave trade at Delagoa Bay in the first half of the nineteenth century.
 It was now possible to explain an exodus of peoples in all directions
 from an epicentre neither on the Hfolosi nor the Pongola. but further
 north to the west of the Bay. It was immaterial whether this trade had
 taken off after 1815 or whether it had existed (at a lower level
 perhaps: we need research) in the eighteenth century. Either way,
 decisive additional weight was given to Hedge's hypotheses concerning
 the transformatory impact of the ivory and cattle trades. The
 Intensification of regional violence after 1815 was now explanable. the
 devious need to resort to the (in fact hypothetical) coming to power of
 Shaka 'in 1816' fell away. Peoples such as the Ngwane and the Ndebele
 were likely to have been expelled from the south-west Bay hinterland by
 the slave trade, Just as peoples to the north were. But, In the
 southern sector their flight drove them straight Into the guns of the
 Griqua and, later, Boers operating out of the Cape Colony. It was this
 double pinning, or the simultaneity of antipodal pressures which
 distinguished southern Africa. Both of the slave trades, as well as the
 upheavals north of the Bay had been removed from history by settler
 propaganda, and Shaka ubiquitously inserted as explanation. The result,
 'the mfecane', was a contrived illusion of the literature, the negation
 of 'events on the ground'.
 It was thia juxtaposition which accounts for the fact that an
 unparalleled pattern of dislocation occurred in proximity to and, in
 part, as consequence of the relatively weak (as compared to central
 Mozambique or west Africa) slave trade at the Bay. Put the other way,
 the specific combination of events was driven dominantly by the settler
 presence: without this, black reactions to the local slave trade would
 have reassembled - perhaps at an equivalently weaker level - the
 sequences along the Zambezi and the Rufiji. As explained later, the
 short initial moves of both Ndebele and Ngwane support this conclusion.
 The black experience is southern Africa ia, thus, quite different from
 elsewhere in Africa, and the nature of the changes within their Boclal
 formations has a specific flavour. Nevertheless, such a peculiar and
 complex serieB of interactions was then thrown comprehensively out of
 focus by settler writing {'the mfecane'). This misdescription of the
 1830s and 1840s has, as mentioned, parallels too in other parts of
 Africa. 'Normally' - if South African had been decolonized after 1945 -
 a return to history would have been effected long ago. Equally without
 parallel (perhaps in world history), however, is the perpetuation of
 these early sleights of hand and literary habits into the present era of
 the cinema, the television and the paperback; and the readaptation of
 mythologies which served one group of purposes before 1850 and then
 around 1900 to new objectives of concealment in the late twentieth
 century.
 To Return To History
 Extricating ourselves from the quicksands of the Cape-Natal propaganda,
 we must gain height for a subcontinental view. Observing this with one
eye, we must fly higher yet and Inspect the human world as a whole, and
 over a much longer time-span. We have to concentrate on the two
 processes at the same time, that in western Europe, 'big' and 'quick1,
 the other beneath us, 'small' and 'slow*. And while one eye is fixed on
 each, a third must measure the accelerating convergence and impact.
 Ridding ourselves of assumptions of 'merrie Africa' (whilst reserving,
 the right to be uneasy about where the now united process is going), and
 concentrating on choosing the words with nuances which will offend the
 least part of the audience; with a final check on our backgrounds,
 prejudices and dreams, we can extricate the Bpare sixth hand and begin.
 Out of feudalism in western Europe emerged capitalism, in the first
 phase of which the Portuguese and Spanish 'discovered* America, rounded
 Africa, and began to harvest the former with the labour of the latter.
 The fruits returned to Europe to generate new technologies, trades, an
 obsession with profit, upheavals in 'world view', population explosion,
 and, sadly, a new era of ever heightening warfare. This phase of
 trading/slaving-based, or plunder-based 'mercantile' capitalism produced
 titanic struggles between new 'nations', the most strategically
 fortunate and politically Innovative of which, England - taking
 Portugual under a quasl-protection (1654; 1703) and making the Dutch
 junior partners (1625-1713), took on the French and by 1800 were half
 way to achieving a world empire. Utilising Blave labour in the
 Americas, and revolutionising land tenure at home, investing the profit
 from the former and juxtaposing It with the internal labour released by
 the latter, the British began to industrialise a generation ahead of her
 rivals. Seeking markets for her depression prone cotton and wool
 industries, naval hegemony against the French, and 'temperate' lands In
 which to settle a perceived (and indeed for a time actual) surplus
 population - in Bhort lebensraum - the British moved into amongst other
 places southern Africa (1806), taking the already present Dutch into a
 frictioned tutelage.
 On the ground beneath us some very interesting 'interactions' have
 already been occurring - and will now intensify - on several
 simultaneous fronts. Around Delagoa Bay, firstly, Portuguese, British,
 1
  Austrian', American and French traders have already by 1800 had a
 considerable impact on local 'Tsonga', 'Sotho' and 'Olentont' societies.
 Cloth, beads, brass and guns are going in, ivory, cattle, ambergris,
 gold etc. are going out. There is some uncertainty - c.1600 - whether
 yet substantial numbers of slaves are being exported; but in view of the
 sporadic references to an eighteenth-century trade and of the lateness
 of our being informed of the very substantial trade after c.1810 we are
 checking the evidence very carefully. Following Hedges, we can see that
 interrelationships between states are powerfully affocted by these
 trades. Conflict between Mabudu, Tembe and Mattolla is intensified.
 Ndwandwe and her satelltes reorientate themselves to the trade. Further
 south an Mthethwa-Mabudu coastal alliance is split into two by the
 west-south-east axis of Ndwandwe and allies. A glance north of the Bay,
 however, indicates that trends in state formation and a heightening of
 violence are not confined to the south. Throughout the region older
 intra-African trade routes are captured by the new dominant ones ending
 at the sea. Peoples as far apart as the Pungwe, the Kei and the Molopo
 are brought within one huge trading network. But all this is
 unexceptional. It resembles, mutatis mutandis, similar experiences of
 west African societies in the same era. We have merely lacked a Curtin
 to chronicle it.
 To the south-weBt, secondly - and here we come to the 'specificity' of
 southern Africa - are the Dutch who find no counterpart in west Africa.
 Between the 1650s and the arrival of the British the Dutch had spread
 out and settled the land. They brought new diseases, began the task of
 exterminating the San and Khoi, and interacted with the Mozambique coast
 by importing slaves, and even for a time establishing a trading company
 at the Bay (1720s). 'Miscegenation' produced Christianised, gun-armed,
 horse-riding 'Bastards', who moved into the interior seeking more land,
 subsumed Khoi groups along the Orange - such as the Kora -, trading,
 raiding - a reach which extended well beyond the Limpopo by the 1790s.
 (Overland contacts with the Bay cannot be ruled out.) Remarkable and
 very powerful 'commando states' emerged, such as that of Klaas
 Afrlkaaner - which require detailed research. The trading-raiding for
 ivory, cattle and, Increasingly slaves - mostly San until the 1810s -
 had a comparable and simultaneous impact in transorangia' as the
 trading/slaving in the Bay hinterland. Legassick notes that
 Koleabangwe's Tlhaping had been 'revolutionised' by about 1810 (a
 comparison between them and Hakhasane's Mabudu or Dinglswayo's Mthethwa
 might be revealing). These considerations too should wean us from our
 fixation with the Mfolosi.
 The Dutch, in the third sector, had additionally penetrated east, making
 contact with 'Xhosa' groups Buch as the Gqunukhwebe the Ndlambe and
 Rharhabe (o'Galkas1) east of the Gamtoos. Trade links were established
 with the Ccaleka east of the Kei (who also received goods from the Bay).
 Inevitably there were struggles of slowly mounting intensity over land
 and cattle. In the late eighteenth and' early nineteenth centuries these
 fairly balanced interactions ('frontier wars' 1-3) were dramatically
 upset by the supercession of Boer rule by that of the British, who
 brought with them the world's most modern weaponry and a 'total
 strategy' new to Africa. Both the Khoi and the Xhosa worlds fell apart.
 In 1809-12 the British enserfed the Khoi and began a genocidal campaign
 to force Bantu groups east of the Fish in order to seize their land.
 The first relocations over a huge area in South Africa's history were
 achieved with a depth of brutality only recently revealed by Maclennan.
 This 'fourth Frontier War1 of 1811-12 began the process of land
 attenuation and 'Flngoisation1. To speak of 'frontier wara* is
 deceptive (the euphemism is a favourite one of Cape historians): It was
 an unending serieB of attacks, pressures, subversions, 'treaties',
 robberies, cattle seizures, proselytizations, betrayals,
 misrepresentations, and restructuring. The European God and value
 system, monagamy, and clothing (to uplift the people of Lancashire and
 Yorkshire) were forcibly introduced, land, labour and cattle seized in
 return. Settler propagandists sedulously minimised the comparative
 scale of this horror (as compared to the mostly imaginary Zulu
 'upheavals'), and encapsulated it off both geographically and textually
 from relevant events elsewhere In the subcontinent. The near conceptual
 impossibility of mentally connecting these events of c. 1810-20 with the
 contemporary careers of Dingiswayo and Shaka is a significant triumph of
 settler historlographical suggestion.
Between about 1815 and 1840 there occurred both a growing convergence
 and interpenetration between the three sectors of the European advance
 (as well as the opening up of a fourth between the Mzlmkhulu and the
 Tugela), and a mounting intensity of violence, as Europeans seized land
 in the south, and labour in each of the sectors - destined either for
 the Cape farms or the sugar plantations of Brazil, Reunion etc. This
 led to a subcontinental-wide crisis for black and 'Khoisan' peoples
 which is not remotely comparable to anything that had gone before. No
 statement of this appears in any text book of South African history (or
 monograph for that matter). The Bay slave trade was on ly de tec ted In
 1981. And the slaving north of the Orange was only clarified in outline
 in my own article due later this year (1988). It is the least of
 coincidences that these years are precisely the years of 'the mfecane'.
 ? In the Cape after about 1810 ens erf men t of the Khoi, and Griqua raids
 for San never came near to solving a chronic labour shortage. The
 British ban on the slave trade, the ban on the utilisation of 'kaffir'
 labour, the intrinsic sparcity of Khoi labour and the impossibility of
 policing a huge region ensured that the large batches of British
 settlers arriving from the unhappy Britain of Lord Liverpool had no
 legal means of obtaining sufficient labour - an unpropitlous fact for
 the farming and defending an easterly creeping march. With the
 compliance of the Governor the settlers and Boers arranged with Grlqua
 and 'frontier ruffians' to supply them with Tswana and Sotho (i.e.
 black) labour from north of the Orange. This doubly Illegal supply
 necessitated the extensive use of euphemisms and lies: the mainly women
 and children brought south by force were labelled 'Mantatees' coming 'in
 search of refuge1 from an auto-violence organised by their own chiefs!
 The 'battle' of Dithakong was merely one such raid (in fact on Kwena and
 Hurutshe) for slaves and cattle, unusual only in the extensive evidence
 left by the missionary leaders. The early and mid 1820s thus certainly
 saw extensive destabilisations In the region north of the Orange: but
 the roots of the violence and of the accompanying hunger lay In the
 south, not in the 'Zulu' east. The flow of violence was from south-west
 to north-east. The Taung emerged aB a predator state - alongside the
 Bergenaars, Koranna and Griqua - in the northern Orange Free State: it
 was almost certainly a combination of Taung and Bergenaars which forced
 the Patsa-Kololo north sometime before 1824. Peoples fled in all
 directions, enlarging the Tinaping and Taung, as well as Moshoeshoe's
 growing state east of the Caledon, and Mzilikazi's on the upper Vaal.
 Others sought their stolen children in the Cape, ending up as labourers
 themselves. The ripples of settler invasions thus had far-reaching
 effects on black societies not only east of the Gamtoos, but north of
 the Orange, even of the Veal. It is artificial to speak of distinct
 'northern' and 'eastern' frontiers: the Caledon and Kei regions were
 fused into one interconnected theatre by criss-crossing raiding bands
 and fleeing peoples. Xhosa bandits raided north, while groups such as
 the Ngwane fled from the Bergenaars south of the Orange, when they were
 immediately characterised by the propaganda of the British and Tembu as
 a new 'Fetcani Horde1. As the Mantatees before them, the Fetcani became
 the target of British raiding - the Ngwane being massacred in the very
 month of Ordinance 49 (July 1828), which, in response to continuing
 labour shortages, further expansion east of the Fish, and the imminence
 of the ending of slavery, permitted the utilisation of 'free' black
 10
 labour for the first time. Muti Hated Ngwane prisoners taken in the
 raid at Hbolompo became the first 'kaffir' labourers to respond to the
 1
  invitation1. Soon they were subsumed under the more versatile
 euphemism 'Fingo'. Ingeniously, settler propaganda attributed the
 regional violence to the Mantatees and Fetcani themselves, a mendacious
 displacement that converted the captives into Untermenschen, the lucky
 recipients of British humanitarian attention. Dithakong and Mbolompo
 became heroic vindications of the new order.
 Pa'ral lei ing the labour-raiding in the Colony was a coterminous
 escalation of the slave trade at Delagoa Bay and Inhambane. This badly
 needs a detailed study, but the following points may be stressed. After
 1815 an extra demand for sugar in Europe with an accompanying rise in
 slave prices, an increasing activity of Brazilian and United States
 slavers, and BritiBh attempts to keep Portugual from slaving north of
 the equator (treaties of 1815 and 1817) produced a convergence on,
 amongst other ports, Delagoa Bay. By 1621-22 both Ga2a and Hthethwa
 were present around the Bay, the former at least trading slaves to the
 Portuguese fort. Tembe, Mabudu and Mattella were all involved in the
 trade. By the later 1820s at least 3,000 slaves - mostly men in this
 case - were being exported annually from both the Bay and Inhambane:
 this is only the detected number of declared slaves. The slaves were
 exported to Reunion, Rio de Janeiro, Havane, Buenos Aires and
 innumberable other destinations. These numbers persisted into tha 1830s
 and 1840s, before declining In the lS50a - when exports switched to the
 Boer farms in the Transvaal. However the figures are read a very high
 percentage of males were being seized in the 'Delagoa Bay Hinterland', a
 fact overlooked by every theorist of the mfecane's causation.
 It is not yet known where the slaves were taken from. An army of black
 musketeers with Portuguese officers existed at Lourenco Marques for the
 seizure of slaves; but the details of their activities are missing.
 Local 'tribal' warfare in the hinterland was virtually certainly
 excacerbated by the market. Fynn in one of his earlier and more
 plausible essays indicates that both the Ndwandwe and Zulu sold their
 prisoners into Blavery. It raises the question discussed by Curtin for
 Senegambia to what extent slave supply came from 'normal' wars, or was
 fed by raiders stimulated into business by the commercial propsects.
 Inexpllcably Hedges fai1 a to mention slavery at al 1, although his
 arguments for the impact merely of the ivory and cattle trades - which
 also intensified during the 1820s - would have been immeasurably
 strengthened. What seems certain 1B the dominance of 'Tsonga1 and
 Ndwandwe-1inked groups in the trade. There is absolutely no evidence of
 a Zulu hegemony in the Bay area in the early 1820s, or at any time for
 that matter. The allegations to this effect were Inserted backwards by
 writers (or their ghosts) such as W.F.W Owen In the 1830s: their
 contemporary accounts of 1823-25 contain no such references. Tshopl
 groups north of the Bay were among the victims. But there are
 indications' that peoples of the Nkomati, Mbelezi, Usuthu, Ingwavuma,
 Pongola and perhaps Mfolozi valleys were attacked. The heightening of
 tension in the subregion can only be explained in this context. The
 otherwise inexplicable collapse and dispersal of Ndwandwe Itself must
 surely be seen in this light. Whether Zwlde himself was a slaver
 supremo must remain an open question. The mechanics of the triangula
 struggle between Mthethwa, Ndwandwe and Mabudu at the turn of the 1820s
11
 need studying, but, given the background, it is unlikely that issues of
 slaving will be absent. Whether the Ndwandwe-1inked Gaza and Ngoni
 (Jere) were slaver states and moved into the Bay region attracted by new
 business opportunities must also for the moment remain hypothesis,
 although the absence of evidence for a Zulu role in these northerly
 movements should be noted. On the contrary, the Zulu movements were to
 the south. Whether the subsequent slaving careers of Ngoni groups
 beyond the Save and Zambezi were a logical continuation of their earlier
 experiences should also be researched. At the least the absurd
 assumption of 'mfecane theory' that the Ngoni migrations were Impelled
 by atavistic Zuluism, or even of Zulu attacks, should be discarded. A
 last question (for now) is whether the slavery-connected migrations of
 'Tsonga' peoples away from the Bay, up the Olifants, Letaba and Levubu
 valleys that Harries describes for the 1930s - when the slave trade
 reached a peak - can be antedated to the 1820s or even L810s. Answers
 to these and many other questions are blocked by our present lack of
 evidence. But at least a search within a promising framework can be
 begun.
 Turning to the comparable cases of the Ndebele (or Khumalo) and the
 Ngwane: it is obviously significant that contemporary writers connected
 the 'upheavals' in the Pongola region with the Bay slave trade. In the
 1820s Hacmillan repeated Dr Philip's observation of 1828 that the
 Khumalo had been evicted by slavers. The Ndebele, on the upper Pongola,
 and the Ngwane, about thirty miles south-west on the upper Mzinyathi,
 were not only both well sited for attacks by slavers, but are both known
 to have been attacked by the slaver Ndwandwe - and in the more
 knowledgeable accounts are depicted aa - having been expelled by the
 Ndwandwe. The Ngwane were also attacked by the Mthethwa (the precise
 sequence of these attacks is shadowy, but probably not relevant here)
 who had an alliance with the slaver state of Mabudu, borrowed
 Makhasane's musketeers, and are known to have been near Lourenco Marques
 in 1821. Conversely, the evidence for Zulu attacks is non existent, at
 least for the period before 1830. In both cases there is otherwise a
 blank in place of an explanation, a blank that I ran into when studying
 the Ndebele in the 1970s. I therefore repeat the argument in my recent
 paper, 'Mfecane as Alibi', that both the Ndebele and the Ngwane were
 expelled wither by primary or secondary slave raiders, and that the
 timing of these events is attributable to the rapidly rising export
 demand at the Bay in the years c. 1816-21 and not to the activities of
 the African Napoleon.
 It is also crucial to understand, to return to an earlier point, that
 the initial moves of both peoples were short - in the Ngwane case about
 fifty or sixty miles south-west into the upper Wilge, the Ndebele about
 seventy miles north-west to the east side of the headwaters of the Vaal
 somewhere near modern Ernielo. (There was, it should be noted, no
 Ndebele migration into the eastern Transvaal.) After further short
 Ngwane moves from the Wilge into the upper Caledon, the gap between the
 two groups had increased from about thirty to nearly two hundred miles,
 a distance which was to make the difference between survival and
 destruction. In an Africa wide context such flightB from slavers were
 'normal'. Even in the context of the eastern high-veld the incursions
 of 'Nguni' from the east was unexceptional per se. What was exceptional
 about these incursions of c. 1818-21 was the scale and the causation. A
 12
 both the Ndebele and the Ngwane came under attack by the
 Griqua/Bergenaar raiders operating out of the south-west and searching
 for cattle and 'Mantatees' (i.e. slaves) for the settler farms. Both
 Matiwane and Mzilikazi were thus caught in the crossfire of the two
 inter-related plunder systems: both were caught and kept moving by a
 second 'system'. Hzilikazi's people, about 400 miles/600ks from the
 Griqua bases!, were in a more favourable position, but were nonetheless
 severely harrassed in the mid 1820s by Griqua attentions. The exact
 moment of the Ndebele migration out of the south-eastern Transvaal into
 the western Transvaal is still open to question (some time between 1827
 and 1833), but the Griqua causation is undisputed. The Khumalo state
 expanded by the absorption of 'Sotho' and 'Tswana' refugees displaced in
 the southern destabilisation - people Tleeing the Taung and Bergenaars -
 on the one hand, and 'Nguni' (e.g Ndwandwe) and possibly 'Tsonga' groups
 displaced like themselves in the eastern displacements on the other. It
 was in these circumstances of a sequence of harrassments, that the
 peculiar evolution of Ndebele amabutho began. ? The Ngwane, conversely,
 were by 1824 much more exposed to Griqua attacks where they had arrived
 west of the upper Caledon - far more endangered than Moshoeshoe's more
 propitiously sited Mokhoteli in the mountains east of the river.
 Emulating the Ndebele in some respects, the Ngwane were shattered by
 Griqua attacks in c. 1825-26. The following migration through the
 north-eastern Cape Into the southern Transkei - the only direction of
 escape open - ended in a third disaster when they were massacred by the
 British army in July and August 1628 in the Immediate aftermath of the
 sanctioning of 'free' labour in Ordinance 49. The Ngwane were flung
 helplessly between the three penetrative fronts of white activity. Both
 the teleology and Afrocentricism of mfecane theory collapse.
 With some of the ground cleared, it is safe, and chronologically
 apposite to turn to the early Zulu. The general failure to probe the
 fictions of Owen, King, Farewell, Fynn, Chase and Godlonton, and the
 most uncritical use of Stuart and Bryant, has ensured that - with the
 notable exception of Hamilton and Wright's recent studies - the analysis
 of the pre-1840a Zulu kingdom is a disaster area. The first thing to
 note is that what linked the three theatres of Delagoa Bay, 'Natal' and
 the trans-Kei was not Shake's impis but settler propaganda. Thwarted at
 the Bay by the failure of the British Government to accept Owen's 'Tembe
 Treaty' of 1823 (as well as by malaria), settlers landed at Port Natal
 in 1824 and at once proclaimed: a recent Zulu devastation of the Mpondo;
 a Zulu depopulation of Natal; and a land treaty granted by Shaka to the
 area so generously depopulated. During 1825*27, as an aphrodisiac for
 the scarcely interested Cape administration and merchant houses, a
 vilification campaign was unleashed against Shake and the Zulu. Every
 exhortation, slander, deception and exaggeration was deployed in an
 initially unsuccessful attempt to tempt Britain north. Zulu tyrany over
 the Bay hinterland was also invented in case British chances in that
 area took a turn for the better.
 Not one of these charges stands up to examination. There was no
 depopulation of Natal, no Zulu hegemony at the Bay, no 1824 land treaty,
 and, virtually certainly, no Zulu attack on the Hpondoin 1824. Neither
 was Shaka the monster depicted in the pages of Fynn and Isaacs. If
 anything, the signs are that as a 'reactive' state (or 'defensive' state
 to use the terminology of Wright and Hamilton) the Zulu were in the
13
 18203 as yet comparatively weak. The emergence of Zulu power after the
 demise of Mthethwa (c. 1815-23) must be seen both in the context of the
 slave trade and the opening of a second European front at Port Natal.
 The first Zulu amalgamations occurred along the White Umfolosi.
 Peoples along the Mkuzi and the upper Mzinyathi - Buch as Hlubi and
 Ngwane, even Ndwandwe groups - fled into the growing state. The
 'Ndwandwe-Zulu' fighting so precisely (and erroneously) dated to 1818-19
 by Bryant (the repeating of Bryant's guessed datings is a sympton of the
 literature) is 'a myth' - probably indicating not a sequence of specific
 battles, but a reference to the generalised upheavals between the
 Pongola and Mfolozi. (And what were the Ndwandwe doing when they
 attacked south of the Hfolosi in '1818-19' and drove 'the zulu" to the
 Tugela?) In this regional struggle the Zulu-linked units were worsted
 and at the turn of the 1820s the centre of the growing Zulu state
 shifted south-east into Qwabe territory, leaving military units to the
 north of the black Hfoloai in a defensive ring. From 1824 the Zulu,
 like the Mabudu in the far north, received the aid of white gunmen, who
 in 1826-7 enabled 'the Ndwande' to be attacked and Khumalo groups along
 the Hfolosi forced to khonza. These 'victories' in fact merely indicate
 the weakness and unexceptionality of the Shaka state until that date.
 They were followed by a further Bhift of the Zulu centre southwards, the
 capital itself moving south of the Tugela in 1825. If anything the axis
 of the state was at this Btage along the Tugela, as Cele and Mbo groups
 in the region voluntarily fused with Shaka. Whether these southerly
 movements are to be viewed as a reaction away from the slaving areaB, or
 as positive alignments towards the Europeans at Port Natal is an open
 question. To attempt to explain these sequences in terms of a search
 for a better combination of grazing and cultivation fails to provide an
 adequate balance between cause and the issue (the growth of the Zulu
 state) to be explained.
 It should be stressed that whilst the evolution of this state, as
 Hamilton makes clear, is complex, the scale of the changes should not be
 exaggerated. The formation associated with Shaka 1 B comparable with
 other emergent Btates of roughly the same era such BB Mzilikazi's and
 Moshoeshoe'B, both equally complex, equally 'revolutionary', equally
 assimilative. Additionally, Shake's state was in the context of Zulu
 history merely the first and moat primitive stage In an evolutionary
 sequence which was to culminate in Mpande's kingdom of the 1860s. In
 view of the regional circumstances in which the Zulu kingdom developed
 between about 1815 and 1830 it is surely misleading to term it a
 ?precolonial' state at any point in its career. Its very nature was
 influenced by white pressures and intervention. The whites themselves
 created mini-states in the area to the south of the Port which changed
 from being allies of the Zulu to profound threats. In 1828 it was an
 alliance of these white-led predatory groups which attacked the Mpondo.
 Ordinance 49, the raids on the Ngwane, and Fynn and Farewell's attempts
 to entice settlement north led to a reckoning in which the whites joined
 with internal opponents to kill Shaka in September 1828 and install the
 hopefully more malleable Dingane. It is significant that some of the
 most powerful of Shaka's supporters refused to accept Dingane, and that
 an extensive civil war occurred between 1828 and c. 1832 in which the
 whites backed Dingane. Dingane'a victory, the transference of the state
 back north of the Tugela, the slaving activities of Farewell, Fynn and
 Isaacs, the falling out of the whites and Dingane, the adaptations in
 14
 s ta te structure during Dingane'B career, the extent and nature of Zulu
 involvement at the Bay and as slavers in the 1830s are a l l issues which
 have so far remained unstudied. By another irony, explainable by the
 la ter historiographical manipulations, the post-1830s development of the
 kingdom under Mpande and Cetshwayo produced something like the
 propaganda picture of the 1820s - another conjurer's i l lusion which
 'confirmed' the early l i t e ra ture and closed i t to question.
 Possibly even less researched than any of the foregoing are interactions
 in the region between the Kei and the Mzimkhulu during the 1820s. The
 repeated insinuation of 'mfecane theory' that this area was penetrated
 by huge numbers of refugees fleeing Shaka haB never been seriously
 investigated and is not supported by the evidence. On the contrary, the
 ' t r anske i ' , l ike the Caledon, was a regional interface between the
 fronts of white penetration - within reach of refugees from the
 Bouth-west Bay hinterland, the Caledon and Orange, and the eastern
 frontier. Local predators such as Faku's Mpondo, Ncaphayi's Bhaca and
 Ngugencuka's Tembu were Joined by Fynn's own raiders , by white and
 'coloured' hunters, traders and bandits, by the cross Drakenaberg raids
 of the Mokhoteli and Tlokwa, and by the incursions of the Ngwane. In
 the north-west. Hlubi incursions are as likely to have had their origin
 in slaving as in Zulu action (and note the Hlubi who fled into Shaka's
 kingdom). Host lethal of a l l were the compressions of the British in
 the south. In 1826 Brit ish missionaries crossed the Kei into Gcaleka
 te r r i to ry . A crossfire of propaganda between the Mzimkhulu and
 Butterworth pleaded for direct expansion north of the Kei through Mpondo
 into Natal; to further th i s , alliances were made with both Mpondo and
 Tembu f i r s t against the Ngwane, subsequently against the Gcaleka
 themselves. Both groups were caught between two fires of white
 destabil isat ion; but we have heard that before. All th is awaits a
 study; nevertheless the primary of southern pressures is c lear . What
 passed south was British disinformation, not Zulu armies and refugees
 displaced by them.
 The f i r s t people labelled 'Fingo' were the odd individuals who
 gravitated to the mission stat ions set up east of the Fish r iver in the
 early 1820s. There are some indications that the word had Bouthem
 origins west of the Fish, and that i t s versat i le meaning embraced early
 In i t i a t e s , t r iba l misfit*, opportunist! and 'col laborators ' , displaced
 'kafflra* in the region south of the Kei, as well as migrants, for
 example from north of the Orange. In missionary useage around 1828
 'Fetcani' and 'Fingo1 are Interchangeable in many passages. One does
 not have to look far for the agents of th is uprooting and labelling.
 The Ngwane captured in the raids of 1828 were also designated Fingos, an
 early use of the term for 'forced labourer ' . In the early 1830s the
 word was being used for people as widely divergent as forced labourers
 and a contingent of armed Xhosa collaborators who were to be used in the
 next ' frontier war'. The accretion of meaning; the very fuzziness of
 the word was to have advantages after 1835.
 By 1833 an even acuter shortage of labour on the eastern frontier
 coincided with Bri ta in ' s abolition of slavery. This did not deter the
 se t t l e r s from raiding the Rharhabe for slaves in the period before the
 war. But even more elaborate covers as compared to those of 1828 were
 necessary. The 'war' that followed, 'D'Urban's war' of 1834-35, was in
15
 essentials a massive land, ca t t l e and labour raid on the Rharhabe and
 Ocaleka in part icular , which dwarfed the Mbolompo campaign in scale.
 The British army seized well over 50,000 'Xhosa' ca t t l e , and, a fact
 unnoticed even by specia l is ts on the Ccaleka, 17,000 (sic) Gcaleka
 prisoners - 85% of whom were women and children - in a aeries of
 spectacular raids in the f i r s t few months of 1835. A combination of the
 'war' and the penetration of the region between the Keiskamma and the
 Kei by British administration at las t solved the labour supply c r i s i s a t
 the crude level. The further land seizures over the next twenty yeara,
 masters and servants ordinances, hut taxation, and missionary
 encouragement soon fine-tuned a modern labour procurement strategy which
 during the 1890s spread throughout Africa. .Given the context of 1835,
 however, the true provenance of the Fingos, as the prisoners inevitably
 were called, was concealed. The raids around Butterworth and along the
 upper Kei of March-June 1835 were erased from the t ex t s . An elaborate,
 though threadbare, story of vast groups fleeing from the Zulu only to be
 persecuted by the Gcaleka - an updating of the 1828 Zulu raid a l ib i -
 was unimaginatively evolved by D'Urban'B military entourage, which,
 suspiciously, included H.F. Fynn. I t i s not yet known where the Zizi
 and Bhele 'chiefs ' were obtained, but the possibi l i ty that they were
 members of Fynn's Hzimkhulu hierarchy, temporarily unemployed, i s the
 hypothesis under investigation. Aa for the Hlubi 'Fingos' , they were
 peoples who migrated into the north-eastern Cape from the eastern Orange
 Free State in the early 1850s and after , who were inserted back into the
 ' f l ight from the Zulu in the 1820s1 in subsequent historiographlcal
 adjustments. The fingo fiction sat isf ied 'London' with one and a half
 eyes averted. Throughout the 1840s and 1850s the falBe history,
 originally at t r ibutable to the mili tary, was embroidered by
 inte l lec tuals and missionaries. The Butterworth missionary, Ayliff, for
 example, whose contemporsry diary of 1831-34 makes no mention of these
 Fingos, plagiarised the se t t le r -mi l i ta ry myth in a ser ies of essays in
 the early 1850s, which were paraded by l a te r writers as if they had been
 written in the early 1830s. This in turn, along with much la ter
 fantasies about ' the Mbo' penned by Scully, was incorporated into
 WhiteBide's History of the AmaWbo (1912). The uncri t ical repetit ion of
 this material by historians of the eastern Cape is worth an inquest in
 I t se l f . Of course, the spectacular increase In the population of Fingos
 between the 1830s and Union has nothing to do with sexual reproduction,
 but quite a lot to do with displacements in subsequent ' f ront ier wars',
 hut taxation, accelerating peasantisation, and adjustments to image in
 the schools. 'Xhosa' collaborators who crossed north of the Kei into
 Fingoland in the 1860s took with them the baggage of a false history as
 part of the price for the land.
 I t is time, too, to end the debate as to the re la t ive central i ty and
 'c rea t iv i ty ' of the 'Great Trek" and 'the mfecane'. Whilst the former
 occurred, the l a t t e r is an hiatoriographical i l lus ion. They are facets
 of the identical process. The Boer Invasions of the high veld after
 1835 were now to tr igger events which were continuation and
 Intensification (as well as modernisation) of previous pressures, as the
 trek i t se l f was merely a stage in European expansion. The coll ision at
 Vegkop (1836) and the slaughter of Retief'B band (1B38) coloured and
 heightened the myths about the Ndebele and the Zulu which the Boers,
 departing from Godlonton's Grahams town, took with them in the f i r s t
 place. Black s ta tes grew into their own myths. Like the Ngwane in
 16
 1828, the Ndebele were now h i t by a third and infinitely stronger force;
 an alliance between the Boers, Griqua and both 'Sotho' and 'Tswana' from
 the far from depopulated Orange Free State. After b i t t e r fighting
 during 1838 the Ndebele fled north of the Limpopo. Dingane was
 eliminated two years la te r , Hosega and Blood River indices of the true
 balance of power in the subcontinent. Mpande's kingdom of the 1940s and
 1850s was an opportunistic response- to the part icular out-come of the
 Anglo-Boer struggle south of the Tugela. Moshoeshoe's precisely
 contemporary kingdom east of the Caledon had analogous foundations.
 Both 'Sotho' and 'Zulu' kingdoms were defined in terms of boundaries
 during a lengthy struggle to prevent themselves caving In completely.
 Both kingdoms reached their peaks in the 1850s, the former collapsing
 under Boer attacks in the 1860s, the l a t t e r succumbing to direct British
 invasion In 1879. To repeat an ear l ie r point: a t no time can ei ther of
 these formations be termed 'pre-colonia l ' . I t was the pressures of
 colonial expansion and slaving which produced them in the f i r s t place.
 Modern concepts of 'pre-colonial socie t ies ' and 'Africanist history'
 have closely accompanied the concept of the mfecane, and have served
 even when unintentionally, the same type of ends.
 Similar patterns of s ta te evolution occurred during the era of the Boer
 invasions of the northern and eastern Transvaal. Albasinl 's s ta te on
 the Letaba, for example, drew peoples fleeing the slave trade at the
 Bay. In certain respects i t paralleled the mini-Btatea set up by Fynn
 and Farewell on the Mzimkhulu a decade ea r l i e r . The Maroteng-Pedi and
 Dlamini-Swazi ' react ive ' s ta tes effloresced (after relat ively fortuitous
 beginnings) in the 1840s. reached a peak in the early 1660s, and
 progressively collapsed after about 1875. Maroteng s ta te building goes
 back at least to the 1770s. Delius notes a general Interconnection
 between an increased regional violence at that time and the trade at the
 coast. Not having information about the slaving, however, he quite
 rightly remained puzzled by the lack of sufficient cause for trends
 which extended to the Steelpoort. The Dlamini fled from the south Bay
 area across the Lebombo into the middle Pongola valley, perhaps sometime
 between 1750 and 1790. The bids to produce 'mfecane' genealogies for
 both s ta tes i s somewhat a r t i f i c i a l , Delius resorting to a possible
 Ndwandwe invasion of the Steelpoort valley in c. 1822, Bonner, for the
 Dlamini, to a hypothesis that Swazi militarism derived from Zwide via
 Sobhuza's Ndwandwe wife, Fulata. Without the Boer invasions of the
 1840B and the slaving at the Bay, however, there would have been nothing
 to write about. As with his competitor Albasini, Sekwati (Pedi)
 augmented his following with peoples who had fled both from the Boers
 and from the eastern low veld, as the Gaza stepped up slave raiding
 after about 1842. As with Moshoeshoe in the Caledon, Sekwati had to
 shoulder aside local r iva l s : who was to create the nucleus of the local
 ' react ive ' s ta te remained in doubt unt i l fairly l a t e . More spectacular
 Btl l l was the expansion of Mswati's 'Swazi' Btate in the 1650s.
 Declining slave prices at the Bay induced Manukosi of the Gaza to switch
 supply to the eastern Transvaal Boers - with payment mainly in guns and
 horses - whose demand for labour reassembled that of the Albany s e t t l e r s
 in the 1620s. Mswati's successful challenge of the Gaza monopoly was
 accompanied by far-reaching military restructuring in the 1850s. The
 sta te began to swell into i t s la ter boundaries with the absorption of
 the hitherto independent amakhandzambi1e ('thoBe found ahead'), again in
 the 1850s. Nothing of this was predestined in Sobhuza's reign.
17
 'The mfecane' thus breaks down in every one of i t s sectors, whether
 geographical or chronological. The whole is rotten; and so is each of
 the par ts . The attempts to 'reform' the mfecane by Maylam and Davenport
 by conceding the point about depopulation, or contending that thia or
 that was exaggerated (perhaps a l i t t l e rephrasing. . . ) are doomed to
 frustration. (There is no half-way house). The thing is unreformable,
 unadjustable, unrepairable. Keep i t (if you like) or abandon i t
 altogether. In the l a t t e r case an enormous hole opens the f i l l ing up of
 which should keep us busy for many years (if we have those years).
 In my remaining paragraph I must ul tra-briefly turn to the problems
 inherent in defining and classifying the new type of s ta tes which
 emerged during this (longer: c. 1740s - lB50a) era. They wars not
 specific to southern Africa at a l l , but resembled (and differed from)
 contemporary formations in both east and west Africa. The changes did
 not revolve around the emergence of a 'regimental' or ' ra iding '
 formation: that is a legacy of the Zulu-centric approach, an error which
 follows from swallowing ' the mfecane1. Yet the Zulu was a variant
 example of the general process. I t was not the emergence of the lbutho.
 but the restructuring and readaptation of the ibutho in the context of
 European pressures which was significant . The 'revolution' was not even
 'Nguni'. I t was not even 'Bantu1. Parallel and equally far-reaching
 changes took place within 'Tsonga', 'Sotho', 'Tswana', and, for that
 matter, 'San' and 'Khoi' formations. Given the fusion of different
 peopleB in many of the examples, these ternm become a hinderance to
 analysis. There was such a wide spectrum of equally relevant 'emergent'
 s t a t e s , with 'war lord' leaders (to use Martin Hall 's term), that i t 1B
 di f f icu l t to know where to place the boundaries. Note the rainbow
 sequence: Boer commando - Griqua commando - Koranna - Taung - Kololo -
 Ngwaketse for example. Or, Brit ish army - Fingo units - Ndlambe - Tembu
 - Hpondo - Gcaleka. Or. Fynn and Farewell's organisation - Thuli - Cele
 - Mbo - Zulu. Alternatively, Albasini 's s ta te - Sekwati's - Pedl -
 'Swazi' - Gaza - Portuguese slavers - to go round in a c i r c l e . In
 nearly every instance there were increased power of chiefs, new
 hierarchies, new patronage systems, restructuring of military
 organisations, the obtaining of firearms, larger s ize, amalgamations,
 greater levels of violence e t c . To attempt to establish a general 'law'
 for a l l th is - a sort of mathematical formula - i s surely to chase a
 mirage. .None of these adapted s ta tes was 'pre-colonial ' a t any moment:
 the idea of 'a precolonial mode of production' (southern African
 variant) is also a fantasy. Each, if I may make my one reference to
 Perry Anderson, is definable in terms of i t s ' supers t ructure ' . This
 gives us greater analytical f lex ib i l i ty , and enough oxygen to be able to
 return to history and submerge for long enough to be able to retr ieve
 sufficient empirical material free from the worry about having to
 pronounce a general law. A prize for the one who discovers an
 unsullied, 'pure' African s t a t e , with a rea l , uncontarnlnated ' in ternal
 revolution1 . The mere existence of evidence precludes
 non-contamination. And with no evidence the secret of the 'inner
 trajectory of change1 will go to the grave in si lence. Two things are
 surely cer ta in: in origin a l l were 'defensive' , or ' react ive ' even,
 indeed, especially when successfully expansionist; and a l l of them,
 brought into being by capitalism, embracing what they could of
 cap i ta l i s t techniques in order to avoid catastrophe, were, nevertheless,
 one- by one, ununitedly, broken down and exploded by the system which had
 18
 Jolted them into life.
 In Briefest Conclusion
 The Afrocentricism, Zulucentricism, and both the chronological and
 Bpatial teleological chain reactions of 'mfecane theory' collapse on
 close inspection. External pressures - particularly the heightened
 demand fo sugar in Europe and British market and lebensraum requirements
 - involved change over a much lengthier period than the (in this
 context) irrelevant boundaries of Shaka's reign. The Zulu were only one
 of a spectrum of 'reactive' states, some of which experienced
 accelerated change in the eighteenth century, others only developing
 after Shaka was dead. There was never either a Zulu or 'Nguni' centre
 to 'the mfecane'; rather, there were several peripheral but converging
 foci of white penetration: the Cape, 'transorangia', Natal and the Bay.
 Black societies were like fish caught in a net: flight from one pressure
 invariably took them straight into another perhaps worse (the Ngwane
 nightmare being only the most notable). This accounts for the paradox
 that the relatively unexceptional slave trade of southern Mozambique
 came particularly in the period after 1600 to be interinvolved in
 concatenations and escalations of violence which are unusual in Africa.
 Whereas the 'normal' slave trade was critically amplified by settler
 expansion and labour procurement systems, memory of the Blave trades was
 erased by settler propaganda. Removing themselves from the scene of
 their own impact settlers achieved an historiographical sleight of hand
 which was perfected over one hundred and fifty years. This vanishing
 was accompanied by the unscrupulous framing of Shaka and other
 'innocent' black figures such as, wierdly, MaNtatisl. The initial alibi
 of concealing labour raids of the period c. 1820-1870 was overlaid by
 another in the early twentieth century mlsaccounting for the land
 division of 1913. A post 1940s variant depicts the Bantuetans as
 resulting from a self-sequestration by blacks into the areas they occupy
 today during the 1820a and early 1830s. The longevity of such compound
 lies was assured by the failure of decolonisation in the aftermath of
 the Second World War, and by the deceptive normality and quality of
 South African historiography during the 1960s and 1970s. It was not,
 therefore, 'the mfecane' that was unique to the world; it waa, rather,
 the unsifted preservation of the flamboyant fictions, fantasies and lies
 of the era of Fynn, their ornamentation by Theal and his colleagues
 before the Firat World War, and their delivery intact to the media,
 educational and propaganda machinery of one of the most efficient and
 futuristic of totalitarian states of the present. The resultant even
 further embroidered mythologies and lies are fed to our schoolchildren
 and university students dally.