The concept of Natal history: a useful tool for exploring South Africa's past? (1994)
In 1994, I published a review article, "Identity and Interaction: a defence of Natal history" in the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History.This argued that the concept of Natal history could offer a useful framework in which to group together and study the interaction of peoples in a region of south-eastern Africa roughly (and I stress the adverb) bounded by the Swazi and the Portuguese to the north, the Xhosa to the south-west and the Sotho and the Boers in the interior.
The name Natal was hardly inclusive: it was coined by a Portuguese explorer who spotted a stretch of coastline (which coastline nobody knows) on Christmas Day, 1497. In the nineteenth century, versions were used as the titles of two settler micro-states. Its modern boundaries date only from 1903. Obviously, to make Natal 'work' as a historical theatre, it must find ways of including the local African majority who, by 1904, constituted ninety percent of the population (an imbalance that textbooks and monographs do not always emphasise). The Natal history that was being written in the late twentieth century – almost entirely by white academics – broke new ground in seeking to bolt in the Zulu past as the counterpart to the more traditional approach of settler politics and Union Jack nostalgia. In 1994, post-apartheid South Africa merged the white province and the Zulu bantustan (in fact, at just about the time my review article appeared). The new entity of KwaZulu-Natal was in reality the colony of 1897 reborn. The rebaptism was appropriate, but it did risk the over-simplification of Natal African identities: for instance, Langalibalele, one of the most intriguing personalities of the nineteenth century, was neither a Zulu nor based anywhere near Zululand. Hence, in the title of the review article, I paired Identity, which is specific and probably unique, with Interaction, which is a shared process that may create a new sense of collectivity.
With crude oversimplification, I suggested thinking of Natal as an oblong, with two sides relatively open and two surprisingly closed. Its coastal strip, although economically important, was remarkably impermeable, partly because the province did not face any inhabited and potentially hostile landmass, but also because the absence of ports (even Durban had problems) hampered leap-frogging maritime advances by potential invaders. The frontier with the eastern Cape was also an understated element in Natal history. It was the west and the north that proved more dynamic and permeable: the need to secure trading access with the interior – all the more important after the discovery of gold on the Rand in 1886 – and the accompanying rivalry with Delagoa Bay. Indeed, In the last decade of the nineteenth century, Natal's English-speaking white population sometimes found itself torn between its emotional attachment to Queen Victoria and its economic dependence upon Paul Kruger.
I confess that I was (and am) attracted to the concept of a distinct Natal history partly for the opportunities it might create for comparative studies. For instance, the academic history of the Canadian province of New Brunswick has also been largely subsumed within a wider framework, in this case that of Atlantic Canada. This approach has been fruitful, but it also tends to obscure the internal dynamics of a discrete and sometimes idiosyncratic political unit. The two jurisdictions are roughly similar in area, and both have an inland capital (Pietermaritzburg / Fredericton) which plays second fiddle to a major port and business centre (Durban / Saint John). By the late-nineteenth century, Saint John, like Durban, sought to become the outlet for continental traffic, in the New Brunswick case the export of wheat from the Canadian prairies. Just as Durban was menaced by the rivalry of Lourenço Marques, so Saint John had to struggle against the superior advantages of Halifax. (I have examined some of these themes in https://www.gedmartin.net/martinalia-mainmenu-3/237-geography-and-governance-the-problem-of-saint-john-new-brunswick-1785-1927.) Similarly, white English-speaking Natal contained sullen enclaves of Afrikaners, just as New Brunswick had hinterland districts populated by French-speaking Acadians, although their emotional ties to francophone Quebec were less intense than northern Natal affinities with the former Boer republics. Of course, the major difference between the two is that New Brunswick did not contain around one million potentially hostile indigenous people. There are also potentially fruitful lines of comparison between Natal and New Zealand. Both came under British rule in the eighteen-forties and experienced racial conflict later in the century. However, the New Zealand wars of the eighteen-sixties were driven by settler demand for land, whereas the Zulu War of 1879 was much more the product of misguided Imperial strategy. In their different ways, Zulu and Maori adopted innovative military strategies, the one aggressive, the other defensive. The difference may reflect the fact that the Zulu State was centralised and subject to stable chiefly rule, whereas Maori never fully overcame their tribal differences. Some may find these comparisons far-fetched and shallow. My point is that, without a distinct and defined approach to the history of Natal as Natal (or KwaZulu-Natal), no such attempts can be made.
"Identity and Interaction: a Defence of Natal History" was published in the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, xxii (1994), 317-31. Some place-names (e.g. Lourenço Marques / Maputo) had already been decolonised, and others have followed since: the renaming of Swaziland as Eswatini in 2018 would seem to have been overdue. The revised municipal titles of eThekwini (for Durban) and uMgungundlovu (for Pietermaritzburg, familiarly Maritzburg) do not seem to have affected the cities themselves. Thus I do not feel any need to apologise for using historical names in a historical context. However, it should be stressed that the article was written at just the moment when the apartheid regime was giving way to a multiracial South Africa, and hence at a point when it was impossible to foresee what kind of political settlement would emerge, and how it might affect historical perspectives. Editors of academic journals naturally impose a word limit on contributors, and to this I choose to attribute some telescoped infelicities of expression, notably the curt use of surnames when referring to scholars whom I admired and respected (and still do). Resetting the article in 2024, I have made some minor changes and eliminated (I hope) a handful of proof-reading glitches, but console myself with the thought that if, thirty years on, this argument in favour of Natal history retains any value, it will be for its overall contention rather than for any elegance in its expression.
Identity and Interaction: a Defence of Natal History
Natal and Zululand From Earliest Times to 1910 edited by Andrew Duminy and Bill Guest. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press with Shuter and Shooter, 1989. Pp. xxix + 489; maps, illustrations (hardback and paperback). ISBN 0-86980-695-0.
The Debate on Zulu Origins: A Selection of Papers on the Zulu Kingdom and Early Colonial Natal edited by D.R. Edgecombe, J.P.C. Laband and P.S. Thompson. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Department of Historical Studies, 1992. Pp. 168 (paperback).
Enterprise and Exploitation in a Victorian Colony: Aspects of the Economic and Social History of Colonial Natal edited by Bill Guest and John M. Sellers. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1985. Pp. xiv + 362, maps, tables, illustrations (paperback). ISBN 0-86980-469-3.
Brave Men's Blood: The Epic of the Zulu War, 1879 by Ian Knight. London: Greenhill Books, 1990. Pp. 200, maps, illustrations (hardback). ISBN 0-94789-897-2.
Kingdom and Colony at War: Sixteen Studies on the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 by John Laband and Paul Thompson. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press with N&S Press, 1990. Pp. xvi + 358, maps, illustrations (hardback and paperback). ISBN 0-86980-766-8, 0-86980-765-X.
Natalians First: Separatism in South Africa 1909-1961 by P.S. Thompson. Johannesburg: Southern Book Publishers, 1990. Pp. ix + 231, maps, tables, illustrations (hardback). ISBN 0-86812-262-X.
Is it possible to use the term "Natal" as a useful tool for clarifying the interaction of the region and its peoples with each other, and with the rest of southern Africa? Does the pursuit of Natal history offer a window into the complexity of South Africa, or does it unwittingly offer support to those who seek to replace apartheid with balkanisation? Certainly, it would seem a pity to have to discard the notion of Natal history along with the detritus of white supremacy in South Africa, not least because it is barely a quarter of a century since Brookes and Webb offered the first modern scholarly overview of the history of the province. It would be unfair to consign Brookes and Webb to the 'Van Riebeeck' school, which regards South African history as starting in 1652, for they drew on the scant available material to describe "the land which we now call Natal" before white people arrived, but from 1823 (or page 17), their central narrative theme lay with the settler community.[1] Shula Marks was among those who criticised Brookes and Webb for failing to explore "those historical processes . . . which were solely African",[2] and the main thrust of historical research since has aimed at redressing the balance.
Three major episodes of Zulu history are now well studied. Morris and Omer-Cooper began in the mid-1960s with analyses of the rise of the Zulu kingdom and the turbulence of the Mfecane which accompanied it. The Zulu war and its consequences have been examined, notably by Guy in 1979 and more recently by Laband. A third upheaval, the Bambatha 'rebellion' of 1906, was the subject of an earlier revision by Marks. Within the colony of Natal, Welsh in 1971 examined the Shepstone system of managing Africans, a view partly challenged in 1988 by Kline, who sought to shift the emphasis from Shepstone to Whitehall.[3]
To some extent, our understanding of Natal history may be distorted by the combination of intensity and selectivity which is the inescapable by-product of the relatively recent flowering of research. Cobbing has challenged the assumption that the Zulu state was identical in boundaries and structure under Dingane and Mpande,[4] and it is certainly difficult to reconcile the Zulu of 1879, whose king seems to have made genuine and even desperate attempts to negotiate with the British,[5] with the received picture of a rapacious Zulu empire of half a century earlier, driven to aggression by its innate military culture. Yet in concentrating on the black experience, historians were at least showing that their academic hearts were in the right place. The price paid for this approach lay in the tendency to neglect of the whites, who merely had a walk-on part in broader studies of South African politics as a bedraggled and often ludicrous minority, roundly dismissed by the acerbic J.X. Merriman as "past praying for",[6] and ultimately symbolised by the flag-waving racism of Heaton Nicholls, the incongruous "member for Zululand", whom Thompson dubs "a caricature of the Natal constituency".[7]
While Duminy and Guest do not explicitly defend their yoking together of Natal and Zululand in the title of the first attempt at a survey history since Brookes and Webb, they point to the establishment in 1978 of the Journal of Natal and Zulu History, and refer not only to the side-by-side existence of a Natal provincial authority and the KwaZulu homeland, but argue that a shared sense of "regional identity" could be seen in contemporary attempts to combine them.[8] In the 1980s an implicit appeal to the idea of 'KwaNatal' drew upon one of the few attempts to create a cross-racial dialogue, but such strategies may seem less appealing since Pretoria's decision to talk direct to the African National Congress. Historical debate has swung from an almost reverential enquiry into the Zulu past towards the suggestion that the grandeur of Shaka's people may owe something to manipulation of the record. Nor, according to Forsyth, is this solely a white sin, for a case can be made that Buthelezi has shifted his own historical rhetoric over time.[9]
The term "Natal" has been something of a moveable feast. Symbolically, it is not African in origin but reflects the assumption of the universal superiority of European culture: it was given to a section of coast sighted by Vasco da Gama on Christmas Day 1497. In fact, there is some doubt about the stretch of coast line da Gama spotted: it may have been in Mpondoland, which Natal expansionism failed to grab in 1894. The name became localised at Port Natal, but the establishment there in 1835 of a township called "Durban" freed Natal to sprawl like a cartographic amoeba in various directions during the next seventy years, as the excellent maps in Natal and Zululand demonstrate.[10]
The brief Boer republic and the early British colony each claimed a block of land to the south of Thukela river, its unity – such as it was – being related less to its physical geography than to the fact that it lay athwart and was tolerated by a still impressive Zulu power. Thus fundamentally the reasons for its existence must be traced to Mpande, whose motives are beyond archival reconstruction and whose acceptance of white neighbours — as he showed in the Klip River affair of 1847[11] — was by no means immutable. Natal was extended southwards in 1866, under the loyal but prosaic name of Alfred County. Zululand, formally annexed by Britain in 1887, was only absorbed by the colony a decade later, having itself been pushed northward into the Tsonga country only two years earlier. Victory in the Second Boer War added another fragment of former Zulu territory, the short-lived New Republic, in 1903. Seven years later, the colony became a province of the Union of South Africa, the terminal point in the coverage of Natal and Zululand. Thus the region which historians back-project had a complete and autonomous existence for just seven years. In that time it was shaken to its foundations by a major African uprising, while the central issue for its white community became, in effect, the terms on which the province would surrender to a wider union.
Yet what alternative title could describe the area under discussion? Not so long ago, a case might have been made for describing the area as 'the northern Nguni lands'. This would have the advantage of locating the white minority in a territory essentially defined by a series of interlinked African cultures, and would blur the issue of precise boundaries. However, if 'Nguni' has not yet followed 'Bantu' into the waste-disposal machine of apartheid, it is no longer so persuasive a classification, and Wright and Hamilton are specific in discarding it. Moreover, even as a definition of language groups, it has unsatisfactory, even dangerous overtones: the grouping of Nguni dialects, which were mutually comprehensible, into northern and southern languages was an academic classification.[12] Thus by implication, 'northern' and 'southern' Nguni were terms for 'Zulu' and 'Xhosa', and might by an awkward leap be seen as coded justification for asserting a parity between Inkatha and ANC. Yet the alternative embraced by Wright and Hamilton, the Phongolo-Mzimkhulu region, is not entirely satisfactory either. It is rather as if a slice of eastern England were to be arbitrarily categorised as the Wear-Waveney region. Moreover, as Laband shows, the Phongolo did not provide an effective frontier, except in the now-classic southern African definition as a zone of messy interpenetration.[13]
At a very practical level, Natal required definition. By 1872, forty per cent of the colony's revenue came from customs duties,[14] and tariffs require boundaries which are firm enough to be policed but permeable enough for trade. Here the choice by Wright and Hamilton of the Phongolo is revealing in another respect, for the river is actually a tributary of the Maputo, which reaches the sea to the north, at Delagoa Bay – beyond the formal boundaries even of 1903. Rather than allow ourselves to become fixated on precise boundary lines, it may be more helpful to picture Natal as an oblong block along the south-east coast of Africa. A possible key to understanding its history may lie in the appreciation that two sides of this rectangle were virtually closed, while the other two were relatively open and often fluid.
The Natal coast was, to a perhaps surprising extent, a sealed book. Archaeological evidence demonstrates that the coastal strip was relatively closely settled from earliest times,[15] thus indicating that the people who lived near the sea were a political factor, as may be witnessed by Shaka's decision to locate his kraal at Stanger. Yet the coastline itself was only marginally a strategic or political factor after the arrival of whites at Port Natal. In 1879, for instance, Chelmsford sent a column along the coast, but this was not an amphibious operation and its principal effect was to divert part of the Zulu forces from the main theatre of war in west-central Zululand.16[16] Two facts stand out about the Natal coast. First, Durban was the only real port between the eastern Cape and Lourenço Marques. Second, Durban itself was no natural harbour. Not until 1904 was it possible for a large steamship to cross the bar, after a seven-year dredging programme which had helped to overwhelm one local ministry. Lucille Heydenrych describes Natal as "a one-port colony" which was obliged to undertake "exceptionally heavy expenditure" on harbour facilities.[17] Since the white minority managed to pass a disproportionate share of the tax burden to the African majority, such investment had implications for race relations in the colony. Potential port facilities were virtually absent along remainder of the coastline. Names such as Port Durnford and Port Shepstone were poignant rather than predictive: a railway bridge on a branch line sealed the fate – or pronounced the elegy – of the latter. There is something faintly amusing about the concern of distant policy-makers in London in the early 1880s to "save a good port" from the Germans by planting the flag on the sandbar in the shallow estuary of St Lucia Bay.[18]
The almost closed nature of the Natal coast throws into relief the open-endedness of its northern flank. Delagoa Bay was the next real port to the north, and the history of southern Mozambique cannot effectively be separated from that of northern Natal (or, here, we should perhaps be more specific and refer to Natal-Zululand). Colenbrander shifts the perspective of the question of Zulu power under Dingane away from the confrontations with trekkers and Port Natal settlers on the southern flank towards relations with the Portuguese to the north.[19] Cobbing takes the process still further, firmly orienting his explanation for the growth of a Zulu empire towards Delagoa Bay, and emphasising defensive rather than expansionist factors.[20] Both Dingane, in the early 1830s, and Mpande twenty years later, were at the height of their authority when they dominated southern Mozambique or flanking territory in Swaziland and the eastern Transvaal. Later, the 1870s, the challenge to Cetshwayo's authority from Zibhebhu derived in part from the latter's access to the import of firearms which the Portuguese could not prevent.[21] Not surprisingly, Natal whites saw control of Lourenço Marques as the key to securing their own investment in Durban. When the partition of the Portuguese colonies seemed likely in 1898, they even offered to buy Delagoa Bay.[22] However, Milner preferred a weak colony to a contented one.
At the opposite end of the oblong, the back door into the Cape seems to have been a flank to which little importance was attached. Natal's principal interest seems to have been the elimination of smuggling, but beyond that the Transkei seems to have formed a mental and political block. The overland route was a poor link with the wider world: Dick King's legendary ride to Grahamstown to seek reinforcements in 1842 took ten days.[23] Similarly, the telegraph link to the Cape which opened in 1878 was probably of less importance than the submarine cable – via Suez and, of course, Delagoa Bay – to Europe.[24] Thompson's short essay on Alfred County in 1879 demonstrates that significant questions can be asked about the complex relationships in this south-western border area.[25]
Natal's long inland border with Lesotho and the Boer republics along the Drakensberg was the closest the colony had to a natural frontier, yet this side of the colony was in many respects its most open flank. This was partly explained by the inseparable interrelationship of African peoples. Herein probably lay the significance of Shepstone's confrontation with Langalibalale in 1873, an episode which arguably is understressed in Natal and Zululand: the Hlubi chief combined the strategic location and the personal prestige to become a rallying figure for Africans across a wide area of south-eastern African.[26] The interconnections of the "native" problem partly explain that most remarkably persistent phenomenon, Natal expansionism. Pretensions were advanced on behalf a settler population, which had reached only 30,000 in 1882, to absorb Basutoland and even the Transvaal in "Greater Natal".[27] Part of this stemmed from the grandiose ambitions of Theophilus Shepstone, whose aspirations for outreach stretched as far as Lobengula.[28] Yet later Natal politicians were attracted to wider unions too: as late as 1904, outright amalgamation with the Transvaal still seemed worth consideration.[29] Natal's dreams of political control over the interior were partly a reflection of its relative weakness in regard to the 'Overberg' trade which it so desperately needed.[30] Duminy and Guest capture one essence of the Natal identity created by the process of colonisation in their retrospect from 1910. "What had once been an inhospitable corner of the African continent was now recognizably an extension of Europe."[31] Yet even so, the Natal commercial economy was too small to matter greatly as an extension in its own right: an observer in 1883 dismissed the colony as "but a hanger-on of the Free State and the Transvaal".[32] Access to these markets, both political and technological, was crucial. As an official noted in 1881, what was distinctive about railway development in Natal was that it was intended "not for the development of agricultural settlement throughout the Colony, but to secure to the local merchants an import trade of goods principally not to be consumed within the colony".[33] For a small colony, Natal was energetic in developing its rail network: the prizes, of course, became much larger after 1886. The railway got as far as Ladysmith in 1886, and was pushed on to Dundee in 1890, giving a boost to the local coal industry.[34] Harrismith in the Free State became the temporary terminus in 1892, but Natal lost out to the Cape – and to Delagoa Bay – in tapping into the big prize, for the Rand was not reached until 1895,[35] leaving the colony "a suppliant for Transvaal favours".[36] Indeed, the 1894 convention which was the price of access was described by one English-language Johannesburg newspaper as "unnatural"[37] for it brought into conflict the British identity and imperial enthusiasms of the Natal white community with its stark need to cling economically to Afrikanerdom. More disastrous was the short-lived mirage – dispelled after the Boer War – that the railways could replace customs duties as the major source of government revenue. Natal briefly seemed to have realised its destiny as "a forwarding station with a kaffir location attached".[38] The advent of responsible government in 1893 probably speeded the processes which impoverished African agriculture,[39] and the whites realised too late – in 1906 – that there was no longer a minimal basis of African prosperity which could be tapped by taxation.[40]
The entity called Natal did exist, and affected in some way or another all the people who lived there — even if some Africans did complain that they only learnt about Shepstone's laws when they were thrown into prison for breaking them.[41] "Natal" can be used as a historical framework, provided it is employed with a sense of outward-looking interaction. Far from submerging the vital Zulu experience in a white-settler construct, such an approach is entirely in line with stimulating recent work which stresses response to external challenges rather than self-combusting internal revolution as the major reason for the sudden irruption of this new force in early nineteenth-century southern Africa.
One great attraction of the rise of the Zulu kingdom and the upheaval of the Mfecane, as portrayed in the work of scholars such as Omer-Cooper, was that it shifted the focus of study away from settlers and towards the "forgotten factor" of African history[42] – African people themselves. The Zulu were a self-created people, the product of an autochthonous African revolution, which triggered a mass scattering of peoples, as far the Zambesi and beyond. For historians, the only point of contention, so it seemed, was whether use the Nguni word Mfecane, or the parallel Sotho term Difaqane for the upheaval – in other words, whether the episode should be labelled by those who drove the process or those on the receiving end.[43]
It was, of course, noted that the Zulu constituted only one of a series of "states" or "confederacies" which congealed in the region in the years after 1800, and therefore some common background causes had to be identified. There were at least two attractive hypotheses for the political changes in African society in the region, population pressure and drought, but neither could be substantiated.[44] Even at the height of historians" fascination with the mfecane (for some denied that the term should be subjected to English capitalisation), the possibility was advanced that trade with Delagoa Bay was a factor in state formation, even if this pointed to an external, non-African element in the causal picture.[45] By 1989 Wright and Hamilton were prepared to argue, albeit tentatively, that demand for ivory encouraged the formation of new military structures and consequently larger political groupings to sustain them.[46] Cobbing took this process a bold step further, arguing that "we are not dealing with an 'elephant-hunting' state, nor one thrown up by environmental degradation, but with an emergency state hastily aggregated in response to a . . . deadly external menace".[47] In Cobbing's hypothesis, local confederacies sprang up in defensive response to large-scale slave-raiding from Delagoa Bay, as the advancing tentacles of the Atlantic slave-trade introduced a catastrophically disruptive element into the region. Cobbing's hypothesis was also a direct challenge to the notion of the Mfecane / Difaqane, for it inverted the relationship between the rise of the Zulu state and the disruption of peoples in the region: if the consolidation of a Zulu power was the result of a defensive response against slaving, then Shaka and Dingane could not be held primarily responsible for the upheaval which was going on around them – even if the Zulu themselves may incidentally have participated in slave-trading as a means of disposing of prisoners.[48]
Thus the basic notion of the Mfecane came under challenge. Cobbing argued that the term had in any case been inaccurately transcribed, and really means "famine",[49] but his real objection to it was that historians had allowed themselves to look at only selected parts of the wider region, through spectacles coloured by the narratives of white pioneers whom he bluntly charged with being themselves slave-runners manipulating the record to divert blame for the instability of African society on to the hapless Zulu.[50] Hence, to Cobbing, the Mfecane was not the kernel of an African-centred account of the region's formative history, but a pernicious white myth of black-on-black violence invented to legitimise conquest. It would appear that Cobbing's presentation at the 1990 Pietermaritzburg workshop aroused unusual controversy.[51] His closing announcement that the Mfecane is "to history what apartheid is to politics and people"[52] no doubt represented the logical culmination of his position, but it can hardly be described as tactful.
Cobbing's challenge has further encouraged a sharp examination of the memoirs of the "bold and merry crew"[53] of empire-builders, notably Isaacs and Fynn, and the early anthropology of Bryant, so long regarded the evidential foundations for any appreciation of the Zulu in their formative period.[54] Once the picture is removed from the pejorative cultural filter of the pioneer white chroniclers, it becomes possible to interpret most Zulu policy, not as inherently bloodthirsty or aggressive, but rather as defensively directed against forces which need to be viewed within a larger-scale Natal-highveld-Delagoa Bay context, one in which Dingane could easily perceive himself to be cornered. However, this view of the Zulu, as Colenbrander points out, only makes the more remarkable the "relative smoothness"[55] of Dingane's accession in 1828: some kind of Zulu identity and "state" structure must be assumed by this point. In turn, Mpande – "an underrated figure"[56] – and even the often derided Cetshwayo should be seen as able and flexible leaders, the more so if we follow Colenbrander in seeing the key to the mid-century Zulu experience as the steady collapse of the cattle economy under pressure from white penetration, at a time when the Zulu were becoming increasingly reliant on imported goods.[57]
What of Natal's other communities? Etherington and Lambert offer contrasting pictures of the gains and losses open to Africans in the later nineteenth century.[58] It may be a profitable to speculate how our views of Natal Africans, other than the Zulu, would change if we banned the dehumanising term "refugees" and took a leaf from the late twentieth-century book by substituting the label "economic migrants". Naturally, it suited paternalists like Shepstone to vaunt Natal as "the resort of refugees of all ranks from surrounding Tribes", rather than accept the possibility that the incomers had other motives for entering the colony.[59] Obviously, the consequences of failure were vastly greater for economic migrants fleeing from Shaka or the slavers than they might be for illegal immigrants or guest workers in the advanced industrial world, but equally bare survival might seem a prize comparable in its attraction to modern material prosperity. Ballard alludes to the raid mounted from Port Natal in 1838 by John Cane, in which over two thousand Africans ravaged Zulu villages, returning with four thousand head of cattle "and over 500 Zulu women and children, who were to be integrated into the Port Natal community as wives and labourers".[60] It would be useful to know more about the motives and sense of identity of the Port Natal Africans who were prepared to take on the fearsome Zulu, let alone what was involved in the "integration" process. According to Ballard, no fewer than "60,000 refugees" moved into the trekker republic between 1839 and 1842, causing "increased competition" for land.[61] It is well to remember that the trekkers might also be seen as refugees. As Etherington's analysis reminds us, some Africans embraced Christianity partly in the hope of improving their prospects in this world. May we not concede some autonomy of motive to the homeless and the uprooted as well?[62]
Thanks to Bhana and Brain, a good basic picture of the Natal Indians is available in the works under review, although one which makes clear that the notion of an 'Indian community' is one which owes more to white-derived ethnic prejudice than to any internal cohesion among the people themselves. There were Hindus and Muslims, indentured labourers and entrepreneurial traders, and they were drawn from most corners of the Indian sub-continent.[63] It would might be worthwhile to project the disparate pattern of the Natal Indians on to the colony's white population too, but oddly enough – since they exercised power and were the spearhead of the European economic penetration which was the "overriding feature" of the period culminating in 1910 – there is little discussion of the nature of the Natal white community.[64] Natal and Zululand betrays a common blind spot among historians, a tendency to overlook population statistics. For instance, only occasionally is the moral drawn that the whites were a very small minority alongside the African masses.[65] This made them a poor bet for responsible government, not least because they constituted a very small pool of political talent. Fewer than fifteen thousand voted in the 1909 referendum on Union, while in the general election of 1890 there was a popular vote majority of 184 for candidates favouring responsible government — out of 4121 votes cast.[66]
There are, however, two statistics which raise questions about the nature of the cohesiveness of the white community in Natal. First, they were surprisingly urban. In 1882 almost half the white population lived in the two main towns.[67] Although Durban and Pietermaritzburg were capable of taking opposite sides over responsible government, it is open to discussion how far the people of these two urban communities shared the values and lifestyles of families like the Methleys, attempting to establish themselves as gentry in the Natal Midlands.[68] Second, they were perhaps less British than they liked to make out. In 1911, with the total white population still short of the six-figure mark, the census found that around sixty percent had been born in South Africa, double the thirty percent who came from Britain. The South African-born included the Afrikaners of Utrecht and Vryheid, over ninety per cent of whom had voted for Union in 1909, as well as the Natal 'British'. Interestingly, one Natal white in every twenty had been born outside the Empire.[69] From 1910 and 1961 a sizeable section of the whites fought for what they called the "maintenance of the old Natal way of life", seeking to defend provincial autonomy and sometimes to demand outright secession. They built their claim to identity around their Britishness, fighting first for the flag and later for the monarchy. Thompson's detailed study is softened by an autumnal sympathy for their hopeless rearguard action, although even the author's patience is tried at times. There was a persistent unreality about the identification with a country thousands of miles away. The historian has no entitlement to object if a politician should choose to describe himself "a South African born and bred . . . but he was yet an Englishman",[70] but it is fair to point out that Sir George Leuchars seems to have had a Scottish surname. The curious introversion of the Natal whites is underlined by their apparent lack of awareness of the province's African majority: whereas in Canada and New Zealand, the British Crown has been claimed (if usually inaccurately) to have a direct relationship with indigenous peoples, the misty-eyed Natal whites never seemed able to see beyond the romantic Englishness of the monarchy. Thompson handles such eccentricities as the Horticulturalists (a cell-based secret movement opposed to an Afrikaner republic) and the pro-monarchist Freedom Radio with commendable solemnity. There is a danger that white people are becoming the new forgotten factor in the history of Natal. This may not only weaken our overall appreciation of the region's past, but also may make the subject a little less entertaining.
Brave Men's Blood is a splendidly produced history of the Zulu War of 1879, mainly from the British point of view, and concentrating on the campaigns themselves. One excellent feature of Knight's book is the way in which illustrations are linked to text, and their strengths and shortcomings as contemporary evidence explained to the reader. The essays by Laband and Thompson also deal with the military side of the conflict, but begin the exploration of Zulu motives and policy which Laband has now taken further in Kingdom in Crisis. Many of the twelve contributions to Enterprise and Exploitation will appeal more to specialists in economic history than to the general reader: sheep, sugar and coal are covered, along with economic conditions, transportation changes and the settler impact on the environment.[71] Natal and Zululand is handsomely produced, and brings together fifteen scholars in sixteen chapters: fortunate the undergraduates who can study from such a text. The Debate on Zulu Origins is at the other end of the production spectrum: it reproduces seven of the papers given at the workshop in their original formats.
Writing in 1990, Duminy and Guest suggested that the 1970s and 1980s were a "golden age" in the writing of Natal history, and predicted that in the decade ahead, pressure on resources would circumscribe research, while intellectual debate would become less challenging since it would be impossible to match the impact of new methodology and radical questioning which had been the hallmark of the previous period.[72] They may have been unduly pessimistic. Four of the volumes under review are collaborative efforts, involving twenty-nine scholars in total. Surnames suggest that there are no Africans among them. It would be a patronising form of racism to imply that the historical discipline will produce different results merely because the fingers typing into the word-processor are black, but at present we hardly know what kind of perspectives, shared or diverse, will be contributed or what sources tapped when Zulu start publishing overviews of Natal history. However, the continuing need for a concept of Natal history may be confidently asserted, and indeed its role may become clearer if the current decade brings about the virtual dismantling of both provincial and homeland structures. Clearly, more research is needed, but perhaps even more necessary is an overview, which is individual rather than team-driven, a more personal interpretation which can stimulate, provoke, even offend. There are at least twenty-nine candidates for the task, and a fascinating, fluid and infuriating cockpit of Europeanised Africa waiting to be analysed.
ENDNOTES
[1] Edgar H. Brookes and Colin de B. Webb, A History of Natal (Pietermaritzburg, 1967), esp. 1. There was a second edition in 1987.
[2] Quoted, Andrew Duminy and Bill Guest, "Introduction", Natal and Zululand [cited as N&Z], xix. The review was published in 1970.
[3] Donald R. Morris, The Washing of the Spears (New York, 1965); J.D. Omer-Cooper, The Zulu Aftermath: A Nineteenth-Century Revolution in Bantu Africa (London, 1966); Jeff Guy, The Destruction of the Zulu Kingdom: The Civil War in Zululand 1879-1884 (London, 1979); John Laband, Kingdom in Crisis: The Zulu Response to the British Invasion of 1879 (Pietermaritzburg, 1992); Shula Marks, Reluctant Rebellion: The 1906-8 Disturbances in Natal (Oxford, 1970); David Welsh, The Roots of Segregation: Native Policy in Colonial Natal, 1845-1910 (Cape Town, 1971); Benjamin Kline, British African Policy in the Colony of Natal 1845-1893 (Lanham, Md, 1988). In reviewing Laband's book in Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, xxi (1993), 466-7, Norman Etherington offered the intriguing speculation "that at Ulundi Zulu soldiers offered themselves as a sacrifice" to give the British a victory that would stop their scorched-earth policy.
[4] Julian Cobbing, "Grasping the Nettle: The Slave Trade and the Early Zulu", in Debate on Zulu Origins [cited as Debate], 22.
[5] J.P.C. Laband, "Humbugging the General? King Cetshwayo's Peace Overtures During the Anglo-Zulu War", in Kingdom and Colony at War, 45-67; Laband, Kingdom in Crisis, 18-45.
[6] Merriman used the phrase twice in 1907-8. P. Lewsen (ed.), Selections from the Correspondence of John X. Merriman 1905-1924 (Cape Town, 1969), 43, 88, and cf. his reference to "those fools in Natal" (1907), and "the smallest, but certainly the most troublesome and obstructive of our partners" in 1909, ibid., 56, 116. For episodes in which Natal whites appear politically naive, see, e.g., L.M. Thompson, The Unification of South Africa 1902-1910 (Oxford, 1960), 41-9, and W.K. Hancock, Smuts: The Fields of Force 1919-1950 (Cambridge, 1968), 456 ff.
[7] Natalians First, 124.
[8] Duminy and Guest, "Introduction", N&Z, xxii, xxv.
[9] Paul Forsyth, "Manipulating the Past: The Political Use of History by Chief A.N.M.G. Buthelezi", Debate, paper 7. (This volume does not have consecutive pagination).
[10] Brookes and Webb, History of Natal, 3-4, discuss da Gama, who is absent from N&Z. Maps in N&Z, 92, 98, 124 and 306 illustrate the varying boundaries of Natal. Cobbing uses the "amoeba" image to describe the changing shape of the Zulu state, "Grasping the Nettle", 12.
[11] N&Z, 100-1.
[12] John Wright and Carolyn Hamilton, "Traditions and Transformations: The Phongolo-Mzimkhulu Region in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries", N&Z, 54-5, largely following Shula Marks, "The Traditions of the Natal 'Nguni': A Second Look at the Work of A.T. Bryant", in Leonard Thompson (ed.), African Societies in Southern Africa (London, 1969), 126-44. For language classification, Monica Wilson, "The Nguni People", in Monica Wilson and Leonard Thompson, The Oxford History of South Africa: i, South Africa to 1870 (Oxford, 1969), 75-6.
[13] J.P.C. Laband, "Mbilini, Manyonyoba and the Phongolo River Frontier: A Neglected Sector of the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879", Kingdom and Colony, 183.
[14] N&Z, 175.
[15] Ibid., 39-40.
[16] Brave Men's Blood, 43 ff. Laband believes that the Zulu did expect a British landing between the Thukela mouth and St Lucia Bay. Kingdom in Crisis, 58-9.
[17] Lucille Heydenrych, "Port Natal Harbour, c. 1850-1897", Enterprise and Exploitation in a Victorian Colony [cited as E&E], 17-45, esp. 40.
[18] "I thought St Lucia Bay was the only harbour along that coast?", the Colonial Secretary, Lord Derby, noted with irritation on being urged that he must annex the whole of Zululand. In 1823 Farewell had lost three men in two unsuccessful attempts to land there, and had switched his operations to Port Natal. James Stuart and D.McK. Malcolm (eds), The Diary of Henry Francis Fynn (Pietermaritzburg, 1969), 52-3. Modern South Africa has built an entirely new deep-water port at Richards Bay on the Natal north coast.
[19] Peter Colenbrander, "The Zulu Kingdom, 1828-79", N&Z, 87-8.
[20] Cobbing, "Grasping the Nettle", Debate.
[21] Laband, Kingdom in Crisis, 63. The firearms were not in fact very effective, ibid., 64. The Fenians considered supplying ammunition to the Zulu through Delagoa Bay. W. O'Brien and D. Ryan (eds), Devoy's Post Bag, 1871-1928 (2 vols, Dublin, 1948), ii, 408-11.
[22] N&Z, 331-2. The British had sought Portuguese permission to send troops through Delagoa Bay to establish a northern front in the Zulu War. Laband, Kingdom in Crisis, 58.
[23] Brookes and Webb, History of Natal, 39; N&Z, 123.
[24] N&Z, 304.
[25] P.S. Thompson, "The Griqua and Mpondo Marches: Natal's Southern Border During the Anglo-Zulu War", Kingdom and Colony, 217-25: See also B.A. Le Cordeur, "Natal and the Transkei, to 1879", Christopher Saunders and Robin Derricourt (eds), Beyond the Cape Frontier: Studies in the History of the Transkei and Ciskei (London, 1974), 163-84.
[26] N&Z, 151-5, 183-5; W.R. Guest, Langalibalale: The Crisis in Natal, 1873-1875 (Durban, 1975).
[27] De Kiewiet's phrase in Cambridge History of the British Empire: vii, South Africa (Cambridge, 1936), 421. See also John Benyon, Proconsul and Paramountcy in South Africa: The High Commission, British Supremacy and the Sub-Continent 1806-1910 (Pietermaritzburg, 1980), 73-5, 93-77.
[28] N&Z, 177.
[29] Thompson, Unification of South Africa, 48-9.
[30] Bill Guest, "The New Economy", N&Z, 305-11; Ritchie Ovendale, "The Politics of Dependence, 1893-9", N&Z, 324-44.
[31] Andrew Duminy and Bill Guest, "The Anglo-Boer War and its Economic Aftermath, 1899-1910", N&Z, 345-72, esp. 366-7.
[32] Correspondent of the Natal Witness, 1883, quoted E&E, 47.
[33] Colonial Office minute, 1881, quoted ibid.
[34] Ruth Edgecombe and Bill Guest, "An Introduction to the Pre-Union Natal Coal Industry'", E&E, 313-15.
[35] Hein Heydenrych, "Railway Development in Natal to 1895", E&E, 47-69.
[36] N&Z, 311.
[37] Johannesburg Star, 1894, quoted N&Z, 326-7. Cf. Ritchie Ovendale, "Profit or Patriotism: Natal, the Transvaal, and the Coming of the Second Anglo-Boer War", Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, viii (1980), 209-34.
[38] Merriman, quoted Brookes and Webb, History of Natal, 68.
[39] John Lambert, "The Impoverishment of the Natal Peasantry, 1893-1910", E&E, 287-307; "From Independence to Rebellion: African Society in Crisis, c. 1880-1910", N&Z, 373-401.
[40] By 1904 the average per capita income for whites was £124.49, for blacks £3.925. N&Z, 367.
[41] N&Z, 173.
[42] L.M. Thompson, "The Forgotten Factor in Southern African History", Thompson (ed.), African Societies in Southern Africa, 1-23.
[43] Thompson used "Difaqane" (Oxford History of South Africa, i, 391ff) following W.F. Lye, "The Difaqane: The Mfecane in the Southern Sotho Area, 1822-24", Journal of African History, viii (1967), 107-31.
[44] The hypotheses are discussed, and dismissed, by Cobbing, "Grasping the Nettle", 9, and by Wright and Hamilton, N&Z, 59-61. Omer-Cooper, Zulu Aftermath, 25-7 assumed the demographic explanation, and archaeological evidence is consistent with a rising population in the early nineteenth century; Tim Maggs, "The Iron Age Farming Communities", N&Z, 42-3. See also Jeff Guy, "Ecological Factors in the Rise of Shaka and the Zulu Kingdom", in Shula Marks and Anthony Atmore (eds), Economy and Society in Pre-Industrial South Africa (London, 1980), 102-19, and Charles Ballard, "Drought and Economic Distress: South Africa in the 1800s", Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xvii, (1986), 359-78.
[45] Alan Smith, "The Trade of Delagoa Bay as a Factor in Nguni Politics 1750-1835", in Thompson (ed.), African Societies, 171-89,
[46] N&Z, 63.
[47] Cobbing, "Grasping the Nettle", 12.
[48] Ibid., 13. Cobbing bases his case partly on two references in Fynn's memoirs, both of which seem to refer not to the Zulu but to Africans living around Delagoa Bay. Stuart and Malcolm (eds), Fynn Diary, 48, 270.
[49] The meaning was discussed by Kevin Carlean in "Myths of the Mfecane and South African Educational Texts", Debate, 3-4. Thompson (Oxford History, i, 391) translates Difaqane as "forced migration". Davenport gives "hammering" for Difaqane and "crushing" for Mfecane, with a broader meaning of "total war". T.R.H. Davenport, South Africa: A Modern History (London, 1977), 10.
[50] Cobbing's paper develops the arguments in his article, "The Mfecane as Alibi: Thoughts on Dikhathong and Mbolompo", Journal of African History, xxix (1988), 504-13. Wright and Hamilton also accept that Natal "was only one of the several quite separate epicentres of political instability . . . in south-east Africa", and that to focus on upheavals around the Zulu "is to give a greatly distorted view of the forces ... shaping the region's history". N&Z, 69.
[51] Graham Dominy calls the mood of the discussion "intense, provocative and even confrontational", "Myths, Manipulations and Nettles: Historians and the Shaping of the Mfecane Controversy. A Critical Introduction", Debate, 2.
[52] Cobbing, "Grasping the Nettle", 19, and cf. Dominy, "Myths, Manipulations", 4.
[53] A.T. Bryant, quoted J. Pridmore, "The Production of H.F. Fynn, c. 1830-1850", Debate, 24.
[54] Pridmore, "Production of Fynn"; Dan Wylie, "Utilizing Isaacs: One Thread in the Development of the Shaka Myth"; John Wright, "A.T. Bryant and 'The Wars of Shaka'", Debate. Misprints have persistent legacies. In 1949 H.C. Lugg described Bryant as a graduate of "Birbeck" College, London. "Foreword", A.T. Bryant, (Pietermaritzburg, 1949), ix. Cf. N&Z, 50.
[55] N&Z, 85.
[56] Ibid., 107 (Colenbrander), but see John Wright and Ruth Edgecombe, "Mpande kaSenzangakhona c.1798-1872", in Christopher Saunders (ed.), Black Leaders in Southern Africa (London, 1979), 45-60.
[57] Peter Colenbrander, "External Exchange and the Zulu Kingdom: Towards a Re-assessment", E&E, 99-119.
[58] Norman Etherington, "Christianity and African Society in Nineteenth-Century Natal", and Lambert, "From Independence to Rebellion", N&Z, 275-301, 373-401.
[59] Quoted, N&Z, 177.
[60] Ibid., 121-2.
[61] Ibid., 122-3.
[62] Ibid., 283. For an example of a label to which white society attached low status as a focus of pride among Africans, see Keletso E. Atkins, "Origins of the Amawasha: The Zulu Washermen's Guild in Natal, 1850-1910", Journal of African History, xxvii (1986), 41-57.
[63] Surendra Bhana, "Indian Trade and Trader in Colonial Natal", E&E, 235-63; Joy Brain, "Indentured and Free Indians in the Economy of Colonial Natal", E&E, 199-233; Joy Brain,"Natal's Indians, 1860-1910: From Co-operation, through Competition, to Conflict", N&Z, 249-74. Two recent articles considerably extend the topic: Vishnu Padayachee and Robert Morrell, "Indian Merchants and Dukawallahs in the Natal Economy c.1875-1914", Journal of Southern African Studies, xvii (1991), 71-102, and Bill Freund, "Indian Women and the Changing Character of the Working Class Indian Household in Natal 1860-1990", ibid., xvii (1991), 414-29.
[64] N&Z, xxiv. Elsewhere, the editors accept that the subject "demands attention". Andrew Duminy and Bill Guest, "Natal Historical Writing During the Last Two Decades: A Conspectus", Debate, 6-8. A New Zealand historian has recently challenged the appropriateness of terms such as 'community' as descriptions of settler societies, which may also be seen as rootless, atomistic and anarchic. Miles Fairbum, The Ideal Society and Its Enemies: The Foundations of Modern New Zealand Society 1850-1900 (Auckland, 1989). For a discussion of collective white psychology, Norman Etherington, "Natal's Black Rape Scare of the 1870s", Journal of Southern African Studies, xv (1988), 36-53.
[65] E.g., N&Z, 234. Figures for the settler population are given almost incidentally for 1879 (194) and 1882 (375).
[66] The turnout in the 1891 election was around 50 per cent, and even the 1909 referendum only reached 58 per cent. N&Z 140-1; Natalians First, 5-9, 177-80. Natal had a colour-myopic franchise. In 1907, 99.1 percent of registered voters were white, and only six Africans had the vote. Thompson, Unification of South Africa, 110-11.
[67] N&Z, 375.
[68] Graham Dominy, "The Methleys of the Natal Midlands: The Making of a Colonial Gentry", Natal Museum Journal of Humanities, xi (1990), 163-81.
[69] Natalians First, 1-2. See also V.S. Harris, "The Klip River Dutch Community 1843-1899", Journal of Natal and Zulu History, vii (1984), 1-10.
[70] Quoted, ibid., 18. One of the two representatives of the Natal 'British' in the first Union cabinet, C. O'Grady Gubbins, was from County Limerick.
[71] Guest and Sellers will shortly publish a sequel, Receded Tides of Empire: Aspects of the Economic and Social History of Natal and Zululand since 1910. [This volume appeared later in 1994.]
[72] Duminy and Guest, "Natal Historical Writing During the Last Two Decades", 6-8.