The Historiographical Development of the Concept “mfecane” and ...

Cape Colony back to Britain in 1884. By 1894 the Mpondo chiefdom, and by
1895 British Bechuanaland, were annexed to the Cape Colony and in the same
year Swaziland became a de facto dependency of the Z.A.R. Thus the last
independent African states were incorporated into the various colonies and lost
their sovereignty. 7
In the aftermath of the gold rush of 1884 to 1886, which took place in the area
soon to become known as Johannesburg, Britain’s interest in southern Africa as
a whole was stimulated. This was opposed by the Kruger government in the
Z.A.R. During the 1890’s a set of complex interactions, based on increasingly
irreconcilable differences between Britain and the Cape and Natal colonies on
the one hand and the Z.A.R. and the Orange Free State on the other, led to the
outbreak of the South African War of 1899 to 1902. The boer republics were
subsequently defeated after a prolonged guerrilla war and became British
colonies. From 1903, officials from Britain, as well as from the four colonies -
Cape, Natal, Transvaal and Orange Free State - shifted their attention from the
conquest of African territories towards a uniform administration of all Africans in
the new Union of South Africa of 1910. 8
This period (1877-1904) saw an acceleration in the development of a ”scientific”
world-view in Europe, which Stepan has summarised as follows,
By the middle of the nineteenth century, a complex edifice of
thought about human races had been developed in science that
was sometimes explicitly, but more often implicitly, racist. That is
7 Davenport, South Africa, 137-61, 192-198. Schreuder, Scramble for Southern Africa, 61-63,
68, 75-87, 91-9,103-06, 107-08. Also C.C. Crais, The Making of the Colonial Order: White
Supremacy and Black Resistance in the Eastern Cape, 1770-1865 (Johannesburg, 1992). N.
Mostert, Frontiers: The Epic of South Africa’s Creation and the Tragedy of the Xhosa People
(London, 1992). C.C. Saunders, 'The Annexation of the Transkei', in Saunders et al.(ed),
Beyond the Cape Frontier, 185-98. Delius, Land Belongs to Us. A. Duminy and C. Ballard (eds),
The Anglo-Zulu War: New Perspectives (Pietermaritzburg, 1981). S.J. Gill, A Short History of
Lesotho (Morija, 1993). Shillington, Colonization of Southern Tswana. Bonner, Kings.
8 Cobbing, ‘Ndebele under Khumalos'. Davenport, South Africa, 202-31. J. Stuart, The History of
the Zulu Rebellion, 1906, 2 Vols. (London, 1913).
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