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

particularly after Omer-Cooper published The Zulu Aftermath in 1966 6 . It
described a nineteenth-century racist myth which Omer-Cooper de-racialised
and recast as creative African energy channelled into African nation building.
Until the 1980’s authors just repeated Omer-Cooper and there was little
challenge to the validity of the mfecane. 7 This because mfecane history has
over the century of its development, 1823 to 1928, assumed the permanency of
a paradigm, which itself was based on the European “Image of Africa”, both as
regards the term mfecane and the way this history was constructed. A paradigm
which made sense to the authors and their readers, and enabled the former to
base their work on it in spite of their ideological commitments. 8 Or as Wright
puts it, ‘liberals, radicals, African nationalists, and Afrikaner nationalists remain
in an unlikely, if unwitting, alliance, some propounding, some accepting, some
bypassing, but virtually none challenging the validity of the notion of the
mfecane’. 9
Cobbing was the first historian to completely reject both the term and the
narrative which defined the mfecane in a prominent academic journal in the late
1980’s. 10 ‘He challenged the long-standing orthodoxy that the destabilisation in
the “Natal” and interior regions in the first four decades of the nineteenth
6 J.D. Omer-Cooper, The Zulu Aftermath: A Nineteenth Century Revolution in Bantu Africa
(London, 1966).
7 J. Cobbing, 'Zulu Amabutho and Production: Some Preliminary Questions', Paper - Rhodes
University, 1977. W. Wörger, ‘Clothing Dry Bones: the Myth of Shaka’, Journal of African
Studies, 4 (1979), 144-58. M. Cornevin, Apartheid: Power and Historical Falsification (Paris,
1980). V.E. Satir [H. Jaffe], 'The Difaqane: Fact vs. Fiction: Colonial Dispossession', The
Educational Journal (September 1983).
8 T.S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolution (2nd. edition, Chicago, 1970). A. Forster-
Carter, ‘From Rostow to Gunder Frank: Conflicting Paradigms in the Analysis of
Underdevelopment’, World Development, 4 (March 1976), 167-171. M. Van Wyk Smith, ‘The
Emplotment of Ethnicity: The Narrative Politics of Othering’, Paper - Rhodes University, April
1993, 8. For Richner see Footnote no. 14.
9 J. Wright, 'Political Mythology and the Making of Natal's Mfecane', Canadian Journal of African
Studies, 23 (1989), 285.
10 J. Cobbing, 'The Mfecane as Alibi: Thoughts on Dithakong and Mbolompo', Journal of African
History, 29 (1988).
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