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

etween fiction and fact. 98 An example of this was his fascination with
cannibals, who were said to have been the sole survivors in Natal’s
depopulation. He also had cannibals roaming the mountains, kloofs and fields of
the greater Caledon Valley area. The only African Theal had rising above the
perceived barbarity of the “African race” during those years was Moshoeshoe -
the standard view held since Arbousset in the 1840’s. 99 He also accepted the
French author’s three-period hypothesis for the greater Caledon Valley area:
the period of peace, the period of wars during the invasions from Natal, and the
new period of peace brought by the missionaries. Theal’s approach to
contradictory evidence was either to ignore it, or to explain it in such a way as to
give it a different meaning. For example, he played down evidence in
documents and books for devastating attacks by groups of mounted Griqua,
Bastaard or Kora raiders in which Sotho-Tswana women and children were
captured and sold as slaves to the large slave markets in the Cape Colony. His
interpretation of this evidence was that the blood-thirsty African invaders from
Zululand had caused the major devastations in the Transgariep, thus making it
possible for the partially-civilised armed raiders to wreak their lesser destruction
on an already devastated local population. Theal used missionaries’ accounts of
the 1830’s as corroborative evidence. 100
Theal’s shorter, single-volume works were summaries of his History of South
Africa and were intended for the popular market. He drew the lines of his
arguments more sharply in these shorter texts, above all with regards to the
mfecane. Theal centred the latter on the idea that ‘in all history ancient or
modern, there is no name with which more ruthless bloodshed is associated
than with that of Tshaka chief of the Zulus’. 101 In these shorter texts, Wylie
pointed out that ‘Theal establishes the trend in which the history of the early
Zulu is effectively the biography of Shaka – the trend continues’ to the
98 Wylie, Savage Delight, 189.
99 Theal, History of Boers, 29-30, 35-9, 42, 44. Theal, History of South Africa, Third Series, VI,
345-6. Arbousset et al., Narrative of an Exploratory Tour.
100 Theal, History of Boers, 42, 50. See Richner, ‘Eastern Frontier Slaving'. E.A. Eldredge,
‘Slaving Across the Cape Frontier’, in Eldredge et al., Slavery in South Africa, 93-126.
101 Theal, Progress of South Africa, 169.
138