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

mfecane narrative. He regarded Shaka and his Zulu state as the ultimate cause
of all the human suffering of that era.
These changes of emphasis influenced most historians writing in the twentieth
century. As Saunders has observed, ’no writer before Theal had presented a
picture of quite such destruction and devastation flowing from Shaka’s
conquests; his narrative, which was dull and lifeless on most topics, came alive
at this point. Clearly he wished to leave his readers with an image of black
barbarism at its most extreme’ and thus wrote of ‘a torrent of invasion’ and a
land ‘covered with skeletons’. 105 The above-mentioned three innovations were
already fully developed by 1885 and were then incorporated entirely into his
flagship publication, the multi-volume History of South Africa, with only minor
adjustments over the next thirty years. Theal chose, despite the fact that he
spent these years on documentary research, to adhere to his ideas on the
mfecane which he formed in the mid-1880’s, ideas based in the main on
previous secondary sources. Some findings from his work on documents were
incorporated in his mfecane history chapters, above all in the second and third
series of his History, such as the stories of the Gaza, Ngoni and Swazi
chiefdoms. His legacy then was a southern Africa-wide, mfecane narrative,
which was already larger than the sum of its parts and merely needed to be
given a name. The term mfecane was, however, coined only in 1928, in the first
ever South African university history textbook written by Walker. 106
Against the background of rapid British imperial conquest and control over
African societies in southern Africa in the period covered in this chapter, an
ever-increasing number of publications were dedicated to at least some aspects
of the African past, in particular to the mfecane. More research was done by
authors in libraries and archives, and more oral information was collected than
was the case in earlier periods. Nonetheless, very little original thought can be
found in works on the mfecane. Rather, it is evident that the dominant discourse
105 Saunders, ‘Pre-Cobbing Mfecane’, 22-23.
106 Walker, History of South Africa, 164, 210, 226. Babrow, 'Theal: Conflicting Opinions of Him',
10.
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