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

the material differently or have embellished upon it, few have added more to our
knowledge of the Mfengu’. 75
The Ndebele and the chiefdoms of the Transvaal
None of the accounts considered in this section adopted the term
Difakane/Lifaqane; and, with the exception of Molema, none had absorbed the
Zulu-centric, geographically-integrated mfecane narrative. They worked with the
older version and centred on past events in the Transvaal. Several authors
concentrated on the Sotho-Tswana speaking chiefdoms, with Winter writing on
the Pedi state and three other authors exploring the history of the Ndebele.
None of the works adhered to Arbousset’s three-period hypothesis. All the
accounts concentrated on the impact of the Ndebele on the Transvaal
chiefdoms, which they reported, surprisingly, was much less catastrophic than
was previously thought.
The four texts examined here constitute collections of micro-histories of the
Transvaal chiefdoms. While they are similar to those of Macgregor, three of the
texts could not have been influenced by him as they were also published in
1905. However, they all had the anthropological methodology of intensive
examination of small chiefdoms in common. The texts referred to are that of
Stow, two government publications referred to as Native Affairs and War Office,
as well as the work by Molema, a Tswana-speaking medical student in Scotland
who published in 1920. While it is to be expected that the two official
publications aimed to assist Native Affairs officials in administering Africans, it is
surprising that Molema had the same motive when he dedicated his book ‘to
members of the governing race, [for whom] some knowledge of the governed
race, their mind and manners seems necessary’. 76 The book published by the
Transvaal Department of Native Affairs was the only one of these texts which
included detailed genealogies, which were an important source for Ellenberger’s
work. The mass of details in the micro-histories may be confusing, as in
Macgregor and Whiteside. The information presented in the micro-histories was
75 Moyer, ‘History of Mfengu’, 15.
76 Molema, Bantu Past and Present (reprinted, Cape Town, 1963), vii.
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