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

information on the mfecane from the relevant texts, but to embed it critically
within the context of published works and their authors. An extensive survey
has been undertaken of books, pamphlets, articles in newspapers, magazines
and journals, and other publications, and only a very few primary sources are
used. As is apparent in every chapter of this thesis, mfecane history - until 1928
- was constructed and developed in the English language, the ‘master code’ as
Tisani defined it. 20 Works in other European and in African languages had a
negligible impact on the developing narrative. It is for this reason, and not due
to an inherent interest in white writers, that this thesis focuses mostly on the
published works of white, male, English-speaking authors.
The European “Image of Africa”.
The answer to the question of how mfecane history was able to become such
an orthodox discourse by 1928 has several facets. As indicated above its nature
as a paradigm on the one hand and as a discourse on the other are part of the
answer. A third and most important aspect is that mfecane history was written
against the background of what Curtin called the European “Image of Africa”,
itself a long-established discourse. 21 This "Image" originated from European
interaction with West Africans in the process of the Atlantic slave trade.
According to Curtin, the European “Image of Africa” was essentially a
‘combination of attitudes, values and theory about the world’, 22 whereby
Europeans applied the concept of “Othering”, regarding themselves in a positive
light and Africans negatively. By the early nineteenth century, the eighteenth-
century idea of the “noble savage”, who was said to have lived innocently in
peace, had changed into that of the “ignoble savage” characterised by
barbarism. As Hammond and Jablow put it, ‘the noble savage epitomised the
ideal of British Character, the beastly savage was its anti-thesis’. 23 According to
Curtin, the above ideas formed ‘the ground work … for the racial doctrines
20 Tisani, ‘Xhosa Historiography’, v.
21 P.D. Curtin, The Image of Africa: British Ideas in Action, 1780-1850 (Madison, 1964). The
European “Image of Africa” is analogous to Orientalism. See Said, Orientalism.
22 Curtin, Image of Africa, viii.
23 D. Hammond and A. Jablow, The Africa That Never Was: Four Centuries of British Writing
About Africa (New York, 1970), 26.
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