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

in this chapter. The influence of Theal, Cory and above all Walker on the
understanding of the dominant discourse of the mfecane narrative by
generations of students and academics alike deep into the twentieth century
cannot be underestimated.
In this chapter two types of texts have been examined. The majority were
written by amateur historians from Europe, among whom missionaries and
colonial administrators, both active and retired, predominated. Mostly they had
not adopted Theal’s Zulu-centric, geographically-integrated mfecane narrative,
and their focus was only on one geographic or ethnographic area. The main
texts - Macgregor, Ellenberger, Whiteside, Native Affairs, War Office, Molema,
Mziki - can be called “antiquarian” along with those of Bryant and Stuart for
whom the terms had been originally coined. While the antiquarian texts were a
dead-end development, which made no progress beyond 1929, their influence
on future historians was significant, and they were regarded as trusted
specialists from whom many details could be culled. In contrast a minority of
books with a general, South African-wide focus, including the one by the only
academic historian, reflected Theal’s Zulu-centric, geographically-integrated
mfecane narrative. They bequeathed this mfecane narrative in the form of a
dominant racist, anti-African discourse, reduced to one page and named
Mfecane by Walker, to the rest of the twentieth century. The methodology of
most of these writers was an endless recycling of ideas from previously
published materials. Education, which expanded under the various Union
governments, required new history textbooks in both English and
Dutch/Afrikaans. Many were supplied, a number also by authors examined in
this chapter, whose Zulu-centric, geographically-integrated mfecane ideas
influenced generations of English- and Afrikaans-speaking South Africans as
well as those Africans to whom a school education was available.
Considerably fewer books on the mfecane narrative were published in
European languages other than English in this period. This is due to the decline
in interest in missionary activities in Europe as well as to the fact that
missionaries tended to publish increasingly in English. In the aftermath of the
South-African War, Dutch-speaking authors were concerned mostly with
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