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

including their livestock and sometimes also their wives and children, as
punishment for a crime. 50 In the other examples it was reported that an
aggressor chiefdom was “eating up” or “devouring” the land or certain
chiefdoms. Here the idiom stood for raiding, stealing of livestock as well as
other food, and thus bringing hardship to the victims. 51 The practice of seeing
cannibals in the mfecane narrative is thus based on a priori ideas from the
European “Image of Africa”, which was activated through the literal translation
of the idiom “eating up”, reaching its gothic excess in Ellenberger’s gruesome
calculation of 300 000 Sotho-speaking people being eaten during the six worst
years of the mfecane by four thousand “cannibals”. 52
There is also a connection between cannibalism and slavery in the mfecane
literature. An analysis of nursery tales from the Transkei of 1875 shows that
cannibals in Xhosa oral literature abducted only girls and young women,
ostensibly to “eat” them, but in reality they were put to work and thus were
actually slaves. 53 This was also reported by Wangemann, who found in Pedi
oral literature cannibals stealing people allegedly as a food source. But
escapees reported that they were put to work and not eaten. 54 Callaway in his
book on oral literature of Natal in 1867 went on to state the logical conclusion
that, ‘it is probable that the native accounts of cannibals are for the most part,
the traditional record of incursions of foreign slave hunters’. He then explained
that for Africans something that is eaten is utterly wasted and the extraction of
slaves from a society was seen as equivalent to being eaten. 55 Ayliff, in his
50 Isaacs, Travels and Adventures, II, 49.
51 See Footnote no. 39. Isaacs, Travels and Adventures, I, 139-140. Arbousset et al., Narrative
of an Exploratory Tour, 54-79, 271, 287, map.
52 Ellenberger, History of Basuto, 222-25. He assumed arbitrarily that there were 4 000
cannibals living in the greater Caledon Valley area, each eating one person per month, which
equals 48 000 people per year times 6 years = 300 000 people eaten.
53 T. ‘Kaffir Nursery Tales’, The Cape Monthly Magazine, 9 to 10 (October 1874 - July 1875). T
was possibly Theal, see the discussion in connection with Mhlanga, ‘Story of Native Wars’, 248-
52, in Chapter 4.
54 Wangemann, Lebensbilder, 95-100.
55 Callaway, Nursery Tales, 159.
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