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

account of Fingo history for Governor Cathcart of 1853, went considerably
further when he wrote that he was ‘inclined to fear that the hellish practice of the
slave trade thus begun on this [Natal] coast, was the origin of those wars which
have nearly produced the entire extinction of the African tribes of this
Continent’. 56 The European slave trade’s impact on West African societies has
been significant and is well-documented. 57 Eighteenth century West African
descriptions such as this one by Atkins - ‘if he [the chief] cannot obtain a
sufficient number of Slaves that way, he marches an Army, and depopulates …
commit[ing] great Depredations inland’ 58 - are part of the historical record.
However, in mfecane history, the link between slave raiding and the reported
depredations was, with a few exceptions 59 , never made by nineteenth or
twentieth century authors or historians until the 1980’s. The ideas by Cobbing
and others from the late 1980’s, that the events described in the mfecane
narrative have to be re-examined in the context of the impact of the slave trade
on African societies were foreshadowed by the above nineteenth century
writers.
Results
The historiographical analysis of the works considered in this thesis yielded
three significant results. Most authors repeated the ideas of previously
published works. Many of the authors who claimed to have relied on African oral
materials in fact based their work on published information. Throughout the
56 (CL) MS 15 543 Sketch of Fingo History for Cathcart by John Ayliff, c.1853, quoted in
Webster, ‘Unmasking Fingo', 255.
57 T.F. Buxton, The African Slave Trade and its Remedy (London, 1840). E. Reynolds, Stand
the Storm: A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade (London, 1965). R.E. Conrad, World of Sorrow:
The African Slave Trade to Brazil (Baton Rouge, Alabama, 1986). D.B. Davis, The Problem of
Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (Ithaca, 1975). Lovejoy, P.E. Transformations in
Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (Cambridge, 1983). Lovejoy, P.E. ‘The Volume of the
Atlantic Slave Trade: A Synthesis', Journal of African History, 23 (1982).
58 J. Atkins. 'Ouidah in 1721', in Davidson, African Past, 224.
59 See Footnotes No. 55 and 56, as well as the comment by Delegorgue in Chapter 4. For the
twentieth century see also Macmillan, Bantu, Boer and Briton, 18-20. Saunders, ‘Pre-Cobbing
Mfecane', 26.
195