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

was the "baggage" in the European writers’ minds when they wrote about
Africans and specifically about mfecane history.
A number of choices were made in the writing of this thesis. The first one
pertained to the organisation of the chapters. These were ordered
chronologically, with Chapters 1, 2, 3 also being chronologically subdivided.
Theal, the only author whose oeuvre straddled the boundary between two
chapters, was analysed entirely in Chapter 4. The challenge in Chapter 5 was
that most of the works examined were regionally focused and nearly half of
them appeared before 1910. Chronological structuring was thus not possible
and a geographical subdivision was used, resulting in sections on works dealing
with mfecane history in Natal and Zululand, in the greater Caledon Valley area,
the Transkei and the Transvaal, culminating in a few general, southern Africa-
wide histories.
The Problem of Periodization
Second was the problem of periodization, both as regards the overall period
covered in the thesis and as far as the cut-off dates for each chapter are
concerned. It is evident that the choice of any cut-off date would blur the
continuities of history across these boundaries. 34 The thesis commenced with
the first newspaper articles that reported the first mfecane-related activity in
mid-1823 and concluded with the first use of the term “Mfecane” by Walker in
1928. This terminal point was chosen, as Walker’s introduction of the concept
“Mfecane” was the zenith of the Zulu-centric, geographically-integrated mfecane
narrative that had been carried forward by previous academic historians. The
historiography of the mfecane after 1928 is best left to a separate study. The
periodization of individual chapters is based on the overall historiographical
development of mfecane history. Chapter 2 ends in 1838, a time when
European authors still wrote accounts of mfecane events taking place in the
“blank space” of the unknown interior. Chapter 3 starts in 1839 with Harris,
whose map belied many previous authors as it shows a great many chiefdoms
34 P. Maylam, History of the African People of South Africa: From the Early Iron Age to the
1970's (Cape Town and Johannesburg, 1986), 136.
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