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

Chapter 2
The Foundation Period: 1820’s to 1838
Every one who visits a barbarous people without some previous
knowledge of their character and language, is liable to be
continually led astray, both by his own misapprehension of what
he witnesses, and still more, by the imperfection of the channels
through which he must necessarily receive information at second
hand. G. Thompson, 1827. 1
Understanding the motives, interest, ideologies or fantasies of
those who write history is no less important than understanding
what really happened. D. Golan, 1994. 2
The objective of this chapter is to show how, between the 1820s and 1838,
authors created the skeletal structure of what later became known as the
mfecane. The subject matter of the texts evaluated in the chapter pertains to
events that took place among the African inhabitants of southern Africa, but the
authors were all Europeans and thus outsiders to the societies under review.
Although these writers were all male, to some degree educated and middle-
class, their social backgrounds were, for the purpose of this thesis, of marginal
importance compared to the fact that nearly all of these texts were written in
English by native speakers. This means that mfecane historiography in this first
period and beyond was a product of British culture expressed through the
medium of the English language, the “master code” of nineteenth and early
twentieth century African, and thus also mfecane, historiography in southern
Africa. 3 This African history from outside was only accessible to literate people
1 Quote attributed to S. Bannister, Humane Policy: Or Justice to the Aborigines of the New
Settlements (London, 1830), quoted in Godlonton, Introductory Remarks, I, 58.
2 Golan, Inventing Shaka, 137.
3 L. de Kock, Civilizing Barbarians: Missionary Narrative and African Textual Response in
Nineteenth-Century South Africa (Johannesburg, 1996), 3. Quoted in Tisani, 'Xhosa
Historiography’, v.
31