"If we can't call it the mfecane, then what can we call it?": Moving the debate forward
Date
1994-08-29
Authors
Wright, John
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Abstract
The mfecane as fetish:
In the last six years a major controversy has blown up among
historians of southern Africa about the historical reality or
otherwise of the phenomenon commonly known as the mfecane (1).
Since it was first popularized by John Omer-Cooper in his book
The Zulu Aftermath, published in 1966,(2) the term has become
widely used as a designation for the wars and migrations which
took place among African communities across much of the eastern
half of southern Africa in the 1820s and 1830s. For more
than a century before Omer-Cooper wrote, these upheavals had
been labelled by writers as 'the wars of Shaka' or 'the Zulu
wars'; today the view remains deeply entrenched among
historians and public alike that the conflicts of the period
were touched off by the explosive expansion of the Zulu kingdom
under Shaka. In a chain reaction of violence, so the
story of the mfecane goes, warring groups carried death and
destruction from the Zululand region southwards into Natal and
the eastern Cape, westward onto the highveld, and northwards
to the Limpopo river and beyond. The violence came to an end
only when most of the communities which had managed to survive
the supposed chaos of the times had been amalgamated into a
number of large defensive states under powerful kings.
Description
African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented 29 August 1994
Keywords
Bantu-speaking peoples. Migrations, Africa, Southern. History. Mfecane period, 1816-ca. 1840