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Beyond the “Zulu Aftermath”: Unscrambling Southern Africa's “Mfecane”

John Wright, School of Anthropology, Gender, and Historical Studies, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa
wright@ukzn.ac.za

As is well known, the period from c.1820 to the mid-1840s was a time of often highly disruptive raids and population movements across much of the eastern half of southern Africa. By the late 19th century, colonial historians in the Cape and Natal were beginning to conceptualize these movements as having constituted a single historical event which stemmed from a single epicentre in what is now the KwaZulu-Natal region. They attributed its causes to the supposedly explosive expansion of the Zulu kingdom under Shaka in the late 1810s and early 1820s. In the first half of the 20th century these ideas spread very widely among writers of southern African history. In the 1960s, the first generation of academic historians of Africa took them up, gave the wars and migrations of the 1820s-1840s period a positive slant as part of a process of ‘nation-building’, and renamed them the ‘mfecane’. For twenty years this ‘mfecane’ was a firmly fixed ‘fact’ of southern African history, but since the late 1980s its basic elements have increasingly been challenged by a growing number of historians. They argue that it is highly misleading for a series of events which took place in far-flung regions over a period of more than twenty years to be seen as a single occurrence with a single cause, and that historians need to give much more attention to multiple sets of causes rooted in a range of regional political dynamics. This paper aims to develop these arguments further and, in disaggregating the ‘mfecane’ into a series of disparate and often unconnected events, outline a new approach to the history of eastern southern Africa in the 1820s-1840s period.