University of California UCOP | 19th century zulu

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When I came to the United States in the middle of the 1970s to undertake doctoral study in African history, it was a period of which there was considerable expectations and hope for Africa. The countries had become newly independent.

We had people like Julius Nyerere in power in Tanzania, people who were talking about the need to develop African forms of democracy, to create new states that were different from those that had been run for the previous 100 years by European colonial authorities.

It was also a period when there were great expectations and hopes for independence being extended to other parts of Africa that were still under the control of other European powers or whites-- whites in the case of Zimbabwe-- white settlers-- whites in the case of South Africa, where the apartheid government was still in place.

But when I first came to the United States-- so countries that we now know as Angola or Mozambique were ruled by the Portuguese government, which still had them under colonial control and were notorious for the use of the secret police in controlling the people.

But African historians at that time in the middle '70s-- as they had started doing in the 1960s-- had focused on developing ideas and research into African agency, focusing on what Africans had done for themselves rather than looking solely at what Europeans were doing to them, but wanting to look at what Africans were doing for themselves, and particularly trying to put that into a context in which historians would study the history of Africa before the arrival of Europeans in the late 19th century as a force of conquest.

And there was a lot of concern about looking at African agency to see what they had done, how they had changed society, change it away from the idea that in some way African society was static and changeless, which is some of the ideas that you might see existing still in some of the stereotypical materials that I've discussed earlier in this class.

But when I first came to do my graduate work, I was particularly interested in focusing on one individual, and that was King Shaka of the Zulu state. And if we look at this "what if" map that I showed you in an earlier class of

Africa-- if Europeans had not come and conquered it in the late 19th century-- we can see here in this imaginary map based on what Africa was like at around about 1844 a place called [INAUDIBLE]. That's been put there by the African mapmaker. And that would be the Zulu Kingdom.

Now, the Zulu Kingdom-- in the early part of the 19th century-- was a new political form. It had not existed there Now, the Zulu Kingdom-- in the early part of the 19th century-- was a new political form. It had not existed there before. It had not existed there in the 17th and 18th centuries, or at least not in the size and organization that existed in the early part of the 19th century. And one historian in particular, John Omer-Cooper, had made a remarkable piece of work when he had talked about the development of a revolution in Africa.

And it's important that he used that word revolution-- he talked about revolutionary change in Africa-- because historians before that time had not talked about revolution as something that could happen in Africa. Small change, little change, but historians had often adopted the notion of staticness within Africa. And Omer-Cooper stressed the revolution.

Now, this revolution was associated with one particular individual. We do not have any contemporary drawings of Shaka Zulu. We do not have anything that seems to be realistic. This drawing was made at approximately the same time and purports to be about Shaka. As to whether it actually is or not, that remains in some dispute.

We do have drawings that were made at the time of Shaka's brother, Dingane. And this, in a sense, captures a different image of a Zulu Lord in the early 19th century. These are three images of Dingane in his dancing clothes, in his regular clothes. As you can see, quite a different portrayal of him than simply as the warrior that we see in this previous one.

Well, when I came and started work on Shaka, what I was struck by was the amount of work that seemed to have been done about him, that people seemed to think that they knew a lot about Shaka. They wrote about him as though he was a barbarian king, a person who had conquered vast areas, but who-- I found in the literature that existed at the time-- described him as equivalent to Attila the Hun.

He was sometimes described as a barbarian. He was described as a latent homosexual. He was described as being emasculated. He was described as being circumcised, as being uncircumcised, et cetera, et cetera. So as you can see, there was a fascination with Shaka, but also a whole amount of material that had been written in all sorts of different ways.

And so what I did was focus on, what could we find out about Shaka? What would we know about him? You are going to read in the course of this class, the work that I wrote about Shaka and what I could find out about him.

But the certain key features that I found when I investigated him was that much of the material that was available to historians in the 20th century had, in fact, been written by Europeans in the middle to later part of the 19th century.

And they were the people who had created a lot of these images of barbarity, of ruthless killing, of a person who would kill you if you sneezed or coughed, and would do so-- and here we'll just show you a few items-- would do so by, say, taking a spear like this. This is a spear that was used in [INAUDIBLE] by the Zulu in the early 19th century-- that was used to stab people. But there were a lot of stories about how Shaka would execute people, especially by impaling them on their anus on a spear like this.

What I found when I read the literature was, well, could I really find contemporary material that suggested-- from an African perspective-- that Shaka had been such a brutal king, that he had engaged in all of these acts, that he had, for example, executed all the old people in his kingdom, that he had caused the death of many people simply if they coughed out of turn or sneezed?

And I found that it was extremely difficult to find that material. It didn't exist. It existed in the European accounts. But then when I looked closely at the European accounts, I could say that, well, it looks like there are about 30 or 40 different European accounts, but actually they copy from one another, sometimes without necessarily acknowledging that they were copying-- because they weren't always exact footnoters, like we should be right now when we quote our sources.

And so what seemed to be a massive evidence from a multiplicity of sources, I found actually could be reduced to accounts that came from two individuals who visited Shaka in the 1820s and were there in the 1830s, but who had a particular point of view in mind in describing Shaka-- and that is that they were interested in having the British go and intervene in southern Africa to forcibly take land and to take it away from the Zulu so that the British would be in control. And thereby, with British control, traders-- which is what these two individuals were-- would then get a safe place for them to carry out their trade so that they could make a larger profit than they could have by working with Shaka, because Shaka hadn't prevented them from trading there.

I mean, the fact that they provide accounts of their interaction with him, of their negotiations with him, demonstrated that he was extremely welcoming to them. He did not treat them badly. He did not threaten them with killing or anything like that. But they were interested for their own business interests in having British extend rule there, because the idea was that if the British had rule in that area, they could get goods at a cheaper price than they would get them if they had to negotiate with an independent African ruler.

So there we have the development of those ideas about Shaka. And in particular, I'll quote from one piece of evidence that comes from correspondence that was exchanged between the author of one of these books and another author at the time, where he was advised-- with regard to Shaka-- to make him out as bloodthirsty as you can.

And I think this is something we want to keep in mind that when we look at material that is produced and disseminated in the 20th century, are we looking at material that is actually true, is based on fact, even when it says it is? When, in fact, we might say, well, no, we've got to question the facts. We've got to question whether, in fact, this is based on fact. fact, this is based on fact.

What we do know-- apart from the fact that Shaka did not necessarily look like that first image, nor did he necessarily look like his brother-- but he probably wore some of the same clothing as his brother, a whole range of things. He wasn't just always walking around with a spear and a shield.

This is another illustration. These are women at the time of Shaka. So we also know that women weren't always walking around in a state of undress. And I'll mention that because as we'll go along in the class, we'll see settler images of Africans in their supposed indigenous garb, which is not often anywhere close to what this was.

What Shaka did do was-- indeed, in the early part of the 19th century, as John Omer-Cooper demonstrated-- create a whole series of African states. And here we have the Zulu heartland that's based there.

But in particular what historians have suggested-- and there's many different arguments about this process that goes on, which is called the mfecane-- the crushing sometimes-- M-F-E-C-A-N-E-- but interpreted in different ways to describe a period of great change in southern Africa in the early part of the 19th century-- is during this period there was, in fact, a political revolution and that Shaka did, in fact, have a major role in the creation of a large, independent African state-- one of the largest in Africa, probably second only to the states of Sokoto Caliphate in West Africa.

But in the course of creating this state-- about which there are various debates about how it happened-- his actions resulted in the creations of other states, some of which have remained to the present day. In this case, the state that's labeled here Basuto-- because of the Basuto people-- but we know it today as the present-day state of

Lesotho. We have the Ndebele people here and here. Both of them are, in fact, Zulu people, originally from Shaka's kingdom, who had fled from him and go up into northern South Africa.

The Ndebele placed here, in fact, is a state-- is where current South Africa is if we think of Johannesburg and north of that. The Ndebele who then moved from this area in the face of European intervention and go up here in present-day Zimbabwe, where they constitute a significant part of the population. But we have other states created-- Swazi-- present-day Swaziland. There are others that are here in Mozambique and further north.

The argument about why the state emerges is a suggestion that brings together environmental history with political, and that is an argument by people who have looked at those charts of rainfall and periods of lack of rain.

They've checked it against also other records that people used to determine rainfall patterns and that in particular is to look at crosscuts of tree stumps, where you can look at the lines of growth in it and you can determine at which point was there a significant growth in a year-- at which point when it's quite thick-- and at which point was there limited growth, in which case it's very thin. And the argument has been made-- as I had suggested, by looking at that table in the other lecture-- that there was, indeed, a massive drought around about the early part of the 1800s. And that perhaps in response to a drought, people led by Shaka trying to protect themselves and their access to resources, to springs and streams and rivers which were drying out, and in the course of that developed social and political structures that at that time were revolutionary. And that is the development, in Shaka's case particularly, of a standing army in which all the warriors were armed with a shield and a spear.

And here is an example purchased from a tourist shop in Johannesburg. A cowhide shield, a spear, in this case, spear right here on the side, knobkerrie. I'll show you that as well. A knobkerrie is a piece of wood with a very hard end on it. It hits you really hard.

In the course of the early 19th century, Shaka did, indeed, make use of this technology and use it in different ways. One of the arguments that has been made that with a spear like this, that often it was much longer, and that in the 18th century, Africans had used spears like this, but with the longer ones and had thrown them, and then were without a weapon.

And John Omer-Cooper among others, argued-- in an argument that's being contested and debated and still remains a matter of an assertion rather than a proven one-- that Shaka was responsible for the development of this as a stabbing spear, so that his warriors would march forward with their shields and their spears and their knobkerries. Instead of throwing them, would come up and stab their enemy straight through, and keep their weapon.

So what I found with this examination-- that I wrote about myself-- was that-- although I was not writing so much about the political aspects of Shaka [INAUDIBLE] and I was writing about what we could know about him personally, what we could try and find out about him. And what I found out about was actually we know very little.

We don't know much. We don't know if he was a really nice person or a really good person or a really bad person. We don't know much. Actually, the subtitle of the article that I wrote used a phrase that was actually from the 19th century clothing dry bones. But I suggested that the clothing that had been placed on the dry bones of Shaka were, in fact, largely the imaginings of Europeans. But it was particular Europeans who created these. And this is what I would like to move on to next.

Because what is striking about the way in which Shaka was understood by Europeans in the 19th century and then written about in the 20th century is how persistent have been the stereotypes. The stereotypes have persisted to the present day. And even though historians and other scholars have written about Shaka and pointed out his political and revolutionary nature and the fact that there is no evidence of his massive killings of people simply out of pure bias or because he was a homosexual or because he hadn't been circumcised or had been circumcised-- things that seem rather silly to mention, but only when you read the scholarship do you realize just how pervasive that material is in writing about a person that we don't really know and how much imagination is expressed by people which would be better not expressed.

We can see the persistence of these stereotypes in the 19th century and into the 20th century. And we can see the persistence, particularly-- not only in the work that was written by those two European traders who had visited

Shaka in the 1820s and then wrote about him in the 1830s and 1840s-- and thereafter the people who were told to make him out as bloodthirsty as you can because that would be very amenable to a European audience which wanted to hear about how bloodthirsty Africans were, wanted to hear how terrible they were. And people essentially marketed an image of bloodthirsty Africa so that then people would be more inclined in Europe to donate money to missionaries to go over and alleviate the barbarity and the terror and donate money in various forms. But we can see some of the persistence of certain stereotypes of what was the rule of an African king like in questions that were posed to Shaka's nephew Cetshwayo.

And this is a drawing here, but it's based on a photograph. From Cetshwayo, King of the Zulus. He's spelled in different ways. This is from the early 1880s.

Shaka himself died in the late 1820s when he was assassinated by his brother Dingane, whose picture I showed earlier. Cetshwayo was the son of another brother. So he has a direct relationship to both Dingane and to Shaka.

But I just want to read to you a number of questions that were posed to Cetshwayo in 1881 at a formal inquiry by the British after they had defeated him in a war that was fought in 1879, which I'm going to be talking about in a later lecture. And what's telling about this is the nature of the questions, the assumption that's built behind the questions that they made. Let's have this first question.

As king of the Zulus, was all power invested to you as king over your subjects? And his response is, in conjunction with the chiefs of the land. I mean, one of the key things in descriptions that you'll see of Shaka is descriptions that he was all-powerful. He could make any decision he wanted. He could kill you at any moment, anywhere, any time.

And you might want to think-- as I talk further in this lecture-- about how that image persists in our depiction of others-- people in other societies who we think are not like us, are not democratic, are tyrannical, are murderous. And Shaka is often the basis for many of those popular images.

Another question-- the next question that is asked of Cetshwayo in 1881, in response to his answer that in conjunction with the chiefs of the land. The next question says, in fact-- as though the questioner knows for sure more than the King himself does about his own authority-- in fact, you have the power to act independently of the chiefs in making an appointment, although you always consult them. And Cetshwayo's answer then, too-- no, the king has not the power of electing an officer. Each time Cetshwayo is very clear. He does not have total power in this society. And we can read back and say, and nor did Dingane and nor did Shaka.

Has the king absolute power to decide? The questioner won't give up. Now, Cetshwayo-- the chief men of the land talk about the case first and bring it up to him. The questioner-- and he finally decides-- again and again returning to this notion that the king has all final authority. And Cetshwayo-- no. He goes on-- sometimes they decide before they come to him. And he approves or disapproves or the case may be and as he thinks it right or wrong, but he does it only in relationship to their advice.

Again, the questioner-- suppose there's a difference among them. Who finally decides? And he says, then the king has the power to decide in this way-- that when he has decided, the chief and the chief men of the country have nothing to say against it, then his decision will stand. So it's still not total power. It's still constrained by the advice of his leading advisors. It's not totally authoritarian.

The questioner comes back again. You told us that you make these laws. Are you bound to govern in accordance with the laws which you and your ancestors have made? And Cetshwayo's answer is, yes, he's bound by the law.

He is not above the law or beyond the law. But that is not the image of an African king that continues to the present day.

And here I want to move on to the growth of an image of an African king that's built on Shaka as the African Attila the Hun and that persists to the present day, and that's spread particularly through fiction and visual media and that surrounds us even as we don't realize that it's fully surrounding us. And the key text in the development of the notion of Shaka as a tyrant.

And in this, the development of the idea that Shaka, in fact, is the quintessential African tyrant comes from the works of H. Rider Haggard, which some of you who are studying 19th century English literature might well be familiar with. And in particular, it comes from a series of books, one of the most famous of which is H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines. You might well have seen a film about King Solomon's Mines. And I'm going to show you some various versions of those.

A key thing to remember about H. Rider Haggard-- he's not just a fiction writer who writes independently about things that he wants to write about. He's actually an employee of Cecil Rhodes, the founder of De Beers Consolidated Mines, the company that continues to the present to be the dominant company in diamond mining in the world.

Cecil Rhodes employed H. Rider Haggard as a person in his PR department in the 1870s and in the 1880s. But then H. Rider Haggard was, in fact, an extremely talented writer and realized that he also could make a living just from writing these books. And there came a natural affinity between writing fiction, but also writing fiction that perpetuated an image of Africa as dark and barbaric before the coming of Europeans, such as were represented by Cecil Rhodes' De Beers Consolidated Mines. And this continues into the 20th century in the depiction of King

Solomon's Mines.

If you're not familiar with King Solomon's Mines, the basic plot goes that a European explorer, adventurer, or whatever you want to call him, goes into darkest Africa, literally in search of what are meant to be the diamond mines that had supplied diamonds to King Solomon many, many centuries ago, millennia ago [INAUDIBLE].

And so the key thing about this is it captures that image of Africa as a source of great wealth, but undisclosed wealth. Diamonds that had been known to the ancients, but had been kept away from people for many, many centuries because of African kings who had secreted these diamonds in the mines and never allowed for them to be traded.

But here in the King Solomon's Mines book and in the ones that followed, the similar sort of things-- we can think about She, for example, another novel of H. Rider Haggard-- we have the dowdy Englishman going into the interior and fighting his way in and fighting his way to save the diamonds for people who can rationally make use of it-- that is people who understand the profit motive-- and doing so usually with a woman on his arm who he's trying to save in some way because she's threatened by the environment in which she's coming into. And this will be captured in some of these images that I'm going to show you right now from movie covers.

Here's an early movie cover. King Solomon's Mines with Cedric Hardwicke, Anna Lee. He's obviously looking a little poorly and she's going to help him out, so there's a little relationship there. That image of the woman helping the man changes in later movies.

Let's have another one. It might be a little more familiar. Some as you might have seen ones like this. This is another King Solomon's Mines. Cedric Hardwicke, Paul Robeson. Here we have the warriors in the back, as you can see. They're all standing there with their cowhide shields-- big cowhide shields. And I mention big cowhide shields because-- as we'll see when we talk later in the class about anti-apartheid activities in the 1980s and the 1990s-- the South African government forbid people from having shields this big and told them they can only have little ones. So we'll see in some video of the struggles in the 1980s and 1990s, people walking around with what looked like little toy shields. But they were the only ones they were allowed to carry.

So here we have this-- in the background, which we can see close up, you'll see a whole lot of wildlife-- also charging. It's the threatening aspects of Africa. Here are the giraffes-- not so bad-- the buffalo, especially the rhinos, the elephants, all lined up, mixing with shields as well. An element of the danger of the foreign place. A bit more recent-- but, again, it's the heroic male with the somewhat slightly smaller, maybe diminutive female on his arms. In this case, Richard Chamberlain with someone else who I don't recognize. King Solomon's Mines.

Patrick Swayze in King Solomon's Mines. In the background, we have the woman, the faithful black retainer. Here he is, coming into the hidden palace, where he'll find the diamonds.

You might well-- on your own time-- want to look at some of the Raiders of the Lost Ark images because they essentially come from Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines. It's the same image that you get, the same metaphor-- the strong white man going into Africa to save it from barbarity. And you might want to think about the ways in which the movie that you're watching-- now 10 years ago, 20 years ago-- essentially is carrying out a message that was developed in the 19th century by diamond miners who wanted to justify the introduction of European rule into Africa and the utilization of Africans as laborers.

Here we have another one-- a 10-cent comic-- King Solomon's Mines. 30,000 savages barred their path to the fantastic diamond treasure that they had hidden in a secret chamber of the dead. Here's the woman who has to be saved. Here's the man who's going to save her. Here, in fact, we now have a female warrior who's standing in the way-- bigger and more threatening, but no doubt to be cut down pretty soon after.

We have more images, again, of Shaka Zulu, specifically coming out in the 1980s and the 1990s in a series of television films that were made. Shaka Zulu with a spear in it. Think of the images that are captured-- the men are all warriors, the epic story of Africa's greatest warrior king.

And while that's meant to be, in a sense, by the filmmaker, a positive message, it really isn't. I mean, the emphasis is on him as a warrior, as a king, as a slaughter, as a tyrant. So the filmmaker would argue that he's presenting him as a hero, not the passive African of some of the previous stereotypical literature.

But in fact, the hidden message here is the fact that the South African government financed the making of this television series. So although this television series purports to be a true story of Shaka that emphasizes his positive character, the reason why the South African government funded the making of it was because it emphasized Zulu-ness as a separate people, as a people who struggled against and fought other Africans.

And this fitted in with a South African government message that Africans in South Africa were not Africans joined together in some fashion, but were people who belonged to different tribes, who would fight against one another and kill one another all the time. That, however, was not noted on the box.

This is another image of the same series. The previous one was fitting to the warrior image. This is fitting to the abs of steel Shaka, the notion that here you have both the warrior king, but the really powerful warrior as well. And, in fact, in the television series, he was played by a person who was a particularly athletic individual.

Another version of Shaka Zulu. This one has David Hasselhoff in it, Grace Jones, Omar Sharif. I mean, we've got a lot of the Hollywood people in it. This time Shaka's got some mysterious costume on that has actually no historical basis, in fact, and looks like we're having a mixture of Shaka in the Middle East, with buildings there that look more like they're meant to be from Palestine, in a sort of sand and sandals type of movie.

Here, again, is another depiction. This is from a game. This I've just found taking it off the web, since I'm not familiar with the games. But this is meant to be Shaka in a game that you can play against Sun Tzu, the Chinese theoretician of warfare. So the emphasis, again, war, killing, slaughter.

The persistence of this imagery is more important than simply the effect that it has on our minds. It's also how it's laid out and how people then justify things. I put this map here because this is another map of the area where Shaka established his state and where a number of other states were established. And you look at the words in this circle here-- territory almost depopulated by the Zulu wars before 1834.

Because just as someone like Omer-Cooper would write about the political change in early 19th century South Africa as being a positive change, the creation of new political structures, other authors-- those who supported white settler rule in South Africa and apartheid in the 20th century-- emphasized the destructive nature of the wars, the killing of people, and the depopulation. So oftentimes you will find that white settlers in the later 19th century and into the 20th century justified white rule in South Africa by saying they were going to areas that had not been occupied by Africans originally or that had been depopulated by Africans. So that when they were going into these lands, they were not taking lands from Africans because there were none there. They were just coming in and moving in, in a peaceful way to take control of things.

This is very persistent because if you read South African media right now, you'll see references often made by certain people who say that it's unfortunate that apartheid has ended, that it was better under apartheid. And as part of their justification, they'll say, well, there's much violence now and it repeats the violence of the early 19th century when Shaka was killing people, as they assert, or land was emptied by the actions of Shaka.

So I just want to finish this lecture by just saying that what we find here-- so striking-- is the persistence of stereotypes, despite the work of historians to try and look at a more fuller analysis of life in the early 19th century to in a sense, give it some blood, but not of dead people, to emphasize the fact that there was, in fact, great political change taking place.

And we instead have the persistence of stereotypes. I'd ask you to think about this as you read my article about Shaka, as you read other material about the early 19th century and think what is remembered, why it is remembered, and who does the remembering. Who's the author of these items? Who's writing about these things?

And think about it also as you look at the popular culture. You do a search on Google for Shaka and see what comes up, see what sort of imagery comes up. You will find that first picture of Shaka, the one showing him-- the sketch-- with the shield. But you also find an enormous amount of other material and all sorts of depictions, most of them-- the warrior king, the bloodthirsty king. Check it out yourself.