University of California UCOP | 19th century zulu [MUSIC PLAYING] 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.