Mfecane Aftermath. John Wright
scholars seeking their way through the textual intricacies of varied editions and secondary texts that have become the primary sources for the historiographical and methodological debates that are a feature of this volume.
CAROLYN HAMILTON
Acknowledgements
The production of a book which is focused on a set of debates poses many problems. The original dialogue on the conference floor was frequently heated and tense. The contributors to this book fail to agree on, indeed, they passionately contest, the orthography of the subject of the book (is it 'The Mfecane', mfecane or 'mfekaan'), not to mention their disagreements over the meaning of the term. Under such conditions, an editor treads a potentially treacherous path. The contributors to this book have, however, given me an easy passage, graciously agreeing to the compromises which I have proposed. They have also demonstrated enormous patience with the delays and rearrangements which were a consequence of the restructuring of the book to accommodate the absence of a contribution from Julian Cobbing.
The book's content covers a number of specialist areas, and the various contributors represent a range of perspectives. Alone I could not have hoped to contextualise the varied offerings adequately and fairly. In this task I have been skilfully assisted by Norman Etherington, John Wright and Neil Parsons who each undertook to provide a contextualising essay on an area of the debates in which each is expert. Readers of the book will doubtless be as grateful as I am for their efforts.
It has been a great pleasure to work with the highly experienced Africana librarian, Yvonne Garson, who is responsible for the consolidated bibliography. Yvonne began the work of creating the bibliography from the footnotes to the various essays, and rapidly exposed the deficiencies of even the most meticulous citations. As many of the debates which arise in this book are located in the way sources are read and cited, a definitive bibliography of the kind compiled by Yvonne is invaluable.
There are many more debts of gratitude. I am grateful to Professors Patrick MacAllister and David Hammond-Tooke for encouraging me to go ahead with the colloquium. Professor Hammond-Tooke gave his permission for the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand to host the event and the Research Office of the same university provided the initial funds which made the colloquium possible. Permission from the Journal of African History to reproduce articles by E. Eldredge and C. Hamilton is gratefully acknowledged. Lastly I would like to thank the co-publishers, Wits University Press and the University of Natal Press for all that they have done to bring this complex work to completion. In particular I am grateful to Margery Moberly of the University of Natal Press who rescued this book from the nightmare of its own internal controversies, and provided crucial support and guidance, both practical and moral.
CAROLYN HAMILTON
Notes on Orthography and Names
A degree of orthographic standardisation has been imposed on the various contributions to the book to facilitate its consultation by readers not fully familiar with the field.
•Though many contributors regard it as desirable to use prefixes for Sotho and Zulu people, as in baSotho/Basotho and amaZulu/Amazulu, and for the languages, as in seSotho/Sesotho and isiZulu/Isizulu, the English equivalents have been used in preference to the many linguistic and orthographic variants.
•Except for the names of people, such as Moshoeshoe, Sotho names have generally been given in the South African spelling, rather than in the form used in Lesotho.
Place names present a particular set of problems.
•Many names were corrupted in colonial writings and on early maps. Wherever possible modern spellings have been used in this book even where these differ from those which are in common usage. Thus Thukela and Mzimvubu have been used, not Tugela and Umzimvubu.
•In some instances an appropriate usage is not easily established. A case in point is Karechuenya which is better known as Kaditshweni. Our use of Karechuenya is based on the following argument provided by Neil Parsons:
David Livingstone, writing to his mother on 27 April 1844, in a letter not published until 1959, used the name Karechuenya. Livingstone explained that the town was next to a conical peak called Chuenyane ('little baboon'). 'Karechuenya' meant 'By it we are vexed' or 'A vexation by or near us', a reflexion of people's complaints about the depradations of baboons on their gardens, putting the blame jocularly on the 'little baboon'.1 The name 'Kaditshwene', on the other hand, is a neologism which was first suggested to the archaeologist P. W. Laidler in the 1930s by a white farmer at Zeerust called Hattingh. As Desmond Cole points out, 'People with no knowledge of linguistics or of the Tswana language have confused tshwenyana or tshwenyane, meaning "young or small baboon" and go tshwenyana meaning "to bother or trouble one another".'2
•Wherever possible, the use of anachronistic place names is avoided. While the forms trans–Kei, trans-Vaal and trans-Orange introduce the problem of a Cape-based perspective and in some instances refer to later river names, they are used in preference to their later counterparts (Transkei, Transvaal and Orange Free State), so as to signal a sensitivity to the problems of naming which are a feature of the study of this period of history.
•Where the reference is to modern archaeological sites rather than precolonial settlements, the contemporary form is used, thus the 'Iron Age archaeology of the Transvaal', but the 'Iron Age in the trans-Vaal region'.
•Since these essays were written new structures have replaced the former provinces and homelands. It was decided not to adopt the new names as the book was already at an advanced stage of production. In some of the regions new names are still under discussion.
1.Schapera, I. (ed.), David Livingstone, Family Letters 1841–1856. Volume One 1841–1848, London: Chatto & Windus, 1959, pp. 96–97; Botswana Notes and Records, Vol.6 (1984), p. 38.
2.Desmond Cole Botswana Notes and Records, vol.23 (1991). Jan Boeyens's contributions to this discussion are also gratefully acknowledged.
Contributors
Thomas Dowson
Formerly a Researcher in the Rock Art Research Unit, Department of Archaeology, University of the Witwatersrand. He is currently Rock Art Research Fellow in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Southampton.
Elizabeth Eldredge
Associate Professor of History at Michigan State University. She has recently published A South African Kingdom: The Pursuit of Security in Nineteenth-'century Lesotho and Slavery in South Africa: Captive Labor on the Dutch Frontier (with Fred Morton).
Norman Etherington
Professor of History at the University of Western Australia and a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. His books include: Preachers, Peasants and Politics in Southeast Africa; Theories of Imperialism: War, Conquest and Capital; Rider Haggard; The Annotated She, and Peace, Politics and Violence in the New South Africa.
Jan-Bart Gewald
An historian who studied at Rhodes University. He is currently completing a Ph.D. at Leiden University in the Netherlands on the socio-economic history of the Herero between 1890 and 1920.
Simon Hall
Lectures in the Department of Archaeology at the University of the Witwatersrand. His general research interests are the nature of interactions between farmers and hunter-gatherers, and the history of Sotho/Tswana speakers.
Carolyn Hamilton
Senior lecturer in the Department of Anthropology, University of the Witwatersrand. Her research interests include the precolonial history of the KwaZulu-Natal region, and the production of the images that dominate that history.