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Fount of Deep Culture: Legacies of the James Stuart Archive in South African Historiography
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 May 2014
Extract
The 2001 launch of the fifth volume of the James Stuart Archive reinforces this publication's reputation as a mother lode of primary evidence. The Archive's existence is largely due to the efforts of two editors, Colin De B. Webb and John Wright, who transformed a tangle of notes into lucid text. They deciphered the interviews that Natal colonist James Stuart conducted with a range of informants, many of them elderly isiZulu-speaking men. Transcribed by Stuart between the 1890s and 1920s, these discussions often explored in vivid detail the customs, lore, and lineages of southern Africa. Although references to the Archive abound in revisionist histories of southern Africa, few scholars have assessed how testimonies recorded by Stuart have critically influenced such pioneering research. Fewer still have incorporated the compelling views of early twentieth-century cultural change that Stuart's informants bring to a post-apartheid understanding of South Africa's past.
Well before the University of Natal Press published volume 5, the evidence presented in the Archive had already led scholars of South African history into fertile, unmarked terrain. One example of groundbreaking data can be found in the statements of volume 4's master interpreter of Zulu power, Ndukwana kaMbengwana. His observations of the past anchor recent studies that debunk myths surrounding the early-nineteenth-century expansion of Shaka's kingdom. Ever timely, the endnotes in volume 5 discuss these reappraisals of historical interpretation and methodology. Editor John Wright elaborates in his preface: “By the time we picked up work on volume 5, we were starting to take note … that oral histories should be seen less as stories containing a more or less fixed ‘core’ of facts than as fluid narratives whose content could vary widely.”
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References
1 Webb, C. de B. and Wright, J., eds., The James Stuart Archive, 1-5 (Pietermaritzburg, 1976, 1979, 1982, 1986, 2001)Google Scholar; hereafter JSA and volume. For the Archive as mother lode: Etherington, N., Great Treks (Harlow, 2001), xixGoogle Scholar. Stuart wrote testimony in isiZulu, a language he spoke well. J. Wright translated Stuart's isiZulu notes. For a slashing critique of Stuart's work see Cobbing, J., “A Tainted Well: The Objectives, Historical Fantasies, and Working Methods of James Stuart, with Counter-argument,” Journal of Natal and Zulu History 2(1988), 115–54Google Scholar. For a rejoinder to Cobbing and appraisal of Stuart see Hamilton, C., Terrific Majesty (Cambridge, 1998), 130–67Google Scholar. For Stuart's methodologies and motives see Wright, John, “Making the James Stuart Archive,” HA 23(1996), 333–50Google Scholar. See note 3 for revisionist histories of southern Africa. I am grateful to Louise Vis and Susie Leblanc for their editorial comments on this paper. I also thank John Wright, Bob Edgar, and Quarraisha Abdool Karim for engaging critically with my interpretations of the Archive.
2 Since the 1970s John Wright has used the Archive to support his original historical scholarship: Wright, J., “The Dynamics of Power and Conflict in the Thukela-Mzimkhulu Region in the Late 18th and Early 19th Centuries: A Critical Reconstruction” (PhD., University of the Witwatersrand1, 1989)Google Scholar; idem., “A. T. Bryant and ‘the Wars of Shaka,’” HA 18(1991), 409-25.
3 Stuart periodically interviewed Ndukwana in 1897 and from 1900 to 1903: JSA 4. Standard historical interpretations of Zulu expansionism relied on one-sided Zulu oral traditions recorded by colonists and accepted uncritically by scholars. Scholarship debunking the mythic power of Shaka includes Wylie, D., Savage Delight (Pietermaritzburg, 2000)Google Scholar; C. Hamilton, Terrific Majesty; idem., ed., The Mfecane Aftermath (Johannesburg, 1995); Golan, D., Inventing Shaka (Boulder, 1994)Google Scholar.
4 “By the time … widely,” “currents of thought,” and “relatively … scholarship”: JSAS, x.
5 “Zulu history, habits, and customs”: Stuart, J., A History of the Zulu Rebellion (London, 1913), viiiGoogle Scholar. During the writing of this article, John Wright and I discussed whether Stuart intended for his interviews to be used as oral history or ethnography. I suggested that the Archive bore a close resemblance to a corpus of ethnographic data. Many of Stuart's Zulu informants observed ritual practices and customary relationships of power at the turn of the twentieth century, sometimes drawing on hearsay to corroborate their accounts (sec the testimony of Qalizwe below) and often implying that their ancient traditions were stable until the coming of colonialism. Wright agreed that the Archive was full of ethnographic information that needed to be “unpacked” as history, but he argued that the collection of ethnography was an inescapably colonial project. Stuart's interviews form the “basis for moving beyond colonial thought in a number of ways,” Wright added, and it was the editors' objective to construct the Archive as a historical rather than an ethnographic body of sources.
6 Stuart's interviews ought to be scrutinized because he expressed colonial biases. For example, his 500-page narrative of a 1906 African uprising in Natal begins with a vindication of the right of white rulers to crush “a race of savages” in order to defend “representatives of Western Civilization”: Stuart, J., A History of the Zulu Rebellion (London, 1913), 1Google Scholar. Stuart also consulted colonial history books to resolve factual inconsistencies in his interviews with Africans: JSA 4, 258.
7 “I forget …. main fact”: Testimony of Ndongeni, 2 Oct. 1905, JSA 4, 257-58. Stuart hunted for invented narratives, suggesting that he, like modern ethnographers, tried to discern “the partiality of cultural and historical truths.” “Partiality … truths”: Clifford, J. and Marcus, G., eds., Writing Culture (Berkeley, 1986), 6–7Google Scholar. Constructions and uses of oral history are examined in another South African context in Hofmeyr, I., “We Spend our Years as a Tale that is Told” (London, 1993)Google Scholar.
8 Stuart's published interviews are now consulted by various scholars. For example, a (postmodern) theory-based assessment of the Archive underlines critic Dan Wylie's deconstruction of white texts on Shaka: Wylie, D., Savage Delight, 230-31, 236Google Scholar. In a forthcoming essay Wylie sharpens his argument that Shakan literature “is an extraordinary palimpsest of half-understood rumours, speculations and plain old lies”: idem., “White Myths of Shaka” in B. Carton, J. Laband, and J. Sithole, eds., Zulu Enigmas (Pietermaritzburg, forthcoming).
9 Problems and opportunities of South African cultural studies: Nuttall, S. and Michael, C., eds., Sense of Culture (Oxford, 2000)Google Scholar. Wider applications of cultural studies: Grossberg, L.et al., eds., Cultural Studies (London, 1992)Google Scholar. “Desire” in colonialism: Young, R., Colonial Desire (London, 1995)Google Scholar. For different scholarly views of the marginalization of historians in South Africa see Nuttall, T. and Wright, J., “Exploring beyond History with a Capital ‘H,’” Current Writing 10/2(1998), 38–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Freund, B., “The Art of Writing History,” Southern African Review of Books 30(1994), 24Google Scholar.
10 For an analysis of African patriarchs' attempts to curb sexual adventuring in Kwa-Zulu-Natal see Carton, B., Blood from Your Children (Charlottesville, 2000)Google Scholar.
11 I thank Peter Delius and Clive Glaser for making available parts of African Studies 61(2002)Google Scholar, which they edited. All quotations in the above paragraph, except (or “bad women,” come from a draft version of their introduction to this volume, entitled “Sexual Socialisation in South Africa: A Historical Pcrpsective.” The editors chose articles for their special issue from papers presented at an international conference, “Aids in Context,” convened at University of the Witwatersrand, 4-7 April 2001. A controversial article on sexual predation and AIDS: Leclercq-Madlala, S., “Infect One, Infect All: Zulu Youth Response to the AIDS Epidemic in South Africa,” Medical Anthropology 17(1999), 363–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Related studies include Karim, Q. Abdool, et al., “Sexual Behavior and Knowledge of AIDS Among Urban Black Mothers: Implications for AIDS Intervention Programmes,” South African Medical Journal 80(1991), 340–43Google Scholar; H. Phillips, “AIDS in the Context of South Africa's Epidemic History: Preliminary Historical Thoughts;” S. Horowitz, “Migrancy and HIV/AIDS: A Historical Perspective;” and L. Grundlingh, “Government Responses to HIV/AIDS in South Africa as Reported in the Media, 1983-1994;” all in South African Historical Journal 45(2001)Google Scholar, forthcoming.
12 Qalizwe kaDlozi's comments on illicit lifestyles and loss of chastity: JSAS, 229-30; “He …. their homes:” ibid., 233-34.
13 Prostitutes and their clientele: JSAS, 232, 240; “who is a good …. behavior:” ibid., 234.
14 “White people …. with anyone”: JSAS, 233. More research needs to address why these girls engaged in transnctional sex, and whether they drew on experiences with African men when meeting white men. A fascinating study in contemporary KwaZulu-Natal is being conducted by geographer Mark Hunter, who suggests that the “bleak prospects for marriage” currently drives some Zulu girls to seek “sugar daddies.” His analysis maps shifting gender identities, especially African ideals of masculinity. “The polygamous patriarch,” he argues, “might be in terminal decline, but his symbolic capital nevertheless gets seized on by men who claim that multiple sexual partners, even with no intention of marriage, are all part of a seamless Zulu ‘tradition’:” M. Hunter, “Sex in the Time of Cell-Phones” in B. Carton et al., eds., Zulu Enigmas.
16 Isimpantsholo: JSAS, 230-32; “bring back … nothing:” ibid., 225-26. Qalizwe spoke from personal experience. He described a run-in near market square Pietermaritzburg, where he “was curtseyed and played before by four girls or women, showing that these said native women are not restrained by any set of feelings or customs. They do just as they like, and … [it] seems this kind of woman (unondindwa) [prostitute] is in the habit of saying that they have control over themselves, that they enjoy ‘responsible government’ (si zi pete),” a reference to self-rule granted by Great Britain to Natal settlers in 1893; ibid., 229-30. For fears in colonial Natal that “disintegration of family life” led to the “inevitable spread of venereal disease” see Packard, R., White Plague, Black Labor (Berkeley, 1989), 242Google Scholar, and further, A. Jeeves, “Public Health in the Era of South Africa's Syphilis Epidemic of the 1930s and 40s” and Martens, J., “‘Almost a Public Calamity’: Prostitutes, ‘Nurseboys,’ and Attempts to Control Venereal Diseases in Colonial Natal, 1886-1890,” both in South African Historical Journal 45(2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
17 British soldiers raping young African women and boys: JSAS, 243-44; “to commit … anus” and “to commit sodomy … would consent:” ibid., 247. Stuart recorded corroborating testimony: “I, Ndukwana says, and Qalizwe were going along the street in Ladysmiti towards our quarters when soldiers (Europeans) came to each of us, and offered us 10s. each, saying they wanted jigijigi [slang for anal intercourse]. I was horrified when I discovered what they wanted, and so was Qalizwe:” JSA 4, 341. The term jigajiga is isiZulu slang for twist and turn. In early 1900s Southern Rhodesia the terms jiga or jigger in siNdebele argot meant “sodomy:” Epprecht, M., “‘Good God Almighty, What's This!’: Homosexual ‘Crime’ in Harly Colonial Zimbabwe” in Murray, S. and Roscoe, W., eds., Boy-Wives and Female Husbands (New York, 1998), 201, 314n20Google Scholar. The British military regarded sodomy as a crime, e.g., Gilbert, A., “The Africaine Courts-Martial: A Study of Buggery in the Royal Navy,” Journal of Homosexuality 1(1974), 111–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The testimonies of Ndukwana and Qalizwe may fuel an ongoing scholarly debate over whether Europeans imposed homosexuality on African men or whether male homosexuality already existed in precolonial Africa. M. Epprecht argues that prominent historians such as van Onselen, C., in Chibaro (London, 1983)Google Scholar, imply erroneously that colonial coercion drove African men to homosexuality. Sec also Achmat, Z., ”‘Apostles of Civilised Vice’: ‘Immoral Practices’ and ‘Unnatural Vice’ in South African Prisons and Compounds, 1890-1920,” Social Dynamics 19/2(1993), 92–110CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Moodie, D. and Ndatshe, V., Going for Gold (Berkeley, 1994)Google Scholar.
18 “Black man … feel indignant”: Bryce, J., Impressions of South Africa (London, 1897), 375Google Scholar. I thank Bob Edgar for the reference to the 14 March 1897 article in the New York Times.
19 Segregation and the stigmatization of Africans: Swanson, M., “The Sanitation Syndrome': Bubonic Plague and Urban Native Policy in the Cape Colony, 1900-1909,” JAH 18(1977), 387–410CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Maylam, P., “The Struggle for Space in Twentieth-Century Durban” in Maylam, P. and Edwards, I., eds., The People's City (Pietermaritzburg, 1996), 1–30Google Scholar; Beinart, W. and Dubow, S., eds., Segregation and Apartheid in Twentieth-Century South Africa (London, 1995)Google Scholar.
20 There are exceptions in this vast body of scholarship. A landmark study of multi-racial urbanization is van Onselen, C., Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand, 1886-1914 (2 vols.: Johannesburg, 1982)Google Scholar. Nineteenth-century African perceptions of race in colonial Natal arc treated in Atkins, K., The Moon is Dead! Give Us Our Money! (London, 1993)Google Scholar.
21 Renewed academic interest in race prompted an international conference in July 2001 at the University of the Witwatersrand. The assembled scholars debated “The Burden of Race? ‘Whiteness’ and ‘Blackness’ in Modern South Africa.” Recent scholarship on this issue includes Maylam, P., South Africa's Racial Past (Aldershot, 2001)Google Scholar; Posel, D., “Race as Common Sense: Racial Classification in Twentieth-Century South Africa,” African Studies Review 44/2(2001), 87–113CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
22 In 1943 the lawyer Pixley Seme employed Anton Lembede as an articled clerk in Johannesburg. A year later, Lembede formed the ANC Youth League. Lembede's philosophy of “Africanism” tried to repair black people's “pathological … loss of self-confidence” by renewing pride in African resourcefulness and achievements: Lembede, A., “Policy of the Congress Youth League,” Inkundla yaBantu (May 1946)Google Scholar in Karis, T. and Carter, G., eds., From Protest to Challenge: A Documentary History of African Politics in South Africa (Palo Alto, 1972), 2:317–18Google Scholar. For Pixley Seme's influence on Lembede's “Africanism” sec Gerhart, G., Black Power in South Africa (Berkeley, 1978), 45–64Google Scholar. Thabo Mbeki's African Renaissance also proposes to restore African pride by ridding South Africa of western pathologies, among them the quest for “obscene wealth” and light skin: Mbeki, T., Africa: The Time Has Come (Cape Town, 1998)Google Scholar. Critical views of the African Renaissance and black South Africans' aversion to African “blackness”: “Interviews with Sikhumbuzo Mngadi, Tony Parr, Rhoda Kadalie, Zakcs Mda, and Darryl Accone” in Nuttall, S./Michael, , Senses of Culture, 107–21Google Scholar.
23 “Natives … developed]ed].… far-off past”: JSAS, 276. Seme was a complex figure who could defend Zulu tradition while dressed in a top hat and waistcoat. See photo in Edgar, R., ed., An African American in South Africa (Athens, 1992), 286Google Scholar.
24 “His body …. hot clothes”: JSAS, 275.
25 “He does not …. ruled by quote”: JSAS, 275; “Money …. no cattle:” ibid., 276. Seme's analogical contrast between maturation/herding cattle and feebleness/making money drew on “Pan Negro” images of the mother continent, where men came of age as innocents sheperding their livestock. Like W.E.B. Du Bois, Seme feared that gluttonous modernity hastened humanity's decline. “Pan-Negro”: Appiah, K., “The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race” in Gates, H. L., ed., Race, Writing, and Difference (Chicago, 1985), 21–37Google Scholar.
26 “We know …. cattle and people”: JSAS, 275.
27 In 1906 Seme gave a speech at Columbia that gloried in his continent's capacity for renewal: “It resembles a plant, it takes roots in the teeming earth, and when the seeds fall in other soils new varieties sprout up,” quoted in Moses, W., Afrotopia (Cambridge, 1998), 88CrossRefGoogle Scholar. An echo of Seme's call for black manhood redemption reverberated in an oration by Henry McNeal Turner in 1893 at the National Council of Colored Men in Cincinnati: “[N]o amount of book-learning divested of manhood respect and manhood promptings, will ever make us [Africans in America] a great people; for underlying all school culture must exist the consciousness that I am somebody, that I am a man”: Speech by Henry McNeal Turner, 28 November 1893, Turner Papers, Howard University. I thank Bob Edgar and Robert Vinson for this reference. Turner's influence on “Back-to-Africa” movements is discussed in Walker, C., Deromanticizing Black History (Knoxville, 1991), 44Google Scholar. Seme elicited this comment from Stuart: “Seme's views on the Native Question are very sane and practical. They seem to me to suffer from not being sufficiently radical (JSAS:277).” Stuart's social and political attitudes are explored at the end of this article. Seme wanted to negotiate racial reforms in South Africa and to sideline cohorts such as “anti-white” Zulu nationalists Petros Lamula and Lymon Maling, who repudiated Europeans for denying Africans equality before the law: La Hausse, P., Restless Identities (2000), 115, 131-32, 223–24Google Scholar.
28 JSAS 276.
29 Seme's prelapsarian vision of African boys who matured into warrior defenders of their people is now represented in some post-apartheid memorials. This is especially evident around the battlefields of Ncome (Blood) river and Bhambatha's stronghold, where new monuments honor assegai-clutching freedom fighters. To be sure, there are also memorials such as the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg that show the panaroma of participants in liberation struggles, including women and elders. In Seme's 1906 oration at Columbia University, he called on Africans to celebrate the “mighty monuments” of their great continent: Seme, P., “The Regeneration of Africa” in Rive, R. and Couzens, T., Seme (Johannesburg, 1991), 75–81Google Scholar. For Seme's approaches to nation-building sec Hausse, La, Restless Identities, 18, 24, 74Google Scholar. Lembede envisaged African youths blazing the trail to a rejuvenated Africa. Like Seme, Lembede was also fond of saying that he was “one with Mother Africa's dark soil:” Edgar, R. and Msumza, L., eds., Freedom in Our Lifetime (Athens, 1996), xx, 2Google Scholar. Scholarship on the modern legacies of youth violence and liberation struggles in South Africa includes Beinart, W., “Political and Collective Violence in Southern African Historiography,” Journal of Southern African Studies 18(1992), 455–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Morrell, R., “Of Boys and Men: Masculinity and Gender in Southern African Studies,” Journal of Southern African Studies 24 (1998), 605–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a rural perspective see Carton, B., “Locusts Fall from the Sky: Manhood and Migrancy in KwaZulu,” 129–40Google Scholar; township view: Xaba, T., “Masculinity and its Malcontents: The Confrontation between ‘Struggle Masculinity’ and ‘Post-Struggle Masculinity’ (1990-1997),” 105–24Google Scholar; cultural politics: Waetjen, T. and Mare, G., “‘Men amongst Men:’ Masculinity and Zulu Nationalism in the 1980s,” all in Morrell, R., ed., Changing Men in Southern Africa (Pietermaritzburg, 2001)Google Scholar. Book-length studies are Glaser, C., Bo-Tsotsi: The Youth Gangs of Soweto 1935-1976 (Portsmouth, 2000)Google Scholar; Delius, P., A Lion Amongst Cattle (Johannesburg, 1996)Google Scholar; Seeking, J., Heroes or Villians? Youth Politics in the 1980s (Johannesburg, 1993)Google Scholar.
30 “For in the Zulu …. other boys”: JSAS, 271-72; “If boys …. in charge,” ibid., 272; “Today … again,” ibid., 273.
31 Seme had not fought in the military for the Zulu kingdom; and much of his formative years were spent in school far from the pastures of cattle country.
32 “All of us …. flee”: JSAS, 88.
33 It is reasoned further that Zulu young men either eagerly defended their way of life or were mobilized to do so because they were in peak fitness and most accustomed to martial discipline, as Seme maintained, particularly after herding cattle in quasi-military age-sets commanded by izinduna and izingqwele.
34 Why, then, do some scholars of Zulu history take for granted that young Zulu men throughout the ages participated in combat? Landmark twentieth-century literature may have contributed to this ahistorical attitude. Novels such as Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front indelibly illustrate the horror of soldiering through the eyes of a schoolboy. Moreover, anti-draft media coverage in Vietnam-era America and late-apartheid South Africa also reinforced the message of Remarque's classic, projecting images of young recruits bogged down in foreign quagmires, or gathering at home protesting their fate as cannon fodder. Whatever the case, the prosecution of war, like the pursuit of peace, should not focus uncritically on the sacrifice of young men. The reluctance to historicize youth participation in war should remind some scholars of a question posed dismissively to materialist historians: Why study the poor? The poor have always been with us. Scholarship on warfare that broadly periodizes the participation of youths in military campaigns includes Townsend, C., ed., The Oxford History of Modern War (Oxford, 1997)Google Scholar; Addington, L., The Patterns of War Since the Eighteenth Century, 2nd Edition (Bloomington, 1994)Google Scholar; van Creveld, M., Technology and War (New York, 1989)Google Scholar. For youth against war see Jeffreys-Jones, R., Peace Now! American Society and the Ending of the Vietnam War (New Haven, 1999)Google Scholar.
35 JSAS, 151. See as well ed. War and Society: the Militarization of South Africa, ed. Cock, J. and Nathan, L. (Cape Town, 1989)Google Scholar.
36 “Deserted his men”: JSAS, 161; “Extent …. the beginning:” ibid., 178; “impi” and “You … deceiving us,” ibid., 179.
37 JSAS, 174-75. For accounts of the Nkandla phase of the 1906 Natal rebellion see Stuart, , Zulu Rebellion (London, 1913), 178–339Google Scholar; Marks, S., Reluctant Rebellion (Oxford, 1970), 201–24Google Scholar; Carton, B., Blood from Your Children (Charlottesville, 2000), 106–21Google Scholar; Thompson, P., A Historical Atlas of the Zulu Rebellion (Howick, 2002)Google Scholar.
38 “Representatives of Western Civilization:” Stuart, , Zulu Rebellion, 1Google Scholar.
39 JSA4, 344-45.
40 It was a somewhat rare circumstance for a white official to record elaborate personal attacks against him and his office. Stuart's informants who leveled such criticism must have felt comfortable enough with their interviewer.
41 “The land question …. in this?”: JSAS, 241; “Such a remark … native ability:” ibid., 256.
42 JSAS, 257.
43 JSAS, 258.
44 Great Britain annexed the former Zulu kingdom as a Crown dominion in 1887. 45 For detailed analyses of imperial politics in Zululand in the late 1880s see Guy, J., The View Across the River (Charlottesville, 2002)Google Scholar, and Laband, J., The Atlas of the Later Zulu Wars, 1883-1888 (Pietermaritzburg, 2001)Google Scholar.
46 To be sure, Stuart's fifty-year oeuvre of books (written in isiZulu and English) and correspondence reveals his ambivalence about the demolition of a rich “tribal” heritage. Perhaps he desired to embrace a living past through the African men he valued as oral historians and acquaintances. Longer tracts of testimony in the Archive reveal a mutual understanding between Stuart and some of his isiZulu-speaking informants. See, for example, Stuart's descriptions of informants that stressed their humanity. The following portrait concludes an April 1910 interview with Singcofela: “I could not manage to have Singcofela's photo taken, owing to his wanting to get away. He is about 60-62 years of age; a fine-looking man about 6 feet high; medium build; dark-yellowish complexion; … good headring rather to the front of his head, but well on the crown; has a peculiar and sudden, small laugh; disappointing as to praising, though knows a considerable amount about tribal affairs….”; JSAS, 347.
47 JSAS, x.