The dynamics of power and conflict in the Thukela-Mzimkhulu Region in the late 18th and early 19th centuries: a critical reconstruction

[摘要] This dissertation sets out to trace the political historyof part of what is now Natal in the period from the thirdquarter of the 18th century to the late 1820s. Afterbriefly describing the nature of political organization inthe region at the beginning of the period, it explainshow, in the later 18th century, several largeparamountcies emerged among the small-scale chiefdomswhich had previously been in exclusive occupation of thearea. It traces continuities between the conflicts whichbrought about the formation of these larger polities andthe upheavals which, in the later 1810s and early 1820s,totally transformed the region's political landscape. Itargues that the concept of the mfecane, which portraysthese upheavals as a product of the violent expansion ofthe Zulu state, is based on colonial-made myths and isdevoid of analytical usefulness. It shows that A.T.Bryant's supposedly authoritative account of the period ofthe upheavals is very largely plagiarized from two minorpublications produced long before by Theophilus Shepstone.It goes on to propose an alternative account whichdemonstrates that the.Zulu state was simply one among anumber of important political actors in the ThukelaMzimkhuluterritories in the 1810s and 1820s. Though theZulu were eventually able to establish domination of theregion, they did not 'devastate' it, as conventionallythey are supposed to have done, and were unableeffectively to occupy more than a small part of it. TheZulu were still in the process of establishing a hold onthe region when, in the mid-1820S, its political dynamicsbegan to be transformed by the increasing involvement ofBritish traders from Port Natal in the affairs of the Zulustate. By the end of the 1820s, cape-based commercial andpolitical interests were beginning to contest Zuluhegemony in the region south of the Thukela, and a new erain its history was opening.

[发布机构] University of the Witwatersrand