South Africa pushed to the limit: the political economy of change

Abstract

young men’s rebellion, and indeed argues to the contrary that there is considerable evidence of “intergenerational cooperation” during this period. Although Mahoney makes good use of the extensive existing historiography in the early sections of the book, the strength of his argument rests on a thorough mining of a range of primary sources, especially those from the official colonial archives. Among these sources he found “voluminous testimony” from Africans, including evidence given in a variety of official proceedings such as succession and land disputes, and, from 1897, reports on local African opinion in Natal provided by paid African government informants called “Native Intelligence Officers” (152). Whilst acknowledging the obvious limitations of these official sources, given the manner of their production, Mahoney defends their value as evidence once placed in proper perspective. Following Carolyn Hamilton, he similarly defends the value of the James Stuart Archive, which he uses to underpin his discussion of the initial failure of Zulu ethnic integration to overcome affiliations to rival chiefdoms (Chapter One). Overall, in its use of primary sources, this book is a good advert for the “tradition of fine-grained, localized social history in Natal” of which Mahoney justly claims to be part (13). Ultimately, The Other Zulus makes a compelling case in laying out the initial obstacles to an overarching Zulu identity among Natal Africans during the nineteenth century, and in explaining the shift in forces that fostered the emergence of an albeit modified Zulu ethnicity among them at the beginning of the twentieth century. However, a short epilogue in which Mahoney asserts that this laid the groundwork for a continuing and – he argues – inexorable process of “Zuluisation” among Natal Africans during the twentieth century is less convincing. This needless telescoping of the more recent history of the Zulus sits oddly with the carefully modulated and meticulously researched arguments presented in the body of this book.