Zulu Identities: Being Zulu, Past and Present

Abstract

Zulu identities: being Zulu, past and present; edited by Benedict Carton, John Laband and Jabulani Sithole. London: Hurst, 2009. xxv + 633 pp. ISBN 978-185065-952-5. £25. "What does it mean to be Zulu today? Is this different from what it has meant in the past?" To answer these questions - as posed on the back cover of this book - the editors assembled a team of fifty scholars, based mainly in North America and South Africa, with a scattering from Britain, and gave them the task of showing how "the characteristic traditions of a pre-industrial people have evolved into different cultural expressions of 'Zulu-ness' in modern South Africa". Moreover, with the defeat of apartheid and the emergence of democracy in South Africa, the editors hoped that the project would play a part in freeing South African history from its past constraints and prejudices. The result is quite simply a tour de force, a collection of fifty-two distinct chapters, none more than twenty pages long, each of which explores in a stimulating and accessible way its chosen theme. And although written by academics for academics, it deserves a far wider audience, especially for those chapters which debunk some of the myths which, for example, surround the nature of Shaka's rule, Zulu militarism, or the relationship between Mangosuthu Buthelezi and ANC leader Albert Luthuli. In a brief review, it is possible to do no more than refer to a few of the themes running through this monumental book. On Shaka, for example, Dan Wylie returns to some of the arguments he has made at greater length in his book Myth of Iron: Shaka in history} In doing so, he makes the important point that "all we have as historians is text [original emphasis], writing, a crafted literature, subject to all the limitations and wiles of language" (p.82). Thus the European witnesses to Shaka's rule, notably Isaacs and Fynn, depicted themselves as "morally upright citizens carrying the light of European civilisation into the heart of darkness", whereas "they were, actually, frontier ruffians grubbing for a quick buck" (p. 83). Moreover, their original writings were rewritten by editors with their own agendas before being published, and mythology gradually replaced history. Wylie points out that this was by no means only a nineteenth century phenomenon. He draws attention to E. A Ritter's influential Shaka Zulu. In this, Ritter gave a detailed and dramatic account of the battle of Qokli Hill which has been copied by many writers since (including, Wylie notes, present-day authors of business strategies). However, Wylie says, "there is no evidence whatsoever that such a battle happened" (p.85). Similarly, John Wright's chapter on Shaka revisits the vexed question of the mfecane, and whether it actually existed outside the minds of earlier writers on Zulu history. He takes particular issue with AT Bryant's influential Olden Times in Zululand and Natal (1929), describing it as "dramatised and hyperbolic" and "inherited directly from the settler stereotype" (p. 73). And, following Cobbing, he reduces the mfecane to "a product of the search made by imperialist and settler ideologues for a plausible alibi for colonial- and imperial-based interests, whose aggressions were ultimately responsible for the violence and social disruptions of the period" (p. 70). A few of the chapters explore how, after the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, the Zulu 'warrior stereotype' entered British popular culture. Jeff Guy explores how the Zulu lziqu - necklaces of carved wooden beads denoting bravery or other qualities - evolved into the prestigious Wood Badge of the Scouts, and gives a fascinating account of how Baden-Powell may have acquired his first iziqu during his time in Zululand. …