Dan Wylie
TERRIFIC MAJESTY: THE POWERS OF SHAKA ZULU AND THE LIMITS OF HISTORICAL INVENTION by Carolyn Hamilton (David Philip)
The fact is, we know almost nothing certain about Shaka – not even what he looked like: one Zulu informant, from our most extensive oral-history source, the James Stuart archive, claims he was short and very dark; another that he was tall and unusually light-skinned. So never mind his political or psychological motivations.
Carolyn Hamilton explores, in part, the validity and influence of such Zulu sources, resisting more literary critics who suggest that Shaka is largely a textual invention, a malleable symbol available for any ideological distortion, from the early white settlers’ self- serving monsterisation to the Inkatha Freedom Party’s nationalistic lionisation.
Hamilton’s project is not to establish the historical facts about Shaka, but to examine to what extent this malleability has been limited by the historical circumstances in which Shaka-as-symbol has been used, and by the presence of Zulu accounts of their king. In short, Hamilton suggests, Shaka is not “just” a colonial myth.
Hamilton presents four case studies. The first disreputable white traders, including Henry Fynn and Nathaniel Isaacs, who met Shaka in 1824, seemed perfectly happy with Shaka.
Until they crossed him, that is, whereupon, in a couple of very specific circumstances, they alleged that Shaka was a murderous tyrant. This image, purveyed unremittingly in Isaacs’ Travels (1836), governed much popularly read literature on Shaka well into the 20th century.
Hamilton argues that even this opportunistically monstrous portrayal had roots in Zulu and other local accounts.
She draws on those traditions collected by Natal administrator James Stuart, offering a brief methodology for assessing the often violently contradictory informants.
Clearly, wildly differing views of Shaka existed even within the Zulu polity; but given that these accounts were collected up to a century later, she can’t demonstrate in detail how at that time specific Zulu accounts influenced the whites’ views.
Next, Hamilton examines with persuasive density the uses of the Shaka “metaphor” by two Natal-Zululand administrators, Theophilus Shepstone and James Stuart.
Both men fundamentally wished to preserve Zulu ruling institutions as a means to colonial control, an approach necessarily based on extensive knowledge of Zulu custom.
Shepstone, in a display of bizarrely arrogant theatricality in 1873, thus utilised the symbolic authority of the founding ruler to present himself “as Shaka” and a de facto “father” of the Zulu”.
As Hamilton shows, however, the Zulu had their own reasons for helping engineer this, making it a less unilateral, appropriative charade than most have argued.
The ambivalence in researching the values of Zulu society while serving a government which fundamentally denied those values is even more evident in Stuart’s career.
In Hamilton’s view, Stuart inherited Shepstone’s philosophies, which had been largely rubbished by the Anglo- Zulu war of 1879.
Stuart devoted massive effort to collecting testimony from some 200 informants of variable plausibility, evincing in the process considerable sympathy with the Zulu – though not enough to prevent him helping suppress the 1906 Bambatha “rebellion”, and propagating the old racist mythologies when it suited his audience.
That dramatically antithetical views could be purveyed by a single (and unusually knowledgeable) man tends, on the face of it, to confirm the view that the image of Shaka has been infinitely manipulable.
Hamilton’s own evidence shows that people could – and did – say just about anything about Shaka. While she reveals in detail the reasons why certain people chose to speak of Shaka as monster or hero in particular historical circumstances, she doesn’t always convince that what they were saying wasn’t invented. Much of it simply had to be: Shaka was either tall or short, not both.
Nevertheless, Hamilton shows how contemporary political pressures from both colonial and African sources helped determine how Shepstone and Stuart manoeuvred through the choices of image available to them – a hugely valuable step towards clarifying the dynamics of the mythology.
Shepstone and Stuart are well suited to support the thesis, however: they were so involved in Zulu politics they could hardly avoid being influenced by their subjects and being particularly constrained by circumstance.
Hamilton seems less sure when discussing those imaginative works which (unlike the narrower audiences which Shepstone and Stuart commanded) spread the legends of Shaka to a mass readership.
Her brief examinations of the novels of Rider Haggard and EA Ritter suffer from a paucity of attention to European narrative models and mythic material.
Haggard, however influenced by his South African visits, was hugely popular not because he was accurate about the Zulu (I think he was less so than Hamilton argues), but because he satisfied the preconceptions of audiences who had never encountered a Zulu in their lives.
Hamilton acknowledges these other influences only in asides which nevertheless threaten to undermine her thesis.
Still, we can’t expect one book to do everything. In showing that the Zulu were never entirely passive recipients of an imposed settler mythodology, she largely succeeds, though she treats Isaacs, Stuart and Fynn much less suspiciously than I would (she scarcely acknowledges the shameful manner in which Stuart edited Fynn’s so-called “diary” into a colonial propaganda piece).
Hamilton’s critical faculties are sharpest in her treatment of Bill Faure’s television series Shaka Zulu – surely the most revolting, inaccurate representation of the Zulu since Isaacs – and of its touristic offspring, the “cultural” theatrics of “Shakaland”. She parses much of the tortuous politicking behind the series, and the sad absurdity of “Shakaland” – a terrific example of Jean Baudrillard’s “simulacrum”: the simulation which utterly displaces reality.
Hamilton demurs vigorously from postmodernist, discourse-based historiography, and argues that with sufficient methodological finesse one can boil the sources down to a “core” of historical certainty. Her attempt to rescue this from gauche empiricism with forays into discourse analysis seem to me the book’s main weakness – but then I’m a literary type.
In all, in serviceable if unenterprising prose, Hamilton provides an extremely important addition to Shakan studies which doesn’t quite prove its point.