Myth Of Iron: Shaka in History
by Dan Wylie (UKZN Press)
At much the same time as Dan Wylie’s first book on Shaka, Savage Delight: White Myths of Shaka, came out in 2000, there also appeared a short work called Leadership Lessons from Emperor Shaka Zulu the Great. Obviously designed to provide an indigenous version of the bestselling Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun, it reproduced all the myths about the Zulu leader: his invention of a regimental system, his technological innovation in the form of the short stabbing-spear, his use of the horned-attack formation, and so on. It also reproduced images from a book on Shaka and the Zulus that I recall from childhood, which isn’t very original (or even, perhaps, legal). And aren’t the appellations “Emperor” and “the Great” peculiarly Eurocentric?
Never mind the dubious comparison of Shaka and Attila — another one of those colonial ideas that fostered the image of a genocidal maniac forging the Zulu nation in fire and blood. (The regular comparison with Napoleon is slightly more complimentary.) At any rate, you’d have thought that aligning Shaka with Attila, the vicious barbarian devastator of much of the medieval West, was not exactly a positive thought wherewith to encourage entrepreneurs. Leadership Lessons from Emperor Shaka Zulu the Great certainly lacked the irony that must have informed the Attila book, but then this kind of inspirational business work is part of a deeply mysterious genre.
As mysterious, in fact, as Shaka himself. As Wylie points out in Myth of Iron: Shaka in History, we actually know very little about Shaka. What we think we know is largely dubious, the product of the imaginations of a small handful of colonial-era travellers who almost all had ulterior motives. These sources are Nathaniel Isaacs, Henry Francis Fynn, James Saunders King, Francis Farewell and Charles Rawden Maclean (who became known as John Ross). Maclean/Ross was the boy shipwrecked on the Natal coast who found his way to Shaka’s court, and in some ways provides the least tarnished portrait of Shaka by a white person. The others were all “pioneers”, which is to say ruthless adventurers out to gain as much personal financial and political advantage as possible from their encounter with the Zulu leader.
This couldn’t be put more clearly than in a letter from Isaacs to Fynn while Isaacs was working (with a ghostwriter) on his Travels and Adventures in Eastern Africa (1836), the first written account of Shaka. In December 1832 Isaacs advised Fynn to supply his own Shaka narrative, and, in his depiction of Shaka and Shaka’s successor Dingane, encouraged him to “Make them out to be as bloodthirsty as you can and endeavour to give an estimation of the number of people they have murdered during their reign[s] …” Such a strategy, said Isaacs, would not only “swell up the work and make it interesting” but would promote the cause of British annexation of the area, which would mean “a fortune for you as well as myself”.
In Savage Delight and Myth of Iron, Wylie shows how Isaacs and Fynn were involved in all sorts of shady schemes to enrich themselves, including perhaps slave-trading, and also demonstrates how the textual history of their works evinces an increasingly falsified portrait of Shaka. History is not simply a succession of easily ascertainable events waiting to be recorded, but is inextricable from the writing of history itself; none of its writers transcend their own historical moment or, for that matter, their own political and personal aims. The history of Shaka as hitherto presented is riddled with such distortions, most of which have gone unchallenged — even by historians sympathetic to the colonised — to this day.
So, in Myth of Iron, Wylie sets out to determine what it really is possible to know about Shaka. Apart from carefully reading the works of Isaacs et al and discarding their embellishments, he takes on the oral history of Shaka as provided by Zulu people themselves, in particular those accounts recorded half a century after Shaka’s death by the colonial administrator James Stuart. There was a time in South African historiography when oral history was valorised as more reliable than the accounts of white colonial historians, for obvious reasons, but Wylie is circumspect. If the works of Isaacs, Fynn and the like are fatally flawed by their partially hidden agendas, then the accounts of the Zulu narrators, when compared with each other, throw up a host of contradictions — and also, often, evince agendas of one kind or another. Besides that, Dingane seems to have made a determined propagandistic effort to paint his predecessor as outrageously evil, even attributing to him some of his own misdeeds.
Consequently, Myth of Iron is not a biography of Shaka but an “anti-biography”. “The material for a trustworthy biography of Shaka simply does not exist,” concludes Wylie, having stated unambiguously (and having proved, in the body of this book), that there “are many gaps and mysteries” in the story of Shaka: “There is a great deal that we do not know, and never will know … Maybe two times out of three, we cannot be sure that the anecdotes told about him are true.”
Most of the famous stories about Shaka are only that — stories. His birth was probably not illegitimate, though he may have been born in the interval between the betrothal and formal marriage of his parents, Senzangakhona and Nandi. The idea that he was rejected and bullied as a child is unsubstantiated, and part of an invented personal psychology that portrayed him as a murderous despot. Certainly, the vast majority of the tales of his bloodthirsty excesses are pure fabrication, conjured up by Isaacs, Fynn and others, and later elaborated with ghoulish gusto by the likes of EA Ritter, whose 1955 “biography”, Shaka Zulu, Wylie simply refers to as a novel — one, more-over, that was reworked and further sensationalised by a ghostwriter with an eye on the European market for horrific tales of African savagery. (Interestingly, though, one aspect of Shaka does emerge so often in so many accounts that it has the ring of truth: his cruel wit, or witty cruelty.)
But Shaka was not just the “monster of a myriad crimes”, as AT Bryant, author of the massively influential Olden Times in Zululand and Natal (1929), called him. He was also portrayed as a military genius and the founding father of the “Zulu nation” (“nation”, of course, being rather an anachronism in this context). These more positive attributes were taken over by Zulu nationalists and Africanists and used to turn Shaka into a hero, but they are also largely mythological. Shaka may have built upon and refined developing military technologies such as the short stabbing-spear and the formation of social-regimental units, but he did not invent them. (He probably did not use the famous horned attack at all, and, contra Leadership Lessons from Emperor Shaka Zulu the Great, he certainly did not “lead from the front”.) The tales of Shaka’s martial successes are exaggerated, too. He did less conquering than imagined; in his consolidation of a Zulu polity and his entrenchment of a politico-military elite, writes Wylie, “Negotiation, patronage, marriages, ritual, language and propaganda were as important … as coercive violence.”
Yet Myth of Iron, despite its status as an “anti-biography”, is not only a work of debunking. For all its evisceration of error, supposition and myth, Wylie nonetheless provides an absorbing picture of Shaka’s world and times, dealing with the debate around the “mfecane” (the alleged large-scale migrations of dispossessed Africans during the period, blamed on Shaka and made into an “alibi” for white conquest) and the related issue of slave-trading on the east coast of southern Africa. Thus he locates what we can know or reasonably surmise about Shaka in the broader context of local and global historical factors, which is immensely valuable. That, combined with his detailed unweaving of the Shaka myth, makes for a deeply fascinating volume — the thorough deconstructive exercise is even, as he puts it, “fun”. Certainly, for all its density, complexity and length, Myth of Iron is a book I couldn’t put down.
In one of the boxed areas in the book that give information about issues and people with a tangential relation to Shaka, Wylie tells the tale of a character nicknamed “Swim-the-Seas”, a Xhosa man who did some translation between Shaka and the white men who were later to traduce him. At the end of his account of the amazing life and career of “Swim-the-Seas”, Wylie notes: “We will never have enough information to write a full biography of this extraordinary man, but someone needs to write a good novel.” Good idea — and, may I suggest, a project for which Wylie himself is perfectly qualified.