John Laband

‘Fighting Stick of Thunder’: Firearms and the Zulu Kingdom: The Cultural Ambiguities of Transferring Weapons Technology

Abstract This paper investigates the reluctance of the nineteenth-century Zulu people of southern Africa fully to embrace firearms in their war-making, and posits that this was an expression of their military culture. Not that the Zulu could not appreciate the battle-winning potential of the new military technology, or were dissuaded from increasingly determined efforts to obtain large quantities of firearms from traders. Yet, because firearms were prestigious weapons, monopolized by the elite, or professional hunters, Zulu commoners had little opportunity to master them and continued to rely instead on their traditional weapons, particularly the stabbing-spear. Even so, cultural rather than practical reasons were behind the rank and file’s reluctance to upgrade firearms to their prime weapon. Employing recorded contemporary Zulu oral evidence, praise songs, and statements of prisoners-of-war, to unpack the Zulus’ own perception of their heroic military culture, it is argued that, because of the engrained Zulu cultural consensus that only hand-to-hand combat was appropriate conduct for a true fighting-man, killing at a distance with a firearm was of inferior significance, and did not even entail the ritual pollution that followed homicide and the shedding of human blood. Only close combat was worthy of praise and commemoration.

“THE DIRECTION OF THE WHOLE OF THE FORCES AVAILABLE”: THE DISPUTED SPHERES OF MILITARY AND CIVIL AUTHORITY IN THE EASTERN CAPE (1877– 1878), NATAL (1879) AND ZULULAND (1888)

In the late Victorian British Empire, the spheres of authority of the civil and military powers were not unequivocally defined, and could lead to wrangles that threatened the efficient conduct of military operations. Three such disputes occurred in southern Africa between 1878 and 1888. In 1878, during the 9th Cape Frontier War, the high commissioner replaced the Cape ministry with a more compliant one to assert control over both the imperial and colonial forces engaged. During the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, the lieutenant-governor of Natal disputed the right of the general officer commanding to deploy African levies raised and stationed in Natal along the Zululand border. In 1888, during the uSuthu Rebellion in Zululand, the governor interfered with the general’s military arrangements because he believed these arrangements affected his civil powers. To head off future disputes of this nature, the British government ruled in 1879 that the commander in the field always had to exercise full control over active operations, and in 1888 finally clarified in which circumstances the general in command assumed operational authority over both the colonial and imperial troops stationed in a colony.

The View Across the River: Harriette Colenso and the Zulu Struggle Against Imperialism (review)

various reasons, had it in for Bunyoro – Samuel Baker and Frederick Lugard appear here in particularly baleful guise – and in the train of their destructive passage have come a multitude of other afflictions. Doyle’s principal concern is to explain Bunyoro’s unusual demographic history – why was it the population here took so long to recover from the continent-wide dip of the early twentieth century? Elsewhere in Africa, populations began to grow significantly by the 1930s, but in Bunyoro the census evidence, unreliable as it is, does seem to point consistently to a declining or static population until the 1950s. In explaining this puzzle, Doyle becomes involved in recounting Bunyoro’s political history in the period from the 1880s to the 1950s, and in doing so he fills a gap – apart from Beattie’s substantial anthropological work, Bunyoro has attracted rather little academic interest. Doyle argues that low fertility and high child mortality can be understood as a consequence of a combination of political circumstances. One of the most enduring consequences of the extended violence of the late-nineteenth century was the loss of cattle, which was devastating for the people of what was, in many ways, a cattle culture. Cattle numbers never recovered, for a variety of reasons, and this destabilized marriage (by disrupting bridewealth customs), impoverished many, and led to a long-term problem with lack of protein in the diet. The self-serving policies of Bunyoro’s rulers, particularly Tito Winyi, helped to perpetuate these problems, even when British hostility towards the kingdom declined from the 1920s: locked into a sycophantic politics of nostalgia, Bunyoro’s local government lagged behind while others in Uganda determinedly pursued development. The blend of demographic theory and political history here is occasionally a little awkward, and there is a little repetition in some of the discussions of demography: we are several times told that Bunyoro is ‘a remarkably unhealthy place’. The tone of gloom does seem a little remorseless, and one is sometimes tempted to wonder if there are other perspectives (cheap, goodquality imported hoes may have damaged local iron working, but presumably they were good news for people who used hoes a lot?). But Bunyoro does seem to have suffered particularly badly both from colonial conquest violence and from subsequent idiotic colonial policies – cattle inoculation programmes that killed more beasts than they protected, commodity price fixing that repeatedly undermined local enterprise – and on the whole Doyle offers a persuasive explanation of Bunyoro’s particular history. If the book ends with a slight hint of uncertainty on the demographic side, this is entirely realistic. As Doyle stresses in his conclusion, there is really still an enormous amount that we do not know about demographic history in Africa.

Why the Boers Lost the War (review)

the experiences of those enslaved and transported through Ouidah particularly admirable. His detailed discussion of Francisco Felix de Souza and the Brazilian community in Ouidah as it operated within both local and international political and economic networks is also very informative. By documenting the expansion and contraction of the towns districts, Laws study provides considerable insight into the history of Ouidah as a coherent yet constantly changing social, cultural, and political unit. I would have loved to have seen more on gender relations in Ouidah (a topic confined largely to the discussion of the roles of the enslaved and the evolving role of women and men in the palm oil trade). The religious history of the town is given fuller attention, largely in the context of Ouidahs residential and political history, but the book left me wanting still more, even of a speculative nature. Despite these minor quibbles—which may have more to do with the limitations of the sources than with the authors choices—this is an excellent study that should be of great interest to those studying West African precolonial history, the history of the Atlantic slave trade, and premodern urban history. Sandra E. Greene Cornell University Ithaca, New York

Jonathan Sutherland and Diane Canwell, Zulu Kings and Their Armies . Barnsley: Pen & Sword Military (hb £19.99 – 1 84415 060 7). 2004, 198 pp.

its legitimacy) for two reasons. First, Christian discourses have long associated culture with ‘demonic practices’, thereby polarizing national and local debates about culture. In fact, some students and teachers have often found it difficult to reconcile the teachings of culture (encountered through participation in cultural programming) to their religious beliefs. Second, prevailing cultural understandings of the relationship between age and traditional authority have simply served to reassert the expertise of the traditional polity (including elders), rather than the cultural knowledges of the students and the teachers (as legitimate knowledge producers). Throughout the study the reader is led to understand how multiple government and popular discourses of culture have coexisted and interacted with each other (for example, state discourses about ‘culture for development’, ‘culture as a way of life’ and ‘culture as drumming and dancing’ and competing popular discourses such as ‘culture as inheritance or historical knowledge and the way of life of the ancestors’, and ‘culture as the customs of traditional kingdoms’). The study is particularly relevant in highlighting the troubling role of the state in the macro-social politics of education, and how the cultural politics of schooling and the processes of educational delivery help define the ‘citizen’. Reading the text one cannot help but pose some questions: What is the role of culture and pedagogy in social transformation? What is the place of local cultural resource knowledge in institutions of learning? How does the contemporary learner evoke culture to respond to issues of responsibility and accountability, not only to oneself, but also to communities and the nation? In broaching culture in schools, what are the politics of the learner’s and educator’s imaginations? How can we reconceptualize dominant understandings of political spaces to include the competing ways culture is resisted? Coe’s book offers the reader some insights in the search for answers to these questions. It is a valuable scholarly piece of work for academic researchers, community workers, educators, administrators, field practitioners, sociologists, anthropologists and political scientists interested in questions of African knowledge production, culture, identity, politics and nationalism. For pluralistic communities working through the tensions of the diversity of ethnicities and cultures through a multicultural education practice, this Ghanaian case study of bringing different ethnic traditions together into a national space offers some critical lessons. Teaching of cultures must be based on the lived experiences and the experiential knowledge of learners. Given the apparent contestations over culture, teaching of culture must also move beyond a celebratory mode. The incorporation of local cultural knowledges into (official) school knowledge must lead to a transformation of both the construction and meanings of knowledge as well as the relationships of students, educators and local communities to the production and teaching of cultural knowledge.

‘War Can't Be Made with Kid Gloves’: The Impact of the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 on the Fabric of Zulu Society

In 1998 Michael Lieven published an article in Albion, in which he discussed the heroic narratives of empire, and the ways in which, in the specific case of the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, they were used to imbue ‘imperial expansion with a sense of heroic and moral purpose’.’ This investigation was his preliminary to a differently focused assessment of the same colonial war, which appeared in October 1999 in History. Called ‘“Butchering the Brutes All Over the Place”: Total War and Massacre in Zululand, 1879’, the article set out to demonstrate ‘that the British campaign, while stopping just short of the demands of genocide, amounted to total war’.* The purpose of this study is to engage critically with this conclusion reached by Lieven. It should be immediately apparent that Lieven’s thesis is based not on detailed, quantitative analysis, but on his subjective and impressionistic response to a variety of contemporary sources which he did not subject to the historian’s mandatory internal and external criticism, but which he accepted at face value. Thus private and unrealisable fulminations by contemporaries are confounded with deliberate policy decisions; while it is not made clear where intentions expressed by British officials and officers were nevertheless never carried out or even attempted in pra~t ice .~ Most crucial of all, however, if Lieven’s claims concerning total war and genocide are to be substantiated, is his failure to place the Anglo-Zulu War in the comparative context of contemporary colonial campaigns and the manner in which they were normally conducted.