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vi
Contents
3 The properties of facts (or how to read with a grain of salt) 101
4 Reading ‘Xhosa’ historiography 141
5 The border and the body: post-phenomenological reflections
on the borders of apartheid 191
6 History after apartheid 219
Conclusion 253
Notes 270
Bibliography and archival sources 309
Index 329
List of illustrations
Figure 1 The cover of the Frederick I’Ons exhibition catalogue; there is little
clarity on whether the figure portrayed is Hintsa or Nqeno 71
Figure 2 Charles Michell’s cartographic representation of the landscape in
which Hintsa was killed, published in 1835 83
Figure 3 Flight of the Fingoes [sic], by Charles Michell, 1836 84
Figure 4 Warriors Fleeing Across a River/The Death of Hintsa, by
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viii
Ah, Britain! Great Britain!
Great Britain of the endless sunshine!
You sent us truth, denied us the truth;
You sent us life, deprived us of life;
You sent us light, we sit in the dark,
Shivering, benighted in the bright noonday sun.
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ix
Acknowledgements
Perhaps the most daunting task in completing this book is to recall the
many people who have had to endure its long incubation. If I mention
them by name, it is not so that they may be reminded of their complicity
in The Deaths of Hintsa but to thank them for their generosity, insight,
friendship and love over the years. To them I attribute my long-held desire
to substitute a politics of despair with a politics of setting to work on
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postcolonial futures.
My first foray into writing this book began under the watchful
eye of Allen Isaacman and Jean Allman at the University of Minnesota,
as a graduate student in African History and as a recipient of a MacArthur
Fellowship grant. The more detailed study of the story of Hintsa was initially
submitted as a doctoral dissertation under the title ‘In the Event of History’
to the University of Minnesota in 2003. Thanks to Allen Isaacman, Director
of the Interdisciplinary Centre for the Study of Global Change, I was granted
an opportunity to interact with a group of thought-provoking historians of
Africa including Maanda Mulaudzi, Peter Sekibakiba Lekgoathi, Marissa
Moorman, Jacob Tropp, Heidi Gengenbach, Derek Peterson, Ana Gomez,
Alda Saute, Helena Pohlandt McCormick and Jesse Buche.
While at the University of Minnesota, John Mowitt, Qadri Ismail,
Ajay Skaria, David Roediger, Lisa Disch and Bud Duvall provided many
new and exciting directions for developing my thoughts on colonialism,
apartheid and postapartheid South Africa. John Mowitt and Qadri Ismail
gave new meaning to the idea of academic exchange, with Qadri especially
responsible for teaching me a thing or two. The members of the postcolonial
reading group fostered friendships conducive to the exploration of ideas.
Monika Mehta (for teaching me how to cut), Andrew Kinkaid, Guang Lei,
Joel Wainwright and Adam Sitze (for teaching me how not to cut) have,
unbeknown to them, been present at every stage of the writing even as I
x
deposited myself far across the Atlantic Ocean in a little-known place called
the University of the Western Cape (UWC).
The History Department and the Centre for Humanities Research
(CHR) at UWC provided the most enabling environment for the development
of new ideas and critique. The staff and students of the History Department
offered unconditional support for my research through the years. Leslie Witz,
Ciraj Rassool, Patricia Hayes, Nicky Rousseau, Brent Harris, Gary Minkley
(now at Fort Hare University) and Andrew Bank made a special effort to read
my work and comment on it. I hope this book is an acceptable response to
their many questions and queries, and that will be seen as a contribution
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xi
A fellowship at the Centre for the Study of Public Institutions
at Emory University provided the much-needed intellectual stimulus
for fine-tuning the formulations of the book. Ivan Karp and Cory Kratz
are responsible for more than they can imagine, including much of the
discussion on the discourse of anthropology in the eastern Cape. Both
offered encouragement, support and unconditional friendship at a very
crucial time in the making of the book. Helen Moffett provided me with
significant editorial comment and engaged with the text during my
fellowship at Emory. I would also like to thank Durba Mitra, Sunandan
Nedumpaly, Ajit Chittambalam, Shailaja Paik and Swargajyoti Gohain who
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xii
Bobo Pemba and the staff of the Albany Museum (History) granted me
permission to reproduce the images that appear in the book.
Friendship is the basis for all writing and hospitality, its condition.
Unfortunately, writing may also inflict untold damage on friendships.
Vivienne Lalu endured most of the fallout of this project. I am truly sorry
for the harm it has caused but would like to acknowledge her steadfast
commitment over the years. Others who graciously suffered my writing and
obsessions along the way include Ajay, Kilpena, Nikhil and Rahoul Lalu,
Ameet, Nital, Meha and Amisha Lalloo, Deepak, Primal, Natver and Badresh
Patel, Jim Johnson, Latha Varadarajan, Noeleen Murray, Nic Shepherd,
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Abdullah Omar, William and Sophia Mentor, Manju Soni, Carolyn Hamilton,
Mxolisi Hintsa, Ramesh Bhikha, Dhiraj, Tara and Reshma Kassanjee, Ratilal,
Pushpa and Hansa Lalloo, Amy Bell-Mulaudzi, Suren Pillay, Kamal Bhagwan,
Saliem Patel, Fazel Ernest, Ruth Loewenthal and members of my extended
family. I am grateful for all they have done to support this book.
A book that is written over many years invariably leads to friendships
across continents and across urban and rural divides. Colleagues at the Basler
Afrika Bibliographien, Basel, Switzerland, especially Giorgio Miescher, Lorena
Rizzo, Patrick Harries and Dag Henrichson invited me to present some of the
arguments of the present book and encouraged me to think beyond borders
and boundaries. Similarly, I have made many friends in the Tsholora and
Mbhashe in the eastern Cape, amongst whom I wish to single out Kuzile Juza,
Sylvia Mahlala, Mda Mda, Nomathotho Njuqwana and Joe Savu. Mostly, the
residents who have won rights to the Dwesa Cwebe Reserve following a land
restitution process deserve my unconditional gratitude. I hope that our many
conversations, agreements and disagreements have helped to make sense of
the predicament of the rural eastern Cape.
This book is dedicated to Kiera Lalu. At the very least, I hope it
may serve to meaningfully account for my absence. As for answering her
searching question on whether this book will end up in a museum, we will
have to wait and see. It is also dedicated to Jaymathie Lalu, Hansa Lalloo, and
my father, Jayantilal Lalu, for all you have done and much, much more.
xiii
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xiv
Introduction: thinking ahead
Wherever colonisation is a fact, the indigenous culture begins to rot and among
the ruins something begins to be born which is condemned to exist on the margin
allowed it by the European culture.1
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1
colonisation more generally. The Irish Times noted that even ‘if Chief Gcaleka
is something of a showman, his search is part of a broader, more serious
movement [through which] indigenous people are increasingly clamoring
for the restoration of human relics removed from their country during the
colonial era’.3 Others resorted to descriptions, veiled in acerbic humour, of a
maverick power-hungry individual invoking a pre-modern register so as to
advance his own ambition and greed. Labelled ‘the chief of skullduggery’,
Gcaleka was accused of having a shrewd eye for publicity by his disgruntled
spokesperson, Robert Pringle, who went on to describe the mission to recover
Hintsa’s skull as a ‘hoax’. 4 The Mail & Guardian quoted Xhosa paramount
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Xoliliswe Sigcawu, who claimed that ‘the sangoma was a charlatan out
to make money and [a] reputation by playing on Xhosa sensitivities’.5 At a
meeting in Nqadu, Willowvale, in the eastern Cape in 2001, Sigcawu asked
the British High Commissioner to investigate how Gcaleka ‘had come to
possess a skull purportedly that of the late Xhosa hero, Chief Hintsa’.6
Mathatha Tsedu, then writing in the Cape Times, stressed Gcaleka’s lack
of success in proving the skull’s authenticity, although – as a member of
the fraternity of journalists – he wrote with a rare hint of sympathy for the
mission.7 Claiming that ‘the head of king Hintsa has been missing since it
was lopped off after he was killed resisting colonisation’, Tsedu added, ‘Chief
Nicholas Tilana Gcaleka has been waging a one-man war to trace the head
and bring it home for proper burial without success.’8
Gcaleka arrived back in South Africa amidst this far-reaching
public interest in his ancestral instruction. But once he set foot in South
Africa bearing a skull he claimed belonged to Hintsa, Sigcawu summoned
him to an imbizo (council) to establish the truth about his discovery. The
skull was confiscated,9 placed in the care of the police mortuary in Bisho,
King William’s Town, and subsequently handed over to GJ Knobel of the
department of forensic medicine at the University of Cape Town, VM Phillips
of the oral and dental teaching hospital at the University of Stellenbosch
and PV Tobias, the director of the Palaeo-Anthropology Research Unit at
the University of the Witwatersrand, for scientific investigation. In a press
the implications of his search for Hintsa’s skull. At one level, we might find
in Gcaleka’s lie more of the constellation of the regime of truth, and how it
functions, than is proclaimed through the juridical foundations of the TRC
itself. Luise White has proposed that lies, like secrets, are socially negotiated
realms of information.16 Good lies, she argues, are crafted, they have to be
negotiated with a specific audience, and they have to be made to stick – a lie,
a cover story, not only camouflages but explains. Lies, in this formulation, are
about excess that demands, inter alia, revised strategies of reading, different
from those that historians are accustomed to. For White, lies are not merely
inventions, but fabrications that rest at the very heart of society and its
histories. The intersection of lies and social life is, we may argue, one way of
perceiving of a narrative dimension that is central to the work of history. To
simply recognise lies as a condition of life is to neglect the structure of the
presumed lie that is so crucial to the functioning of social worlds. In other
words, it is to ignore the ways in which lies overlap with regimes of truth or,
more importantly, how regimes of truth are lodged in the articulation of what
are ultimately considered lies.
At another level, the allegations of the lie simply put into greater
doubt the very effects of a regime of truth which, while being mobilised to a
presumably noble end of national reconciliation, offered little hope of settling
the outstanding questions about the colonial past. In speaking of colonialism
I am aligning the concept with a suggestion by Nicholas Dirks, who argues
The quest for Hintsa’s head not only called into question the categories by
which the TRC functioned, but also seemed to inadvertently short-circuit
a discussion amongst South African historians after 1994 about the crisis
in history.22 This crisis has been variously represented as a drop in student
himself. While the search for evidence was insufficient to meet the
expectations of history, his evoking of dreams and imagination was seen
as equally deficient in laying claim to reliably participating in the discourse
of history.25 Taken together, this was seemingly sufficient reason for his
disqualification. To simply cast Gcaleka aside for failing the rules of a regime
of truth, either in terms of the rules of evidence or in terms of recourse to
the imaginary structure, is to ignore how his quest foregrounds the work
of the imaginary structure in the discourse of history. After all, history,
as Hayden White has shown, necessarily relies on an imaginary structure
in the construction of its narratives.26 In history, the imaginary structure
is a necessary and complementary aspect of discourse. If we follow the
lead of De Certeau,27 we might say that the imaginary structure is not, as
White suggests, merely a structural condition of history, but ‘a restless
seeking after the self in the present underpinning the discourse of history’.
The disqualification of Gcaleka on the grounds of resorting to imaginary
structure thus thwarted a more sustained reflection on how history as a
discourse suppresses the function of the conditions of narrativity in its
discourse. Gcaleka, perhaps surreptitiously, renders the distinction between
evidence and imagination, or history and historiography, inoperable by
revealing their imbrications in the modes of evidence of the colonial archive.
This inoperability of a key distinction in historical discourse is a
recurrent theme in narratives on the killing of Hintsa. Consider, for example,
Sarhili [could not] forget that terrible day more than twenty years
previously (April 1835) when he had accompanied his father Hintsa
as he rode proudly into the camp of Governor D’Urban. Hintsa was
given assurances of his personal safety, but he was never to leave the
camp alive. D’Urban disarmed Hintsa’s retinue, placed the king under
heavy guard and threatened to hang him from the nearest tree. Hintsa
was held hostage for a ransom of 25 000 cattle and 500 horses, ‘war
damages’ owed to the colony. He tried to escape but was shot down,
and after he was dead his ears were cut off as military souvenirs.28
In adhering to the broad outlines of Peires’s account of the cattle killing, Mda
offers the following account of the circumstances in which Hintsa was killed.
Narrating the unfolding drama of the cattle killing, Mda reminds us of the
chasm between the administrative burden of the colonial archive and the
demands of anti-colonial memory:
The Otherworld where the ancestors lived had been caressed by the
shadow of King Hintsa. Even though almost twenty years had passed
since King Hintsa had been brutally murdered in 1835 by Governor Sir
Benjamin D’Urban, the amaXhosa people still remembered him with
great love. They had not forgotten how D’Urban had invited the king
to a meeting, promising him that he would be safe, only to cut his
ears as souvenirs and ship his head to Britain.29
The story of the killing of Hintsa cannot be told without blurring the
distinction between history and historiography. This is the premise of this
book, which endeavours to connect the modes of evidence of the colonial
archive with the imaginary structure that underlies its narrative possibilities.
In delineating the indistinction of the two in the story of the killing of
Hintsa, I hope also to outline a way to connect history and historiography so
as to activate a postcolonial critique of apartheid that would enable possible
new directions in the rewriting of South African history.
power. In the long run such an approach may help us better comprehend the
formation of subjectivity in South African history.
Today, in the aftermath of apartheid’s legal dissolution, it is also
necessary to reformulate the meaning of apartheid given the seemingly
entrenched legacies of authoritarianism that seem to persist in South African
society. The postcolonial critique of apartheid is a continuation of a strand
of critique that derives from a critical engagement with the intellectual
inheritance of Marxist scholarship of the 1970s, which investigated the
structural conditions of apartheid. The scholarship of the 1970s, especially
the formative debate involving Martin Legassick and Harold Wolpe, helped
to activate a revisionist understanding of race and class and to pave the
way for the agency rooted in the black experience of rural dispossession
and urban labour.32 The critique of apartheid, influenced to some extent
by the growth of underdevelopment theories, forged in the context of Latin
America, resulted in an analysis in which the concepts of race and class
critically interrupted each other. However, these arguments were later
appropriated into the narratives of the Cold War and resistance to apartheid
in South Africa, tending in the process to become somewhat fixed in
their meaning.33 One reason for this is, perhaps, that, in the discourses of
liberation movements, the notions of race and class became increasingly
regulated through programmatic statements such as ‘colonialism of a special
type’, which became the basis of analyses of apartheid within the African
This, however, was not merely to write a social history from below; one that
was additive of those who were cast as Europe’s people without history. The
elaboration of the concept ‘subaltern’ exposed something of a categorical
crisis when history’s relation to power was specifically refracted through the
prism of postcolonial criticism. As such, the subaltern marked a necessary
limit in the composition of power. This, as Gyan Prakash notes, means that
subalternity erupts within the system of dominance and marks its limits
from within, that its externality to dominant systems of knowledge and
power surfaces inside the system of dominance, but only as an intimation,
as a trace of that which eludes the dominant discourse. 42 Even as a ruse of
dominance, as a sign internal to a system or an impossible inadequation
in a sign system, the term ‘subaltern’ nevertheless conveys a sense of
categorical distinction. If Prakash’s formulation echoes my own reading of
Gcaleka, there is still some need to explain the shift proposed by subaltern
studies from the recuperative project surrounding the preordained subject
of history to a reading of the traces of subalternity in hegemonic discourses.
The question, it seems, is equally one about the concepts of difference that
subaltern studies entertains and whether these might help to activate a
postcolonial critique of apartheid.
and Marxism, each promising a future that transcended a violent past but
becoming increasingly embroiled in the prescriptions of the Cold War. In
the SSC, the subaltern is inserted into the logic of these grand narratives, not
because it can be featured as an exemplar of historical consciousness, but
because it enables an investigation of the anatomy of failure to complete the
critique of colonialism in the discourses of nationalism and Marxism.
The work undertaken in the name of the SSC, itself a considerably
diverse research agenda bound together by a broad postcolonial intellectual
commitment, has resulted, in at least one sense, in a critical deconstruction
of historiography – both nationalist and Marxist. In the promise of transition
from colonial rule, the figure of the subaltern stood, hyperbolically perhaps,
as a demographic differential, to use Guha’s term, that interrupted the flows
of historiographical modalities of social change. If indeed that phrase has
proved successful in calling attention to failed promises, I want to argue that,
in a peculiar if not ironic sense, apartheid too could be seen as an instance
of demographic difference, especially if we consider its legislative tyranny of
separate development.
Yet, there is something more poignant than the reminder of
apartheid’s decree in the arguments of the SSC, especially in its attempt
to question the theories of change presented by nationalist and Marxist
historiography in respect of those whose consciousness needed to be
translated into respective metafictions. More crucial is the way in which the
With hindsight, it can be said that there were three broad areas
in which Subaltern Studies differed from the history-from-below
approach of Hobsbawm or Thompson (allowing for differences
between these two eminent historians of England and Europe).
Subaltern historiography necessarily entailed a relative separation
of the history of power from any universalist histories of capital,
a critique of the nation form, and an interrogation of the relation
between power and knowledge (hence of the archive itself and of
history as a form of knowledge). In these differences, I would argue,
lay the beginnings of a new way of theorizing the intellectual agenda
for postcolonial histories. 44
My engagement with the SSC is premised not so much on its notion of the
subaltern as demographic differential but rather on its interruptive strategy
for reading, as I have already suggested, the theories of change. I am not
necessarily interested in comparative histories in the social scientific sense
of that term or in the use of the term ‘subaltern’ to denote yet another subject
category in the pantheon of multiculturalism. I do not feel that the term
‘subaltern’ should limit us to a sense of categorical distinction. Mine is a
more selective advancement of the project of the SSC which stages an inquiry
about the theory of change in the transition from apartheid to postapartheid
South Africa, and allows us, as Hall would have it, to intensify postcolonial
Lines of flight allow us to relocate the force of agency in the very conditions
of constraint to which it is ultimately bound. It sheds light on the specific
in its wake? Far from being akin to a superstructure, though, the colonial
archive is a reminder of the possibilities of power to code every emergent
relation in society, even the resistance to that power that I too ultimately seek
to establish through the process of writing this book.50
As theories of underdevelopment increasingly seeped into analyses
of apartheid through Marxist scholarship in the 1970s and 1980s, a more
discreet strand of postcolonial criticism inaugurated in part by the work
of Bernard Cohn and Edward Said simultaneously, but independently
of specifically Marxist framings, drew attention to the vast networks of
knowledge by which the colonial project created the conditions for the
exercise of power.51 That the critique of apartheid as a recognisable social
formation opted out of pursuing this latter postcolonial trajectory seems to
have stunted the possibilities of intensifying the critique of apartheid, in
ways that tackled the disciplinary conditions of apartheid’s exercise of power.
Taken together, Cohn and Said placed before us a radical revision of
the analysis presented in Michel Foucault’s Order of Things and Archeology
of Knowledge;52 theirs was not merely an echo of the trajectory charted in
Foucault’s early work. Their arguments on the making of the Orient as an
object of knowledge tended to diminish the distance between epistemic
formation (the arrangement in an episteme of rational elements and other
elements that are not rational) and discursive formation (the regularisation
of statements expressed through their positivity). Accordingly, Foucault’s
This statement not only offers a way to ascertain the complicity of history
in sustaining forms of power, but also extends the critique to those
histories that present themselves as inclusive and radically opposed to
imperialism. The desire to seek an inclusionary narrative of world history
has relinquished the need for a critique of historicism which was part of the
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selective narrative, and its diabolical consequences, in the first place. More
importantly, Said is attempting to re-circuit knowledge that does not amount
to merely enacting earlier historicist reversals of anti-imperialist narratives
of change.
In seeking to revisit the relation between apartheid and colonialism,
I am suggesting that the search for the meaning of the postapartheid may
benefit from the postcolonial expectation of an epistemic rupture and that
the latter may be served by a deeper understanding of apartheid. Stated
differently, the possibility of a postapartheid that is geared at deepening
democracy is perhaps best dealt with by bringing a postcolonial critique
of apartheid to bear on it. This would entail bringing to an end historicist
constructions in which colonialism, apartheid and the postapartheid (or, in
this instance, the post-apartheid) are treated as merely temporally sequential
rather than connected through the techniques of disciplinary reason.
As the machinery of apartheid is dismantled and its components
placed on the proverbial dust heap of history, three very specific questions
that have not guided the critique of apartheid hitherto remain to be
answered: what kind of disciplinary power did apartheid represent, what kind
of normalising effects does it entertain and where would we mark the ends of
apartheid? These questions arise from a sense of difficulty in defining what
can be best described as the faltering narratives of transition from apartheid
to postapartheid.
This book is organised roughly into two related sections. The first examines
colonial modes of evidence and the imaginary structure that define the
deliberations about the killing of Hintsa. The killing of Hintsa is filtered
through complex grids of intelligibility that not only constitute the modes of
evidence of the colonial archive but also result in the subjection of agency.
These colonial modes of evidence significantly organise the deliberations of
a settler public sphere and anti-colonial nationalist responses. In the second
section, I enact a strategic invalidation of reversals of the colonial archive by
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historians fail to recognise that they are deeply implicated in this discursive
formation. The colonial archive constitutes a pervasive system of knowledge,
combining poetics and the exercise of power, which acts upon individuals
and regulates their statements. It is from this shadow that I argue we ought
to seek a line of flight. Perhaps such a move may enable a repetition of the
story of the killing of Hintsa which is different from that which it repeats.
Nicholas Gcaleka seemed to have highlighted the limits that
apartheid posed on the reworking of modernist concepts of nation and
identity. Stepping into the event of history he encountered a discourse that
was structured by the conflictual interplay of constraint and productivity.
Important to understanding this predicament, I ask that we attend to
the difference at the core of a system of representation as a step towards
ultimately radicalising the critique of apartheid. One way to accomplish this
would be to isolate the difference that is at the core of the discourse of history
by investigating how the subject is activated through the epistemic principles
of evidence, poetics and the recovery of subjectivity. By Gcaleka’s prompting
we are compelled to track the process by which a little-known healer–diviner,
in his encounter with the history of colonialism, became entangled in the
formation, regulation and transformation of historical statements relating
to the deaths of Hintsa. Thinking thus is to engage the possibilities of living
after colonialism, and indeed apartheid. ‘After History?’ – ‘History!’ writes
Joan Scott.57 And after apartheid?
31
deflects all responsibility for the story by introducing the sequence of events
with the phrase ‘it is said’. The story of the death of a ‘moving spirit’ is thereby
entrusted to an anonymous third person while the implicitly sarcastic gesture
implied by such a deflection conveys a sense of narrative impasse.
Symptomatic of the predicament that surrounds the indecision of
narrating the story of the killing of Hintsa is the problem of assigning
roles to the various actors in the narrative – the king, the British soldiers,
civilian conscripts, and the investigating subject. None of these
positions can be taken as given. One reason for this uncertainty is perhaps
that these subject positions are each products of an intricate and overlapping
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an eighteenth century split in the House of Phalo into Rharhabe and Gcaleka
houses (discussed in more detail in Chapter 4), and colonial exploitation of
this social arrangement. The narrative is largely told in terms of patrimony
and chiefly authority organised around the emergence of two houses that
defined the precolonial Xhosa kingdom. Underlining the central distinction
between the Great House and the right-hand house, John Henderson Soga,
writing in the 1930s, noted:
By courtesy, matters affecting Xhosa customs might occasionally
be referred to a chief of the older branch [the Gcaleka branch]
especially when a precedent was involved, but this did not prevent
the Right-Hand House from following its own line of conduct,
irrespective of what that precedent might be, should it choose to do
so. Laws promulgated by the court of the Ngqika’s were not subject to
interference by the Gcaleka chief.8
Phalo, under whose rule the distinction between the two houses became
noticeably marked, died in 1775. His son, Gcaleka, ascended to the
paramountcy while Rharhabe emerged as the regent of the right-hand
house. Gcaleka died three years later, in 1788, and was succeeded by his
son Khawuta. Oral traditions present Khawuta as a very weak leader by
claiming that he did not strengthen the position of his rule, which lasted
until 1794. The Rharhabe house, under the leadership of Ndlambe and
aggravated by the fact that Hintsa had given Ndlambe refuge at the time of a
leadership dispute in the Rharhabe house and that, for his part, Ngqika had
extended an alliance with the British against his uncle. When Ngqika died
in 1829, apparently of alcohol abuse, his son Maqoma fought a guerrilla-
styled war in the Amathole Mountains in which British forces suffered
considerable losses.9 The appointment of Benjamin D’Urban in 1834 and the
deployment of Colonel Harry Smith to arrange the defence of Grahamstown
where settlers had taken refuge, saw a change in tactics towards Maqoma.
The British colonial officials at the Cape chose to target the paramount king,
Hintsa, east of the Kei River in a town later renamed Butterworth for the
war being waged against the colony. They accused Hintsa of complicity in
Maqoma’s war and of harbouring cattle allegedly stolen from settlers along
the eastern Cape frontier. On a mission to the Mbashe River to retrieve
cattle, Hintsa was killed and his body mutilated and, some say, his head
was severed.
Narrative impasse stems from the manner in which the British
cleared the scene of the crime, removed traces that may have enabled an
alternative history and left in its place only one story: their own. It seems
ironic, though perfectly understandable, that alternative versions of the
South African past should defer the narration of this cowardly act, such a
crucial event in South African history, to the very perpetrators of murder.
More importantly, the deferrals and doubts that frame an alternative history
and procedures of evidence making and the protocols of history – the social
process, in other words, of the subjection of agency.
The colonial archive is not merely a condition for knowledge but an apparatus
that inaugurates a very specific form of the subjection of agency.14 Whereas
the colonial archive is usually read in relation to its exclusions, its function
in the process of subject constitution, its process of objectification in other
words, reveals the techniques of colonial governmentality interlaced with
the grammar of domination. The colonial archive thereby combines and
orders dispatches, cartographic representations, information and intelligence
reports, commissions of inquiry and the orders of language in a very specific
way to keep the subject in its place.15 Taken together, we may discern very
specific modes of evidence in the colonial archive as well as the effects of
such an assemblage of evidence.
Ultimately, these modes of evidence of the colonial archive operate
in a manner that organises our reading of its subjective effects. If we
consider the archive along a reformulated notion of agency that does not
merely hark back to nostalgic constructions, then we may have to attend
to the further question of the materialisation of subjectivity in the colonial
archive and the ways in which the latter is conditioned and sustained by
colonial archive.
Fort Willshire offered a suitably safe venue to hear evidence about the
killing of Hintsa, especially when compared to the gruesome detail that
surfaced at the commission of inquiry convened in 1836. The metaphorical
resonances in the selection of the fort to conduct the investigation into
the death of Hintsa were not lost in the choice of venue. It was Colonel
Willshire, in whose honour the fort was named, who in 1819 had given
Hintsa the assurance that the ‘amaGcaleka would not in the slightest be
interfered with if the king complied with what was right and reasonable’.21
That warning seemed to confirm a long-standing belief that Hintsa
had been plotting against the British and that his death might be tracked
to the first indications and suspicions of treachery. The sense of suspicion
that dated back to the governorship of Lord Charles Somerset was
reaffirmed through the commission of inquiry into Hintsa’s death,
instituted by Sir Benjamin D’Urban in 1836. Through the investigation
of the commission of inquiry, Hintsa was blamed and held responsible
for his own death.
For scholars who stumble upon the military commission of inquiry
convened by an embattled governor, Benjamin D’Urban, a year after the
If such statements were clearly motivated by colonial racism, they may also
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frontier history’.27 Shrewsbury had written in January 1835 that ‘all Africans
should be registered – every man wearing on his neck a thin plate of tin
containing his name and the name of his chief – to identify offenders and
enable the British government to know the number and strength of frontier
tribes’.28 The claims of expertise and dominance were premised on a desire
to know. The correspondence that forms such a core component of the
colonial archive on the eastern Cape, however, may also be read in terms of
an inability to penetrate the veils of secrecy that so confounded British forces
during the period of the wars of conquest in the Cape. In a letter from the
trader John Rowles on 17 December 1834, for example, we find suggestions of
the limits of colonial knowledge. Rowles writes:
I can state, from my own knowledge, that Hintsa’s chief councellors
[sic] have been, for last six months, – that is to say, from the period
when Hintsa went to the upper country on the pretext of hunting –
in close communication with the frontier Caffers; – as soon as one
of them returned, another was despatched and this intercourse was
continued. Those councellors [sic] remained upward of a month before
they returned to Hintsa. I never knew this kind of intercourse to
subsist before between Hintsa and the Frontier Caffers. When I asked
them what they had been doing among the Frontier Tribes, they made
some trivial pretext, such as they went to get assegais, or some cattle
or to pay a visit.29
At a glance, there is very little discrepancy between the two reports. Both
point to the threat posed by Hintsa and to the possibilities open to the British
if this were to materialise. One small, though extremely significant exception
for my argument emerges upon a closer reading. This relates to the certainty
within which the second report is framed. If in the earlier report Hintsa’s
actions are presented in terms of possibilities, in the later report we learn
the information economy but rather that which was beyond colonial horizons
of comprehension – the movements, moods and political alliances that were
being forged outside of the purview of the colonial state and its information-
gathering apparatus – that prompted the British to colonise the land of the
Gcaleka and to kill Hintsa.
The unknowable – or, more appropriately, the unverifiable colonial
imaginary – was not only expressed in the period preceding the killing of
Hintsa (as demonstrated by the first report or in racially charged claims that
likened the Xhosa to untameable ‘wolves’ ready to prey on colonial society as
soon as the opportunity presented itself). If read closely, the unknowable may
be discerned from the very tone in which colonial officials such as D’Urban
described the event in its aftermath, as they set about telling their story of a
treacherous Hintsa who was responsible for his own downfall.
In D’Urban’s report to Lord Aberdeen in June 1835, the governor set
out to explain the circumstances surrounding Hintsa’s death. Hintsa, in this
version, entered D’Urban’s camp on 30 April 1835 to sign a peace treaty in
which he agreed to a British demand for the ‘return’ of 50 000 head of cattle
and 1 000 horses in exchange for a cessation of hostilities. Upon signing
the treaty, Hintsa apparently asked D’Urban for permission to remain at
the camp with his son Crieli (Sarhili) instead of returning to his residence.
Hintsa had offered himself as hostage to ensure that the British received the
cattle and horses, which they demanded as part of the settlement. Initially
Maqoma from behind enemy lines, colonial officials increasingly doubted the
reliability of their intelligence work. While they suspected that Hintsa was
organising an attack against the British, they were unable to decipher the
messages – conveyed either in code or in secrecy, according to D’Urban – that
Hintsa had dispatched to the outer reaches of the frontier. Hintsa was capable
of threatening the colonial project from both within and beyond colonial
spheres of control or surveillance. The sentiment of doubt expressed in the
first report that D’Urban sent to the Colonial Secretary was therefore resolved
through an act of violence in which those who threatened the extension
of a line on a map and the securities that attended to that cartographic
practice were killed and mutilated. Hintsa’s death was necessary for colonial
expansionism.
If cartographic representations were produced in relation to what
I have suggested were colonial insecurities and anxieties, how did these
simultaneously come to produce a sense of security and certainty? To
answer this question, we need to consider the way mapping worked and was
organised in the Cape. According to JS Bergh and JC Visagie’s cartographic
guide of the Cape frontier zone, two maps were central to the unfolding
drama in the region.39 The first 40 was drawn by surveyor-general CC Michell
and the second, 41 a sketch map, was, according to Bergh and Visagie, clearly
carried and used by Governor D’Urban to record landmarks and place names
as the invading force progressed. 42
map we have the replaying of the myth of the empty land. Xhosa polities
are isolated and are represented through a singular symbolic inscription.
No attempt is made to account for the expanse of Gcaleka, Ngqika,
Gqunukhwebe or Ndlambe settlements, nor are the interconnections
reflected in any way. Instead, we have a single symbol with the name
‘Hintsa’ inscribed below. Whereas D’Urban’s survey depicts the corresponding
locations and movements of the first, second, third and fourth divisions
of colonial troops, Michell’s map casts the territory as secure and is more
detailed, representing the extent of the various chieftaincies and the areas
of influence. If, then, D’Urban’s map anticipated a reality – casting its
gaze into a field of vision and opening it up so that possibilities become
apparent that may point the way to an enhancement of power45 – Michell’s
appropriated the anticipated reality and represented it in terms of a scientific
abstraction. Both power enhancement and power preservation belong to the
will to knowledge.
The convergence of the two operations can be gleaned from James
Edward Alexander’s Narrative of a Voyage. 46 Alexander had accompanied
the first division along with Michell and D’Urban. The colonial travel
account is presented in terms of the trope of adventure, where insecurity is
connected to a notion of heroism and bravery while facticity is represented as
accomplishment. Here I must limit my comments to two specific suggestions
that enable Alexander’s travel account.
reality but organise and license the expropriation and exploitation of land. 47
Similarly, Thongchai Winichakul’s study of Siam and the mapping of what
he terms the geo-body frames the relationship between cartography and
conquest in terms that echo Ryan’s central argument and that are being
developed in this chapter:
Force defined the space. Mapping vindicated it. Without military
force, mapping alone was inadequate to claim a legitimate space. But
a map always substantiated the legitimation of the military presence.
Mapping and military became a single set of mutually re-inforcing
technologies to exercise power over space. 48
It is not certain that the Xhosa shared the conception of the frontier that is
suggested by Giliomee’s research on the Cape frontier from 1770 to 1812.
This is a point I shall return to in a later chapter. For the moment
I wish to pause and contemplate a different answer to Martin Legassick’s
suggestion that more attention be paid to the ‘frontier’ itself.50 Based on
the preceding discussion on the rules of the formation of evidence, the
frontier was also a conceptual or imaginary formation premised on the
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Hottentots were present when the shot was fired that killed Hintsa?’;
‘Whom did you see on the spot when you came up to the body of Hintsa?’;
‘In what part of the body did he receive his mortal wound?’; ‘Did you think
the brains you saw was [sic] the consequence of the gun-shot wound?’ and
so forth.
In his study of the military court of inquiry records, the historian
JG Pretorius warns against too easy an acceptance of the explanation offered.
According to Pretorius, it is difficult to establish what exactly happened
after Hintsa arrived in the British camp, because of the lack of disinterested
evidence. Pretorius claims:
The official accounts – those of Harry Smith and D’Urban – were
written only after the chief’s death, and so were the accounts of
other eyewitnesses. Not much importance should be attached to
the depositions of chiefs and other persons collected by Smith
after Glenelg [Secretary of State for the Colonies] had censured the
D’Urban–Smith settlement. The whites among these persons, such
as the Wesleyan missionaries, were all friends of D’Urban and Smith,
while the Xhosa, such as Tyali and Maqoma, could have made their
depositions under pressure or by means of the question-and-answer
method, and made to say whatever Smith wanted. All this evidence
had the purpose of proving in retrospect certain things about Hintsa
and must therefore be treated with utmost care.54
which our encounter with the event is bound to confront colonial frames
of intelligibility. These frames are significant in identifying the limits of a
history that seeks to ascribe a place in the story for those formerly excluded,
or those who were victims of colonisation. Pretorius, however, ignores
the strategies through which these alternate possibilities are excluded. If
evidence, as Arnold Davidson has suggested in reference to historian Carlo
Ginzburg’s interventions in this regard, is mediated by codes, then we need
to ‘enter the codes of evidence’ in order to gauge how they come to privilege
certain claims against others.56 The point of ‘entering the codes of evidence’
is not to be seen as an attempt simply to detect interests and bias, but rather
to explore the distribution of techniques that produce a facticity that is the
foundation of evidence in service of a claim. At best, Pretorius offers us a
first-order reading of the court record that situates the text within a larger
cultural and political context – the extraneous conditions which accompanied
the text’s production.
A second-order reading may require us to focus on the evidentiary
strategies implicit in the text, which provide the basis for verification and
refutation. In this respect, I suggest that we read the record in such a way
that the story of Hintsa produced by colonial officials is also necessarily a
story that depends on the production of the subaltern as effect. In other
words, the story of Hintsa can only be told by recourse to the marginalisation
of those actors that offer any hope of an alternative narrativisation. Here we
64
the deaths of hintsa
2
Mistaken identity
65
The killing of Hintsa was rapidly absorbed into the deliberations
of a settler public sphere in Grahamstown. This sphere represented the
contestations emanating from the war of 1834–35 in which Hintsa was
killed and connected the relatively isolated settler society in and around
Grahamstown to a larger framework of Empire.2 A settler community,
locked away in the far reaches of the eastern Cape frontier zones, could not
merely rely on conventional forms of communication to establish its place
in the world of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie. The debates that raged
in the pages of The Grahamstown Journal and the South African Commercial
Advertiser during the 1830s between humanitarian liberals and settler
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mistaken identity 67
and served the emergent interests of a settler public sphere. I want to refer to
this excess as an imaginary structure, in part because it continues the process
of the interpellation of the subject begun by the colonial archive as it also
seeks to limit the scope of enunciation to the dominant interests of settler
society. This overlap of elements of the imaginary structure consequently
produced a subject of mistaken identity, as the memory of the king was both
literally and figuratively pinned to the metonymic grounds of his killing.
The deliberations surrounding Hintsa in London and Grahamstown
not only reveal how public spheres constitute subjectivities; they also allow us
to track the function of the imaginary structure in producing the subaltern
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The image of Hintsa that today features in museums, popular histories and
academic texts belongs to the colonial archive and an emergent settler public
sphere on the far reaches of the eastern Cape frontier zones in the 1830s.
Images of unreliable and treacherous Xhosa chiefs characteristically mediated
the formation of a settler identity on the eastern Cape frontier during the
nineteenth century. Specifically, the most persistent image of a cunning,
untrustworthy and treacherous chief was that associated with a portrait of
explain this demand for images of ‘the enemy’, Lucy Alexander, curator of the
Frederick I’Ons retrospective exhibition in 1990, suggests that they served
as souvenirs and ‘that it was the expression of admiration for the opponent
not unlike that of the trophy hunter’.8 For Alexander, the portraits refer to the
‘ultimate exorcism of the enemy, exceeded only by the physical mutilation – as
in the case of Hintsa – of the bodies of the enemy’.9 An aesthetic practice
originally directed at the ceremonial presentation of the bourgeois self in
industrial Europe was adapted for purposes of casting a formidable enemy
and exaggerating the bravery of British military personnel along the eastern
frontier of the Cape Colony.10
The portrait of Hintsa returns us to the place of the subject of violence
in the colonial lexicon. In the space of colonial enunciation Hintsa would
forever be consigned to the status of subordination – that place in the colonial
statement reserved for those intransigent opponents of colonial advance.
Hintsa, it seems, emerged as a figure of speech, a supplement of the desire
to ground and govern the colonised subject as the war of 1834–35 approached.
The story of the killing of Hintsa, especially when later told in the register
of anti-colonial resistance, would often encounter this location of the proper
name of Hintsa in colonial discourse as a specific limit. This was also the
case when efforts were made to narrate the event as part of a larger story of
colonial excess and violence, of objectification and the loss of subjectivity.
What remained intact was the symbolic status accorded to the name of
mistaken identity 69
Hintsa by colonial officials. While the regime of truth reminds us of the
status of Hintsa as object of colonial discourse, the imaginary structure of
colonial enunciation reminds us why the truth about the killing of Hintsa is
anything but self-evident.
Lucy Alexander’s retrospective exhibition on I’Ons is critical for
precisely this reason. It draws us into a strategy of reading that compels us
to confront the referential illusion of portraiture with the accompanying
demand for exploring the subject’s position in the grammar of domination
that supports and sustains it. She encourages us not to think of portraiture
as a series of objective representations, a point supported by the confusion
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Far from being objective portrayals, Alexander suggests that many portraitists
subsumed the colonised subject into the genre of nineteenth-century
English artistic traditions, especially the picturesque – a distinct product of
the nineteenth-century Romantic imagination. In the case of the portrait of
Nqeno probably mistaken by its present owner as Hintsa, Alexander tells us
that the depiction is not devoid of colonial desire. In her reading of the case of
mistaken identity, she suggests that the elegant pose of the subject resting on
a rock signifies possession of land and its underutilisation – the issue allegedly
around which the Sixth Frontier War was fought. For Alexander, it is the
landscape that invites interpretation of the portrait. Another way of stating this
is that the work of interpretation is a necessary condition for understanding
portraiture because, even in this most literal sense of grounding, the subject
of the portrait is meaningful only insofar as it is related to the circumstances
mistaken identity 71
of its production.12 If reading the portraits of Xhosa chiefs produced in the
1830s can only be made sense of through the circumstances of their making,
we might suggest that it was not to the English picturesque that Alexander
should have turned to provide a reading of the portraits of Xhosa chiefs, but
rather to more localised settler productions of history.
In the years following the conclusion of the Sixth Frontier War in 1834–35, the
genocidal attitudes of settlers on the eastern Cape frontier became increasingly
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villainous Gaika’s. I wish the Boers would come into the Amatholes in
straggling parties. They have my permission for extermination, it is now
the only word and principle to guide us. I have named General Somerset
Commandant General but I should be glad if the Boers would name their
own Commandant. Under him they may go on their way and shoot as
they like so that they add their force to the general cause. This is a war of
Black against White and the White must combine or lose all.14
mistaken identity 73
his people in the Free State’.17 Many settlers in the eastern Cape, in keeping
with the vilification of Hintsa, sought to continue the process of expropriation
of land despite the reluctance of the colonial state, which had returned land in
the ceded territory that had initially been expropriated from the Xhosa after the
Battle of Amalinde in 1819 involving Ngqika.
Settler interests in the eastern Cape mediated the tensions that
surfaced in a discourse that designated the rules of the true following the
commission of inquiry into Hintsa’s death. They achieved this mediation
partly by rearranging and redeploying the referent ‘Hintsa’ in colonial
discourse. The desire to colonise land occupied by Xhosa chiefs had as its
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mistaken identity 75
already mentioned, is contained in the introduction to the diary when he
connects Hintsa to Sarhili, and by extension insinuates a continuity of
characterological traits. The second example is by way of a parenthetical entry
to a description of the events following the killing of Hintsa. The entry reads:
Taking his son Kreli [Sarhili] with us, we pursued the spoor of cattle
towards the Bashee and came in sight of them before sunset. We
observed vast herds being driven off in all directions on the opposite
mountain range (Bomvanaland in 1877, where Kreli has recently done
the same – repeating history).21
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mistaken identity 77
once impenetrable Fish River, or to verify D’Urban’s positive impressions
of Smith’s actions.25 Cross-referencing offers more than simply a device
for filling narrative gaps. It also gestures, I would argue, towards a secular
knowledge that is indispensable for determining the subject of history
through the method of proof. The properly historical subject, moreover, is
one that separates pleasure from mission, that possesses a consciousness of
the importance of pastness, especially those aspects of the past which define
the destiny of the self-proclaimed hero.
Let us join Smith’s story at the point at which he provides justification
for his mission to the Kei River to retrieve what he calls ‘colonial cattle’.
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Crossing the bed of the Tsomo, Smith describes his ‘most precipitate march
on Hintsa’s kraal’.26 Not finding him there, Smith set about burning the
kraal. This provocation, it is claimed, brought Hintsa into the British camp
in an ‘undaunted manner’.27 It is at this point in the narrative that Smith
places before us the weight of secularity, mobilising it against the inveterate
weakness of desire:
(The poor savage always buries the past in oblivion, and regards the
present only. He has not the most distant idea of right or wrong as
regards his line of conduct. Self-interest is his controlling impulse,
and desire stands for law and rectitude).28
its dismemberment – for that act was cast as a product of the imagination of
those opposed to progress.
The negative stereotype that founds the settler public sphere faced
one major difficulty. The subject, Hintsa, refused to acknowledge Southey’s
hailing as he scurried down the slope of the Nqabara River. He refused to
heed Smith’s and Southey’s call to halt and he did not turn in recognition of
the source of the hail. This double failure meant that the negative stereotype
would be entirely given over to the task of grounding Hintsa. This was
achieved by ensuring that the Hintsa who emerged as a figure of speech
of the diary and autobiography was repeatedly and necessarily processed
through the relations established between landscape and portraiture.
Travel writing
On its own, Michell’s portrait of Hintsa had little meaning until placed
in a larger textual network. Shortly after the commission of inquiry into
Hintsa’s death, its meaning was genealogically altered when it was included
in the travel writing of James Edward Alexander, a member of the Royal
Geographic Society, in the 1830s. Alexander’s An Expedition of Discovery
into the Interior of Africa professed a strong desire to discover some of the
secrets of ‘the great and mysterious continent of Africa while consenting
to exchange civilized for savage life’, a view that was not too far from the
mistaken identity 79
prevailing views of most of the inhabitants of Grahamstown.29 Desire
and discovery, secrecy and mystery belonged to the ongoing saga of the
competitive spirit of being the first to find, enter or discover areas unknown
to Europeans – Gordon in 1777, Patterson in 1778, Le Valliant in 1781, Barrow
in 1797, Truter and Somerville in 1801, Lichtenstein in 1805, Burchell in 1809,
Campbell in 1813, Thompson in 1827, Hume in 1834 and perhaps Alexander
in 1838. So powerful was the desire to be part of the list of firsts that from the
seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, no less than 175 names of travellers
and explorers, including that of Alexander, were carved into the walls of the
Heerenlogement Cave in the north-western Karoo in the hope of posterity.30
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To have his name included in this list, Alexander had set his sights on the
area between the 21st and 24th parallels – the area he identified as being
inhabited by the Damaras. His arrival at the Cape early in 1835, sponsored by
the Royal Geographic Society, unfortunately coincided with a South Africa
that he would later describe as being ‘in a state of commotion’. As Alexander
notes, ‘tensions between the Amakosa and the Cape colony meant that it
was evidently not the time for geographical research’.31 Instead, he opted for
military service and became an aide-de-camp and private secretary to the
governor, D’Urban, in 1835.
The interruption profoundly affected relations between explorer and
sponsor, so much so that in its recollection of the period in the centenary
commemorative history of the Royal Geographic Society, Hugh Robert Mill
(the Society’s president in 1930) alluded to the tensions that emerged around
Alexander’s expedition. Alexander, it appears, was thought of as a promising
traveller who would contribute significantly to the map collection in the
Society’s library. Given limited financial resources, the Society, according to
Mill, made arrangements for Alexander to travel as ‘a man of war and the
Government’.32 Effectively, this entailed a nondescript passage, the benefits
of which could be shared by settler society and the colonial government. The
uncertainty surrounding the terms of contract, then, may have been at the
core of the tensions that would engulf Alexander’s mission to the Cape. Mill
writes of this tension as follows:
As for the gains for geography – as Mill put it with a tone of disappointment,
partly at the losses incurred by the Society – the Delagoa Bay expedition was
terminated and instead excursions were undertaken across the Orange River
into Damara and Namaqua lands, reaching Walvis Bay on the West Coast.
To salvage something of this generally described failure, Mill notes that
Alexander enjoyed much big-game shooting and rendered good services to
the Cape government, for which he was knighted. Similarly, he is recognised
for having gone on to fight in the Crimea and in New Zealand and for rising
to the rank of General, until his death in 1885.
Alexander’s oeuvre, consisting of five book-length accounts of his
travels and experiences, defies the general assessment of failure offered by
Mill in 1930. Neither simply a representative oeuvre of colonial mindsets nor
merely a window to a colonial context, Alexander’s writing permits us to
explore the relationship between discourse and narrative and to investigate
the way an imaginary structure is folded into the operation of a system
of knowledge. It also reveals what knowledge and the limits of knowledge
meant for the colonial enterprise.
The war of 1835 that interrupted Alexander’s geographical research
and, consequently, the Royal Geographic Society’s ambition of cartographic
procurement, was later incorporated into a book on travel writing entitled
Narrative of a Voyage of Observation, published in 1837. Chapter 23, which
is dedicated to the events that make up the reason for the supposed
mistaken identity 81
interruption, begins with a cartographical sketch of the Gnanabaka
(Nqabara) River. The sketch, produced by the surveyor Charles Cornwallis
Michell, was first made available as an accompaniment to the record of the
inquiry compiled in the aftermath of the events of 12 May 1835. Michell’s
map, appropriately titled Plan of the Ground where Hintsa attempted his Escape,
and was killed, featured a representation of the four miles over which the
action in which Hintsa was killed occurred (see Figure 2). A distance of one
mile was covered in the approach of Hintsa and his escort of British forces
as they reached the Nqabara River from the direction of the Guada River (‘a’
to ‘h’ on the map). The second mile started at the point at which the Nqabara
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River was crossed and illustrates, by way of a perforated line, the decision to
follow the cattle trail to the right. The third mile (marked ‘a’ to ‘b’) indicates
the distance covered by Hintsa as he tried to escape from Smith’s escort, the
chase by Smith and the eventual dislodging of Hintsa from his horse. From
the letter marked ‘b’ to an almost undecipherable ‘e’ placed in the Nqabara
River, we have the distance covered by Hintsa as he is dislodged from his
horse, pursued by Southey and Lieutenant Balfour and eventually shot and
killed. The fourth mile brings into view a kraal to which Hintsa was allegedly
heading before Smith stopped him. Two further points are ‘f’ and ‘g’, which
respectively position Umtini (Hintsa’s councillor) – who had earlier left the
party escorting Hintsa and who observed the events – and the other spoor of
cattle to the left, which Hintsa dissuaded Smith from pursuing.
Like the sketch, the summary of topics that precedes Alexander’s
account in Narrative of a Voyage repeats a familiar story of the event. Phrases
like ‘The General Proclaims the Kye to be a new Boundary – A Short Review
of a Change in Sir Benjamin D’Urban’s sentiments – His Declaration to
Hintsa – The Policy of Extending the Colony – Duplicity of Hintsa – Return
of Colonel Smith’s Corps – Death of Hintsa’ all work to conjure up the
terms of a familiar story. One consequential exception relates to the alleged
treachery of Hintsa who had set a trap in advance of the British forces.
While there is significant repetition of the plot of the story about
the killing of Hintsa in Alexander’s travel account, there is also a unique
mistaken identity 83
It has thus been seen that, during the whole course of the negotiations
and transactions with this savage chief, he never acted otherwise
than with the greatest duplicity and bad faith; and only in the single
instance of his stopping the massacre of the Fingoes, when under
the influence of fear for the consequences to himself, did he ever act
otherwise: but the day of retribution was at hand.35
mistaken identity 85
Consider, for instance, ‘a square redoubt of sixty yards each face, enclosing
a circular cattle kraal for forty horses, with a ditch and abattoir outside,
and the fence fifty yards distant, out of assegai range, all speedily traced,
and with jackets off and working parties of pick, shovel and hatchet men
set to vigorously complete the work’, 40 as opposed to ‘the banks of a small
stream called the Impotshana, near a ravine three hundred feet deep, with
precipitous sides which almost approached each other, throwing the bottom
filled with trees, into deep gloom, becoming a valley of death’. 41 The story
of colonial advance and the tone in which the death of Hintsa was to be
narrativised privileged order and reality over a sentimental attachment to the
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landscape. In Alexander’s text, the actual event of 12 May is explained over six
pages, with little if any digression from the script that was performed in the
preceding commission of inquiry in 1836. However, colonialism was not only
a story of advance but also of retreat, repetition and loss.
Alexander’s entry on 13 May, the day after the killing of Hintsa,
tells a different story. It warns that the conceptualisation of space
emphasising the importance of surveying – the desire to capture, describe
and inhabit – was never beyond the spectre of danger. The day is marked
in colonial memory by the calamity that befell Major TC White – the
assistant Quartermaster General of the burgher force. White, regarded
in colonial circles as an excellent scholar and surveyor, was anxious to
add ‘to his carefully constructed map of the country through which the
troops had passed since the commencement of the war’. 42 Having ignored
the dissuasion of Captain Ross and Caesar Andrews, it is believed White
proceeded to a hill above the camp where he was attacked and killed. The
mourning of the death of White pointed to a double tragedy, for in the event
that saw the demise of White, his vast cartographic output, sophisticated
equipment and intricate sketches had also disappeared – lost, as it were, to
history. Alexander quotes the three troopers who had accompanied White, to
narrate the story:
The major had placed [them] at different points of observation; and
with the corporal beside him, and his surveying table before him, he
The bodies were discovered, we are told, stripped and bloody, and the
double-barrelled guns, the major’s gold chronometer, surveying instruments
and map carried off. The mourning implicit in Alexander’s writing of the
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mistaken identity 87
Hintsa was killed, Michell’s portrait conveys an impression of Hintsa, his
downward gaze conveying a sense of cunning and intrigue, his mouth and
ears shadowed so as to portray a sense of hidden intent. Both portrait and
cartographic inscription reflect a sense of betrayal by the landscape which
Alexander had previously anticipated as tameable and inhabitable. There is
an attempt to associate difficult terrain and impervious country with Hintsa.
The convergence that results from the textual network that operates
in Alexander’s travelogue and the conjuring of a sense of danger might be
explained by the inability of the British intelligence apparatus to anticipate
competing linguistic registers through which the landscape was mediated.
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Images that exceed words: the limits of the settler public sphere
mistaken identity 89
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Collection: Private
Figure 4: Warriors Fleeing Across a River/The Death of Hintsa, by Frederick I’Ons n.d.
Across a River, although this might be an error of listing. 47 Only once the
painting was included in the inventory of I’Ons’s collection in the possession
of a descendent, Douglas Galpin, does the title The Death of Hintsa appear.
Some art historians’ interpretations of the painting support this naming.
In her analysis of I’Ons’s painting, Marijke Cosser proceeds by placing
I’Ons in the turmoil of the 1830s in the eastern Cape when he first arrived
and then by alluding to the possibility – based on family accounts and on
the fact that I’Ons had supposedly served in the Grahamstown Mounted
Volunteers – that the artist had witnessed the event of the killing of Hintsa.
Cosser also notes that the painting of the demise of Hintsa was, by I’Ons’s
own admission, thought to be one of his best. Cosser tells us the painting
receiving a shot from Southey ‘who is shadowed behind a rock to the left of
the painting’. 49 This, we are told, contradicted official versions that held that
British soldiers killed Hintsa in self-defence.
I’Ons’s painting engages a spatial slice in time in the composite
sequence we have come to call the killing of Hintsa. It is a slice that
positions four subjects viewed, it seems, from a position further
downstream. On the left bank we have a subject who has fired his rifle
(whom Cosser names Southey with the help of the archive); in the centre
of the river we have another subject with rifle aimed at a fleeing figure.
Wedged between the two we have an injured subject, blood oozing out
of a wound to the right side of the body, and perhaps penetrated by another
bullet from the fired gun on the left. A fallen assegai lies to the right,
its pointed edge directed towards the placidly flowing water, as if to
underline an intention to use the weapon. On the opposite bank we see
another subject in the motion of escape with his back turned to the observer
of the painting.
The colonial archive provides a necessary index to the portrayal of
the unfolding saga in the painting. As such, the work of art becomes, in this
reading, a mere illustration of the archive or one amongst several expressions
of witnessing. Viewing the painting as a supplement to the archive may
derive from the burden of the title that the work acquired in 1958. In some
sense then, the title commits us to a reading of the painting that foregrounds
mistaken identity 91
the action associated with the killing of Hintsa. Read under its former
(presumably incorrect) title, Warriors Fleeing Across a River requires a
closer, if not different, reading and analysis of the painting. Here the
landscape takes precedence over the space of death. However, neither
approach, in my view, is adequate because both fail to come to terms
with the painting’s categorisation as an example of historical painting.
Nineteenth-century artistic taste, we are told by some art
historians, held the historical painting in considerably high regard.
The historical painting took the production of the significant moment
seriously, even though its concept of event was only one element of
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When Nicholas Gcaleka set off in search of Hintsa’s skull, there was a general
feeling that this was an expression of someone whose speech fell outside of
the norms of an emergent public sphere in democratic South Africa. Yet, as
publicity and indeed curiosity increased about the search for Hintsa’s skull,
there was a need for the public sphere to ground the subject. Left to his
own fantasies, Nicholas Gcaleka was seen as a threat for having introduced
a sense of incoherence to an already fractured public sphere. In arriving at
such a hasty conclusion, the question of how the public sphere deals with
that which is incommensurate was left unattended. In short, this meant
that any response to Gcaleka in the public sphere would be measured by the
violence that marked the emergence of that sphere at a point of departure
in nineteenth-century colonialism. Rather than his claim leading to the
formation of a subaltern counterpublic,53 Gcaleka emerged as a subaltern
effect in the sanctioned narrative of postapartheid South Africa.
The subaltern entry into the realm of the public sphere, insofar as it
fails the requirements of property, publicity and rationality, registers a failure
mistaken identity 93
that is not only constitutive but also a prerequisite for the functioning of
that public sphere. It is for this reason that a public sphere would seemingly
expend its resources and energies on deliberating the highly unlikely claims
of someone who professed to speak and act on behalf of the ancestors. I want
to propose that the entry of the subaltern into the historical formations of the
bourgeois public sphere is enabled by the grounding of the colonised subject
and sustained by the repetition of the subaltern effect.54
If we were to set this against the expansive publicity that surrounded
Nicholas Gcaleka’s search for Hintsa’s skull, we might inquire into how
potentially effective the notion of a subaltern public sphere is in diminishing the
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mistaken identity 95
undermines the theoretical potential of his own claim. To treat this search
for the skull as part of a corporatist plot was to lose sight of the tropes that
allowed for this slippage. Let me return to this oversight in Nicol by exploring,
once again, what we are made to understand by seeing and believing.
Ordinarily, the importance of seeing is ascribed to its immediacy,
a point I argued in the previous chapter. But it may also be explained
in terms of its relation to consciousness, the process of its filtering. The
retina, as Marx claimed in ‘The German Ideology’,58 conveys the clarity of
consciousness. The name for this relation is ideology and if, as Marx informs
us, ‘in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a
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camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical
life processes as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their
physical life processes’.59 Wendy Brown has offered a provocative rereading
of this argument, suggesting that for Marx the remedy to the inversion of
reality in consciousness ‘may be corrected as completely as the brain corrects
the inversion of images on the retina’.60
The eye, Lacan would later claim – as if implicitly revising Marx’s earlier
formulation – is a rather discerning organ, endowed with the fatal power to
separate between a visual grammar on the one hand and, on the other, relating
to the gaze which establishes the subject’s position in this grammar. If anything,
the subject’s position in this grammar is a matter of instability, as in the case
where the subject does not fit the language of original conceptualisation.
Clearly, the Lacanian refinement contributed significantly to the model of
interpellation that inspired Althusser’s forays into the operation of ideology.
But the overemphasis on the scopic has left much of the discussion of ideology
somewhat deficient in explaining the instability that attends to the subject.
This is where Nicol’s reading of Nicholas Gcaleka’s mission is most
thought-provoking. In the midst of the imagery of Gcaleka bearing a skull,
Nicol recalls the cacophony that engulfs the subject.61 This combining of the
scopic and the sonoric helps us to conceptualise the subject as more than just
that which is seen, but also how it is made to resonate in the public sphere. The
coincidence of the scopic and sonoric I call the act of communicability through
are scattered across the eastern Cape. In Butterworth, the site that marks
the Great Place63 is identifiable by rusted and wrangled street markings. A
tombstone erected by Xoliliswe Sigcawu in 1985, on the banks of the Nqabara
River, marks the site of the killing. Similarly, the image of Hintsa found in
Museum Africa in Johannesburg, in the Albany Museum in Grahamstown, in
Jeff Peires’s The House of Phalo and as the frontispiece of a conference held at
the University of Cape Town in 2002 titled ‘Memory and forgetting in the life
of the nation’ attests to the continued significance of the killing of the king.
All these representations currently in circulation, I wish to argue, belie the
controversy surrounding the image of Hintsa. Portraiture, it seems, should be
read within the terms of enunciation that seek to ground the subject and limit
the realm of the sayable. A focus on colonial interpellation and enunciation
opposes the current practice of public representations of Hintsa, which
circulate as mere illustration and as inconsequential to the larger historical
narrative through which the contemporary South African nation imagines
itself. If colonial portraiture is taken as merely an objective representation,
there is little possibility of making sense of later nationalist substitution.
Let me draw this chapter to a close with a comment why seeing is not
necessarily to be equated with believing. The file containing some of George
Pemba’s sketches at Cory Library in Grahamstown includes a portrait of
Hintsa with initials ‘GMP’ (see Figure 5b on page 98). My forays into the
portrait of Hintsa led me to believe that the image that was in circulation
mistaken identity 97
had been produced by Pemba, probably in the 1930s. But one nagging
question remained. On what did Pemba base his portrait of the king?
Mda Mda, a prominent lawyer in Butterworth who introduced me to sites
related to Hintsa, suggested that Pemba’s image was largely drawn from the
descriptions of the king in the opening lines of a commemorative poem by
SEK Mqhayi, written at the time of the hundredth anniversary of the killing.
Mda’s lead made sense in terms of my estimated dating of Pemba’s portrait
to the 1930s. I assumed that in versions of the portrait in circulation, the
name of the artist had simply and perhaps unfortunately been removed.
Two weeks before Pemba passed away, I travelled to his house in
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of nationalist representation, one will have to echo the cry of George Southey
as he set off in pursuit of the king down the banks of the Nqabara River,
‘Stop! Or I’ll Shoot!’ It is only in listening that deception and nobility are
recognisable in the portraits, and through which the attributes of treachery
and bravery are discernible. The very contingency that followed from reading
the colonial portrait was the cue for impeding the effort to construct a settler
public sphere through recourse to the colonial story of the killing of Hintsa.
The name of that intervention was anti-colonial nationalism. However,
to accomplish its task of interfering with colonial narratives, anti-colonial
nationalist narration had first to overcome the historical and aesthetic
foundations of a settler public sphere in which the story of Hintsa featured
so prominently. That historiographical encounter is the subject of the next
two chapters. For now, we must conclude that the portrait of Hintsa offers
the outlines of colonial interpellation and enunciation as it participates in the
formation of a settler public sphere that is aligned to colonial hegemony.
mistaken identity 99
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100
the deaths of hintsa
3
101
struggling to come into its own at the expense of the Xhosa. Symptomatic
of these tensions was the often rancorous public debate in the newspapers
of Grahamstown, the Cape Colony and Britain involving representatives of
settler opinion and humanitarian sentiment.
Given these tensions of Empire, and the animosity that defined the
relations between colonial officials and settlers in the eastern Cape, how
is it even possible to conceptualise a version of the South African past as
settler colonial historiography?4 Most responses to this question tend to
be caught in the impasse of the race versus class debate in South African
historiography. Very little, if any, attention is paid to the epistemological form
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of settler colonial history which also, I suggest in the next chapter, enables
and posits unfortunate limits for anti-colonial nationalist history.5 As a result
of the tendency for historiography to be treated as a system of classification,
settler histories are generally identified by the categories that define them, by
their place in the ideological spectrum, and not by their form. Alan Lester,
for example, tells us how identities were forged in relation to the spaces of
colonial violence along the eastern Cape frontier.6 While the elements of
a settler public sphere are discernible in Lester’s work, he unfortunately
does not follow through with a textual deconstruction of the mediating
apparatus that leads to subject formation. This oversight results in a rather
disappointing conclusion rooted in identity and a view of subjectivity that
sees the colonial archive as a resource rather than an alibi for violence.
The story of the killing of Hintsa offers much more to work with
than merely the resonant traces of identity. The emphasis on the form of
settler history is equally critical to understanding the modes of evidence
of the colonial archive and the emergence of a nationalist response. Too
often, settler histories are thought of as merely racially exclusive histories
of whiteness. Such views are at best tautological because, in approaching the
question from the standpoint of racial exclusion, they neglect to address
the forms of subjection and their articulations that are necessary for settler
histories. Diminishing our sense of the processes of subjection in settler
histories undermines the possibilities of understanding what we mean
The properties of facts (or how to read with a grain of salt) 103
significantly affected the approaches adopted, presumably by historians, to
colonialism and to South African history more generally. As he wrote in the
1930s, perhaps anticipating the restrictive anti-colonial nationalist narrative
of colonial dispossession:
Out of the heaving and thrusting of the nineteenth-century there
has emerged no romantic tradition comparable with the literature
of adventure in which the North American Redskins [sic] were the
heroes. The explanation is at least partly to be found in the different
social and political position of the descendents of Pontiac, Sitting
Bull, or Osceola in the forgotten and inoffensive Indian reservations
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a very crucial set of interviews with Mda Mda, a lawyer based in Butterworth
who is often seen by scholars as an important resource for oral accounts
of the eastern Cape. In his study, Peires finds that cattle were central to
demarcating class boundaries between chiefs and commoners so that the
struggle between these two groups, he argues, took the form of a struggle for
cattle. Since cattle were the primary means of reproduction, Peires points out
it was also the means of controlling subjects who depended on cattle.
Peires emphasises the blurring of the realms of political control and
economic organisation in precolonial societies. In this respect he draws
a distinction between ownership and possession where the latter was the
reward of the commoner and the former the means through which the chief
expressed power over his subjects. Evidence for this analysis is drawn from
both oral histories and accounts of settlers and officials such as W Shaw and
Andrew Smith. Cattle were the sign of obligation and exchange, of control
and reproduction.
In distinguishing between ownership and possession, Peires draws
an analogy between the position of the serf in the Middle Ages in western
Europe and the Xhosa commoner, both of whom had access to the means of
production even when it was owned by the lord or chief respectively. Peires’s
House of Phalo is dedicated to the confrontations that undermined Xhosa
feudal relations and paved the way for emergent, if not truncated, capitalist
social relations. The task, however, was also to prove the distinctness of
The properties of facts (or how to read with a grain of salt) 105
precolonial social formations. Here he invoked the homestead principle
which, he argued, coexisted with a royal ideology to define Xhosa political
and social formations.
Clifton Crais’s study of the making of a colonial order in the
nineteenth-century eastern Cape, published almost five decades after
De Kiewiet’s Imperial Factor, expresses the ambition of exploring the
emergence of the combinatory formation he calls ‘racial capitalism’.9
Crais sees the colonial order that emerged in the eastern Cape as paradoxical,
formed out of discrepancies of colonial culture between metropolitan
control and settler capitalist ethos. It is then the working out of this paradox
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Whereas De Kiewiet argued in terms of the necessity of black labour for the
South African social formation, Crais articulates the concomitant force of
culture and limits of power that accompanied the making of a servile black
labour force. Crais marks the process of servility as uneven and haphazard –
thereby wedging a space in De Kiewiet’s story for an African agency and
resistance – so that it deepens the incidental nature in which black labour is
Or in reverse:
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The properties of facts (or how to read with a grain of salt) 107
encountered in nationalist narration. The convergence of a developmentalist
conception of history and nineteenth-century colonialism, however,
facilitated the assignment of subject positions and also later enabled a
nationalist response by making available the techniques of subjection
necessary for the functioning of power.14 As competing and complementary
forms of social subjection, apartheid and colonialism may be differentiated
systemically even though they are essentially cut of the same epistemic
cloth. This is not to conflate nineteenth-century colonialism and twentieth-
century apartheid but to explore their shared expressions in determining
the conditions of possibility for the production of subalternity, which is a
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One reason for this uncertainty was that claims were being submitted
on behalf of family members who resided at a distance. The possible
exaggeration of losses may similarly have proved beneficial in justifying
colonial encroachment but it also placed strain on colonial officials to meet
The properties of facts (or how to read with a grain of salt) 109
the reparation demands of claimants, especially after the war. The ‘facts’
pertaining to losses sustained are therefore complicated by the ways in which
the archive records and presents its figures.
It is this interplay of calculation and miscalculation, of doubt
expressed as numbers, that enters the field of history, first as a factual basis
for D’Urban’s demand to Hintsa for the return of the cattle and other items
and then as factual pretexts ‘that were always [also] becoming texts’.19 Alex
Wilmot’s biography of Richard Southey, published in 1904, went on to draw
on this factual base to come close to hinting at revenge as a reason for killing
Hintsa. Wilmot writes:
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The Southey’s had lost their all – stock, house and furniture.
They were left destitute in consequence of a totally unprovoked
irruption of savages, and were aware of cold-blooded and brutal
murders of white men and women. No wonder that they and the other
settlers felt their blood boil in the veins when charges were hurled
against them. Their losses during the war consisted of about 800
head of cattle, 1 000 sheep and goats, as well as 50 horses and all
their household effects.20
Once again the discrepancy is only slight and since Wilmot avoids the
academic protocols of referencing in this instance, it is difficult to ascertain
from where he derives his figures. Crucial for the purposes of the discussion
here, however, is the way in which the ledger of losses seeped into a settler
history and a biography as the basis of fact. There were, however, other
consequences. If, as I argued earlier, the conditions of knowledge, and
indeed the settler public sphere, always also articulated with the conditions
of violence, then we may have to inquire into the specific forms of historical
knowledge about the Xhosa produced as a result of this coincidence. My
initial suggestion is that the histories of the killing of Hintsa were products
of discrepant ways of knowing. In this respect, the ethnographic concerns of
Colonel Collins in the early nineteenth century combined with a more open
contest about who earned the right to be called victims of the war of 1834–35.
which he now only uses for hunting. The country now occupied by
Hinsa’s people, is situated near the sea, between the Kyba and the
Bassee, rivers of equal magnitude, and distant about forty miles
from each other. In addition to the Gooa several more small streams
serpentise through this fine tract, among which the Koho at a short
distance east of Hinsa’s residence, which is situated in the middle of
his territory, and the Juguga, a few miles beyond the Koho, are most
deserving of notice. As the Kaffirs are themselves unacquainted with their
population, it is impossible for a stranger to know it. We guessed, however,
that this tribe might consist altogether of about 10 000 souls. They are all
under the absolute control of Hinsa, but divided among a number of
subordinate chiefs. It is not less difficult to form an estimate of the
numbers of their cattle, than respecting their population. I think it
probable that they may exceed 20 000.21
The report is significant for at least two reasons. Firstly, all the proper names
relating to the Xhosa underwent significant orthographic alteration in
subsequent years. Thus, Hinsa would later be written in the colonial archive
as either Hintsa or Hinza, Gyka would become Nqika and later Ngqika,
and Bassee would be rendered as Bashee and later Mbhashe. What might
be too easily dismissed as inconsequential relates to a second aspect of the
excerpt, namely the desire to ‘know the population’.22 Knowing the population
The properties of facts (or how to read with a grain of salt) 111
in this ethnographic exercise pointed to something other than its cultural
formation or its orthographic inscription. It also pointed to the demand for
a census – a counting – of people and cattle. Shortly after Collins estimated
the size of Hintsa’s polity, he turned his attention to a breed of cattle, observed
in the different kraals, that had ‘colonial marks’ and to Hintsa’s two horses,
thought to be of colonial stock. Avoiding the consequences of unsubstantiated
accusation, Collins issued a friendly caution to Hintsa, informing the
latter that he understood the cattle to have been stolen from colonists and
then exchanged for others ‘in order that the proprietors should not be
enabled to discover them’.23 Collins promised ‘advantageous bargains’ if the
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distant countries.24
The properties of facts (or how to read with a grain of salt) 113
discrepancy was to collapse notions of cattle as property – the basis for
settler relations with the Xhosa – and cattle as the distinguishing referent
of Xhosa culture.
The recommendations that followed Collins’s ethnographic
conclusions were implemented by the British governor at the Cape, Lord
Charles Somerset, before 1820. If we are to extend the general argument
of a recent history of the frontier by Tim Keegan,26 we might say that the
implementation of policy based on Collins’s report resulted in the area
between the Fish and the Kei Rivers being declared neutral and ceded
territory after the battle of Ndlambe in 1818–19. The result was a marked
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separation between Xhosa and colonist. By the late 1820s, however, Collins’s
ethnography was proving contradictory and unreliable. In the 1830s,
Keegan points out, the ivory frontier had receded, and increasingly Africans
were becoming dependent on the sale of livestock, animal products and
agricultural produce for access to British manufactured products. This shift
in trade, Keegan suggests, significantly undermined self-sufficiency and
drained cattle resources among the Xhosa. It also demanded new relations
with the Xhosa and with this came the demand for new ways of knowing the
Xhosa – ways of knowing that did not exclusively operate on the premise of
difference established by way of ethnography.
In the face of mounting pressure from metropolitan interests,
the settler public sphere drew on a concept of history to shift the claims
about difference to a more fundamental distinction based on a formulaic
understanding of the stages of economic development. Such arguments
would also need to take account of the discrepancies at the level of social
organisation and the principle of property that was at the heart of difference
in the levels of development. The first move, it seems, entailed inscribing
the Xhosa as antecedent of a settler concept of history – a concept that
became especially discernible with the end of slavery in 1834. The second
move – not necessarily separable from the first – was to highlight difference
in understanding the meaning of property. The first move would ensure that
settler versions of property would win out in the second.
The properties of facts (or how to read with a grain of salt) 115
Glenelg added, ‘the character of “irreclaimable savages” cannot with
justice be assigned’.28 The self/other distinction, we could say, proved to
be inadequate when considered in relation to the emergent demands of
trade on the frontier. The respective positions of Glenelg and D’Urban
reflected a larger metropolitan debate about pursuing a policy of either
free trade or colonisation. But in reversing D’Urban’s expansionist
policies, Glenelg had effectively bypassed settler interests and structures
of accumulation on the one hand, and settler constructions of race-based
difference on the other.
In the midst of this controversy between the government and a settler
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Settler history
One of the foundational texts of settler collective memory and history was, as
Alan Lester has suggested, Robert Godlonton’s A Narrative of the Irruption of
the Kafir Hordes published in 1836 in the immediate aftermath of the Sixth
Frontier War in which Hintsa was killed.29 Godlonton’s narrative was aimed at
the reconstruction of the settler’s past, an analysis of the present predicament
of the colonists and a defence of their activities.30 In Lester’s assessment,
Godlonton’s text pointed to the demands for a specifically settler identity that
promoted unity and cut across class, gender and political divides. Godlonton’s
text, in this reading, was aimed at narrating the cause and course of the Sixth
Frontier War and sought to win favour with metropolitan audiences who may
otherwise have sided with humanitarian propaganda about the extreme forms
of settler violence against colonised peoples.
Irruption is a text that leads us towards an understanding of how the
Xhosa came to be known, defined and colonised. We could argue that the text
is invariably, if not specifically, about the Xhosa even though it is often seen
The properties of facts (or how to read with a grain of salt) 117
circumstances that led to the killing of Hintsa through a mixture of
journalism and history.
The benefit of the use of journalism as a strategy in this context was
that it produced a totalised sense of process composed of the movements
captured in unfolding events and the development of history. These two
complementary temporalities not only reveal the text’s operation but also
point to the totalising claims of settler histories. The movement of unfolding
events, of the everyday in other words, I will call for the purposes of the
argument ‘movement in the first degree’; larger-scale movements of society
I will refer to as ‘movement in the second degree’.33 Such a metaphorical
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Combined with this, we are treated to the story of the advance of colonial
forces under Somerset into what was considered neutral and later ceded
Cadastral prose served movement in the first degree well because, firstly,
it highlighted, as I suggested earlier, the agency of the Xhosa and opposed
their characterisation in humanitarian discourse as victims of settler
excesses. Secondly, it narrated events in such a way as to demonstrate a unity
of purpose on the frontier, especially when this concerned relations between
the British and Dutch farmers. Godlonton, for example, emphasised the
fact that:
several of the most gallant affairs which took place during the war
were those in which the Dutch farmers particularly distinguished
themselves. It is pleasing as it is just to accord this need of
praise. Much has been done to excite between the English and
Dutch inhabitants a suspicious jealousy; but we are happy to
say that late events have discovered the injustice of the attempt;
and it may be confidently expected that the only rivalry between
them in future will be a generous emulation as to who shall
most efficiently advance the true interests of this land of their
joint adoption.36
The properties of facts (or how to read with a grain of salt) 119
Finally, cadastral prose served movement in the first degree insofar as it
tabulated the extent of losses of cattle, horses, sheep and other commodities.
Drawing on the ledgers of reported losses and the general calculations
produced to cost military operations, Godlonton’s narrative of atrocities
produces a corresponding number to substantiate his elaboration of an
argument in favour of those he thought to be ‘true sufferers’ – those
incidentally vilified in humanitarian propaganda.
Movement in the first degree would end with a quarrel, a set of
demands and a killing – a kind of synthesis aimed at turning the accusation
of the humanitarians on its head. In the quest for reversing blame, the
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Five days later, on 29 April, the quarrel was translated into demands, which
were not only written but also translated into Xhosa by Shepstone for the
benefit of Hintsa.
1st – I demand from Chief Hintsa the restoration of 50 000 head
of cattle, and of 1 000 horses. 25 000 head of cattle and 500
horses immediately, as hostilities will continue till they are
delivered, and 25 000 head of cattle and 500 horses in one year
from this day.
2nd – I demand that Hintsa, as the acknowledged chief of western
Xhosaland, shall lay his imperative commands, and cause them to be
obeyed, upon his chiefs of the tribes Tyali, Macomo, Eno, Bothma,
Dushani, T’slambie, Umhala, and their dependents, instantly to
cease hostilities, and send in, and give up to me, all the fire-arms
which they may possess.
3rd – I demand that the murderer of William Purcell be immediately
brought to the condign punishment of death by the Kafir authorities,
and in the presence of Commissioners, whom I shall appoint to
witness the execution and to whom the Chief Hintsa will cause to
be delivered 300 head of good cattle for the benefit of the widow and
family of the murdered man.
4th – I demand, that the same atonement be made for the murder of
Armstrong, as that demanded for the murder of Purcell.
The properties of facts (or how to read with a grain of salt) 121
5th – I demand that for the due and full execution of the above
conditions, the Chief Hintsa shall deliver into my hands here, on the
spot, and immediately, two hostages, to be chosen by me from among
the chief persons about him. 40
The act of writing and translation was more than a summary of the
grievances held by colonists against the Xhosa. It was also the culmination
of a general belief in what colonial officials thought to be their moral right
and legitimate purpose. It was a right demanded on the basis of prefigured
notions of private property and justice – the foundational concepts of an
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More damning was the information gathered from Reverend John Ayliff,
who had spent five years as a missionary near Hintsa’s residence, and the
researches of Reverend Kay regarding the capture of female children from
the Mfengu for the ‘most odious purposes’. 44
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The properties of facts (or how to read with a grain of salt) 123
sense it was a truly colonial history because it promoted progress at all costs –
a progress guaranteed by force and not, as in the missionary constructions of
humanitarian lobbyists, by gradual conversion and improvement. Ultimately,
in Godlonton’s depiction of the war of 1834–35, the difference between the
settlers and the Xhosa was increasingly defined in terms of a combination of
movement in the first degree and movement in the second degree.
A settler history would not be adequate if it did not return to the subject both
in terms of an agency tasked with the possibilities of change and one whose
subjection was necessary for such change to occur.
In Godlonton’s narrative, the elevation of the concepts of progress,
justice and property significantly elided the reliance on a constitutive
imaginary structure. He was, after all, a journalist. Godlonton’s was
an account of the war of 1834–35 that had seemingly been necessitated
by the outcry amongst a small but vocal humanitarian lobby about the
killing of Hintsa. The anthropological presuppositions that gave rise to a
colonial imaginary structure, which I called attention to in the discussion
of grounding Hintsa in the previous chapter, would resurface later to
undermine the counter-claims about the killing of Hintsa and the distinct
possibility of an alternative history that emerged from within a fractured
public sphere.
The fracture was formed around a vocal liberal campaign that
charged the settlers with abuse of local populations without, we should note,
surrendering the story of the master journeymen of the British Empire
leading the way to progress and civilisation. The pronouncements that
sparked the crisis in Grahamstown were made by humanitarian liberals and
organised around the reports of Reverend John Philips. Philips provided
the humanitarians with the basis for arriving at competing versions of what
happened to Hintsa, which detracted from the official version that surfaced
The properties of facts (or how to read with a grain of salt) 125
in the commission of inquiry in 1836 and instigated a deliberation that
was indispensable to the formation of a settler public sphere. Much of this
deliberation was carried out in the pages of the South African Commercial
Advertiser, a newspaper that professed the humanitarian course and that
itself prompted the journalist Robert Godlonton to offer his history of the
war of 1834–35.
Based on the report of the commission of inquiry in 1836 – which
became the official statement on the killing of Hintsa – and the defensive
stance adopted by Godlonton and others in Grahamstown towards the much
smaller, yet vocal lobby of the humanitarians, the story of the killing of
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Hintsa affirmed the modes of evidence of the colonial archive and supported
the process of the subjection of agency. However, for all their expressions
of the higher pursuits of property and progress, settler historical narratives
could not escape the effects of the imaginary structure, discussed in the
previous chapter, upon which they were founded in the first place.
Godlonton’s record of the events of 1834–35 expresses a commitment
to applying universalising concepts of progress and property drawn from
nineteenth-century bourgeois economics to a notion of history that privileges
proximity to the events recounted. It has pretensions of an objective history
by connecting things as they appear in ideas to things as they really are.
In a Marxist reading, it would qualify for the pejorative charge of being
ideological because of an inversion of the concept of property at work in its
narration. In other words, Godlonton needed to distort the representation
of cattle in Xhosa society in order for his notion of progress to work.
The underlying distortion has resonances with Marx’s discussion of the
universalising claims of bourgeois economics in his study ‘The German
Ideology’. There Marx notes:
Although it is true that the categories of bourgeois economics
possess a truth for all other forms of society, this is to be taken
only with a grain of salt. They can contain them in a developed,
or stunted, or caricatured form, but always with an essential
difference. 47
The properties of facts (or how to read with a grain of salt) 127
of violence and to justify these actions by linking progress and property to
presupposed bonds amongst settlers, colonial officials and metropolitan
elites.
Contemporary historiographical evaluations of settler history tend
to emphasise the ways in which these histories are produced in the
cleavages of the public sphere or they tend to construe settler histories
as purveyors of racial ideology. These arguments are of course crucial
in the political positions adopted by the discipline of history to oppose
apartheid, although these very epistemological choices remain aloof of the
Mannheimian paradox in which the charge of ideology boils down to yet
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The properties of facts (or how to read with a grain of salt) 129
himself on this occasion, and was caught in the trap he had set for
others. It was but too clear why the troops had been led into that wild
region, and also what would have been the fate of a small force had it
accompanied him; for the hills and the immediate surroundings were
crowded with his people. And there had been wanting, any further
evidence of the mischief premeditated by Hintsa, it was supplied by
the presence of Umtini and the servant with the fresh horse which
had been sent so mysteriously from the camp and which was there
in readiness for the chief. Hintsa got no more than the reward for
his perfidy.51
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How did Cory arrive at such a characterisation of Hintsa, especially after all
his effort to interview a descendant of the king? Cory’s perspective had to be
supported by a particular organisation of the narrative of the killing which
corresponded to the modes of evidence of the colonial archive described in
Chapter 1 of this book. Interspersed in the six volumes of The Rise of South
Africa, Cory engages a portrait of Hintsa that serves to repeat not only the
content of the colonial archive but also its form. Some of this content is
derived from Lindinxuwa; the remainder is derived from the visit by Colonel
Collins to the Great Place between the Kei and Mbashe Rivers in 1809. In the
nearly 100 years that passed following the encounters between Collins and
Hintsa on the one hand, and Cory and Lindinxuwa on the other, the marks
of uncertainty in the original report from Collins to Lord Caledon, colonial
governor in the early 1800s, were noticeably erased.
Cory made an appearance in Willowvale on 28 January 1910
specifically to meet Lindinxuwa but was disappointed to find that the chief
was not there; he had, Cory learnt, travelled some 20 miles to sort out a land
dispute. Hargraves, the resident magistrate, sent a messenger to request
Lindinxuwa to return as soon as possible. The interview commenced on
29 January in the courthouse. ‘I was furnished with a table,’ noted Cory,
‘below the magistrates desk.’52 The description of the setting of the interview
was not inconsequential, as I will show.
The historian’s description of the setting replays the themes of doubt and
certainty – expressed through descriptions of Lindinxuwa and Gosani – that
marked the strategies generic to the colonial archive for narrating Hintsa’s
killing. Cory’s meticulous recording of the circumstances and the content
of the interview was not merely a product of the standard of historical
methodology. It plotted in detail what would be Cory’s conclusion about
the character of Hintsa. After a familiar outline of family genealogy and
geography by way of the indexicality of graves of his ancestors, Lindinxuwa
proceeded to narrate the story of the killing of Hintsa, with a few twists to
the official tale. Cory’s account selectively drew on this narrative, especially
by taking seriously Lindinxuwa’s insistence that Hintsa had lost his temper
and decided to escape. While latching onto the affirmation of Hintsa’s escape,
he ignored suggestions of the king as a prisoner. He also tended to ignore
Lindinxuwa’s response to the question about the mutilation of the body.
Asking him about the mutilation of Hintsa’s body, he said it is true –
Hintsa’s head was cut off. It is a disgraceful thing to say that thing
[i.e. to talk about it]. All the Gcalekas say that Hintsa’s head was cut
off. That is why Kreli never had any peace of mind with the Europeans
until his death and ever since we have been fighting with the white
people until now, on account of that thing. Hintsa was buried at
Nqabara by his chief councillor, Ncoko.54
The properties of facts (or how to read with a grain of salt) 131
Quite clearly, Lindinxuwa’s testimony was beginning to show signs of the
nationalist retrievals of the story of the killing of Hintsa, especially with the
probable threats of land dispossession on the horizon at the beginning of
the twentieth century. There was, however, another more telling reason for
ignoring the bulk of the account supplied by Hintsa’s son. Midway through
the interview, the chief explained that he was thirsty because of all the
talking. Gosani, according to Cory’s notes, concurred. With the permission
of the magistrate, a permit was issued for Cory to purchase a bottle of brandy
which, we are told, Lindinxuwa and Gosani took neat, before proceeding to
speak about the beheading of Hintsa.
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Henry MacDaniel, a deserter from the Cape Colony, a ‘boer refugee’ called
Lochenberg and some runaway slaves who explained their presence in
Gcalekaland by way of the cruelty of their former masters. All, we are told,
refused the offer to return to the Cape Colony. The meeting, as Cory seems
to suggest, proved rather meaningless in comparison to the effort Collins
made to reach the Great Place. Hintsa, he claims, ‘manifested a friendliness
towards the Colony; he promised to assist both in sending back exiles and in
preventing others from entering and taking refuge in his country’.58 Nowhere
in this narrative do we find explicit reference to the concern with concepts
of property and progress that were so prominent in the nineteenth-century
account of Godlonton. Also erased is the caution presented to Hintsa about
harbouring stolen cattle. By the time Cory was constructing his history in
the 1920s, the Union of South Africa had set in place the notions of rights
to property and ownership, so that concepts of property and progress must
have appeared as a fait accompli and therefore unnecessary to return to.
This is perhaps what differentiates the history produced by Cory from that of
Godlonton. Instead, Cory’s account of the journey of Colonel Collins makes
available the tropes of the empty land and the necessary racial markers that
would qualify it as a settler colonial history.
The racial markers went directly to the character of the Xhosa chiefs.
Collins’s earlier visit to Hintsa’s brother, Buru, ends in a very specific
description of the chief. Little is mentioned of the conversation other
The properties of facts (or how to read with a grain of salt) 133
than the fact that Buru was unwilling to discuss matters related to
Hintsa or the ‘tribes’ that fell under him.59 Yet, Cory provides a detailed
description of Buru as being of ‘about twenty-four years of age; his
countenance was rendered interesting by a good-humored smile and a
very fine set of teeth; his figure was tall and elegant, but, as well as his
face was rendered more like that of a Hottentot than a Kaffir by being all
over smeared with ochre’.60 About Hintsa, Cory cites the degrading analogy
found in the autobiography of Harry Smith in which it is claimed that the
king was ‘a very good-looking fellow, his face though black the very image
of poor dear George IV’.61
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In narrating the story of the killing of Hintsa, Cory was faced with a
major problem. If he was to resort to constructing Hintsa as a treacherous
king, who, it could be proven, was leading the British troops into a trap,
and if this testimony had been recorded as part of D’Urban’s commission
of inquiry in 1836, then the killing of the king would have amounted to
an assassination and an act of premeditated murder. The historian had to
transform the earlier forms of reasonable doubt into a sense of reasonable
suspicion and spontaneity – without of course implicating those who killed
Hintsa in an act of murder.
Cory’s depiction of the killing of Hintsa does not depart from the
version of events that surfaced in the 1836 commission. Large parts of the
testimony are reproduced in his history, and there is an unquestioning
acceptance of the explanations given by British soldiers. To support this
alignment with the commission of inquiry, Cory negotiates the uncertainty
of that record in ways that deepen the suspicion surrounding Hintsa, and
which ultimately, in the eyes of the British soldiers and later Glenelg himself,
made him responsible for his own death. Not only did the alignment combine
with presuppositions of property, progress and justice generic to Godlonton’s
narrative but also with the properties of facts folded into the colonial
imaginary. Taken together, I suggest, these formed what I call settler history.
Two examples may help to highlight this crucial point of convergence
in settler colonial history. The first relates to the meeting between D’Urban
The properties of facts (or how to read with a grain of salt) 135
himself and his son as hostages. They were, however, assured that they were
not prisoners and free to leave when they chose. At this gesture, we are told,
the governor was ‘disarmed of suspicion’ towards the king. Cory does not
tell us here what the cause for suspicion was in the first place. That much
must be inferred because it cannot be corroborated. This is precisely where
the imaginary structure is called into play in the work of history, often
organised around those who fail to function by the rules governing the true.
Once again, a subaltern effect reveals the compromise between a regime
of truth and the imaginary structure that constitutes the colonial archive.
Settler colonial history therefore demands a reading in reverse or, as Marx
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put it in ‘The German Ideology’, with a grain of salt. Such a reading grasps
the consolidation of modes of evidence at the point at which settler colonial
history presents itself as an ideological claim.
Thus, the second point of convergence in settler colonial history
relates to making sense of the suspicion surrounding Hintsa’s decision to
adhere to D’Urban’s demands. Everywhere, says Cory of the atmosphere
that prevailed on the eve of the war of 1834–35, there were signs, though
perhaps indistinct, of a coming storm.65 How does the historian deal with
this level of suspicion or that which is anticipated? Cory traces the sources
of suspicion in those subjects who do not make the cut of the true, yet are
critical to delineating a line of action. He finds a perfect possibility in the
‘rascal’ Hermanus. On the eve of the war of 1834–35, Cory’s narrative turns to
the figure of Hermanus or Xogomesh, the supposedly ‘dangerous rascal’ who
had spied on Maqoma for the British.66 Generally, Hermanus is lambasted
as the scourge of Albany and accused of theft and leading a rebellion to
attack Fort Beaufort later in 1851. Hermanus seemed to have exploited
the conditions of quiet ferment which threatened the Colony late in 1833.
Tucked away in a footnote, Cory offers us an assessment of the role played by
Hermanus leading up to the outbreak of hostilities in the 1830s:
History repeated itself in the career of this man. . .he was a Gaika
and a man of considerable ability; spoke Dutch as well as his
own language and also understood English; he thus became very
The properties of facts (or how to read with a grain of salt) 137
of leading the British troops into a trap. At another level, this information
derived from a ‘rascal’ such as Hermanus served to anticipate but did
not determine British actions. This is why the intelligence provided by
Hermanus did not feature in the commission of inquiry convened in 1836.
Yet, it was critical to the justification for the killing of Hintsa in the context
of the public sphere.
What Cory’s voluminous history of the rise of South Africa achieved
in respect of the story of the killing of Hintsa was to realign the fissures and
discordant elements that had appeared between the settler public sphere and
the colonial government. Such a history functioned to undermine the liberal
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with the official version that emerged from the colonial commission of
inquiry into Hintsa’s death and the liberal public sphere.
Critical to understanding the form of settler colonial historiography,
I would argue, is how it is intimately dependent on the production of the
subaltern effect. The trope of suspicion introduced through the footnoted
character of Hermanus and the general unreliability of his information
helps to connect conservative elements of the public sphere with an official
evidentiary mode of subjection. Suspicion is the tissue of such a connection
and the subaltern subject its unreliable mediator. The manner in which
Hermanus is entered into Cory’s narrative recasts the motive for killing
Hintsa. Therefore, it is perhaps useful to treat settler historiographies not
as merely racial histories but as a form of history that helps to secure the
subjection of agency. The advantage gained by reading settler histories with
a grain of salt is that we are able to view this historiographical production as
deeply implicated in subjection, but necessarily through a process that also
leads to the production of the subject of history in the service of a reconciled
settler colonial history.
The properties of facts (or how to read with a grain of salt) 139
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140
the deaths of hintsa
4
. . .who would not drink nectar but from the skulls of the slain.1
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141
The attempt to dislodge the monopoly of the colonial archive in talking about
the history of the eastern Cape resonates with Chatterjee’s concern that
opposition to colonialism may turn out to be merely, or simply, derivative.
If we were to rephrase Chatterjee’s question slightly, we might ask what
the utopian underpinnings of nationalist history were and to what extent
these formative conditions of opposing colonialism allowed it to extricate
itself sufficiently from the prescriptions of colonial history. More succinctly,
we might revitalise a phrase coined by Shula Marks several years ago in
her discussion of the ‘ambiguities of dependence’ to capture the sense of
entanglement mentioned by Chatterjee. 4 One of the sources of nationalist
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mainly in the first half of the twentieth century, was increasingly sustained
by the changes taking place in the disciplines of history and anthropology
in South Africa. With the rise of segregation and later, after 1948, apartheid,
disciplines such as history and anthropology underwent significant shifts,
especially as a result of their encounter with the pervasive, if not elusive,
‘native question’.10 In most instances, this was a product of changing
institutions, international influences following the defeat of fascism in
Europe, which impacted on scholarship locally, and a reorientation of the
very objects of disciplinary inquiry in South African scholarship.
At stake in this fissure was an effort to extend disciplinary knowledge
to the social problem of the ‘native’ that would, in some instances at
least, result in a concept of pluralism to counter the racial segregationism
propounded by the state. Paul Rich gives some indication that the overlap
of terms between liberal pluralists and state was deliberate. He informs us
that the philosopher RFA Hoernle, and AW Hoernle, a social anthropologist
at the University of the Witwatersrand, helped to direct liberal thought
towards ‘establish[ing] a dialogue with the segregationist state’ because of
its importance as a political position which South African liberals had to
adopt.11 At the same time, there was growing dissent at the static cultural
objects of humanist disciplines that neglected the prospects of social change
as a condition for knowledge. Amongst these dissenters were historians
such as WH MacMillan and CW de Kiewiet and anthropologists such as
Strategic invalidation
country.26
In Mqhayi’s account of the ‘death’ of Hintsa, the level of the fact is treated
as an extension of the act of colonial violence. The facts of history are
surrendered to the actions and demands of colonial forces, dislodged from
that D’Urban had concocted in the attempt to establish that Hintsa was
playing a ‘double game’. For Mqhayi, Hintsa’s diplomacy while in the British
camp with Buru and his son, Sarhili, was met with threat and intimidation.
Demanding that Hintsa issue a law that would prevent his people from
interfering with the Fingoes (Mfengu), D’Urban threatened to hang Hintsa
if he used the opportunity to send through ‘underhand’ messages to his
people to engage in warfare. Later the king was threatened with banishment
to the island of Nxele (commonly also known as Robben Island) or with
being shot. 40
Faced, we are told, with these pressures, Hintsa was compelled to
escort the British to retrieve the cattle that had been demanded. This was
later ‘construed’ by the British as a plan to escape which ‘meant the war
would be heavier than it otherwise would be’. 41 In Mqhayi’s qualification
we have an implicit indication of the motive for the killing of Hintsa. In its
careful phrasing, the statement alludes to a further threat by D’Urban to
banish Hintsa to the island while being concerned with the implications of
an escape for the British more generally.
The figure of Hintsa that was crafted in this short counter-narrative
is intricate, especially when considered in relation to the rather stereotyped
descriptions emanating from Cory’s history. Here we have the ingredients
necessary for a recasting of Hintsa as a leader endowed with the qualities
of diplomacy in the face of engulfing violence, a victim of intimidation, a
( When the white people arrived among us, there was questioning and
debating among them, some saying there was no form of government
among the Xhosa’s, the only thing that existed was the despotic rule
of the chief. He had the power to bully and to pass verdicts that would
be final, whether the society was satisfied or not.)
Inkunz’elwel’eziny’inkunzi
Ndidane ndayinko Ndakuv’ukuba izentinile
Ayikwel’ikutenina Lenkunzi. Lwapel’usapo
Kukutshisana ngasemva
Ngomzikizikan’ ogqitywe kwa ngabafazi
NguTeyase noSingiswa kwamazolo
Akuko nto iyakuvel ’eNqabara 49
instance. It is a familiar and recurring theme in the work of Mqhayi and Soga –
the latter having devoted considerable attention to the life of Sarhili, Hintsa’s
son, in his writing. In some respects the return to origins must be treated as a
response to the insufficiency of colonial history by invoking the category of the
prehistory of colonial violence. Historians have often critiqued this view for its
overt romanticism – a critique that says very little about Europe’s romances of its
origins – or for its historicist implications. For nationalism the return to origins –
even when presented as a foundational fiction – is crucial for a story of identity
and necessary for pointing to the insufficiency of the temporal plot of colonial
violence. The notion of origin is freed from history as progress and redeployed in
the affirmation of cultural difference.
Without reifying this sphere of difference, we might argue that it at
least designates the productivity of nationalist narration. Edward Said has
instructively drawn our attention to the productivity of nationalist narration
in his reflections on the poetics of Yeats and the problem of ‘nativism’.
Although Said critiques this nativist tendency for its pursuit of a precolonial
essence, he nevertheless argues that it:
re-inforces the distinction (between ruler and ruled) by revaluating the
weaker or subservient partner. And it has often led to compelling but
often demagogic assertions about a native past, history, or actuality that
seems to stand free not only of the coloniser but of worldly time itself.51
By the 1930s, at the time when Soga was writing, the forging of a historical
figure in nationalist narration could not avoid the interpretive frameworks
created by the insertion of South Africa into global capitalist relations of
production and exchange. What emerged was an increasing production of
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economic histories that sought to locate the local in the expansive dynamic
of capital. In this milieu, the question of resurrecting Hintsa could hardly be
undertaken without also engaging the spectre of world history or what I will
call the career of Geist – or historical spirit – in South Africa. A protracted
but necessary digression through two examples of the career of Geist in
South Africa, which by the first half of the twentieth century seemed to defy
Hegel’s rather exclusive approach to world history, is necessary to make sense
of the disciplinary conditions for the rise of ‘cultural history’.
In 1917, three years after the publication of Ityala Lamawele,
SM Molema, a contemporary of Mqhayi, offered a presidential address
to the African Races Association of Glasgow and Edinburgh titled
‘Possibilities and Impossibilities’ in which the complex relation between
nationalist historiography and concepts of progress may be gauged.
Published in 1920 as part of a larger collection of essays under the title
The Bantu: Past and Present, the paper is a vehement critique of the
appropriation of a philosophical concept of progress by racial science.
Without resorting to polemic, Molema painfully highlights the pitfalls
of racial science, which was engrossed in establishing the reasons for
what it termed black inferiority as a product of biological disposition
or environmental and historic reasons. For Molema, the debate denied the
possibility of what he termed the improvement of the black man. But in
opposing the concept of progress that founded racial science, Molema was
of progress:
It is a law of all scientific investigations to presume a uniformity and
orderly sequence in phenomena that are being observed, whether
these be physical, chemical or biological. It is a basic, fundamental
principle, an axiom and a law of philosophical history – in its
inquiry into the social, moral, or intellectual evolution of man – to
presuppose human progress and human perfectibility, throughout
humanity, even though the visible progress may be haphazard,
irregular, desultory, and zigzag; even though it may be full of failings
and falterings. The underlying principle is – what one man can do,
another can generally do also; what one nation can achieve, another
nation can also achieve.59
Within South Africa there was not to be found a single tribe that was
sufficient unto itself. The natives bought, they sold, they worked. The
racial separation of white and black could not obscure how much
they were part of one another. The distinction drawn between the
civilisation of the European and the barbarism of the native no longer
corresponded in adequate manner to the difference in their economic
and social positions. Their contact, and ultimately their conflict, were
caused not by different but by similar interests. Tribe was linked to
tribe in a subtle bond, welded not by the natives themselves, but by the
European; for everywhere the stronger pressed upon the land and the
life of the weaker, appropriating the one and transforming the other.61
saw the introduction of the Transkeian Territories and the system of native
government with the creation of a native reservation.
The dissident texture of De Kiewiet’s writing was accomplished by
identifying specific relations of dependency that defined the onset of South
African industrialisation. De Kiewiet constructed his history by combining
a focus on relations of production on the land with a sense of changing
social relations in a period of emergent industrialisation. Historiographically
speaking, we might say that he sought to undermine the exclusivity of an
Afrikaner nationalist discourse which refused to come to terms with the
indispensability of black labour in the process of industrialisation, and
targeted the imperial factor as primarily responsible for the subjugation
of black South Africans. To the black man, argued De Kiewiet, not to the
white man, does South African history owe its special significance. And, he
argued that the greatest social fact of the century was not gold or diamond
mining, or even agriculture, but the universal dependence on black labour.
Unfortunately, De Kiewiet too hastily foreclosed the reading of nationalist
historiography, which sought to reverse the brutal effects of colonial power
with depictions of the pastoral conditions of precoloniality. If De Kiewiet
was rearticulating the arguments about land and colonisation found in
Soga’s writing, his approach to the effects of rapid industrialisation seemed
to contradict Mqhayi’s. The pastoral tone of Mqhayi’s writing seemed better
suited to an ethnography that attended to the problem of vanishing cultures.
The other version of Geist’s career also acknowledged the widespread effects
of industrialisation. Rather than proclaiming the transformation of the
colonised subject into industrial worker, it set out to reclaim the last vestiges
of this subject in the name of culture. Between 1928 and 1930, Duggan
Cronin travelled some 2 718 miles from the diamond fields of Kimberley
through the towns of Elliotdale, Tsomo, Ngqanakwe and Idutywa, amongst
others, to produce ‘a faithful photographic record of native life before the
opportunity [was] lost’.64 The areas he visited formed part of Gcalekaland,
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Beyond the specific paternalism attributed to the visual referent lies the
network of citations that enabled a recuperation of a culture presumed
to be fast fading away. Duggan Cronin would mark his project by way of
declaring ‘a genuine interest in the Native and sharing in the remorse that
Bantu culture should fade away’.66 To counteract the negative consequences
of ‘civilisation’ on native life, Duggan Cronin set out to capture the ‘fine
physique of the native’s industry and their peculiar customs, superstitions,
art and all the different aspects of their lives.
The photograph mediates an encounter with modernity and, in
the case of Duggan Cronin’s photographic studies, with an African life
supposedly eroded by modernity. We may even say that the photograph
human interest for his own sake, is at last coming into his own.69
The work of recuperating the subject, and the disciplinary subjection of those
thought to be the last remaining traces of precolonial tradition – victims, so
to speak, of the march of progress – depended extensively on discovering the
historical basis for ethnographic research. Before undertaking his journey
to Gcalekaland, Duggan Cronin scoured the existing historical writings on
the eastern Cape, which included those of Moodie, Theal and HA Bryden.
His field notes also refer to assistance gained from, amongst others, John
Henderson Soga. Among his research concerns, once again extensively
reflected in his notebooks, were the histories about the killing of Hintsa in
1835 and the cattle-killing episode of the 1850s, especially the role of Sarhili,
Hintsa’s son, in the latter event.
While the specific relationship between historical research and the
photographic enterprise is generally difficult to ascertain, the implications of
the connection should not be underestimated. The connection has serious
consequences for the treatment of the photographic oeuvre as not merely
a repetition of an earlier ethnographic practice but a concerted attempt at
photographing African history. Many commentators have viewed Duggan
Cronin’s work as an ethnographic record of a vanishing culture. For example,
in 1954 the Cape Times noted that the collection of over 4 000 photographs
‘is a remarkable record of the dress, ornaments, weapons, customs and
that matter.
Negotiating loss by way of the temporal ambiguity of the salvage
photograph – or the process of re-enactment – is the very condition for
the emergence of a particular mode of disciplinary inquiry. Edwards
draws a similar conclusion in her discussion of the Torres Strait expedition
when she argues that ‘the intellectual preconditions of the past allowed for
the demonstrational validity of reenactment’.75 But shortly thereafter, she
argues that there was another perspective on re-enactment – that of the
people of Torres Strait. Like Haddon who led the Torres Strait expedition,
Duggan Cronin offered a glimpse of an encounter around the photograph
involving Chief Ngubezulu of Elliotdale and himself. But unlike Edwards,
who contemplates the ways that cultures write themselves into ethnographies,
we might consider what kinds of subjectivities are effected by this moment
of exchange.
Considered in relation to the threat posed by industrialisation, Duggan
Cronin’s native studies reinvented the category of ‘tribe’ as the site of lost
history. The photographs were selected and published in eight volumes with
accompanying commentary by leading anthropologists and administrators.
Each volume specified cultural differences and included portraits of chiefs and
the categories that defined the traces of a precolonial social formation.
Beyond a narrowly ethnographic reading, Duggan Cronin’s
photographic studies of native life are accompanied by a massive
Re-imagining Hintsa
By the 1930s the story of the killing of Hintsa was deeply ensnared in
nationalism’s encounter with colonialism, segregation and disciplinary
knowledge. The entanglement would haunt subsequent efforts at recasting
Hintsa. In 1937 Lovedale Press issued a poem by Mqhayi to commemorate
the hundredth anniversary of the death of Hintsa. Mqhayi’s poem consists of
a 35-line introduction, followed by seven sections ranging in length from 21
to 65 lines addressed to the British, the Ngwane, the Thembu, the Bomvana,
the Zulu, the Mfengu and the royal Xhosa house.
The days have come! The days have come!
The days of the remembrance of Hintsa have come.
This Hintsa belongs to the Khawuta of Gcaleka
The days, as it were, had clearly come for re-imaging Hintsa. In order to still
say ‘great things to the nations of the world’ – to world history perhaps –
Mqhayi’s poem was prefaced by the revised image of the king referred to in
Chapter 2. The artist George Milwa Pemba, while enrolled in the department
of Fine Arts at Rhodes University in the eastern Cape, produced the sketch
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years at Lovedale, Thema highlighted his passion for history, especially the
opportunity it afforded him to compare English and South African history.
Like many of his contemporaries, Thema believed that African leaders
like Shaka and Moshoeshoe were under-represented in history, thereby
enhancing the prestige of the white race. More important, though, was the
spirit of contestation that permeated the writings of Thema who, in reflecting
on the history of the eastern Cape, claimed:
the so-called ‘Kaffir wars’ were said to have been waged solely for the
purposes of plundering lonely farmers; but an impartial enquirer
would have discovered that although there was a great deal of
plundering and pillaging the wars were prompted by an ardent desire
to rid the country of European invaders. They were similar wars to
those waged by the Britons against the conquering Romans, Anglo-
Saxons and Danes; or by the Anglo-Saxon tribes against invading
Normans. The motive that prompted these wars was not that of
stock theft, but that of self-preservation. It was not for the sake of the
farmers’ cattle and sheep that black men made that futile but noble
attempt to ‘drive the White man into the sea.’ It was not for the sake
of mere plunder that the Amaxhosa people, in obedience to the false
prophecy of a misguided girl burned their corn and killed their cattle
in the hope that the White man would be driven into the sea. Nor was
it merely to bring calamity upon the Xhosa nation that Nonqawuse
far from being destroyed through their union with notions of culture.
Unfortunately, the triumph of recurrence is also the point of the ostensibly
inescapable cunning of reason. If, as Partha Chatterjee argues, nationalism
proves inadequate for the cunning of reason, then we could say that that
failure is idiomatically expressed in the unchallenged historicism that bound
nationalism to colonial discourse.81 As Sande Cohen suggests, historicism
attempts to achieve a cultural ‘timeless time’, an image which holds together
categories such as origin and result.82 Historicism, he argues further,
renders an image of an unavoidable presentation handed down by ‘history’
which braids past, present and future in the here and now. Historicism, in
other words, has the tendency to flatten history. In seeking to rewrite the
story of Hintsa, anti-colonial nationalist narration may have contributed to
precisely such a flattening of history.
Once sanctioned, historicism would allow for an endless refashioning
of the figure of history, even lending itself to the most reactionary and
dangerous forms of nationalist articulation. Five years after the publication
of UmHlekazi uHintsa, the king would be mobilised once more against
the British, but this time worked into the inaugural story of Afrikaner
nationalism: the Great Trek. In 1943, on the eve of the ascendancy of
Afrikaner nationalism, Professor CJ Uys – the renowned Afrikaner
nationalist historian – published a series of articles in the popular Afrikaans
magazine Huisgenoot, proposing a revision of the standard historiography of
basic thesis is that the Sixth Frontier War dramatically transformed the
Great Trek, that iconic event that defined a nascent Afrikaner nationalism,
from a scattered sentiment to a politically cohesive action. Whether or not
beginnings tally with ends in nationalist narration, its modes of subjection
should make us wary about its transformative potential.
Border discourse
190
the deaths of hintsa
5
191
The study of racial formations often flowed from the potential of
Martin Legassick’s seminal ‘The Frontier Tradition’, which challenged the
liberal views of the historian Eric Walker by highlighting the functionality
of race to the sociology of class. The frontier tradition which served liberal
historiography failed to relate race to the changing material base of society.
The inspiration of the later turn to racial formation was in the normalisation
of race in the practices of power, derived in part through models of dispersal
rather than a concentration of power. What these scholars were stressing was
that the postapartheid might be met with the capillary structure of power
that Foucault described for his metaphor of the process of subjectivation.3
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This, I would argue, was the latent, and at times unanswered, postcolonial
question coming home to roost. The move in the direction of studying racial
formations more singularly was, however, somewhat tentative, perhaps given
that it was presented on the cusp of the end of formal apartheid. What I call a
tentative first step can be discerned in a polemic about South African history
by Clifton Crais, in which he points out:
The first [opening for a more emancipatory production of history]
concerns the deconstruction of the white mythology of history in
South Africa, a critical analysis of the relationship between the
production of history and the stabilisation of power. Read against
itself, the canonical writing of the South African past unfolds as a
series of transpositions and, ultimately, a sort of incessant struggle
with the ghosts of Theal and Cory. Each new ‘school’ of historians
invents, so that it can destroy in almost Oedipal fashion, its
intellectual progenitor. 4
archive by targeting the very structure of the border – the residual trace of
apartheid – that has contained the story of the killing of Hintsa thus far as a
story of the homeland.
We might say that this chapter is about the virtuality of the border
as much as it is about its actuality. We might also say that it is a story of
how boundaries become borders when folded into the circuits of a colonial
archive. Borders form, I wish to argue, in the ‘prose of counter-insurgency’.
The notion of the prose of counter-insurgency is of course indebted to
the work of Ranajit Guha, who has implicitly asked that we not only see
the colonial archive as producing an imagined community but also anticipate
its operation as an imaginary structure. Guha encourages us to consider
the distributions of metaphor, metonym and, we might add, synecdoche
in translating the consciousness of the rebel into terms familiar to power
and history – terms that resonate with the spontaneity associated with
colonial charges of insurgency and revisionist constructions of anti-colonial
resistance.
As I see it, the argument proposed by Guha does not merely
call for accounting for colonialism via its archive, but also for working
towards effecting an epistemic break with its conceptual reign over the
postcolonial present.7
economy and ecology. The net effects of a colonial episteme were indeed
severe. If the effects were borne by those who were targets of a civilising
mission, and if those effects doubled as strategies for entrapping Africans
in a colonial tribalism, such a claim is established by recourse to the very
archive of colonial governmentality. This, for example, is what Crais tells us
midway through his discussion on the production of boundaries:
The colonial archive for the 1870s and 1880s is replete with
discussions of boundaries, their drawing up and the anxiety and
contestation they invariably caused, and the displacing of people
that frequently followed the colonial organisation of political space.
Africans made it clear that they lived in a world in which boundaries
were not ‘fixed’ and in which political claims very frequently
overlapped. People living in what became known in anthropological
discourse as ‘maximal lineages’ did not inhabit contiguous areas.
‘There is no fixed boundary,’ one chief told the chief magistrate; ‘our
people are intermixed.’ Some of his people were ‘about 18 miles from
my Kraal. The space between us is filled up by’ people attached to
other chiefs.16
itself, one that has called forth different configurations of reading amongst
historians. Think only of ideas of reading against or along the proverbial
grain.17 To distinguish my argument from those of Crais and Mager, I wish
to recall the now familiar phrase ‘the prose of counter-insurgency’, proposed
by Guha for the unreadable traces of subalternity in official archives and
their derivative historiographies.18 Important in Guha’s choice of phrase is
the idea that the prose of counter-insurgency is not reducible to insurgency as
such. Similarly, the traces of insurgency are not to be understood in a merely
prelinguistic sense but as constitutive of the discourse of the archive. In this
chapter, the prose of counter-insurgency calls attention to an administrative
trace of the network of counter-insurgent spying and surveillance through
which we may begin to explain the subaltern effect of the discourses
of borders and boundaries. The phrase ‘prose of counter-insurgency’
suggests why attending to the imaginary structure of the colonial archive,
notwithstanding its pervasive function as instrument of power, is important
in advancing the critique of colonialism and, of course, apartheid. The will
to knowledge that renders insurgency intelligible as an object of knowledge
is constitutively bound up with police power in the broadest sense. It is not
a question of unknowable cultural difference in the anthropological sense,
but a political and post-phenomenological question of understanding the
institutional conditions of possibility for what appears self-evident in one’s
own (historiographical) experience.
The extension of the colonial border to the Kei River in 1835 was folded into
the making of the story of the killing of Hintsa. This, as I argued earlier, was
achieved through a process of the subjection of agency specific to a colonial
mode of evidence.21 The dispersal of the effects of an information economy
combined with a grammar of domination that involved making the active
verb of colonial reportage – instigate, invade, contrive and plunder – resonate
with the object nouns of its discourse – primitive, uncivilised, savage and
‘Cafre’. The grammar of domination was never too far from the effects of
colonial domination. The one is incomprehensible without the other.
In keeping with the initial elaboration of the concept of a colonial
mode of evidence, I wish to argue that the finalisation of the border can be
traced in the cracks that appeared in the system of indirect rule involving
the late king’s son, Sarhili. On 16 October 1885, the resident magistrate in
Elliotdale in charge of Bomvanaland sounded an enthusiastic note of victory
over having secured Sarhili’s registration and also that of his subjects.
Assuring the chief magistrate, Major Elliot in Umtata, that he was unable
We might pause to ask how this knowledge of Sarhili being haunted by the
spectre of his father was arrived at so that Walker might conclude, subtly
perhaps, that Sarhili was effectively resisting the power of the Cape governor.
The answer to this question is not as easily supported by a a self-referential
verification within the colonial archive. The ghost of Hintsa travelled a
more circuitous route into the history of the last nineteenth-century war
of conquest involving Sarhili, and became a more complicated presence in
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taken refuge in the forests of the lower Bashee and were accompanied by
a large number of armed followers. They claimed that between 1 000 and
2 000 men ‘hostile to the colonial government’28 had amassed in the area.
In particular, the detectives claimed that the armed men had been on
the lookout for government spies whom they were ordered to kill without
mercy upon discovery, and that Sarhili was in contact with the Pondo chiefs
and the baSotho who were expected to provide assistance in ensuring the
‘subjugation of the white man and the overthrow of the Government’.29
The nature of these suspicions corresponded in their broad outline
to the story of the killing of Hintsa in 1835. Hintsa, too, had been suspected
of plotting against the British in what the colonists called Maqoma’s war.
He too was seen as setting a trap for the British and accused of liaising with
Rharhabe chiefs to rebel against the British. Most importantly, colonial
officials suspected Sarhili of playing a double game that allegedly repeated the
tactics adopted by Hintsa.30 In this discourse, Hintsa was not merely invoked
as exemplar but as the return of the repressed. Echoing the latter coincidence,
the resident magistrate confirmed that Sarhili was trying to use the colonial
administration to secure land for settlement, as he was plotting to ‘rise again
from the ashes of defeat’31 and attempt to overthrow the British government.
A few days after the first report, on 19 May 1881, the resident
magistrate wrote that messengers were sent from Captain Blyth to inform
Sarhili of a mistake made in conveying the idea that he would be given a
required a skill in the use of official reportage. The following quotation from
one such report gives us a precise basis from which to evaluate such skill:
Late events, especially the tacit non-acceptance by Kreli [sic] of the
terms afforded him by government have shown how suspicious he
is, or rather how covetous and exacting under the pretence of being
suspicious and afraid of the Government; but when it is remembered
that his people have flocked around him and have for several months
past been jealously watching, lest government – exasperated by his
persistent finessing – should send a patrol in pursuit of him – it can
readily be understood, how this district has been kept in anything
but a quiet settled state and how its office work has been impeded.
Scarcely can a constable from this office go through the district on
duty but what it is considered that he is a spy from the Government,
endeavouring to find out Kreli’s hiding place and his life is therefore
by no means free from danger.36
arrest, Mbebe was forcibly released by 30 armed men headed by one Sombali.
Sombali sent a message to the resident magistrate stating that Mbebe was
‘not a government man’ but was rather ‘one of Kreli’s men’. 40 The statement
from the policemen, Langeni and Nenka, painted a macabre picture of
the discovery:
We first came across the head apparently that of a girl, a number
of bones were lying about, a little further on I saw the head of a
woman. Quwe was present and recognized it to be that of his wife. On
enquiring from the young man who first discovered the bodies he told
me they were very much decomposed and saw several dogs tearing
them to pieces. . .I then said I must arrest Mbebe. Sombali said Mbebe
is Kreli’s man and that no magistrate can arrest him. 41
Failure to arrest Mbebe and Sombali, even after receiving permission from
Sarhili, proved to be a major setback for Vice. By seeking the extradition of
Mbebe, Vice sought to make inroads into areas claimed to be under Gcaleka,
rather than colonial, authority. This made the work of colonial officials
exceedingly difficulty. Vice might have believed that receiving permission
from Sarhili to arrest Mbebe and Sombali would be seen as a tacit acceptance
of his attempts to extend colonial authority to the Mbashe valley. But when
Sombali and Mbebe escaped, and when Sarhili handed over five cattle
belonging to Mbebe to the policemen, Vice was left profoundly embarrassed.
included the techniques of mapping, census and the collection of hut tax.
Territorial demarcation and the creation of administrative units produced
enabling conditions for Morris. Under his watch, there seems to have been
a diminishing dependence on spying and detective work in the areas of the
lower Mbashe River. Yet, the prose of counter-insurgency left an indelible
mark on his administrative style. On 21 November, Morris attempted to
eclipse the domain of surreptitious speech and rumour by requesting
permission for a new census to be taken. Apparently, the existing registers
were unreliable and this affected the ability of the resident magistrate to
collect hut taxes.
In a confidential letter to the chief magistrate a few months after
he had assumed office, Morris wrote despairingly of ‘the Gcaleka who only
acknowledge Kreli and repudiate the right of Government to control them in
anyway’. 42 In his letter he noted:
The Gcaleka occupy a portion of Bomvanaland about 20 miles from
the Bashee mouth thereby causing a feeling of animosity to exist
amongst the Bomvana’s [sic] who as legal subjects of Government
object to this occupation being forced upon them by these people
and request that the government take some steps to remove them as
they cannot be responsible for the results as there is already a strong
feeling existing which may at any moment cause collision. These
Gcaleka refuse to pay hut tax, thereby raising the idea among the
The Gcaleka, he pointed out, came into the district as refugees and were
scattered among the Bomvana headmen. These headmen, he claimed, were
being ignored and the Gcaleka were asserting rights to which they had no
claim. More worryingly, the area along the coast had been transformed into
‘a refuge and haunt of thieves and lawless characters’. 44 Having pointed out
the dire conditions that supposedly prevailed in his district, Morris called for
the removal of the Gcaleka.
The origins of this panic did not emanate from the rituals
surrounding the collection of hut tax, but from the lack of ‘information’
forthcoming. Increasingly, Morris had to rely on the Bomvana headman,
Langa, for his reportage. But this allowed for some continuity in the
representations of the Gcaleka, especially the sense of intrigue that emanated
from the work of counter-insurgency. Morris was forced to seek information
by other means, including past records which, he complained, were useless
in providing information on Gcaleka men, women, children and stock that
needed to be removed from Bomvanaland. 45
To counteract the dearth of information, the Gcaleka were summoned
en masse to a meeting on 19 February 1884 for the purposes of registration –
or so it seemed. Morris pointed out that 700 people attended the meeting
accompanied by Sarhili. They refused to register. But he also reported that
he was enabled by the meeting to frame a return which was an approximate
estimate. He also made it clear that while he avoided giving them any
without a question and live peaceably with the Government and I shall
put down all arms from today – that these have got me into trouble. 49
A few weeks later Sarhili sent another message assuring Elliot that he would
not cause the Major the slightest trouble when he came to point out the
boundary. He even joked that he believed Elliot had forgiven him on account
of his (Sarhili’s) birthday.50 But Elliot never arrived. Instead, the boundary
was proclaimed by the resident magistrate, Morris. The chief magistrate,
for his part, may have calculated that the Gcaleka/Bomvana boundary paled
in comparison to the ability to extend the Thembuland boundary further
to the Hole-in-the-Wall. The prose of counter-insurgency had created a
minor distraction in the form of the Gcaleka/Bomvana boundary in order
that it might extend its grip over Gcalekaland. Sarhili had forgotten to glance
over his shoulder – to guard his rear, as he was said to have remarked
while preparing for a meeting with the resident magistrate some years
earlier. In the three submissions by Chief Sirunu, Chief Tyali and Sarhili
in October 1885, attention was devoted entirely to the extension of the new
boundary that limited and constricted the territorial claims of both Bomvana
and Gcaleka.
Crais tells us that a meeting had indeed taken place between Elliot
and Ngangelizwe, although the document is now damaged and no date
is discernible.51 However, he concludes that Ngangelizwe considered his
declaration of victory. This, as Guha has argued, often appears as a blind spot
in radical historiography which fails to acknowledge the terms of law and
order in every occurrence of the voice of insurgency in the colonial archive.
Such then is the episteme of the border, neither a site of transgression
nor an absolute limit. Borders only ever appear to matter where they never
really are. This at least is the provisional conclusion of a reading of the prose
of counter-insurgency which blurs boundaries, establishes borders and defers
endlessly to other levels in the orders of discourse as it envelops colonised
subjects and their historians.
218
the deaths of hintsa
6
219
as a driving force in the discipline of history is the subject of marginality.
The study of African history has repeatedly sought to offer this subject a
role beyond its subservience for which it is produced by hegemonic forms
of power. The subject of African history is a willing subject of resistance,
adaptation, consciousness, collaboration, speaking of its victimisation,
perpetration, or set to work in the unenviable role as cultural broker.
In re-evaluating Nicholas Gcaleka’s search for Hintsa’s skull by way of
a discussion of the subjection of agency, I have asked not only for unravelling
the work of history in facilitating the subjection of agency but also whether
it is possible for the discipline of history to have a different relation to those
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who do not make the cut of its discourse. Is it possible to adopt a different
relationship to the concept of marginality that is constitutive of the discourse
of history, one that treats marginality not merely as evidence of some
objective socio-economic condition but, more fundamentally, as a symptom
of the processes by which the modes of evidence of the colonial archive
are constituted and from which knowledge production proceeds? More
importantly, what implications might this new relationship have for what I
am calling ‘history after apartheid’, that is, a history that seeks to step out of
the shadows of the colonial archive and its far-reaching operations? Although
these questions have framed the argument of this book, especially as they
relate to the responses generated by Nicholas Gcaleka’s alleged retrieval
of Hintsa’s skull in 1996, it may be useful to restate the problem in terms
that serve to recall the attempt to read Gcaleka’s mission as an indication of
disillusionment with postapartheid South Africa.
The desire to present Nicholas Gcaleka in terms of an identity that
mediates the economic difficulties accompanying unfulfilled promises
in the postapartheid period, as Shula Marks suggests, is displaced, in the
argument of this book, with an inquiry into how his subalternity is an effect
of, and an irreducible crisis for, a regime of truth and alternative histories.
By concentrating upon the modes of evidence, without which this regime of
truth is invalid, this chapter seeks to go beyond the reversal of the colonial
archive that is attempted in nationalist narrations of the killing of Hintsa.
discourse, that is, in finding in the misfit of the text the sources for the break
up of a regime of truth, its modes of evidence and the imaginary structure
which, combined, resulted in the subjection of agency.
My textual cue for pursuing this line of argument is an exhibition of
the colonisation of the eastern Cape at the Albany Museum in Grahamstown.
As you may recall from the earlier discussion, Grahamstown was the setting
of an emergent settler public sphere which was activated in part by the war
of 1834–35 and the killing of Hintsa. The Albany Museum was, and is, very
definitely a museum of the frontier. In Cory’s The Rise of South Africa, it
is named as containing the skull of the ‘rascal’ Hermanus, and in recent
exhibitions it has put on display ornaments and an assegai seized from Hintsa
on the fateful day when he was killed on the banks of the Nqabara River
in 1835. Since 1994, the Albany Museum has taken its first steps towards
reconciliation, through revising the gallery on the history of the eastern Cape.
We have, in the museum’s text displays, a more favourable representation (by
postapartheid standards) of the 100 years of war that engulfed the eastern Cape
in the nineteenth century. However, it is a history that now relates to the rise
of a new national narrative, one that sympathetically details interpretations
associated with Xhosa historiography while offering a glimpse into settler
colonial histories. It does not seek to provide a balanced history though, as the
need to provide a corrective to settler colonial history is more pressing. In the
process of correction, several aspects of the exhibition attest to post-apartheid
fact)’ opens up the very problematic that has defined my argument. Graham
portrays a scene of frenzy where no amount of factual accounting can produce
a sense of order or narrative cohesion, while the parenthetical correctives
offered by the museum to the title of each panel are telling indeed.
Collection: Albany Museum
Figure 6a: The death of Hintsa, by Hilary Graham, 1990, Panel 1: The tragic death of
Hintsa (Chief Hintsa and Harry Smith negotiate the return of stolen cattle).
Figure 6b: Panel 2: Smith shoots Chief Hintsa (in fact George Southey fatally shot Hintsa).
Figure 6c: Panel 3: Smith cuts off Hintsa’s ear (this is the artist’s view and not a proven fact).
The unspoken desire expressed here is, of course, that the assemblage of
quotes, pictures and objects – the products of a history of colonisation – may
inspire another interpretation. The curators of the Albany Museum find the
potential for interpretation in stories, such as that of the killing of Hintsa,
which have for so long been understood as a dead end amongst historians.5
Reminding readers that historians are not time travellers who can leap back
into the distant past to study it first-hand, Gerard Corsane argued in the
pages of The Phoenix, the museum’s magazine, that:
historians can seldom claim that they know or can present all the
exact details of what happened in the past. Although they should aim
at being objective and disciplined they will not end up with absolute
truths. Instead, using the evidence critically and professionally,
they can only ever hope to provide an interpretation of what they
think occurred. The readers of historical interpretations will also be
about the killing, the exhibition offers the following apology that combines
two rather discrepant propositions: ‘Although the true facts of Hintsa’s death
will remain shrouded due to a lack of evidence, he has since been seen as a heroic
symbol of Xhosa nationalism.’ For the purposes of this chapter, I will refer to
these as propositions A and B respectively.
Not too long ago the renowned British historian and philosopher
Robin Collingwood would have dismissed the first proposition as a problem
that should not occupy the historian. So far as Collingwood was concerned,
the rules of the game of history meant interpreting all the available evidence
with the maximum degree of critical skill. In his famous The Limits of
Historical Knowledge, Collingwood suggested that historical thinking ‘does
not mean discovering what really happened, if “what really happened” is
anything other than “what the evidence indicates”’.7 He, of course, did not
anticipate the problem that emerges when the evidence itself produces
doubt – when it was constituted as doubt – over what really happened, as
we shall shortly see in the discussion on the story of the killing of Hintsa.
The suggestion implicit in the Albany Museum’s text is that it was precisely
the lack of evidence that produced the conditions for another history, one
that symbolically deployed the figure of Hintsa in the narrative of
anti-colonial nationalism.
How then did the project of refiguring Hintsa in ‘Xhosa nationalism’
bypass the despair that Dipesh Chakrabarty once claimed had accompanied
The slippage into multiculturalism that concerns Zizek has of course also
troubled many postcolonial critics. Leela Gandhi, for example, points out
that it is Said’s contention that in their desperate assertions of civilisational
alterity, postcolonial nations submit all too easily to a defiant and puerile
rejection of imperial cultures.16 The result is an acceptance of nativism by
postcolonial nations which, according to Said:
is to accept the consequences of imperialism, the racial, religious,
and political divisions imposed by imperialism itself. To leave the
for me as witness was prepared, but I was at the time preparing for
a journey into the interior, I hurried my movements and started
on horseback, leaving my wagon to follow. Thus the summons was
not served. All the other witnesses being well primed, denied any
knowledge of the mutilation, and the enquiry came to an end, much
to the annoyance of Dr Campbell who tried, but could not revive it
after my return.23
In Halse’s recollection, it was after this incident that Hintsa made his
escape and was pursued and shot. Interestingly, in Smith’s autobiography,
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such as John Philips, who it was claimed ‘had taken up an attitude towards
the British settlers’ and was ‘entirely carried away with sympathy towards the
natives, whom he looked upon as a people who were oppressed and robbed by
the colonists’.30 Missionaries such as Philips were held entirely responsible
for stirring up sentiment against the colonists in England and for the reversal
of D’Urban’s colonial policy that favoured settlers.
As for the killing of Hintsa, colonial officials painted a picture of a
treacherous Xhosa king who was ultimately responsible for his own death.
Sir John Herschel, the Cape intellectual, regarded the death of Hintsa as
a casualty ‘naturally incident to the attempt to escape, in which a man
knowing his wish takes the chances and fails’.31 Had Hintsa escaped,
Herschel continued, it would have placed Smith’s troops in danger. George
Southey, who shot Hintsa, was seen by many to have operated purely and
legitimately within the parameters of duty. In a letter claiming to furnish a
true statement of Hintsa’s death dated 7 February 1836 from King William’s
Town and probably addressed to Southey, the writer claims:
The conspicuous part which you performed in the affair will naturally
excite you on perusal of the false statements which have been sent
forth to deceive the public; but feel satisfied that you only performed a
duty which however disagreeable, circumstances rendered necessary –
and which entirely resulted from the treacherous conduct of the chief
himself. Whoever knows the character and habits of the Kafir is well
stop the bullets or favour his escape. Smile and charm were, in Shepstone’s
analysis, part of a premeditated plan that deserved the outcomes that were
achieved. Taken together, Southey, Halse (notwithstanding the points of
contradiction relating to the death of Major White and the issue of mutilation
alluded to earlier) and Shepstone’s accounts correspond to the narrative of
treachery which was held to be the central reason for killing Hintsa and
upheld by the portrayal of the king. This was a story that would be repeated
at the military commission of inquiry in 1836 and the revisions – the inclusion
of additional information such as the distance of 200 yards from which Southey
first shot at Hintsa – were all marshalled as authenticating techniques. In the
spirit of collective memory, the basic claim that Hintsa deserved his fate
was proven.
In an environment where colonial homogeneity was assumed but never
really guaranteed, there were always other stories that would inadvertently
surface. Moral outrage at the killing of Hintsa was not merely the preserve
of metropolitan lobbyists or the amaXhosa. In his recollections of frontier
experiences, Captain Charles Lennox Stretch made clear his view of the
killing as brutal conduct. For expressing these views, Stretch was approached
by both Captain Murray and Lieutenant Balfour and cautioned about his
pronouncements on the event. And while Balfour accused Stretch of a personal
vendetta, the latter referred him to four officers of Balfour’s regiment – Peddie,
Leslie, Fisher and Lacy – who all remembered Mr Driver, Southey and Shaw,
out the emblems of his manhood, Mr. Shaw the ears and skin of his
chin, while a certain doctor with a bayonet endeavoured to extract
some of his teeth.35
Six months later, in June 1962, Luthuli made a similar plea in the pages of
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In his statement during the Rivonia trial on 20 April 1964, Mandela repeated
this anecdote. This time, however, he added that these stories motivated
him to serve his people. Both Luthuli and Mandela narrate the nation in
terms of the inspiration drawn from the founding fathers. The male subject
notwithstanding, both Luthuli and Mandela allude to the need to reconstruct
In this search for history, Hintsa emerged alongside many other founding
‘fathers’ such as Shaka and Moshoeshoe. For nationalist narration these
founding fathers embodied the discrepant values of difference and sameness,
the latter in the articulation of their contribution to the first semblance of
anti-colonial nationalism. Nationalism qualifies as a quasi-transcendental
Hence, we are often left with the paradoxical notion of Xhosa nationalism.
In rather crude terms we could say that nationalism, as it is presented in
the museum of the frontier, is the sum of anthropology, geography and
history. While the anthropological has always been suspected because of its
pivotal role in the dreaded homeland system of apartheid, the subversion
of settler colonial narratives seemed to require history in order to make an
effective argument. The result was the development of a disciplinary object
called the ‘precolonial state’ which made provision for ‘museumized access
to ethnic origin’45 that sought to sidestep the implications of apartheid
ideology. The precolonial state may have had ethnically derived identities
but, the museum tells us implicitly, they were in every manner comparable
to the apparatus of the state as it came to be known in nineteenth-century
Europe. The precolonial state was precolonial in its essence but universal in
its functioning as a state. And to prove that the Xhosa had a viable concept
of history, the Albany Museum presents us with an account that stresses
the exercise of state power and the functioning of an apparatus that covers
the fundamental aspects of social life: the distribution of resources, the
regulation of everyday life, warfare, diplomacy and economic power. What
this amounts to is nothing less than conceptual equalisation between the
precolonial and the colonial.
To think after apartheid is to remain sensitive to the way such
equalisations manifest themselves even today in and as the very sediment
he is in every sense a noble man and it has been his most earnest
endeavour for the last twenty years to keep on good terms with the
English nation.’46
Dancing to the tune of the colonial master was not without its problems,
especially when it involved figuring the category of the people who were
presented as the subjects of such a benevolent chief. Despite the sense of
generosity towards the settler society conveyed in the Castle of Good Hope,
we are given a glimpse of the consequences of the failure of colonial society
to recognise the deep sense of responsibility that Xhosa chiefs had towards
their subjects. Chief Sarhili’s relationship with the colony, the exhibition
suggests, was always troubled as he tried to protect his territory:
The 1857 Eastern Cape disaster [referring to the cattle-killing
episode] should be told for its tragedy and its meaning. Therefore,
the chief’s support for the Nongqawuse cattle killing episode led him
to admit responsibility for the suffering of his people. Thus he said:
‘I was a great chief, being as I am the son of Chief Hintsa, who left
me rich in cattle and ordering my people to do the same, and I shall
be left alone as my people must scatter in search of food; thus I
am no longer a chief. It is all my fault; I have no one to blame but
myself.’ Such words reveal the obligation of trust chiefs had towards
their people. 47
The nationalist desire for history, that is, its desire in part for a re-evaluation
of its precolonial past in the light of what it considers colonial distortion, is
also the logic by which it necessarily pursues the ideal of the nation state.
attempt to represent the authority vested in the precolonial state. So, too, are
all the components of the exhibition that convey the history of 100 years of
warfare in terms that mourn the passing of the dissolution of the precolonial
state. The Albany Museum is not, as it first appears these days, a contact
zone but a representation of the order of a form of nationalism founded on
the legitimacy derived from the resource of the precolonial state. This is
its interpretive limit, which it unfortunately fails to acknowledge when it
invites viewers to use the exhibition as a stepping stone to develop their
own interpretations.
The routes from nationalist standpoint to Spivak’s ‘museumized
access to ethnic origin’, however, are punctuated by the vast edifice of
apartheid which redirects difference and sameness, essentialism and
universality into the oppressive and detested homeland or bantustan system.
It is this modality of indirect rule under apartheid that rearticulates the
logic and teleology of the precolonial state, what in Mamdani’s terms may
be thought of as the conditions for the emergence of the bifurcated state
in Africa.52
The productivity of the interpretive limit rests with its ability to shape
the politics of reparation in the name of an oxymoronic formulation called
Xhosa nationalism. Paul Salopek of the Chicago Tribune writes about the
demand by the Xhosa royal house for reparations amounting to 1.5 billion
dollars and for which they were prepared to go to the World Court.53 Citing
But where, asks Guha, lies the originality of Indian culture of the colonial
era and why does it defy understanding either as the replication of
the liberal-bourgeois culture of nineteenth-century Britain or as mere survival
of an antecedent precapitalist culture? In his response to this question, he
attributes the availability of the antecedent to the necessary failed universalism
that resulted in dominance without hegemony and a nationalist claim to
history that entailed a struggle for recognition. This failure by design on the
part of British colonialism was accompanied by a condition of power which
Guha represents diagrammatically as shown in Figure 7.
Coercion
D
Persuasion
Dominance
Power
Subordination Collaboration
S
Resistance
Figure 7: Guha’s representation of power.
way to think after apartheid, I have called attention to the work of history as
constitutive of power – and, of course, vice versa. I have tracked the contours
of an archive dedicated to constituting the will to power of colonial rule, the
ambitions of nationalism in its claim to history, the institutional investments
of the discipline of history and the museum of the frontier in prolonging a
programme of truth as a will to power. Most importantly, I have engaged
Gcaleka in ways that recall for us Foucault’s intervention that ‘transgression
is not related to the limit as black to white, the prohibited to the unlawful,
the outside to the inside, or as the open area of a building to its enclosed
spaces’.60 Rather, Foucault argues, a transgression:
is like a flash of lightening [sic] in the night which, from the
beginning of time, lights up the night from the inside, from top to
bottom, and yet owes to the dark the stark clarity of its manifestation,
its harrowing and poised singularity; the flash loses itself in this space
it marks with its sovereignty and becomes silent now that it has given
a name to obscurity.61
Throughout this book, I have attempted to argue that Gcaleka was not
evidence of some prevailing socio-economic crisis but a product of a mode
of evidence that operated to demarcate what can be said and what is actually
said. He is subaltern by virtue of being an effect of a vast colonial and
epistemological complicity in which his suggestion of Hintsa’s beheading
252
the deaths of hintsa
Conclusion
Discourse is not life; its time is not yours.1
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Where does Nicholas Gcaleka leave us? I have argued through the
pages of this book for a reworking of the concept of the subaltern at the
heart of what has come to be known as subaltern studies. Rather than
limiting the use of the term ‘subaltern’ to a representative sign of the
position of the subject, we might think of activating a discourse against
subalternity through a critique of disciplinary reason.2 Subalternity, I
suggest, is not to be confused with the project of social history which
seeks to recuperate a repressed or forgotten subject of history. The
subaltern is not the ‘other’ of historical discourse, as Dipesh Chakrabarty
reminds us. And the word ‘subaltern’ does not function merely as a place-
keeper of categorical difference but as a subject in/difference between
what can be said and what is actually said. If anything, the subaltern is
constitutive of historical discourse, if not its most elided effect. Working
against subalternity is to place the reality effects of the discipline of history
alongside its subaltern effects. Similarly, calling attention to this elided
sphere not only highlights the relationship between history and power but
also how the subaltern is repeatedly read as the subordinate proposition in
historical statements. In terms familiar to the argument of this book, I have
253
attended to the question of how it is that Nicholas Gcaleka became a sign of
post-apartheid times.
Three tactical considerations define my response to this overriding
question. The first relates to the way the subaltern effect is the mark of
difference between what can be said and what is actually said, under
conditions in which the latter is elided by the reality effect of the discourse
of history. I argue that this level of difference essentially helps us to see
how the modes of evidence of the colonial archive might serve as the
condition of possibility of apartheid as both a system of exclusion and
inclusion. I have attempted to show this paradoxical but necessary operation
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through accounts of the subjection of agency related to the story of the killing
of Hintsa in 1835, which in part prompted Gcaleka’s quest for the return
of the king’s skull.
The second tactical consideration relates to the disciplinary formations
to which modes of evidence of the colonial archive give rise. I have argued
that the colonial archive produces a second level of distinction at the core of
a system of representation by distinguishing history and historiography. The
distinction functions primarily to once more elide the imaginary structure
upon which the discourse of history depends. Even when nationalist anti-
colonial narration seeks to strategically invalidate the claims of the colonial
archive by setting to work on the imaginary structure, it nevertheless runs up
against the constraints posed by the orders of discipline.
Finally, I have tried to take forward the task of strategic invalidation by
making nationalism’s encounter with the limit placed on it by the orders of
discipline, the very target of critique. I have not only attempted to step out of
the shadows of the colonial archive or call attention to the disciplinary forms
of history and historiography to which it gives rise. I have also attempted,
with the help of Nicholas Gcaleka and the Subaltern Studies Collective, to
argue for a critique of disciplinary reason so that the very notion of apartheid
is reconstituted and given new meaning in a critique of the postapartheid
present. In so doing, I have called attention to the normalising effects of
apartheid that haunt the present.
conclusion 255
of the master’s narrative. 4 It is not a school of history but a long-drawn-out
effort at creating the conditions for an epistemic rupture of the European
narratives of progress that reorient the pursuits of knowledge away from the
forms of power they have hitherto upheld.
This explains the variety of subaltern studies. In the South Asian
context, subaltern studies was marked as a specific and limited project
of investigation, a process of ground clearing, to use a phrase coined by
Gyan Pandey, a leading member of the Subaltern Studies Collective.
The term ‘subaltern’ was deployed in the context of the discussion to
reassess the inheritance of Cold War political narratives as they defined
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conclusion 257
globalisation and its corporate facades mask a more fundamental and
growing interdependence between discipline and technology in Africa,
a convergence that I would argue is a particular hangover of the Cold
War. Often this convergence takes shape in development discourses in
contemporary Africa. The historicism of much of this development discourse,
directed as it often is at creating efficiency of government, technological
acquisition among elites and token relief for the poor, merely reproduces
the conditions of marginality that have been well-known features in African
societies. The models of the convergence of discipline and technology produce
the dual and interchangeable effects of intrumentalisation of power and, once
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conclusion 259
History/historiography
in two quite different positions within the scientific process: the real
insofar as it is the known (what the historian studies, understands, or
‘brings to life’ from a past society), and the real insofar as it is entangled
within the scientific operations (the present society, to which the
historians’ problematics, their procedures, modes of comprehension,
and finally a practice of meaning are referable). There are in effect two
types of history, according to which one of these positions of the real is
chosen as the center of attention. Even if hybrids of these two types are
more prevalent than the pure cases, the types can be easily recognized.
One type of history ponders what is comprehensible and what are
the conditions of understanding; the other claims to reencounter lived
experience, exhumed by virtue of a knowledge of the past.7
By this very logic, neither the postapartheid nor the postcolonial can be seen
as mere outcomes of the processes of apartheid and colonialism respectively.
That transition will depend on the self-criticism that attains to the most
recent installation of a social form. In this book I have argued for a critique
of the very foundational categories which today have come to obscure the
origins of apartheid in rather normative forms of the exercise of power.
Rather than seeing apartheid as aberration, we should heed Foucault’s
reminder that the racial state can in fact be traced in the institutional forms
that served the interests of defending society more generally. Apartheid
was not racism’s first word, but its last. The violence of apartheid was, we
might say, a latent feature of the formation of the modern state. In staging a
conclusion 261
postcolonial critique of apartheid, I have attempted to offer some possibility
for constituting a concept of the postapartheid which discerns it from
the genealogies of the modern racial state. In the process, I have defined
apartheid as a constellation of colonial modes of evidence that threaten the
elaboration of a meaningful concept of the postapartheid.
For postcolonial criticism more generally, the insistence on the
schism between history and historiography as a defining feature of the
discourse of history disavows the necessary relation between colonial
violence and the discipline of history. Postcolonial criticism, on the one
hand, operates in relation to a discipline of history which derives many of its
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just an argument about change through time, but one about progress.
History is, according to Ismail, impossible without colonialism.12 This is not,
as I understand it, a call to ‘abandon history’. Rather, it is an invitation to
explore the connections between fact and faith or the disciplinary condition
by which an archive produced under conditions of colonisation is filtered,
processed and repackaged only to give rise to the subaltern effect.13 This is
to demand that history’s relation to colonialism itself be subjected to
sustained critique.
conclusion 263
to insulate the memory of violence from its supposed aestheticisation. Yet,
elsewhere, the futility of distinguishing the components of a representational
system into what Shahid Amin calls event, metaphor and memory has
resulted in a feeling that the effects of violent histories have been short-
changed in modernist narrativisation, which emphasises progress at all
costs. If violence is the signature of our modernity, then perhaps we might
say that this very violence is that which we cannot seem to escape.
The uncertain relation of history to the intrinsic violence of modernity
also places it in an uncertain relation to the encounter with the violence of
apartheid. Given the aporia, it has become necessary to return to the place
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evidence of the colonial archive, I have called attention to the subjective effects
that flow from the ways in which the colonial archive ultimately organises
our reading of the story of Hintsa’s killing. I have asked that the archive be
construed as central to defining the modernist event. As a regime of truth,
it polices the difference between what can be said and what is actually said.
The language game of the archive, however, does not allow for the recovery of
subjectivity. The archive, and the colonial archive in particular, does not merely
produce the colonised subject as an effect but as a subaltern effect. It produces
the colonised subject, we might say, as incomplete, as not quite a subject – even
mutilated in the case of Hintsa. The archive functions as a mode of evidence
and an apparatus of constraint even at the expense of dispensing with the
imaginary structure so central to its constitution. It should not therefore be
read against or along the proverbial grain. It is for this reason that the archive
in this book is not construed as a system of representation but as an apparatus
essential for the process of the subjection of agency.
Nicholas Gcaleka became embroiled in this notion of the historical
event. In the process, his emergence as an object of the discourse of
history in which he sought to participate recalled precisely how such a
transformation was brought about through a realignment of the archive,
nationalist narration and the postcolonial recovery of subjectivity. The
singularity of that encounter revealed, in the argument of this book, the
loose ends that lend themselves to the process of strategic invalidation.
conclusion 265
Gcaleka’s mission, at its most basic level, allows us to problematise
the archive by leading us towards an understanding of the techniques in
the making of regimes of truth. The aim here has been to read the archive
in relation to the formation of possible statements about the killing of
Hintsa. Rather than seeing the archive as a storehouse, I have considered
the enabling possibilities for thinking of the archive along lines proposed
by Foucault’s Archeology of Knowledge. Foucault offers a conception of the
archive that prompts us to inquire into the challenge posed by anti-colonial
nationalist discourse when he argues:
Between language (langue) that defines the system of constructing
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conclusion 267
second phase, it is the signified itself which is repulsed, merged in
the referent; the referent enters into direct relation with the signifier,
and the discourse, meant only to express the real, believes it elides the
fundamental term of the imaginary structures, which is the signified.
Like any discourse with ‘realistic’ claims, the discourse of history
thus believes it knows only a two-term semantic schema, referent and
signifier; the (illusory) merging of referent and signified defines, as
we know, sui-referential discourses.16
the text, especially if we accept that the time of discourse is not (y)ours.
conclusion 269
Notes
15 I have in mind here the problematic that Derrida addresses. See J Derrida, Spectres
of Marx: the state of the debt, and the work of mourning, and the new international,
translated by P Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994).
16 L White, ‘Telling more: lies, secrets and history’, History and Theory 39:4
(December 2000), pp. 11–22.
17 N Dirks, ‘Colonialism and culture’ in N Dirks (ed.), Colonialism and culture (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992).
18 Dirks, ‘Colonialism and culture’. Dirks’s argument is useful in considering the
problem in South African historiography, which approaches colonialism in purely
historicist terms – in terms that merely recite configurations of the past as simply
an essential and necessary development. Historicist approaches lend themselves
too readily to emergent conditions of power so that it becomes possible to prove
transcendence. To avoid the pitfalls of historicism it may be necessary to not
merely proclaim the uniqueness of colonialism as a system of domination, as
Dirks does, but also to inquire into modes of operation and the difficulties entailed
in thinking our way out of its trappings. It is in this shift that I ask that we
consider the colonial archive as a specific mode of evidence that defines not merely
the qualities of domination but also the structure of recurrence. To effect such a
temporal reworking is to ask that we consider the colonial archive as fundamental
to the story of the transition from apartheid to postapartheid.
19 See A Sitze, Articulation, truth and reconciliation in South Africa: sovereignty,
testimony and protest writing (PhD thesis, University of Minnesota, 2003).
20 A Krog, Country of my skull (Johannesburg: Random House, 1998).
way the declarative stance taken by Ranger could be substituted with an enabling
critique. That such eminent scholars as T Ranger, S Marks and L White have written
about the controversies surrounding body parts and heads suggests that the matter
cannot simply be treated as a site of nationalist mobilisation. See Ranger, ‘Chingaira
Makoni’s head: myth, history and colonial experience’, Hans Wolff Memorial
Lecture, African Studies Program, Indiana University, 29 March 1988.
32 H Wolpe, ‘Capitalism and cheap labour-power in South Africa: from segregation
to apartheid’, Economy and Society 4 (1974), pp. 425–456; H Wolpe, ‘The theory of
internal colonialism in South Africa’ in I Oxhaal, T Barnett and D Booth (eds),
Beyond the sociology of development (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975).
33 A postcolonial impulse is discernible in Marxist interventions that cautioned
against racial reductionism in analyses of apartheid. Harold Wolpe, a lawyer and
later sociologist by training and one of the foremost critics of apartheid in the
1960s and 1970s, cautioned against viewing apartheid as merely a continuation of
segregationism by arguing that its emergence could be tracked in the diminishing
significance of precapitalist relations through passage of the 1913 Land Act.
Racial ideology, Wolpe pointed out, must be seen as an ideology which sustains
and reproduces capitalist relations of production. The view was elaborated
in response to emerging perceptions, expressed in work by scholars such as
Martin Legassick, that after the Second World War segregation was continued
as apartheid or ‘separate development’. The attempt to generalise the effects of
apartheid, while useful in accounting for the transfer of violence from countryside
to town, did not allow, in Wolpe’s reckoning, for an investigation of the specificity
of native reserves in maintaining capitalist relations. The so-called native
agency are nostalgic because, ‘instead of pursuing a line of reflection in which one
is seeking to specify a systematic production of the possibility of both power and
resistance, the defence of agency-cum-agent appears to retreat behind the theoretical
and political advances of the past half-century in quest of an entity who can make
decisions about political choices and be responsible for them’. See J Mowitt,
Percussion: drumming, beating, striking (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 51.
36 A McClintock, ‘The myth of progress: pitfalls of the term post-colonialism’, Social
Text 31/32 (1992), pp. 84–97; E Shohat, ‘Notes on the postcolonial’, Social Text
31/32 (1992), pp. 99–113; A Dirlik, ‘The postcolonial aura: third world criticism in
the age of global capitalism’, Critical Inquiry (Winter 1992), pp. 328–356.
37 A Ahmad, In theory: classes, nations, literatures (New York: Verso, 1992).
38 S Hall, ‘When was “the postcolonial”? Thinking at the limit’ in I Chambers and
L Curti (eds), The post-colonial question: common skies, divided horizons (New York:
Routledge, 1996).
39 Hall, ‘When was “the postcolonial”?’, p. 250.
40 K Marx, ‘On imperialism in India’ in R Tucker (ed.), The Marx–Engels reader,
second edition (New York: WW Norton, 1978).
41 R Guha, History at the limit of world history (New York: Columbia University Press,
2002), p. 4.
42 G Prakash, ‘The impossibility of subaltern history’, Nepantla: Views from the South
1:2 (2000), pp. 287–294.
43 GC Spivak, ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ in C Nelson and L Grossberg (eds), Marxism
and the interpretation of culture (Champaign, IL.: University of Illinois Press, 1988).
44 D Chakrabarty, Habitations of modernity: essays in the wake of subaltern studies
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 8.
Press, 1987). See also, H Bhabha, Nation and narration (New York: Routledge,
1990).
49 Deleuze and Guattari, cited in Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues II, p.38
50 M Foucault, The will to knowledge: the history of sexuality, Vol. 1 (London: Penguin,
1978), pp. 92–97. In these pages we find the most profound rephrasing of the
repressive hypothesis. But I would argue that it be read alongside Gilles Deleuze’s
arguments about potentiality in writing. See Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues II, p.
50.
51 BS Cohn, ‘The command of language and the language of command’ in R Guha
(ed.), Subaltern studies IV: writings on South Asian history and society (Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1985); E Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).
52 M Foucault, The order of things (London and New York: Routledge, 1989);
M Foucault, The archeology of knowledge and the discourse on language, translated by
AM Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972).
53 See E Said, ‘Michel Foucault, 1926–1984’ in J Arac (ed.), After Foucault: humanistic
knowledge, postmodern challenges (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University
Press, 1988); also Foucault, Order of things.
54 M Foucault, Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison, translated by A Sheridan
(New York: Vintage Books, 1975).
55 E Said, Reflections on exile (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000),
pp. 210–211 (my emphasis).
56 P Veyne’s Did the Greeks believe in their myths? An essay on the constitutive
imagination, translated by P Wissing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988) is
not inconsequential to this line of argument. In Veyne’s argument the constitutive
imagination is not a displacement of truth but its very condition.
and C Rassool and G Minkley, ‘Orality, memory and social history in South Africa’
in S Nuttall and C Coetzee (eds), Negotiating the past: the making of memory in
South Africa (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1998).
18 For an innovative use of this method see Hamilton, Terrific majesty. The concept
of mediation has been more thoroughly theorised by R Williams, Keywords: a
vocabulary of culture and society (London: Fontana, 1985) and Spivak, ‘Can the
subaltern speak?’. Spivak especially allows us to review what we take as the
function of representation by invoking two terms from Marx, Darstellung and
Vertretung. Luise White’s intervention points in this direction but is not theorised
to the same extent. See also Spivak’s more recent weaving together of ‘The Rani
of Sirmur’ – GC Spivak, ‘The Rani of Sirmur: an essay in reading the archives’,
History and Theory 24:3 (1985), pp. 247–272 – and ‘Can the subaltern speak?’
which revisits the question of the female informant in feminist historiography.
This is not to deny the sophisticated historical critiques and critiques of history
that address the objective/bias binarism. See for example De Certeau, Writing of
history; Veyne, Did the Greeks believe?; D LaCapra, Rethinking intellectual history
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983). Suffice it to say that outside of this critical
tradition, the discipline of history retains its commitment to this facile and
unproductive binarism.
19 The phrase belongs to Clifford Geertz. I acknowledge its reductionism in
relation to Luise White’s specific intervention. Nevertheless, I am proposing
a transactional reading in which the possibilities and promise of an overall
intervention are temporarily suspended so as to contemplate the argument
being pursued in a different direction. In this respect, I also stress that White’s
interrupt the modes of production narrative. See for example B Bozzoli, ‘Marxism,
feminism and South African studies’, Journal of Southern African Studies 9:2
(April 1983), pp. 139–171; S Geiger, Tanu women: gender and culture in the making of
Tanganyikan nationalism (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1997).
21 G Cory, The rise of South Africa, Vol. 1 (London: Longman’s, Green and Co., 1921),
p. 395.
22 I elaborate on this point in Chapter 5. See also C Crais, The politics of evil (Cape
Town: Cambridge University Press, 2003); A Mager, Gender and the making of
a South African bantustan: a social history of the Ciskei, 1945–1959 (Portsmouth:
Heinemann, 1999).
23 F Hartog’s The mirror of Herodotus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988)
explores the relationship between observation and evidence at greater length.
Autopsy is based on observational technologies but also privileges a form of
evidence and proof.
24 Such paradoxes are by no means unique. T Niranjana, Siting translation: history,
poststructuralism and the colonial context (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1992), p. 3, argues that translation, paradoxically, also provides a place in ‘history’
for the colonised.
25 Cape of Good Hope: Caffre War and Death of Hintsa, Blue Book 279 of 1836
(hereafter Cape of Good Hope): Dispatch from D’Urban to Earl of Aberdeen
(19 June 1835), p. 15.
26 William Beinart has drawn attention to a similar tendency in his ‘Political and
collective violence in southern African historiography’, Journal of Southern African
Studies 18:3 (September 1992), pp. 455–485. For Beinart ‘colonial or white settler
(my emphasis).
31 Cape of Good Hope, D’Urban to Secretary of State (19 June 1835), pp. 15–16
(my emphasis).
32 H Smith, The autobiography of lieutenant-general, Sir Harry Smith (London: Murray
Publishers, 1901).
33 Cape of Good Hope, D’Urban to Aberdeen (19 June 1835), p. 19.
34 Cape of Good Hope, D’Urban to Aberdeen (19 June 1835), p. 19.
35 An expedition by British forces against the Ngwane in 1828 led colonial forces
across the Kei River to Mbolompo, south of the Mthatha River and the Mpondo
chieftaincy. It did not lead to annexation of land but rather to the capture of labour.
Those captured were taken to Fort Beaufort, according to Timothy Stapleton, and
sold to white farmers. The capture resulted in the killing of 400 Ngwane who had
hidden in a nearby forest and the capture of 100 women and children. Colonial
officials claimed that the expedition was undertaken in the interests of saving
the Ngwane from Hintsa and Vusani. Stapleton, however, suggests that it was an
attempt to procure labour. See Stapleton, Maqoma; see also Crais, Making of the
colonial order. Crais argues that the colonial state joined the Thembu, the Mpondo
and the Xhosa in the war against the Ngwane and that many of the survivors were
rendered destitute refugees or sources of servile labour.
36 D’Urban made clear his intentions of reclaiming these lands which had been
occupied by various chiefs, describing them as beautiful and fertile.
37 Cape of Good Hope, D’Urban to Aberdeen (19 June 1835), p. 20.
38 Cape of Good Hope, D’Urban to Aberdeen (19 June 1835), p. 20.
T Bassett, ‘From the best authorities: the mountains of Kong in the cartography of
West Africa’, Journal of African History 32 (1991), pp. 367–413.
45 M Heidegger, The question concerning technology, translated by W Lovitt (New
York: Harper Torchbooks, 1977).
46 JE Alexander, A narrative of a voyage of observation among the colonies of western
Africa. . .and a campaign in Kafirland, Vols 1 and 2 (London: Henry Colburn
Publishers, 1837).
47 S Ryan, ‘Inscribing the emptiness: cartography, exploration and the construction
of Australia’ in C Tiffin and A Lawson (eds), De-scribing empire: post-colonialism
and textuality (New York: Routledge, 1994).
48 Winichakul, Siam mapped, p. 126.
49 R Elphick and H Giliomee, The shaping of South African society (Cape Town:
Maskew Miller Longman, 1979), p. 296.
50 M Legassick, ‘The frontier tradition in South African historiography’ in S Marks
and A Atmore (eds), Economy and society in pre-industrial South Africa
(London: Longman, 1980).
51 J Comaroff, ‘Images of empire, contests of conscience: models of colonial
domination in South Africa’ in F Cooper and AL Stoler (eds), Tensions of empire:
colonial cultures in a bourgeois world (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
52 For a discussion of these tensions of Empire see T Keegan, Colonial South Africa
and the origins of the racial order (Cape Town: David Philip, 1996).
53 J Naidoo, Tracking down historical myths (Johannesburg: AD Donker, 1989).
54 JG Pretorius, British humanitarians (Pretoria: State Archives, 1988), p. 179.
myself” is the one whom we must believe’. That rule applies as much to Greek
as it does to other Indo-European languages. The above is not always the case,
according to Benveniste, who cites Latin as an aberration. Important for our
purposes here is Hartog’s claim that the juridical sense of histor is premised on
a definite connection between seeing and knowledge. This is similar to Hegel’s
sense of ‘original history’, discussed in his philosophy of history.
60 Evidence by Eno, MF1253, South African Library, Minutes of Proceedings of Court
of Inquiry, 23 May 1836, p. 61.
61 In the work of Terry Eagleton and Gayatri Spivak the idea of reading against
the grain assumes a different tactical implication. Spivak suggests that a
reading against the grain is enabled by moments of transgression in the text.
But transgression is not seen in terms of an invasion, à la Luise White. Rather,
it is intrinsic to the very operation of the law. Transgression may interrupt or
bring a discourse to crisis, but we should guard against making too much of its
transcendental quality. GC Spivak, A critique of postcolonial reason: toward a history
of the vanishing present (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).
I found Adam Sitze’s formulation in his work on protest writing and the discourse
of transitology especially illuminating here. See A Sitze, The immune system
(East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, forthcoming).
62 R Guha, ‘The prose of counter-insurgency’ in R Guha and GC Spivak, Subaltern
studies II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983).
Press, 1997). The Tensions of empire are not only restricted to settlers and colonial
officials. A public sphere may also be marked by categories of gender and
class interests.
5 J Habermas, The structural transformation of the public sphere: an inquiry into a
category of bourgeois society (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989). I believe that
the inaugural violence that sometimes founds the settler public sphere is reason
for caution against an all-too-easy localisation of the field of public discourse
through notions of subaltern counterpublics that Nancy Fraser has more recently
championed. If anything, the settler public sphere calls attention to the inaugural
violence that accompanies the rise of the public sphere more generally. N Fraser,
‘Rethinking the public sphere: a contribution to the critique of actually existing
democracy’, Social Text 25/26 (1990), pp. 56–80.
6 Michell’s portrait was reproduced in JE Alexander, Excursions in western Africa and
narrative of a campaign in kaffir-land, Vol. 1 (London: Henry Colburn Publishers, 1840).
7 While I will make this argument in relation to the practice of nineteenth-century
portraiture, it may also be useful to see H Berresem, ‘The “evil eye” of painting:
Jacques Lacan and Witold Gombrowicz on the gaze’ in R Feldstein et al. (eds),
Reading seminar XI: Lacan’s four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1995).
8 L Alexander, Frederick I’Ons retrospective exhibition catalogue (Port Elizabeth: King
George VI Gallery, 1990), p. 5.
9 Alexander, Frederick I’Ons, p. 5.
10 A Sekula, ‘The body in the archive’ in R Bolton (ed.), The contest of meaning: critical
histories of photography (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989). The transformation
13 A43, Godlonton Letters, No. 70, S Rowles to Godlonton (26 June 1851), William
Cullen Church of the Province Records, University of the Witwatersrand.
14 A1350, Caesar Andrews Papers, Smith to Andrews (January 1851), William Cullen
Church of the Province Records, University of the Witwatersrand.
15 A43, Ayliff to Godlonton (12 September 1850), William Cullen.
16 A43, No. 813, William Southey to Godlonton (4 January 1865), William Cullen;
A43, Holden Bowker to Godlonton (20 June 1860), William Cullen.
17 A43, William Southey to Godlonton (23 September 1865), William Cullen.
18 The concept of a secondary discourse has been elaborated upon in Guha, ‘Prose of
counter-insurgency’.
19 Cape of Good Hope Blue Book on Native Affairs (Cape Town: Saul Solomon, 1878),
p. 29.
20 A1350, The Diary of Caesar Andrews (1875), p. 2, William Cullen.
21 A1350, Diary of Caesar Andrews, p. 35.
22 A1350f and A1370f, Caesar Andrews Papers, William Cullen.
23 A1350, Diary of Caesar Andrews, p. 47.
24 Smith, Autobiography, p. 11.
25 Smith, Autobiography, p. 28.
26 Smith, Autobiography, p. 34.
27 Smith, Autobiography, p. 35.
28 Smith, Autobiography, p. 35.
29 JE Alexander, An expedition of discovery into the interior of Africa (London: Henry
Colburn Publishers, 1838), pp. vi–vii.
30 Alexander, Expedition of discovery, pp. 175–176.
J Arrowsmith published a map called ‘Eastern frontier of the colony of the Cape of
Good Hope’, which was compiled from manuscript surveys and sketches supplied
by Michell. See D Schrire, The Cape of Good Hope, 1782–1842: from De la Rochette
to Arrowsmith (London: Map Collectors Circle, 1965), p. 7.
39 Alexander, Narrative of a voyage Vol. 2, p. 158.
40 Alexander, Narrative of a voyage Vol. 2, pp. 158–159.
41 Alexander, Narrative of a voyage Vol. 2, p. 158.
42 Alexander, Narrative of a voyage Vol. 2, p. 171.
43 Alexander, Narrative of a voyage Vol. 2, p. 172.
44 Alexander, Narrative of a voyage Vol. 2, p. 172.
45 D Livingstone, The geographical tradition (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1992).
46 Personal communication with Michael Stevenson (16 May 2001), Newlands,
Cape Town.
47 JJ Redgrave and E Bradlow, Fredrick I’Ons: artist (Cape Town: Maskew Miller
Longman, 1958).
48 M Cosser, Images of a changing frontier: worldview in eastern Cape art from
Bushman rock art to 1857 (MA thesis, Rhodes University, 1992), p. 53. See also A
Taylor, ‘True picture of Hintsa’s death?’, Cape Times (16 August 1996). Taylor argues
that I’Ons reconstructed the scene from eyewitness accounts. Claiming the painting
as one of I’Ons’s finest landscape depictions, Taylor points out that the work depicts
‘the scene after Southey’s second shot, with Hintsa pleading and his companion
slinking off across the river while soldiers fire from the cover of the rocks’.
49 Cosser, Images of a changing frontier, p. 53.
inquired ‘show me the Zulu Proust’? See E Said, Humanism and democratic
criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), p. 27.
57 Said, Humanism and democratic criticism, p. 27.
58 K Marx, ‘The German ideology’ in R Tucker (ed.), The Marx–Engels reader, second
edition (New York: WW Norton, 1978).
59 Marx, cited in W Brown, Politics out of history (New Jersey: Princeton University
Press, 2001), p.78.
60 W Brown, Politics, p. 78.
61 I found Martin Jay’s elaboration of the decentring of the eye and the critique of the
primacy of vision in Taylor instructive, especially regarding where this genealogy
of ocularcentrism leads. Its pursuance, however, is not possible in the present
work. See M Jay, ‘The disenchantment of the eye: surrealism and the crisis of
ocularcentrism’ in L Taylor (ed.), Visualising theory: selected essays from V.A.R.
(New York and London: Routledge, 1994).
62 See for example G Cory, The rise of South Africa, Vol. 3 (London: Longman’s, Green
and Co., 1932), p. 323. In a footnote Cory notes: ‘The author had an interview some
years ago with a very old Mr. Bowker who had a clear recollection of those times,
and whose bias, if he had any, was on the side of the colonists. He stated that, as
a trophy of that campaign, he had shown to him in High Street of Grahamstown,
two human ears wrapped in a piece of brown paper, which were said to have been
those of Hintsa.’
63 The Great Place refers to the seat of the royal house. In Hintsa’s time the Great
Place was in Gcuwa. Sarhili’s Great Place was in Hohita. Currently, the Great Place
is located in Nqadu near the town of Willowvale.
the histories that dominated the settler public sphere. Saunders offers a useful
point of departure for this discussion. See C Saunders, The making of the South
African past (Cape Town: David Philip, 1988).
5 I am aware of Fredric Jameson’s critique of Hayden White’s supposed figural
relativism that issues from the ‘conceptual machinery’ in his tropological studies
of history. See F Jameson, The ideologies of theory: essays 1971–1986, Vol. 1,
Situations of theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). I am
of course aiming at a more Foucauldian formulation of the problem in referring
to the notion of event. According to Foucault:
One can agree that structuralism formed the most systematic effort to
evacuate the concept of the event, not only from ethnology but from a whole
series of other sciences and in extreme case from history. . .But the important
thing is to avoid trying to do for the event what was previously done with the
concept of structure. It’s not a matter of locating everything on one level, that
of the event, but of realizing that there are actually a whole order of levels of
different types of events differing in amplitude, chronological breadth, and
capacity to produce effects.
Later, in a specific reference to history, he points out that ‘one’s point of reference
should not be the great model of language (langue) and signs, but to that of war
and battle. . .History which bears and determines us has the form of a war rather
than that of language’. See M Foucault, Power/Knowledge selected interviews
1972–1977 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), p. 114. See also P Rabinow and
H Dreyfus, Michel Foucault: beyond structuralism and hermeneutics (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1983).
13 See for example S Boniface Davies, ‘Raising the dead: the Xhosa cattle-killing and
the Mhlakaza-Goliat delusion’, Journal of Southern African Studies 33:11 (March
2007), pp. 19–41.
14 See M Legassick, ‘The state, racism and the rise of capitalism in nineteenth-
century Cape Colony’, South African Historical Journal 28 (1993), pp. 329–368.
15 For further discussion of the centrality and consequence of the number in the
colonial imagination see A Appadurai, ‘Number in colonial imagination’ in
C Breckenridge and P van der Veer (eds), Orientalism and the postcolonial predicament
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993); M Poovey, A history of the
modern fact (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
16 LG47, Chronological List of Losses Reported, 9.7.1835. State Archives, Cape Town.
17 LG46, General List of Losses Sustained by Eastern Frontier Inhabitants in the Kaffir
War, 1834–35, State Archives, Cape Town. James Edward Alexander put the cattle
losses on the Southey farm at 800. See Alexander, Excursions in western Africa,
p. 410. A record of losses was also featured in the documentation of the
commission of inquiry, with the Southey name featuring prominently.
18 LG46, General List of Losses.
19 T Richards, The imperial archive (New York: Verso, 1993), p. 4.
20 A Wilmot, The life and times of Sir Richard Southey (Cape Town: Maskew Miller,
1904), p. 23.
21 Colonel Collins, ‘Journal of a tour to the north eastern boundary, the Orange River
and the Storm Mountains, 1809’ in D Moodie (ed.), The record; a series of official
papers relative to the condition and treatment of the native tribes of South Africa, Part V
1808–1819 (Cape Town: Balkema, 1960), p. 42 (my emphasis).
the Cape of Good Hope, 1834–1835 (Grahamstown: Meurant and Godlonton, 1836).
30 A Lester, ‘ “Otherness” and the frontiers of empire: the eastern Cape colony,
1806–c.1850’, Journal of Historical Geography 24 (1998), pp. 2–19.
31 Appadurai, ‘Number in colonial imagination’.
32 J Philips, Researches in South Africa (London: James Duncan, 1828).
33 The New World Dictionary (second edition) describes degree as ‘any of the
successive steps or stages in a process or series’. Its usage here is consistent with
that of Marx rather than that of De Kiewiet, the difference being that the former
concentrates on the implications of historical development whereas the latter
treats degree in the more restrictive sense to mean relative intensity. K Marx, ‘The
Grundrisse’ in R Tucker (ed.), The Marx–Engels reader, second edition (New York:
WW Norton, 1978).
34 See J Ayliff, The history of the Abambo (Butterworth: Gazette, 1912), p. 26.
35 Godlonton, Irruption, p. 6.
36 Godlonton, Irruption, pp. 113–114.
37 Godlonton, Irruption, p. 122.
38 Godlonton, Irruption, p. 149.
39 Godlonton, Irruption, p. 150. Of course, the narrative played down specific
incidents of colonial violence and neglected to tell us what several other accounts
claimed, namely that Hintsa’s residence was torched.
40 Godlonton, Irruption, p. 154.
41 Godlonton, Irruption, p. 141.
century Natal (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1986), p. 5. Marks notes that ‘in
South Africa segregation serves not simply as the institutional and ideological
buttress of the white monopoly of power at a time of rapid social change; it is the
central mechanism for the reproduction of cheap and coercible migrant labour’.
5 Marks, Ambiguities, pp. 72–73. For a good example of this ambiguity of African
intellectuals see B Peterson, Monarchs, missionaries and African intellectuals:
African theatre and the unmaking of colonial marginality (Johannesburg: Wits
University Press, 2000).
6 Marks, Ambiguities, p. 56.
7 T Ranger, ‘Nationalist historiography, patriotic history and the history of the
nation: the struggle over the past in Zimbabwe’, Journal of Southern African
Studies 30:2 (June 2004), pp. 215–234. (The Zimbabwe African National Union
Patriotic Front (Zanu PF), formed after a merger of Zanu and Zapu in 1988, is
currently (2 April 2008) the ruling party in Zimbabwe.)
8 C Rassool, The individual, auto/biography and South African history (PhD thesis,
University of the Western Cape, 2004).
9 See for example L de Kock, ‘Sitting for the civilisation test: the making(s) of a civil
imaginary in colonial South Africa’, Poetics Today 22:2 (Summer 2001), pp. 396–397.
10 Adam Ashforth has described the emergence of the ‘native question’ in official
discourse. A Ashforth, The politics of official discourse in twentieth century South
Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
11 See P Rich, Hope and despair: English-speaking intellectuals and South African
politics, 1896–1976 (London: Routledge, 1983), p. 48.
18 A Odendaal, Vukani Bantu! Black protest politics in South Africa to 1912 (Cape
Town: David Philip, 1984).
19 Soga, South-eastern Bantu; SEK Mqhayi, Ityala Lamawele (Alice: Lovedale Press,
1931); SEK Mqhayi, ‘UmHlekazi uHintsa’ (Alice: Lovedale Press, 1937).
20 J Peires, ‘Lovedale Press: literature for the Bantu revisited’, English in Africa 7
(1980), pp. 77–83.
21 Peires, ‘Lovedale Press’.
22 Peires, ‘Rise of the “right-hand house” ’, p. 118.
23 Soga, South-eastern Bantu, p. 141.
24 Soga, South-eastern Bantu, p. 155.
25 See Keegan, Colonial South Africa.
26 Soga, South-eastern Bantu, pp. 178–179.
27 Soga, South-eastern Bantu, p. 169.
28 Soga, South-eastern Bantu, p. 179.
29 See Webster, ‘Unmasking the Fingo’.
30 Soga, South-eastern Bantu, pp. 178–179.
31 Soga, South-eastern Bantu, p. 180.
32 This is a statistic that incidentally also appears in the work of Godlonton and
represents a clever subversion of his general assumptions on Mfengu slavery.
Soga, South-eastern Bantu, p. 95
33 Soga, South-eastern Bantu, p. 172.
34 Soga, South-eastern Bantu, p. 178.
Bantu was essentially patriarchal’ and that ‘among the military tribes of the east
coast (the Xhosa and Zulu polities) the government tended towards despotism’.
By the time village organisation is discussed, Molema turns to the trope of
collectivity and social and economic equality. For Molema, the mark of difference
is not to be sought in social organisation but in the spirit that informed the social
structure. ‘The fiber running through the feeling of brotherhood,’ says Molema,
invoking the productivity of spirit, ‘was consanguinity – each member of the tribe
believing himself related by blood and descent to another member’. In drawing out
the force of contrast, Molema writes:
T he combinations and contrasts of capitalism and pauperism, competition
and despair, sinecures and sweated labour, gorgeousness and squalor were
impossible under the Bantu policy. Individualism, as understood in the
Western world, could not thrive. Collectivism was the civic law, communism
and a true form of socialism the dominating principle and ruling spirit.
(See Molema, Bantu, past and present, p. 115.)
Even the more conservative Pixley ka Seme, one of the founders of the modern
South African Native Congress, urged the movement’s supporters as early as
1911 that, ‘The demon of racialism, the aberrations of the Xhosa–Fingo feud, the
animosity that exists between the Basuto and every other African must be buried
and forgotten. . .We are one people’ – see A215.78, African Lodestar: Official Organ
of the ANC Youth League (Transvaal), (December 1951), Dr SM Molema Papers,
South African Library, Cape Town.
By rewriting the history of the nineteenth century in a manner that helped
to interpret the predicament of the twentieth century, and by ascribing motives
66 Anstey, ‘South Africans in black and white’, Sunday Times Lifestyle (27 August 2000).
67 See E Edwards, ‘Performing science: still photography and the Torres Strait
expedition’ in A Herle and S Rouse (eds), Cambridge and the Torres Strait
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
68 Derrida’s discussion of Levi-Strauss is crucial here. See J Derrida, Of grammatology,
translated by GC Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).
69 B Humphreys, ‘The Duggan Cronin Bantu Gallery’, Kimberley Lantern x1:2
(December 1961), pp. 74–75.
70 ‘Unique memorial’, Cape Times (3 September 1954).
71 C Harris, ‘Pictorial monument to a vanishing culture’, The Diamond News and
the S.A. Watchmaker and Jeweller (November 1951), p. 20. How Harris could have
discerned happiness in the expressionless sitters of the posed portraits produced
by Duggan Cronin is of course difficult to ascertain.
72 J de Jager, ‘The portrait exhibition’, Pretoria News (28 April 1987).
73 Humphreys, ‘Duggan Cronin Bantu Gallery’, p. 76.
74 Edwards, ‘Performing science’, p. 117.
75 Edwards, ‘Performing science’, p. 120.
76 J Opland, Xhosa oral poetry: aspects of a black South African tradition (Johannesburg:
Ravan Press, 1983), p. 256. (The translation is drawn from Opland. Thanks to
Siyabonga Ndebe for checking the translation against the original version.)
77 Mqhayi, ‘UmHlekazi uHintsa’.
78 Opland, Xhosa oral poetry.
79 A215.78, SM Molema Papers, RV Selope Thema ‘Out of Darkness’, South African
Library, Cape Town.
Menchu, Kaplan calls for a self-reflexive practice of cultural politics that critiques the
limits of modernity. Critical to Kaplan’s reformulation of the limits of transnational
feminism is the argument of postcoloniality which holds that ‘borderlands’ that flow
from the texts of writers such as Gloria Anzaldua remind us of the need for analysis
of discourses of difference as proposed by Lata Mani and Chandra Mohanty. The
resultant aporia is incidentally also where we might set to work on breaking free of
the moulds of power. See Haraway, Simians, cyborgs, and women; C Kaplan, ‘The
politics of location as transnational feminist critical practice’ in I Grewal and
C Kaplan (eds), Scattered hegemonies: postmodernity and transnational feminist
practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). See also R Menon and
K Bhasin, Borders and boundaries: women in India’s partition (New Jersey: Rutgers
University Press, 1998); E Burgos-Debray (ed.), I, Rigoberto Menchu: an Indian
woman in Guatemala, translated by A Wright (New York: Verso, 1984).
8 AO Jackson, ‘The ethnic composition of the Ciskei and Transkei’ in Ethnological
Publications, No. 53 (Pretoria: Department of Bantu Administration and
Development, 1975), p. 2. For an example of the incororation of the eastern
Cape frontier into Afrikaner nationalist narration see L Witz, Apartheid’s festival
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003).
9 Peires, ‘Rise of the “right-hand house”’. Peires contests the explanatory value of
fission and proposes a more probable sense of segmentation in its place.
10 Peires, House of Phalo, p. 172.
11 See also Mager, Gender, pp. 113, 122, n.93. ‘To ensure a “tribal separation” between
the Xhosa of the Transkei and Ciskei, it was desirable that Sandile be elevated
to the status of paramount of all the Xhosa outside the Transkei. Fortunately,
of the frontier. Unlike the museum that featured in the pages of the periodical
Lantern in 1961, which suggested a place of great silence, the museum today
is more likely to be associated with the dynamics of a contact zone. J Clifford,
‘Museums and contact zones’ in Routes: travel and translation in the late twentieth
century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997). Elaborating on
the notion of ‘contact zone’, Clifford draws on Mary Louise Pratt’s[ref?] idea of
a contact zone which she defines as the space of colonial encounters, the space
where peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with
each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of
coercion, radical inequality and intractable conflict, see ML Platt, Imperial eyes:
studies in travel writing and transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992).
For Clifford the advantage of Pratt’s conceptualisation is twofold. Firstly, it works
at displacing the term ‘frontier’, which is grounded in a European expansionist
process. Secondly, the term is important in that it provokes ongoing stories of
struggle. Of course, this is a strategy that marks ethnography after the critique
of its colonising legacy.
4 Introductory panel, Contact and conflict: the eastern Cape 1780–1910, Albany
Museum, Grahamstown.
5 The point about the dead end that the killing of Hintsa represents was emphasised
by Gerard Corsane in the museum’s magazine The Phoenix.
6 G Corsane, ‘The assassination of Hintsa?’ in The Phoenix: Magazine of the Albany
Museum 8:1 (1995), p. 19.
7 R Collingwood, ‘The limits of historical knowledge’ in Essays in the philosophy of
history (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1965), p. 99.
59 This is particularly the case in Guha’s notion in Dominance without hegemony that
the work of Indian historiography was to expropriate the expropriators. It is also
the sentiment contained in the eloquent opening lines of the text in which Guha
claims: ‘There was one Indian battle that the British never won. It was a battle for
appropriation of the Indian past.’ See Guha, Dominance without hegemony, pp. 1, 99.
60 D Bourchard (ed.), Language, counter-memory, practice: selected essays and interviews
by Michel Foucault (London and Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 35.
61 Bourchard, Language, p. 35.
62 Foucault, Archeology of knowledge, p. 216.
6 Mowitt, Text.
7 De Certeau, Writing of history, p. 35 (my emphasis).
8 Marx, ‘The Grundrisse’, p. 242 (my emphasis).
9 R Guha, ‘A conquest foretold’, Social Text 54, 16:1 (1998), pp. 85–99.
10 Carolyn Hamilton’s discussion of the James Stuart Archive as establishing a living
source of tradition has explored the conditions under which one idea of precolonial
Zulu society emerged. Focused on the production – as opposed to the invention –
of history, Hamilton outlines the emergence of an archive by emphasising the
processes of mediation and representation. The shortcoming here, of course,
is that this approach perhaps unwittingly replays the schism at the heart of the
discipline of history, thereby sheltering the discipline from self-criticism. See
Hamilton, Terrific majesty.
11 J Rabasa, ‘Dialogue as conquest: mapping spaces for counter-discourse’ in
AJ Mohammed and D Lloyd (eds), The nature and context of minority discourse
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
12 Q Ismail, ‘Discipline and colony: The English patient and the crows nest of
postcoloniality’, Postcolonial Studies 2:3 (1999), pp. 425–426.
13 I use the term ‘archive’ in the same sense that Foucault does. The archive, in
this formulation, is viewed as the formation, transformation and dispersal
of statements. See especially Foucault’s Archeology of knowledge, p. 130, for an
elaboration of this conception of the archive.
14 Foucault, Archeology of knowledge, p. 130. See also Said, ‘Problem of textuality’,
pp. 709–710. Said writes:
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Chapter 1
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from D’Urban to Earl of Aberdeen (19 June 1835).
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Chapter 2
A43, Godlonton Letters, No. 70, S Rowles to Godlonton (26 June 1851), William Cullen
Church of the Province Records, University of the Witwatersrand (hereafter
‘William Cullen’).
A1350, Caesar Andrews Papers, Smith to Andrews (January 1851), William Cullen.
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Cape of Good Hope Blue Book on Native Affairs (Cape Town: Saul Solomon, 1878).
A1350, The Diary of Caesar Andrews (1875), p. 2, William Cullen.
A1350f and A1370f, Caesar Andrews Papers, William Cullen.
Chapter 3
LG47. Chronological List of Losses Reported, 9.7.1835. State Archives, Cape Town.
LG46. General List of Losses Sustained by Eastern Frontier Inhabitants in the Kaffir War,
1834–35, State Archives, Cape Town.
Ms17038, Cory Notebook 4, Cory Library, Rhodes University, Grahamstown.
Chapter 5
Inventory to the records of the chief magistrates, Transkei, CMT, 1875–1912, State
Archives, Cape Town.
Correspondence from Resident Magistrate, Elliotdale, to the chief magistrate,
Thembuland (16 October 1885), State Archives, Cape Town.
Cape of Good Hope Blue Book on Native Affairs (Cape Town: Saul Solomon, 1878).
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A1350, The Diary of Caesar Andrews (1875), p. 35, William Cullen Church of the
Province Records, University of the Witwatersrand.
Chapter 6
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(1817–1880), Cory Library, Rhodes University, Grahamstown.
A96, Diary of T Shepstone (March–December 1835), Natal Archives Depot.
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Grahamstown.
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Albany Museum, Grahamstown.
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Studies.
Transcript of Stretch, Cory Library, Rhodes University, Grahamstown.
agents 14, 22, 39, 57, 78, 219 Bantu Studies 146–147, 177
(see also agency) Bergh, JS 51
Ahmad, Aijaz 17 Boers 73, 119
Albany Museum (see under museums) Bomvana 181–182, 204, 207, 208–216
Alexander, James Edward 52–53, 77–78, borders 49, 195–217, 298–299n7
79–89 (see also boundaries)
Alexander, Lucy 69, 72 boundaries 50, 53, 61, 195–200, 204–205,
Andrews, Caesar 74–77, 86, 89, 205, 232 213–217
anthropology 2, 27, 125, 143–148, 157, 177–178, (see also borders)
180–181, 188–189, 197–201, 240
apartheid 4–30, 42, 103–104, 108, 128, 143, C
145, 147, 157, 171, 185, 191–199, 216–127, cadastral prose (see prose, cadastral)
240, 245, 254, 256, 262–265, Campbell, Ambrose George 58–60, 231
268–269 capitalism 6, 14, 16–18, 39, 103–108, 172, 174,
(see also segregation) 217, 246–247, 256, 262–263
critique of 13, 24, 143 cartographic representation (maps)
postapartheid studies (see under (see under texts)
postapartheid) cattle 34, 36, 46, 48–49, 61, 65, 69, 78–79,
resistance to (see resistance) 84, 105–115, 120–123, 126, 129, 133, 135,
archive, colonial 9–15, 22, 27–30, 32, 37–63, 150–155, 158–159, 210
91–92, 102–103, 126, 128–131, 141–146, colonial demands for stolen 34, 36,
161, 165, 169, 188–189, 194–196, 48–49, 69, 78–79, 109, 112, 121–22,
200–201, 205, 216–217, 221–222, 250, 129, 135, 155, 158–159, 185
254–255, 259, 262, 265–269
329
killing of 12–13, 33, 178, 241–242 Comaroff, John 54
as a means of control and reproduction Commission of Inquiry 6–7, 28, 32–33, 40–41,
105–108 55–57, 58, 60, 72–78, 125–126, 134,
trade in (see trade) 235–236
censorship 169–170 compensation, for losses (see under settlers)
census 112, 199–200, 211 Cory, George 28, 91, 128–139, 158–159, 192, 221
Chakrabarty, Dipesh 21, 225–226, 228, 237, Cosser, Marijke 90–91
248, 249, 253 counter-insurgency
change 22 and insurgency 201, 216
Ciskei 145, 157, 197–199 prose of 33, 196, 201, 205, 207–217
(see also homelands; Transkei) Crais, Clifton 33, 106–108, 192–193, 199–201,
class 15–17, 102, 145, 192, 246, 257 214–215
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Elliot, Major 203, 207, 214–215 Glenelg, Lord 56, 72–73, 115–117, 134
ethnography 111–116, 165, 178–180, 198–200, globalisation 17–18, 195, 257–259, 269
228, 250 Gluckman, Max 143–144
evidence 9, 10, 27, 32, 35, 38, 42, 54–57, 61, Godlonton, Robert 28, 116–124, 125–126,
94, 103, 117–118, 126, 133, 145, 177, 205, 134–139, 151, 153, 156, 171
216–217, 221, 225, 227, 230, 236–237, Gosani 131–132
249–250, 265 government, colonial
(see also texts; truth and lies) resistance to (see resistance)
modes of 7, 9–14, 22, 27–30, 31–63, 94, sources of information 37–38, 42–46, 55,
103, 126–127, 137, 189, 194–195, 217, 138–139, 213
220–222, 250, 255, 259–260, 262 (see also evidence)
exhibitions, museum 29, 69–70, 176, Gqunukhwebe 52
221–226, 241, 248 grain, reading against and along 41, 63, 103,
(see also museums) 278, 283
colonial history exhibition at the Albany Guattari, Felix 23–24
museum (see under museums) Guha, Ranajit 19, 29, 63, 196, 201, 216–217,
246–249, 256
F
feminist criticism 216–217, 279, 287, H
298–299n7 Hall, Stuart 17
Fingo (Fingoe) (see Mfengu) Halse, Henry James 230–232, 235
Foucault, Michel 24–25, 192, 249–250, 266–267 Hammond-Tooke, WD 145–147, 148, 157, 198–199
frontier 50–51, 53–54, 66, 114–116, 149, 192, Hegel, Georg 18–19
221, 240, 250 Hermanus 136–139, 221
Index 331
Hintsa 129–138, 151, 154–155, 158–160, 181–184, history (see also historicism; historiography)
206–208, 215, 229–242, 267 from below 19
colonial and settler attitudes towards discipline of 7–8, 163
40–41, 46–47, 65–66, 73–75, 84, discourse of 11, 13
118–121 event of 10, 13, 30, 263–269
colonial demand for cattle and horses historiography (see historiography)
(see under cattle) history after apartheid 13–15, 18, 219–251, 265
Commission of Inquiry into death of (see nationalist (see history, nationalist)
Commission of Inquiry) oral 39–40
imprisonment of 34, 49, 78, 136 patriotic (see under history, nationalist)
inspiration for nationalists 237–240 precolonial (see history, precolonial)
killing of 4, 6, 12, 48–49, 55–57, 58, racial 138–139
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right–hand house 35, 145–148, 198, 200 152–153, 155–156, 174–175, 204, 206,
House of Phalo 33, 97, 105 208, 215
humanitarians, liberal 101–102, 125–126, 132, landscape 27, 68–77, 79, 83–93, 174–175, 181
138, 232, 236 Legassick, Martin 15, 54, 192, 273–275n33
hut tax (see taxes) Lester, Alan 102
letters (see under texts)
I lies (see truth and lies)
identity 70–71, 102 Lindinxuwa 129–132
India 18 lines of flight 23–24
indirect rule 163, 203–204, 209–216, 245 London Missionary Society 112, 117–118
industrialisation 144, 146, 172, 175–177, 180–181 Lovedale Press 29, 147, 169–170
information, colonial sources of (see under
government, colonial) M
invalidation, strategic 27, 29, 103, 146, 149, 154–156, MacMillan, WH 143–144
169, 188–189, 194, 230, 254, 262, 265 Mager, Anne 199
I’Ons, Frederick 70, 89–93 magistrates 130, 170, 200–217
(see also Death of Hintsa (Frederick I’Ons)) maps (see under texts)
Ismail, Qadri 259, 263 Maqoma 34, 36, 51, 56, 61, 135, 136, 150,
Ityala Lamawele 146, 153, 158, 161–171, 184, 188 154–155, 159, 162
marginalisation (see marginality)
J marginality 27, 51, 59, 62, 165, 220, 228, 230,
Jackson, Arthur O 197–198 257–259, 268, 274
Jordan, AC 162, 164, 168, 183, 188 Marks, Shula 14
Julie, Windfogel 58–59 Marxism (see Marxist scholarship)
Index 333
Marxist scholarship 15, 20–21, 24, 126, 174–175, N
273–275n33 narration and narratives 4, 8–13, 20, 23, 27,
Marx, Karl 18, 103 34–36, 39, 42, 72, 75, 77, 88, 92–93,
Mbebe 209–210 99, 124–126, 138, 146, 157–158, 166,
McClintock, Anne 16–17 172, 185–189, 237, 239, 244, 254, 259,
Mda, Mda 105 264–268
Mda, Zakes 12–13 Narrative of a Voyage 52, 77, 81–82
mfecane 152 Narrative of the irruption of the Kafir hordes 116
Mfengu 49, 83–84, 120–124, 151–154, 159, 162, nationalism, Afrikaner 175, 186–187
181–183, 202–204 nationalism, anti-colonial 10, 16, 20–21, 29,
portrayal as slaves (see slavery) 49, 141–146, 156, 160, 166–167, 172, 181,
Michell, Charles Cornwallis 51–52, 69, 82, 186–188, 193, 194, 216–217, 225–226,
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Index 335
segregation 103, 143–147, 157, 171, 174, 177, 181, structures, imaginary 10–11, 13, 27, 29, 68–70,
194–195, 268 81, 125–128, 136, 138, 156–157, 162,
(see also apartheid) 167, 169, 196, 201, 204, 217, 221–222,
serfdom 105, 122, 152–153 254–255, 265, 267–268
(see also slavery) subaltern 18–23, 57–58, 62–63, 68, 93–94,
settlers 66–68, 72–77, 117–118, 119, 123–125, 97, 108, 128, 136–139, 192–193, 195,
230, 233 201, 220, 226, 228–230, 243–250,
claimed losses for compensation 73, 253–258, 263, 265, 268–269
108–110, 120 subalternity 19, 24, 108, 192–195,
history (see history, settler) 248–250, 253–255
Shepstone, Theophilus 115 subaltern studies 19–23, 228, 249,
Shohat, Ella 16–17 255–258
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Index 337
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