The Maphumulo Uprising: War, Law and Ritual in the Zulu Rebellion. Scottsville: University of KwaZulu Natal Press, 2005. ISBN 978-1-86914-048-9.
Reviewed by Bradley Skelcher (College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Delaware State University)
Published on H-SAfrica (August, 2007)
Shortly after his release from prison in February
1990, Nelson Mandela delivered a speech in Durban about apartheid in
Natal. In the speech, he made reference to a protest against a poll tax
in 1906 called the Bhambatha Rebellion. "The Zulu people, led by Chief
Bhambatha [kaMancinza], refused to bow their proud heads and a powerful
spirit of resistance developed, which, like the battle of Isandlwana,
inspired generations of South Africans."[1]
Isandlwana was the location
where King Cetshwayo kaMapande of the Zulus defeated the British army
during the 1879 Anglo-Zulu War. In 2006, South Africa commemorated the
one hundredth anniversary of the Bhambatha Rebellion of 1906. At the
tenth anniversary celebration of the adoption of the South African
Constitution in Cape Town on May 8, 2006, President Thabo Mbeki referred
to the Bhambatha Rebellion and how it inspired the people to fight
colonialism and then apartheid that followed.[2] The Bhambatha Rebellion
evokes strong images of the long struggle against oppression in South
Africa and has been invoked by political leaders in the country
thereafter. Many claim it to have been the first resistance to apartheid
in South Africa.
Jeff Guy has authored numerous works on the history of what is now called KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, including The Destruction of the Zulu Kingdom: The Civil War, 1879-1884 (1994) and The Heretic: A Study of the Life of John William Colenso, 1814-1883(1983). He followed with a book about Colenso's daughter titled The View Across the River: Harriette Colenso and the Zulu Struggle against Imperialism (2002). Most recently, Guy wrote Remembering the Rebellion: The Zulu Uprising of 1906 (2007). With the release of The Maphumulo Uprising,
Guy continues his exploration of British colonialism and its impact on
South African history, in particular Natal Colony and Zululand. As he as
done with his previous works, Guy has accomplished an informative
history chronicling the expansion of the British Natal Colony into
Zululand and its solidification of colonial rule in southern Africa
while making it enjoyable to read in his forceful writing style. His
gripping method of writing compels the reader to engage in his works.
The Bhambatha Rebellion in the newly merged Natal
Colony and Zululand occurred following the announcement of a poll tax,
or a tax levied against all men who did not pay a hut tax. This tax
directly challenged the traditional patriarchal authority of Zulus or at
least what remained of it after the British conquest of Zululand in the
late nineteenth century. By direct taxation of young men not yet
married, the British colonial authorities "hastened the breaking up of
the patriarchal rural homestead, the rupture of kinship links, and the
further fragmentation of African communal life" (pp. 21-22). Guy probes
more deeply into the effect of the poll tax and surmises, "it disrupted
the spiritual forces that linked sons to their fathers and their
fathers' fathers whose shades watched over the homestead" (p. 22).
The poll tax struck at the basis of spiritual life
among the Zulus, which in essence strikes at the core of Guy's work. He
not only probes the material impact of the poll tax, but also the
spiritual consequences of British colonial actions. The Bhambatha
Rebellion was as much a spiritual action as it was a physical response
to British imperial authority. Many saw the imposition of the poll tax
as a direct challenge to their ancestors' power. Historian Sean Redding
sees the rebellion against the poll tax as "placating the ancestors"
that suggests their "ancestors strongly supported their resistance and
would allow them to prevail."[3]
The focus of the book, however, is not Bhambatha kaMancinza, inkosi
or chief of the Zondi within the Mvoti division of the Natal Colony. It
is not the story of Dinuzulu kaCetshwayo ka Mpande, recognized by the
Zulus as descendant of legendary Shaka kaSenzangakhona and their king;
he paid the poll tax. Rather, Guy writes about a more localized
rebellion in the Maphumulo and Lower Thukela divisions to the north and
west of Durban on the border of Natal and Zululand. It was here that the
rebellion spread bringing inkosi Meseni kaMusi of the Qwabe
from the Mvoti valley. During the rise of the Zulu under Shaka, their
distant cousins, the Qwabe, nearly disappeared as a people. By the end
of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, the Qwabe
had reconstituted themselves into small homesteads with women and
children as the producers of wealth with patriarchs controlling the
means of production and beneficiaries of these units.
The other figure in the rebellion was Ndlovu
kaThimuni Zulu of Nodunga chiefdom lying in valleys along the Otimati
and Timati streams. His grandfather fell from grace with King Dingane
regarding Boer intrusions into Zululand in 1838. Theophilus Shepstone,
Secretary of Native Affairs, "recognized him as a colonial chief"
thereby exploiting "divisions amongst chiefs" and catering to their
"desire for authority" (p. 43).
In June 1906, the protest against the poll tax turned
violent with the killing and mutilations of Adolph Sangereid, Albert
Powell, and Oliver Veal. Following militia and military attacks and the
killing of 1,500 people accused of rebellion in the Maphumulo and Lower
Thukela divisions, the government began arresting people accused of
insurrection and murder. The government focused its attention on two inkosi
accused of leading the rebellion. Meseni and Ndlovi were accused of
armed insurrection with the "intention of overthrowing the government"
and of murder (pp. 111-112). In all, the government accused twenty-one
men of murder. All were found guilty and sentenced to death. However,
the government commuted all but five of the death sentences to prison
sentences.
According to Guy, Ndlovu and Meseni were chiefs and
responsible for their people's actions. Guy, however, characterizes them
as "clever men, with a lifetime's experience in adjudication ... who
covered their tracks, literally and metaphorically" (p. 239). Both were
sent to St. Helena rather than to the gallows, but eventually were
released and exiled. Dinuzulu, too, was arrested, imprisoned, and later
exiled. In the end, British colonial authority in all of its brutality
was preserved and expanded throughout Natal and Zululand. The rebellion,
nonetheless, did hasten the creation of the Union of South Africa in
1910, which was responsible for releasing Dinuzulu from prison, but
exiling him from his homeland. In fairness, the new government also
released the others imprisoned at St. Helena; they, too, were not
allowed to return to their homelands. The rebellion also accelerated the
institutionalization of segregation with passage of the Natives Land
Act in 1913.
Guy offers the latest work on the Rebellion, which
has garnered little interest among scholars in the history of South
Africa. Walter Bosman and James Stuart were two of the earliest who
wrote about the Bhambatha Rebellion with the former publishing The Natal Rebellion in 1907 and the latter publishing A History of the Zulu Rebellion of 1906 and Dinizulu's Arrest and Expatriation in 1913. A contemporary, J. L. Dube, published a newspaper in Durban named Ilanga Lase Natal
in isiZulu. Dube published accounts of the Bhambatha Rebellion with all
the subtleties of the language often misunderstood by South African
authors writing in English or Afrikaans. Both Bosman and Stuart
described a rebellion of treacherous leaders who opposed progressive
attempts by the British to move the native South Africans into
modernity. Shula Marks followed over fifty years later with Reluctant Rebellion: The 1906-1908 Disturbances in Natal
(1970). Marks describes a desperate situation in which native South
Africans faced economic destitution because of infected cattle and the
aftermath of the Anglo-Boer War that devastated much of the region.
Compelled to pay a poll tax, many rose up in protest knowing the
impossibility of paying it. More recently, Benedict Carton wrote Blood from Your Children: The Colonial Origins of Generational Conflict in South Africa
(2000). Carton takes the position that the rebellion was not aimed at
colonial rule. Rather, it was between young native South Africans and
the older generation. Both young men and women were rebelling against
the patriarchal system that existed among the native South Africans in
Natal and Zululand.
Guy, in many respects, agrees with Marks's earlier
work. He sees the rebellion as a response to colonial attempts to break
patriarchal rule replacing it with a modern capitalistic system based
upon wage labor. This was an attempt by colonial authorities to separate
indigenous South Africans from their homelands, forcing them into the
wage-labor system. In an act of desperation, Bhambatha and his followers
protested. Faced with violent responses from colonial authorities, the
rebellion responded in-kind. Out-gunned, the rebels turned to
traditional methods of warfare rooted in war medicine and native
religion. Other colonized people resorted to similar tactics, such as
the Native Americans in their resistance to American expansion across
the continent and the Chinese resistance against European hegemony in
the Boxer Rebellion.
Guy describes the Bhambatha Rebellion by retelling
the historical events through meticulous archive research and
exploration of secondary works. He also provides the reader with a
detailed account of the court proceedings using court records and
newspaper accounts, all of which reveal the spiritual aspects of the
rebellion yet to be significantly explored by other authors. The subject
would benefit from a comparative approach that explored what was
happening in other British colonies at the time. In all, however, this
work is an important contribution to the understanding of colonialism in
South Africa and is recommended to any scholar interested in the
socio-economic and political history of Natal and Zululand in South
Africa.
Notes
[1]. Nelson Mandela, "Address to Rally in Durban,"
February 25, 1990,
http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/mandela/1990/sp900225-1.html .
[2]. Thabo Mbeki, "Address of the President of South
Africa" at a Joint Sitting of the Houses of Parliament on the Occasion
of the 10th Anniversary of the Adoption of the Constitution of the
Republic of South Africa, Cape Town, May 8, 2006,
http://www.dfa.gov.za/docs/speeches/2006/mbek0508.htm .
[3]. Sean Redding, "A Blood-Stained Tax: Poll Tax and the Bambatha Rebellion in South Africa," African Studies Review 43, no. 2 (September 2000), 29.
