Jacob Dlamini, Business Day
IN 1879, the British
destroyed the Zulu kingdom, putting paid to one of the last major precolonial
polities in southern Africa. To hear white supremacists and apologists for the
British Empire tell it, the defeat of King Cetshwayo’s army marked the triumph
of European enlightenment over African barbarism; to hear Zulu and African
nationalists tell it, the destruction of the Zulu kingdom signalled not the end
of Zulu political sovereignty but the beginning of a pan-African struggle
against white rule.
Both accounts present the
overthrow of the kingdom in stark terms, as a struggle between African and
European, black and white. In fact, matters were messier than these accounts
are willing to acknowledge. Sure, the British army was the most powerful military
force at the time, with the hardware and training befitting its status as the
defender of the world’s reigning superpower, and the Zulu warriors who went to
battle for Cetshwayo were a rudimentary force with the most basic weapons (and
some guns) at their disposal.
In truth, the British
needed far more than their sophisticated weapons and training to defeat the
Zulus. They needed collaborators — Zulu collaborators — and there were plenty
of these to go around. For reasons to do mainly with the violent founding of
the Zulu kingdom under Shaka in the early 19th century, there were many
communities that harboured cultural and political resentments against
centralised Zulu authority. So when the British came calling, looking for
allies against Cetshwayo, they found more than enough Africans to help them
defeat the Zulu kingdom.
Among those who
collaborated with the British against Cetshwayo were the ancestors of one Jacob
Gedleyihlekisa Zuma. Far from helping build and protect the Zulu kingdom, the
Zumas helped the British destroy it. For their exertions, the Zumas, like many
other Africans who collaborated with the British, were rewarded with land that
had belonged to the Zulu kingdom until 1879. As the historian Meghan
Healy-Clancy and anthropologist Jason Hickel say in their 2014 book Ekhaya: The
politics of home in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, Nkandla is actually the spoil
of collaboration, given to the Zumas for their role in the defeat of the Zulu
kingdom.
Healy-Clancy and Hickel
point to the irony of Zuma using Nkandla to enact a certain idea of Zulu
authenticity and to show his respect for his ancestors and their traditions
when those ancestors were collaborators against the Zulu kingdom. Healy-Clancy
and Hickel draw on the work of John Wright and Jeff Guy, eminent scholars of
precolonial and colonial Zulu history, to make their case.
In turn, Wright drew on
the James Stuart Archive, the richest collection of material on precolonial
Zulu history, for his argument. Guy, who died last December, was working, among
other topics, on Zuma’s collaborationist history when he died.
Lest we be accused of
singling out the Zumas and Nxamalalas (Zuma’s clan), we should point out that
they were by no means unique in their collaboration. They were also not the
only ones to be given land in return for their collaboration. In the same year
in which the British defeated the Zulu kingdom, they also destroyed the Pedi
kingdom. Boer commandos and thousands of Swazi collaborators assisted the
British in that campaign. It had been the same story in the wars between the
British and the Xhosas. There, Mfengus helped the British destroy the Xhosa
kingdom and were rewarded for their troubles with land confiscated from the
defeated Xhosas.
To ask why so many
Africans collaborated in the destruction of African polities and, with them,
African sovereignty is to ask a simplistic and patronising question. It is to
assume that African polities were somehow apolitical entities without
differences and discord. These were complex societies riven with all sorts of
fissures. As scholar Mbongiseni Buthelezi shows in his work on the Ndwandwe and
historian Michael R Mahoney argues in his 2012 book, The other Zulus: The
spread of Zulu ethnicity in colonial SA, there were many so-called Zulus who
did not identify as Zulus in precolonial Zululand. There were many polities,
like the Ndwandwes, who had been defeated by the Zulu kingdom and then forced
to become Zulus.
Many of these people
might have spoken the same language, shared a cuisine, intermarried and traded
with one another, but they did not identify as Zulu. Many of them had to be
forced to identify as Zulu. As Mahoney shows in his book, it is not until after
the Bambatha rebellion of 1906 that one can speak somewhat convincingly about a
Zulu nation covering every corner of what we today call the Kingdom of
KwaZulu-Natal. Even this was more in response to the depredations of colonial
rule than it was to people suddenly waking up one day in 1906 and deciding that
they wanted to become Zulus.
The process by which the
"other Zulus" became Zulu was gradual and uneven.
Understand this and you
might understand some of the ructions under way in KwaZulu-Natal today, where
the Ndwandwe, among others, are questioning why land that supposedly belongs to
all the Zulus should be held in trust for them by a king, Goodwill Zwelithini,
whose legitimacy and authority they have never accepted.
As Buthelezi points out
in his work, the Ndwandwes are certainly not the only "Zulus" who are
calling into question the idea of a unified Zulu kingdom with Zwelithini at the
helm.
