Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2brh9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T09:16:04.514Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Ndukwana kaMbengwana as an Interlocutor on the History of the Zulu Kingdom, 1897–1903

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 May 2014

John Wright
John Wright*
Affiliation:
University of KwaZulu-Natal University of the Witwatersrand
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In the six years from October 1897 to October 1903, Ndukwana kaMbengwana engaged in scores of conversations in numerous different locations with magistrate James Stuart about the history and culture of the nineteenth-century Zulu kingdom. In the 1880s Ndukwana had been a lowranking official in the native administration of Zululand; at an unknown date before late 1900 he seems to have become Stuart's personal induna or “headman,” to give a common English translation. Stuart's handwritten notes of these conversations, as archived in the James Stuart Collection, come to a total of 65,000 to 70,000 words. As rendered in volume 4 of the James Stuart Archive, published in 1986, these notes fill 120 printed pages, far more than the testimonies of any other of Stuart's interlocutors except Socwatsha kaPhaphu. From 1900, Ndukwana was also present during many of Stuart's conversations with other individuals.

In the editors' preface to volume 4 of the James Stuart Archive, after drawing attention to the length of Ndukwana's testimony, Colin Webb and I wrote as follows:

Since these were the early years of Stuart's collecting career, it is probable that Ndukwana exercised a considerable influence on the presuppositions about Zulu society and history which Stuart took with him into his interviews. No less likely, however, is the reverse possibility that Ndukwana in turn became a repository of much of the testimony he heard while working with Stuart, and that, increasingly over the years, the information which he supplied would have been a fusion of data and traditions from a variety of sources.

Type
The Making of an Archive
Information
History in Africa , Volume 38 , 2011 , pp. 343 - 368
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Dubow, Saul, Illicit Union: Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa (Johannesburg, 1995).Google Scholar
Guy, Jeff, The View across the River: Harriette Colenso and the Zulu Struggle against Imperialism (Charlottesville/Oxford/Cape Town, 2001).Google Scholar
Hamilton, Carolyn, “Identity, Oral Traditions and the Struggle for Power in the Early Zulu Kingdom,” MA thesis, University of the Witwatersrand (1985).Google Scholar
Hamilton, Carolyn, “Authoring Shaka: Models, Metaphors and Historiography,” PhD thesis, Johns Hopkins University (1993).Google Scholar
Hamilton, Carolyn, Terrific Majesty: the Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical Imagination (Cape Town, 1998).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hamilton, Carolyn, Mbenga, Bernard, and Ross, Robert, “The Production of Preindustrial South African History,” in: Hamilton, Carolyn, Mbenga, Bernard, and Ross, Robert (eds.), The Cambridge History of South Africa, Volume 1, from Early Times to 1885 (New York, 2010), 1–62.Google Scholar
Harries, Patrick, Butterflies and Barbarians: Swiss Missionaries and Systems of Knowledge in South-East Africa (Oxford/Harare/Johannesburg/Athens OH, 2007).Google Scholar
Kopytoff, Igor, “Introduction,” in: Kopytoff, Igor (ed.), The African Frontier: the Reproduction of Traditional African Societies (Bloomington/Indianapolis, 1989), 8–78.Google Scholar
Laband, John, Rope of Sand: The Rise and Fall of the Zulu Kingdom in the Nineteenth Century (Johannesburg, 1995).Google Scholar
Laband, J.P.C., and Thompson, P.S., Field Guide to the War in Zululand and the Defence of Natal 1879 (Pietermaritzburg, 1983).Google Scholar
Lambert, John, Betrayed Trust: Africans and the State in Colonial Natal (Pietermaritzburg, 1995).Google Scholar
Lambert, John, and Morrell, Robert, “Domination and Subordination in Natal, 1890-1920,” in: Morrell, Robert (ed.), Political Economy and Identities in KwaZulu-Natal: Historical and Social Perspectives (Durban, 1996), 63–95.Google Scholar
Mokoena, Hlonipha, Magema Fuze: the Making of a Kholwa Intellectual (Pietermaritzburg, 2011).Google Scholar
Natal Government, Blue Book on Native Affairs 1901 (Pietermaritzburg, 1902).Google Scholar
Odendaal, André, Vukani Bantu! The Beginnings of Black Protest Politics in South Africa to 1912 (Cape Town, 1984).Google Scholar
Stuart, James, uKulumetule (London, 1925).Google Scholar
Webb, Colin, and Wright, John (eds.), The James Stuart Archive of Recorded Oral Evidence Relating to the History of the Zulu and Neighbouring Peoples, volume 4 (Pietermaritzburg, 1986).Google Scholar
Wright, John, “The Dynamics of Power and Conflict in the Thukela-Mzimkhulu Region in the Late 18th and Early 19th Centuries: a Critical Reconstruction,” PhD thesis, University of the Witwatersrand (1989).Google Scholar
Wright, John, “The making of the James Stuart Archive,” History in Africa 23 (1996), 333–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wright, John, “Rediscovering the Ndwandwe Kingdom,” in: Swanepoel, Natalie, Esterhuysen, Amanda, and Bonner, Philip (eds.), Five Hundred Years Rediscovered: Southern African Precedents and Prospects (Johannesburg, 2008), 217–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wright, John, and Manson, Andrew, The Hlubi People in Zululand and Natal: a History (Ladysmith, 1983).Google Scholar