The so-called ‘mfecane’ has been explained in many ways by historians, but never adequately. Julian Cobbing has absolved the Zulu of culpability for ongoing regional conflicts, but his work is severely flawed in its use of evidence. Cobbing is incorrect to argue that the Delagoa Bay slave trade existed on a large scale prior to the disruptions beginning in 1817, and European slaving therefore cannot have been a root cause of political turmoil and change, as he claims. Cobbing correctly identifies European-sponsored slave-raiding as a major cause of violence across the north-eastern Cape Frontier, but his accusations of missionary involvement are false. Jeff Guy's interpretation of the rise of the Zulu kingdom based on environmental factors is inadequate because he examined only stock-keeping and not arable land use, which led him to false conclusions about demography and politics. In this paper I argue that the socio-political changes and associated demographic turmoil and violence of the early nineteenth century in southern Africa were the result of a complex interaction between factors governed by the physical environment and local patterns of economic and political organization. Increasing inequalities within and between societies coupled with a series of environmental crises transformed long-standing competition over natural resources and trade in south-eastern Africa into violent struggles.

An important aspect of Julian Cobbing's radical critique of the ‘mfecane’ as the pivotal concept of the history of southern Africa in the nineteenth century is the claim that the image of Shaka-as-monster was an ‘alibi’ invented by Europeans in the 1820s to mask their slaving activities. Reconsideration of this claim reveals that it is based on the misuse of evidence and inadequate periodisation of the earliest representations of Shaka. Examination of the image of Shaka promoted by the Port Natal traders in the 1820s reveals that, with two highly specific exceptions which were not influential at the time, the traders' presentation of Shaka was that of a benign patron. It was only in 1829, after the Zulu king's death, that European representations began to include a range of ‘atrocity’ stories regarding Shaka. These were not invented by whites but drew on images of Shaka already in place amongst the African communities of southern Africa. These contemporary African views of Shaka and the ways in which they gave shape to the European versions are ignored by Cobbing, and this contributes to his failure to come to grips with past myth-making processes in their fullest complexity.

Despite its pivotal economic position in Central Africa, the history of Zimbabwe's Wankie Colliery has scarcely been explored. Although the historical pattern of capital accumulation and class struggle on the colliery has yet to be traced in any detail, this article suggests that a useful starting point is the protracted labour crisis which convulsed the colliery in 1918. Attempts to expand output through intensified pressure on a dwindling supply of black labour soon established a vicious circle in which workers' health deteriorated rapidly. Hundreds of black miners were incapacitated by ‘tropical ulcers’. An ensuing commission of enquiry exonerated the colliery's management of any blame, but it is nonetheless significant for the light it casts on the British South Africa Company Administration's narrow conception of its role after the Privy Council decision depriving it of ownership of ‘unalienated’ land in the Colony. The article's last section examines the conflict between the colliery's management and organized white workers in the context of the racial division of labour. In doing so, it emphasizes the structural vulnerability of white labour in the colonial era.

There is evidence from across the disciplines that at least some of the contemporary regional names of African tribes, dialects and languages are fairly recent inventions in historical terms. This article offers some evidence from Zimbabwe to show that missionary linguistic politics were an important factor in this process. The South African linguist Clement Doke was brought in to resolve conflicts about the orthography of Shona. His Report on the Unification of the Shona Dialects (1931) shows how the language politics of the Christian denominations, which were also the factions within the umbrella organization the Southern Rhodesia Missionary Conference, contributed quite significantly to the creation and promotion of Zezuru, Karanga and Manyika as the main groupings of dialects in the central area which Doke later accommodated in a unified orthography of a unified language that was given the name Shona. While vocabulary from Ndau was to be incorporated, words from the Korekore group in the north were to be discouraged, and Kalanga in the West was allowed to be subsumed under Ndebele.

Writing about sixty years later, Ranger focusses more closely on the Manyika and takes his discussion to the 1940s, but he also mentions that the Rhodesian Front government of the 1960s and 1970s deliberately incited tribalism between the Shona and the Ndebele, while at the same time magnifying the differences between the regional divisions of the Shona, which were, in turn, played against one another as constituent clans. It would appear then that, for the indigenous Africans, the price of Christianity, Western education and a new perception of language unity was the creation of regional ethnic identities that were at least potentially antagonistic and open to political manipulation.

Through many decades of rather unnecessary intellectual justification, and as a result of the collective colonial experience through the churches, the schools and the workplaces, these imposed identities, and the myths and sentiments that are associated with them, have become fixed in the collective mind of Africa, and the modern nation states of the continent now seem to be stuck with them. Missionaries played a very significant role in creating this scenario because they were mainly responsible for fixing the ethnolinguistic maps of the African colonies during the early phase of European occupation. To a significant degree, these maps have remained intact and have continued to influence African research scholarship.

This paper contributes to a growing body of literature on the socio-economic impact of the Second World War on Africa. The focus is on the inter-relationship between the state, settler farmers and African labour in Southern Rhodesia. The war presented an opportunity for undercapitalized European farmers to enlist state support in securing African labour that they could not obtain through market forces alone. Historically, these farmers depended heavily on a supply of cheap labour from the Native Reserves and from the colonies to the north, especially Nyasaland. But the opportunities for Africans to sell their labour in other sectors of the Southern Rhodesian economy and in the Union of South Africa, or to at least determine the timing and length of their entry into wage employment, meant that settler farmers seldom obtained an adequate supply of labour. Demands for increased food production, a wartime agrarian crisis and a diminished supply of external labour all combined to ensure that the state capitulated in the face of requests for Africans to be conscripted into working for Europeans as a contribution to the Imperial war effort. The resulting mobilization of thousands of African labourers under the Compulsory Native Labour Act (1942), which emerged as the prize of the farmers' campaign for coerced labour, corrects earlier scholarship on Southern Rhodesia which asserted that state intervention in securing labour supplies was of importance only up to the 1920s. The paper also shows that Africans did not remain passive before measures aimed at coercing them into producing value for settler farmers.