Research Articles (History)

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Bhambatha and the Zulu Rebellion 1906.
(University of KwaZulu-Natal., 2008) Thompson, Paul Singer.
In 1906 there occurred a rebellion among a part of the indigenous people against the settler government of the British colony of Natal, ostensibly against the collection of a poll (capitation) tax on adult males. It is very often called the Zulu Rebellion, but it has many names, and it is commonly called “Bhambatha’s rebellion” or “the Bhambatha rebellion”, after the most famous of its leaders. The centenary of the rebellion was marked by public celebrations of a political character which however shed very little light on the actual historic events. These celebrations were sponsored by the provincial government, usually in collaboration with ad hoc local bodies. They commenced when the provincial premier announced that Bhambatha would be posthumously reinstalled as a chief. There followed the laying of wreaths at memorials at Mpanza, near Greytown on 8 April 2006, followed by a cleansing ceremony and the dedication of a memorial wall to the “Richmond Twelve” on 22 April. They culminated in the laying of more wreaths and the reinstatement of Bhambatha to his chieftaincy at Mpanza on 11 June. The latter affair also engaged the national government, and the crowded programme included speeches by the president and deputy president, as well as provincial premier, the chairperson of the House of Traditional Leaders and the king of the Zulu nation. A special postage stamp was issued to mark the occasion. Almost a week later, on 16 June or Youth Day, a Bhambatha Memorial Concert took place at Lake Merthley, also near Greytown. On 27 September Bhambatha was awarded the national Order of Mendi in Gold for Bravery. Outside the government sphere there was very little to mark the centenary. Two plays, which did not enjoy government support, hardly got off the ground. A third, which did, was the musical 1906 Bhambada–The Freedom Fighter, which ran for a fortnight in Pietermaritzburg, and was touted to go on to Pretoria, but did not, probably for political as well as aesthetic reasons. A government-funded Indigenous Knowledge Systems project by local university academics produced a book entitled Freedom Sown in Blood: Memories of the Impi Yamakhanda, which contained practically nothing about the rebellion itself. Another book, Remembering the Rebellion: The Zulu Uprising of 1906, comprised a series of twelve commemorative supplements previously published in the The Witness and related newspapers in partnership with the provincial department of education. Beautifully illustrated and pitched at schools, it necessarily simplified scholarship on the rebellion for its readers.
“Colours Do Not Mix”: segregated classes at the University of Natal, 1936-1959.
(University of KwaZulu-Natal., 2011) Bhana, Surendra.; Vahed, Goolam Hoosen Mohamed.
This paper examines segregation in university education with special reference to the circumstances around which separate classes were introduced for Blacks in 1936 at the NUC and continued until 1959, some nine years after the institution achieved university status. It examines the roles of various individuals, most particularly Mabel Palmer (1876-1958) who, as organizer, was instrumental in persuading politicians, administrators, and academics to run segregated classes; and of E. G. Malherbe, who as Rector of the University of Natal from 1943-1965 defended them as the only practical alternative to a segregated university.
Cultural Heritage Tourism Potential at Six former American Board Mission Stations.
(University of KwaZulu-Natal., 2010) Fakude, Gordon Phiwinhlanhla Ian.
This initial assessment of the cultural heritage tourism potential is a component of a broader project aimed at conducting research and revitalizing selected former American Zulu Mission Stations in southern parts of KwaZulu-Natal. Whilst the Heritage, Tourism and Community Development Project is being considered by a range of stakeholders including local communities at the localities where the six mission stations are located, the University of KwaZulu-Natal is charged with leading the research component of the project. The purpose of research in this project is to 'lay bare' the indelible print on the cultural and heritage landscape left behind by the missionaries in this region of South Africa. A principal component of the project is to encourage community development through promotion of religious heritage tourism in order to stimulate local tourism-based production and services such as crafts, hospitality accommodation and cultural/educational events in the Mission Stations. Therefore, the purpose of this part of the research is to present an initial scan of the heritage tourism potential of the six mission stations.
Defying the moulds of patriarchy: Nomambotwe Khawula of Umzumbe in Natal, 1860 – 1927.
(University of KwaZulu-Natal., 2010) Portmann, Bridget.
The Umzumbe mission station is probably one of the most beautiful and inspiring stations belonging to the American Board Mission. It is situated in the south coast of KwaZulu-Natal and surrounded by rolling hills, endlessly stretching for miles in every direction. The mission station was first conceived in 1861 by Elijah and Addie Robbins and later taken over by Henry and Laura Bridgman in 1869. Under their leadership a church, school and dispensary were all built and opened. The station was also run by Amy Bridgman Cowles, Laura Bridgman’s daughter, and her husband George Cowles from 1904. It was this family that have written and passed on the stories of some of the more prominent members of their congregation in Umzumbe. It is in critically evaluating both the author and the subjects of missionary writing that we can learn more about the stereotypes that people faced and their changing nature over the two generations of the three women examined: two of them defying the traditional moulds of patriarchy and the third as the storyteller.
The economic experimentation of Nembula Duze/Ira Adams Nembula, 1845 – 1886.
(University of KwaZulu-Natal., 2010) Jackson, Eva Aletta.
This paper gives a short biography of Ira Adams Nembula, the Natal sugarcane manufacturer. Nembula's business and his family have been often mentioned but not fully described before in accounts of Natal's nineteenth-century economy and mission stations. This paper draws on historians' narratives and missionary writings on Nembula from the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (American Board), and incorporates information from the archives of the Secretary for Native Affairs (SNA), to look at the life of a man who was described by missionaries as one of the “first fruits” or very first converts to Christianity in Natal, and was a preacher, a pioneering sugarcane producer, and also a transport rider. The paper outlines Nembula's and his mother Mbalasi's position and portrayal as initial converts in the American Board, his sugar milling business, and his plans to farm on a large scale. Nembula's steps towards buying a large tract of land left an impression in the procedures government followed around black land ownership; and may also have contributed to the formulation of colonial laws around black land ownership and exemption from “native law”. Nembula's story in many ways exemplifies the amakholwa experience of what Norman Etherington has called “economic experimentation” and the frustration of that vision.
The establishment of a faculty of agriculture in Pietermaritzburg, 1934-1949.
(University of KwaZulu-Natal., 2008) Guest, William Rupert.
The limited but expanding literature on the history of scientific research and the conquest of livestock and crop diseases in South Africa has hitherto been characterised by a pronounced emphasis on developments in the Cape. Notable exceptions have been some studies focusing on aspects of agricultural activity in the Transvaal, including veterinary training and research undertaken at Onderstepoort. Relatively little attention has been given to what is today the KwaZulu-Natal region, apart from a longstanding interest in the fortunes of the sugar industry, the expansion of wattle production and the conservation of indigenous game. The establishment of faculties of agriculture was an important further step towards the institutionalisation and sophistication of scientific research in that sector of the national economy. The first three of South Africa’s university faculties of agriculture experienced long gestation periods. The oldest, at Stellenbosch, had its origins in the Agriculture Department which started in 1887 with five students at the Victoria College. It was removed in 1898 to Elsenburg and formally established in 1918 as a full faculty at the new University of Stellenbosch. The second, in Pretoria, began with the agricultural science courses taught from 1907/08 at the Frankenwald estate north of Johannesburg as part of the Transvaal University College. It began to take shape from 1916 at what, in 1930, formally became the University of Pretoria. The third agricultural faculty, established in 1949 in Pietermaritzburg, was the outcome of a prolonged campaign on the part of educational and other public figures in the Natal-Zululand region.
A fire that blazed in the ocean – Gandhi and the poems of Satyagraha in South Africa, 1909 -1911 by Surendra Bhana and Neelima Shukla-Bhatt.
(University of KwaZulu-Natal., 2011) Govinden, Devarakshanam Betty.
No abstract available.
H.I.E Dhlomo’s brilliance as a writer, dramatist, poet and politician knew no bounds : a reappraisal.
(University of KwaZulu-Natal., 2010) Cele, Mwelela.
When Herbert Isaac Ernest Dhlomo, commonly known as H.I.E. Dhlomo, died during a heart operation on 23 October 1956, the South African literary firmament lost one of its brightest stars. He was only fifty-three and seemed to have the whole world at his feet.
The historiography of the KwaMachi people: a frontier community between amaZulu and amaMpondo in the ninteenth century.
(University of KwaZulu-Natal., 2009) Cele, Nokuthula Peace.
This article examines the establishment of the KwaMachi chieftaincy in Harding, on the south coast of KwaZulu-Natal in the early nineteenth century. This province is often associated with popular notions of ethnic history that see all Africans living in KwaZulu-Natal as AmaZulu. This universal outlook not only fails to acknowledge the significance of the history of pre-Shakan communities, it also does not take into consideration borderland communities whose history has been shifting in time, and who should be understood in terms of their unique history. Analysis of the processes of community building in what became KwaZulu-Natal shows that it is often difficult to categorize people along a single ethnic line. People of various backgrounds in the region influenced the development of their own communities as well as the definition of “Zuluness”. Locating KwaMachi within this context, I argue on the basis of archival and oral research that official and rigid distinctions are not completely dominant due to ongoing interaction through migrations, creation and shifting of colonial boundaries, and marriages and other alliances, all of which clouded and undermined ethnic homogenization. Such distinctions rarely have been incorporated into the subject literature. The construction of Zulu identity in the KwaZulu-Natal province was thus not a fixed practice; it underwent various processes defined by social and political dynamics emerging at different times in history.
History and heritage: a special issue on former American Board mission stations in southern KwaZulu-Natal.
(University of KwaZulu-Natal., 2010) Khumalo, Vukile.
The editorial provides a historical context to this Special Issue on Mission Stations in Southern KwaZulu-Natal.
History and Heritage: Socio-economic profiles of six former American Board Mission Stations in southern KwaZulu-Natal.
(University of KwaZulu-Natal., 2010) Zungu, Ntokozo.; Khumalo, Vukile.
This paper is based on a questionnaire that a team of researchers at the University of KwZulu-Natal (Howard Campus) in collaboration with community activists conducted between February 2007 and May 2008 in six former American Board Mission Stations; namely, Adams, Amahlongwa, Ifafa, Mfume, Umthwalume and Umzumbe in southern KwaZulu-Natal. The research questionnaire sought in the first instance to establish socio-economic profiles of these mission stations. We think such a profile would allow us to answer the following two questions. First, what is to be done with the old infrastructure and memory of the activities of the American Board Mission? Second, how residents of the identified mission stations feel about the possibility of their church structures becoming heritage sites?
Land disputes, social identities and the state in the izimpi zemibango in the Umzinto district, 1930–1935.
(University of KwaZulu-Natal., 2009) Sithole, Dennis Jabulani.
This article challenges the widespread tendency to label and dismiss all manner of violent conflicts involving rural African communities as “faction fights”, “tribal disturbances” or “native unrest” primarily because such a generalisation perpetuates a stereotypical belief that there is an inherent propensity towards mindless violence among African people. By tracing the long roots of conflicts in the Umzinto district it illustrates that tensions brewed for long periods of time before they deteriorated into violence, and that violence was often the last resort, chosen when people had explored and exhausted all avenues for the peaceful resolution of conflicts. Careful examination of the political and economic contexts in which tensions surfaced and degenerated into violence also reveals that there were non-African players who contributed to the outbreak of violent conflicts.
Learning about controversial issues in school history: the experiences of learners in KwaZulu-Natal schools.
(University of KwaZulu-Natal., 2011) Wassermann, Johannes Michiel.
Under Apartheid, History was taught according to a positivist model in which it was claimed that “objective truthful History” was passed on to learners. Consequently, since both learners and teachers were expected to subscribe to History in an uncritical manner, educational engagement with controversial issues hardly ever occurred and multiple perspectives to topics were not explored. At face value at least, the idea was created that History was taught in a neutral manner. In reality, school History was dominated by an Apartheid paradigm, an Afrikaner Nationalist framework and content to support this. As a result History was used as a tool to legitimise Apartheid. Since 1994, the Apartheid educational legacy has been dismantled and a new curriculum, the National Curriculum Statement (NCS), and a new educational philosophy, Outcomes Based Education (OBE), have been implemented.
Leslie McCracken and Charles Bethune Horsbrugh: collecting birds’ eggs in Northern Ireland in the 1920s and early 1930s.
(Edinburgh University Press for The Society for the History of Natural History., 2012) McCracken, Donal Patrick.
This paper is a case-study of a school-boy’s egg collection in Northern Ireland in the 1920s and early 1930s. The collection and Leslie McCracken’s friendship with Charles Bethune Horsbrugh, an established naturalist, not only expanded McCracken’s consciousness far beyond the boundaries of his rural existence but also reveal, through the specimens given to McCracken by Captain Horsbrugh, the considerable extent of amateur egg-collecting and the interchange of eggs both within Ireland and Great Britain, and further afield, then and in previous generations. A socio-historic sketch is provided, together with an account of the more interesting bird’s eggs, their collectors, and the location of collection.
The Natal Militia: Defence of the Colony, 1893-1910.
(University of KwaZulu-Natal., 2011) Thompson, Paul Singer.
Natal was a small British colony of settlement in southern Africa which was the scene of fighting in the Anglo-Zulu War, the Anglo-Boer wars of 1881 and 1899-1902, and the Zulu rebellions in 1888 and 1906. The British settlers depended on the mother country for protection for half a century, but after 1893, when the Colony became self-governing, they had to provide for their own defence. They established a small, well trained field force of Volunteers, but it was found to be inadequate in the South African (Second Anglo-Boer) War. In the post-war reassessment of Imperial Defence and Army Reform, Natal modernized quickly, and established a well armed and (relatively) efficient Militia based on compulsory manhood training. In the process settler society was militarized and imbued with Imperial patriotism. When the Colony became part of the Union of South Africa in 1910, its Militia offered an example for the new Union Defence Force.
Political violence – disrupting ways of ‘doing’ politics: an exploration of organisational and political life in Mpumalanga Township, 1970s-1980s.
(University of KwaZulu-Natal., 2011) Bonnin, Deborah Rosemary.
The political violence, between supporters of the Zulu ethnic movement, Inkatha, on the one hand, and those of the African National Congress (ANC) – aligned United Democratic Front (UDF), on the other, that tore apart the province of KwaZulu-Natal during the 1980s and 1990s was firmly located in spaces that had already established ‘ways of doing’ politics, and, amongst people who knew each other. Moreover, these spaces were localised and grounded in particular places and in the relationships and histories of those places. The question that is of interest to this paper is how did these established ‘ways of doing’ politics become disrupted to the extent that the province became engulfed in a civil war between supporters of these two organisations?
Power without knowledge: three nineteenth century colonialisms in South Africa.
(University of KwaZulu-Natal., 2008) Breckenridge, Keith.
Over the last three decades, scholars of empire have established a very intimate connection between archival knowledge and colonial rule. The works of Franz Fanon on the psychological effects of colonial rule, Michel Foucault on discursive regimes of truth in the making of modernity, and Edward Said on the politics of European scholarly engagement with colonial cultures have underwritten a vast new literature on the intellectual motives of empire. As James Scott observed twenty-five years ago, modern colonialism exercised power as much “in paperwork as in rifles”. The connections here between western knowledge, writing, record-keeping and racist over-rule are intimate. Humble grammarians, philologists and historians have been accorded new imperial significance in these accounts, many of which are preoccupied with the direct links between the politics of writing (and archiving) itself and European colonial supremacy. The great scope and power of these studies has tended to obscure a question that I would like to consider in this article: Was colonial over-rule possible without knowledge? Here my question is not simply whether colonial governments could function with faulty or uncomprehending informational systems, which the British in India evidently managed in the decades leading up to the Rebellion. Rather it is whether the acts of archival government—of gathering and preserving knowledge about the colony and its peoples, and documenting the practice of government—were a necessary part of imperialism in the nineteenth century. I want to make the case here that the nineteenth century history of south Africa shows that imperialism could function quite well without knowledge—at least of the kinds of knowledge regimes that Foucault and Said have studied so productively. In the Transvaal and in the Colony of Natal in the second half of the nineteenth century two explicitly illiberal, anti-utilitarian, undocumented governments were at work. I think, although I do not show it here, that in the making of the Union and Apartheid in the next century, each of these probably held more local influence over individuals (whites and blacks) than the rump of utilitarianism that remained in the Cape Colony.
Practices of naming and the possibilities of home on American Zulu mission stations in Colonial Natal.
(University of KwaZulu-Natal., 2011) Healy, Meghan Elisabeth.; Jackson, Eva Aletta.
From the 1840s, the American Zulu Mission (AZM) in Natal included a number of converts who took on Christian names after missionaries within the circle of the AZM, and after those missionaries’ American friends and relations. This article emphasises an issue that has been secondary in scholarship on naming as a tool of colonial control and redesignation: the responses to and uses of such names by those who bore them. We address this issue through an examination of two prominent lineages: the Goba/Hawes and Nembula/Makhanya families on American mission stations north and south of Durban. Our findings suggest that the results of missionaries’ exertions of power through renamings were uneven: that pre-baptismal names resurfaced as a means of laying claim to or invoking particular identities and pasts; that baptismal names, or parts of them, could be mobilised or rejected over time according to different needs; and that attention to names may help to track these dynamics over time. We make use of the sociolinguistic understanding of names as “labels” (terms without semantic content) or as “pointers” (names pointing to, for instance, the circumstances of a person's birth) and adapt these categories: suggesting while scholars have seen baptismal names essentially as colonising labels, in the cases we explore, both baptismal and pre-baptismal names have served also as pointers—gesturing towards unstable pasts and futures.
Review of Allison Drew, Between Empire and Revolution: A Life of Sidney Bunting 1873–1936 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007; Pretoria: Unisa Press).
(University of KwaZulu-Natal., 2009) Govinden, Devarakshanam Betty.
“The struggle for survival” : last years of Adams College, 1953-1956.
(University of KwaZulu-Natal., 2010) Ngonyama, Percy.
No abstract available.

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