2 - Oral Traditions in the Reconstruction of Southern African History

Summary

The oral traditions from the isiZulu-speaking people are a critical and central starting point for the reconstruction of much of the history of southeastern Africa. The success of the AmaZulu king Shaka and his successors in achieving political unification and dominance over a wide area ensured that their early genealogies and oral traditions of inheritance, migration, settlement, and peaceful and hostile interactions in the area were remembered into the twentieth century. Studies of the AmaZulu ruling line of descent and their followers have illuminated processes that included the subordination of peoples incorporated, both willingly and unwillingly, into the emerging Zulu kingdom in the late 1810s. The incorporated population was socially, politically, and culturally diverse, and the process was accompanied by internal social stratification. Records of the past, both written and oral, are more often preserved by rulers who have survived political upheaval, skewing the record in favor of those who have predominated. Fortunately, however, the oral traditions that James Stuart collected in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries included the distinctive histories of the many subordinated families, lineages, and chiefdoms whose identities came to be subsumed under the larger AmaZulu identity after the consolidation of the kingdom in the 1820s. In addition to the oral traditions recorded by Stuart, of critical importance are oral traditions and histories as well as personal observations recorded about early KwaZulu and precolonial “Natal” history by the early traders Henry Francis Fynn, Nathaniel Isaacs, and Charles Rawden Maclean.

Mandhlakazi told James Stuart that he should give great weight to whatever he heard from Mgidhlana ka Mpande about the royal house of Zululand by saying, “His words fill the mouth.” Stuart added the annotation, “That is, his talking is authoritative, final and so [therefore] complete.” In other words, Mandhlakazi was reporting Mgidhlana's reputation as an authoritative and fully credible source and in doing so indicated that the AmaZulu people were able to recognize and distinguish an authoritative source from someone who was not reliable.