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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 May 2019
Although John W. Colenso thought that he was merely acting as amicus curiae — a friend of the court — in compiling evidence to explain Langalibalele's supposed rebellion in 1873, the Bishop of Natal ended up writing a damning anti-colonial tract. This paper will attempt to show how this report — written for the Queen and Colenso's House of Lord peers — is not just an achievement in legal refutation and forensic analysis but that it was a linguistic and cultural statement about the working and limits of Zulu law as Colenso understood it through his interactions with his Natal converts. Although it is obvious that Colenso's audience was not moved by his supplications on Langalibelele's behalf, it is less obvious why those who thought of Colenso as a maverick and heretic should have ignored his thorough repudiation of cultural chauvinism. The paper will suggest that Colenso's Remarks were ignored precisely because to take them seriously would have meant abandoning the authoritarian underpinnings of the late 19th century colonial project.
This article has been at least six years in the making. I would first like to thank the staff of the New York Public Library for granting me initial access to John W. Colenso's report. This article was first presented as a conference paper at the 2012 “South Africa: Retrospection, Introspection, Extraversion” conference held at the Centre of West African Studies (CWAS) at the University of Birmingham, UK. Thank you to the panellists and audience for the comments given at that conference. Thank you to the following funders: the National Research Foundation (NRF), the Wits Mellon Inclusive Professoriate grant, and the Friedel Sellschop award. Many thanks to my colleagues at WiSER (Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research) for their comments and suggestions. Lastly, I would like to thank Keith Breckenridge for the constant encouragement. Author's email: [email protected]
1 Natal Government, The Kafir Revolt in Natal in the Year 1873: Being an Account of the Revolt of the Amahlubi Tribe under the Chief Langalibalele and the Measures Taken to Vindicate the Authority of the Government: Together with the Official Record of the Trial of the Chief and Some of His Sons and Indunas (Keith & Company, 1874). In his remarks, Colenso consistently refers to this document as the ‘official record’ even though technically it was independently printed by the publishers Keith & Company. The actual papers relating to the revolt that were presented to the Houses of Parliament, have a different title and different publishers.
2 John W. Colenso, Langalibalele and the Amahlubi Tribe: Being Remarks Upon the Official Record of the Trials of the Chief, His Sons and Induna, and Other Members of the Amahlubi Tribe. Presented to Both Houses of Parliament by Command of Her Majesty. January, 1875’ (London: 1875), iii. Many sources describe Colenso's report as a ‘pamphlet’. See for example, McClendon, Thomas V., White Chief, Black Lords: Shepstone and the Colonial State in Natal, South Africa, 1845–1878 (Rochester, NY, 2010)Google Scholar, 116. This terminology alone would make a reader assume that this was a ‘small book’ dealing with a trifling matter. This is not so. The document produced by Colenso is 166 pages long. The use of the term ‘pamphlet’ in the official record may therefore be in itself a political act to discredit Colenso. What this definition of Colenso's work as pamphleteering occludes is the fact that he enjoyed a power which the colonial government resented, namely that he had his own printing press and had trained his converts as printers. The link between printing, popular literature, pamphlets and pamphleteering is detailed in Joad Raymond's Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 2006).
3 On the history of colonial Natal and for a conventional account of the trial drawing on the official record, see for example, Guy, J., Theophilus Shepstone and the Forging of Natal: African Autonomy and Settler Colonialism in the Making of Traditional Authority (Pietermartizburg, South Africa, 2013), 403–13Google Scholar; Herd, N., The Bent Pine: The Trial of Chief Langalibalele (Johannesburg, 1976)Google Scholar.
4 Colenso, ‘Langalibalele and the Amahlubi Tribe’.
5 Ibid. iv.
6 For another account of the 1873 rebellion as a clash between the autocratic power exercised by Theophilus Shepstone and the wilfulness of Langalibalele and his people, see McClendon, T. V., White Chief, Black Lords: Shepstone and the Colonial State in Natal, South Africa, 1845–1878 (Rochester, NY, 2010), 82–124Google Scholar.
7 Storey, W. K., Guns, Race, and Power in Colonial South Africa (Cambridge, 2008), 144–81Google Scholar.
8 The trial of Langalibalele was based on the blurring of the boundaries between law (whether customary or English) and Shepstone's arrogation of chiefly power to his own person.
9 Guy, Theophilus Shepstone, 403–13.
10 Ibid. 405.
11 J. W. Colenso, Langalibalele and the Amahlubi Tribe, 28.
12 Ibid. 22.
13 Guy, J., The Heretic: A Study of the Life of John William Colenso, 1814–1883 (Johannesburg and Pietermaritzburg, 1983), 197Google Scholar.
14 Colenso, Langalibalele and the Amahlubi Tribe, 58, 83.
15 Guy, The Heretic, 46–53.
16 Guy provides the most thorough account; ibid. Cetshwayo kaMpande (1826–1884; r. 1873–1879) was the last Zulu king, since his capture and exile marked the end of Zulu autonomy. For an account of the end of Zulu kingship, see J. Guy, The Destruction of the Zulu Kingdom: The Civil War in Zululand, 1879–1884 (Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, 1994). For Cetshwayo's version of his kingship, see Webb, C. B. and Wright, J. B., eds., A Zulu King Speaks: Statements Made by Cetshwayo Kampande on the History and Customs of His People (Pietermaritzburg and Durban, South Africa, 1987)Google Scholar.
17 Mamdani, M., Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Kampala, 1996), 62–108Google Scholar.
18 Guy, The Heretic, 40; Davenport, T.R.H. and Saunders, C.C., South Africa: A Modern History (New York, 2000), 116–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
19 Guy, The Heretic, 49; 84–6.
20 Colenso, Langalibalele and the Amahlubi Tribe, iii.
21 McClendon refers to Colenso's work as a ‘pamphlet’; McClendon, White Chief, Black Lords, 116. On the implications of doing so, see note 2, above.
22 Herd, The Bent Pine, n14; Colenso, Langalibalele and the Amahlubi Tribe, 6.
23 Herd, The Bent Pine; Guy, The Heretic, 199.
24 Guy, The Heretic, 198.
25 Ibid. 202–3.
26 Brookes, E. H. and Webb, C. B., A History of Natal (Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, 1965)Google Scholar, 10; Guy, The Heretic, 197.
27 Keletso Atkins provides a thorough exposition of how the Natal colonial government attempted to stem the flow of Zulu refugees by imposing apprenticeships and labour requirements on them; Atkins, K., The Moon Is Dead! Give Us Our Money! The Cultural Origins of an African Work Ethic, 1843–1900 (Portsmouth, NH, 1993)Google Scholar.
28 Colenso, Langalibalele and the Amahlubi Tribe, 1.
29 Ibid. 26.
30 Colenso, Langalibalele and the Amahlubi Tribe, 3.
31 Ibid. 4.
32 Ibid. 6.
33 Guy, The Heretic, 206–7.
34 The document being referred to in Colenso's commentary is Maclean, J., A Compendium of Kafir Laws and Customs: Including Genealogical Tables of Kafir Chiefs and Various Tribal Census Returns (Grahamstown, South Africa, 1866)Google Scholar. Strictly speaking, the Compendium was for ‘British Kaffraria’; that is, it was used to govern the ‘Xhosa’, the latter term being itself an unsatisfactory equivalence of what the British meant when they labelled the inhabitants of the east coast of southern Africa as the ‘Kafir tribes’.
35 Colenso, Langalibalele and the Amahlubi Tribe, 44.
36 Ibid. 128.
37 Guy, The Heretic, 205.
38 Ibid. 206–7.
39 Colenso, ‘Langalibalele and the Amahlubi Tribe’, 286.
40 C. Hamilton, ‘“Zoolacratism” and “Cannibalism”: A Discussion of Historical Disposition Towards the “Shakan” Model of Social Order and Political Rights’ (paper presented at the History Workshop Conference, University of Witwatersrand, South Africa, 13–15 July 1994), 4.
41 J. Guy, ‘Perpetuating Power: Reading and Writing in Natal and the Zulu Kingdom’ (paper presented at the Paradigms Lost, Paradigms Regained? Southern African Studies in the 1990s, Journal of Southern African Studies’ 20th Anniversary Conference, 9–11 September 1994), 21.
42 J. Guy, ‘An Accommodation of Patriarchs: Theophilus Shepstone and the Foundations of the System of Native Administration in Natal’ (paper presented at the Masculinities in Southern Africa Colloquium, 2–4 July 1997), 5.
43 Colenso, Langalibalele and the Amahlubi Tribe, 287.
44 Ibid. 287–8.
45 Ibid. 290.
46 Qtd. in Ibid. 67.
47 Ibid.
48 Ibid. 81.
49 Ibid.
50 See Guy, The Heretic, 228–32.
51 Fuze, M. M., The Black People and Whence They Came: A Zulu View (Pietermaritzburg & Durban, South Africa, 1979), 104Google Scholar.
52 M. Mamdani, Citizen and Subject, 37ff.