The Other Zulus: The spread of Zulu ethnicity in colonial South Africa by Michael Mahoney, and: The Griqua Past and the Limits of South African History, 1902–1994 by Edward Cavanagh (review)

Identities are incredibly contingent, particularly those crafted in the midst of colonial domination, as most historians of the colonial experience would be quick to affirm. Two recent publications in South African history provide both an understanding of the incredibly localized nature of colonial identity formation, with an eye to the larger politics of settler colonialism.

Michael Mahoney’s The Other Zulus: The spread of Zulu ethnicity in colonial South Africa is an ambitious yet careful study of the development of an overarching Zulu ethnic identity during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing from an extensive variety of government records, personal correspondence, and ethnographic archives, Mahoney constructs a survey of the colonial period in Natal and neighboring polity of Zululand that closely investigates the different pressures that shaped forms of tribal or inter-ethnic allegiance. For Mahoney, Africans who lived within colonial Natal in the years prior to the Anglo-Zulu War profoundly resisted identification with “Zuluness,” instead associating themselves with chieftaincies that had existed prior to the far-reaching conquests of Shaka, the first paramount Zulu ruler. Such a move found ready support with a colonial administration committed to governing on the cheap, particularly under the administration of Theophilus Shepstone, Natal’s long-serving Secretary of Native Affairs, who advocated for colonial rule that rested upon a maintained system of Indigenous governance. Mahoney argues that prior to the outbreak of war in 1879, Natal’s African population believed that their immediate interests lay not in an ethnic identification that required the recognition of a supreme and still very independent Zulu monarch north of the colony. Indeed, he asserts that the identification with local chiefdoms resulted from being situated between a colonial state “too weak to hate” and a Zulu king “too strong to love” (82). It was only after the Anglo-Zulu War that Natal’s African population, linked through a shared antipathy to rising settler power and strengthened through experiences such as those shared by young men on the goldfields of the Witwatersrand, began to look to a greatly reduced Zulu monarchy as a relatively powerless figure upon which they could project complex ideas of nationalist identification. For Mahoney, this process of new ethnic affiliation became most visible with the widespread identification of rebellious Africans with the Zulu monarch Dinizulu in 1906, over a quarter century after the defeat of the Zulu monarchy.

Mahoney’s careful, detailed work is at its most effective when he examines the profound disidentification of Natal’s African population with the Zulu kingdom to the north; as he argues, “the Zulu ethnic identity of virtually the entire African population of Natal was itself not a given; it had to be established” (5). Thus begins a richly layered and source-rich description of the awkward negotiation of Africans between colonial rule and a larger Zulu identity. Likewise, by placing the focus of his study firmly in Natal, and not Zululand proper, Mahoney allows for a greater understanding of the complexities of identity formation within a (settler) colonial polity. The profound ambivalences of Africans within Natal with regard to both the Natal government and the Zulu kingdom reveal the limits of a settler state in compelling its Indigenous inhabitants and the nuanced ways in which those colonial subjects worked to articulate themselves on terms most amenable to them.

Mahoney’s boldest offerings are also perhaps his most tenuous; in examining the process of African ethnic identification in colonial Natal, he offers productive challenges to the notion of colonial hegemony, particularly as it has been understood in both South African historiography and within larger British colonial history writing. For Mahoney, Zulu ethnic identification arose as a possible choice (which he terms a “moral economy”) in the midst...