Barbarians ancient and modern

American Historical Review

Volumn 116, Issue 1, 2011, Pages 31-57

  Etherington, Norman ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA   (Australia)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 79952215635     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/ahr.116.1.31     Document Type: Article

References (123)

1. Julian Cobbing, "The Case against the Mfecane" (seminar paper, Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town, 1983).
2. Julian Cobbing, "The Mfecane as Alibi: Thoughts on Dithakong and Mbolompo," Journal of African History 29 (1988): 487-519.
3. The proceedings of this conference at the University of the Witwatersrand were subsequently published as Carolyn Hamilton, ed., The Mfecane Aftermath: Reconstructive Debates in Southern African History (Johannesburg, 1995).
4. Sometimes the Sotho word difaqane is used in texts. Among the most influential formulations of the concept are Eric Walker, A History of Southern Africa (1928; 3rd ed., London, 1965), 175-176;
5. and Monica Wilson and Leonard Thompson, eds., The Oxford History of South Africa, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1969-1971), 1: 391-399.
6. Most notably John D. Omer-Cooper, The Zulu Aftermath: A Nineteenth-Century Revolution in Bantu Africa (London, 1966).
7. Cobbing himself had taken part in the reexamination of nineteenth-century African kingdoms with his Ph.D. dissertation on the Ndebele kingdom in south-central Africa: "The Ndebele under the Khuma-los, 1820-1896" (University of Lancaster, 1976).
8. Personal communications, Terence Ranger and Julian Cobbing.
9. Elizabeth A. Eldredge and Fred Morton, eds., Slavery in South Africa: Captive Labor on the Dutch Frontier (Pietermaritzburg, 1994);
10. Nigel Penn, The Forgotten Frontier: Colonist and Khoisan on the Cape's Northern Frontier in the Eighteenth Century (Athens, Ohio, 2005).
11. Elizabeth A. Eldredge, "Sources of Conflict in Southern Africa, c. 1800-30: The 'Mfecane' Considered," Journal of African History 33, no. 1 (1992): 1-35.
12. William F. Lye, ed., Andrew Smith's Journal of His Expedition into the Interior of South Africa, 1834-36 (Cape Town, 1975), 235;
13. Nathaniel Isaacs, Travels and Adventures in Eastern Africa, ed. Louis Herman and Percival R. Kirby (Cape Town, 1970), 265.
14. Elizabeth A. Eldredge, "Sources of Conflict in Southern Africa, c. 1800-30: The 'Mfecane' Considered," Journal of African History 33, no. 1 (1992): (Pubitemid 39033278)
15. A. T. Bryant, Olden Times in Zululand and Natal: Containing Earlier Political History of the Eastern-Nguni Clans (London, 1929), 72-79;
16. D. Fred Ellenberger, History of the Basuto, Ancient and Modern (London, 1912), 29, 303.
17. For a brilliant discussion of missionary narratives of paradise lost, see Richard Grove, "Scottish Missionaries, Evangelical Discourse and the Origins of Conservation Thinking in Southern Africa," Journal of Southern African Studies 15, no. 2 (1989): 163-187.
18. Dan Wylie, Savage Delight: White Myths of Shaka (Pietermaritzburg, 2000).
19. Christopher Saunders, "Pre-Cobbing Mfecane Historiography," in Hamilton, The Mfecane Aftermath, 21-34.
20. Cobbing, "The Mfecane as Alibi," 502;
21. Jeff Peires, "Matiwane's Road to Mbholompo: A Reprieve for the Mfecane?" in Hamilton, The Mfecane Aftermath, 236.
22. John Wright, "Beyond the 'Zulu Aftermath': Migrations, Identities, Histories," Journal of Natal and Zulu History 24-25 (2006-2007): 1-36.
23. Norman Etherington, The Great Treks: The Transformation of Southern Africa, 1815-1854 (London, 2001), 326-333.
24. Etherington, "A Tempest in a Teapot?" 211-212.
25. Paul A. Landau, Popular Politics in the History of South Africa, 1400-1948 (Cambridge, 2010).
26. Jeff Peires, in contrast, maintains an extreme essentialist position: "it may be true that under very rare and special circumstances, one might be forced to modify one's ethnic affiliation, but an African does not change his identity quite as easily⋯ You cannot change who you are"; review of Etherington, The Great Treks, Journal of Natal and Zulu History 20 (2002): 73.
27. Carolyn Hamilton, Terrific Majesty: The Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical Invention (Cambridge, Mass., 1998);
28. Thomas Spear, "Neo-Traditionalism and the Limits of Invention in British Colonial Africa," Journal of African History 44, no. 1 (2003): 3-27. (Pubitemid 36543983)
29. Peter Brown, The World of Late Antiquity: From Marcus Aurelius to Muhammad (London, 1971).
30. Peter Brown, "SO Debate: The World of Late Antiquity Revisited," Symbolae Osloenses 72, no. 1 (1997): 8-9.
31. Review of Erich Zöllner, Geschichte der Franken bis zur Mitte des sechsten Jahrhunderts, Speculum 47 (1972): 578-579.
32. Walter Goffart, Barbarians and Romans, A.D. 418-584: The Techniques of Accommodation (Princeton, N.J., 1980), 4-5.
33. For a good summary of Wolfram's contributions, see Guy Halsall, Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, 376-568 (Cambridge, 2007), 15-16, and in relation to Goffart's accommodation thesis, 431.
34. Chris Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400-800 (Oxford, 2005), 84-85.
35. Halsall, Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, 436.
36. Herwig Wolfram, History of the Goths, trans. Thomas J. Dunlap, new ed. (Berkeley, Calif., 1990), 12; first published in German as Geschichte der Goten (Munich, 1979).
37. Halsall, Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, 153-159, 327.
38. For a representative collection of new thinking among archaeologists, see Sam Lucy and Andrew Reynolds, eds., Burial in Early Medieval England and Wales (London, 2002).
39. Halsall, Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, 56-58, 102-109, 34, 283.
40. Bryan Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization (Oxford, 2005), 9-10, 87, 81, 53, 174, 134.
41. Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire (London, 2005), 202, 198.
42. Walter Goffart, Barbarian Tides: The Migration Age and the Later Roman Empire (Philadelphia, 2006), 14.
43. G. W. Stow Collection, National Library of South Africa, Cape Town.
44. Later published as G. W. Stow, "The Causes of the Fall of Ancient Empires: Will Similar Causes Occasion the Fall of the One under Which We Live?" Eastern Province Monthly 2 (1857-1858): 422-433.
45. John Centlivres Chase, The Natal Papers: A Reprint of All Notices and Public Documents Connected with That Territory, 2 vols. in one (1843; repr., Cape Town, 1968), 20.
46. J. W. Colenso, An Ordination and Three Missionary Sermons (Cambridge, 1855), 35-36; italics in the original.
47. Louis Harms, founder of the Hermannsburg Missionary Society, counted Tacitus's Germania as his favorite book;
48. see Theodor Harms, Lebensbeschreibung des Pastor Louis Harms (Hermannsburg, 1868), 17, 28;
49. and Georg Haccius, Hannoversche Missionsgeschichte, 3 vols. (Hermannsburg, 1907-1911), 2: 74.
50. On Swiss missions, see Patrick Harries, Butterflies and Barbarians: Swiss Missionaries and Systems of Knowledge in South-East Africa (Oxford, 2007), 44-49.
51. Stow to Lucy Lloyd, Harrismith, October 21, 1878, Stow Collection, MSB 472, Box 1, National Library of South Africa, Cape Town.
52. George William Stow, The Native Races of South Africa: A History of the Intrusion of the Hottentots and Bantu into the Hunting Grounds of the Bushmen, the Aborigines of the Country, ed. George McCall Theal (London, 1905), 488.
53. H. Bartle Frere, "Systems of Land Tenure among Aboriginal Tribes in South Africa," Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 12 (1883): 265.
54. Alice Werner, "Recent Work in Bantu Philology," Journal of the Royal African Society 5, no. 17 (1905): 61.
55. Twenty years later she invoked the V ölkerwanderung again, this time in relation to white Voortrekkers of South Africa, in a review of volume 4 of George Cory's Rise of South Africa, Journal of the Royal African Society 25 (1926): 381-383.
56. Robert Bain and Lauren McArthur Harris, "A Most Pressing Challenge: Preparing Teachers of World History," Perspectives on History: Newsmagazine of the American Historical Association 47, no. 7 (October 2009): 34.
57. See, however, fn. 46 below for cogent critiques of the idea that Bantu migrations occurred as a single datable historical event.
58. An ongoing debate on Aryan invasions of India bears a family resemblance to the debates on barbarian identities, movements, and effects surveyed in this article.
59. See Thomas R. Trautmann, Aryans and British India (Berkeley, Calif., 1997);
60. Trautmann, ed., The Aryan Debate (New Delhi, 2005);
61. and B. B. Lal, "Aryan Invasion of India: Perpetuation of a Myth," in Edwin F. Bryant and Laurie L. Patton, eds., The Indo-Aryan Controversy: Evidence and Inference in Indian History (New York, 2005).
62. Jan Vansina comprehensively traced the debate over Bantu expansion to its Victorian origins in "Bantu in the Crystal Ball, I," History in Africa 6 (1979): 287-333,
63. and "Bantu in the Crystal Ball, II," History in Africa 7 (1980): 293-325.
64. He also demonstrated the flaws in all simple models of migration as a sweeping movement of peoples or a military forced march. Vansina later refined his case by showing how Bantu expansion might have occurred with only small numbers of people engaged in the original migration: "Western Bantu Expansion," Journal of African History 25 (1984): 129-145;
65. "New Linguistic Evidence and 'the Bantu Expansion,'" Journal of African History 36 (1995): 173-195. All of Vansina's critique might with little alteration be applied to the so-called Völkerwanderung.
66. See Shula Marks, "South Africa: 'The Myth of the Empty Land,'" History Today 30, no. 1 (January 1980): 7-12.
67. For a detailed analysis of Jordanes, see Andrew Gillett, "The Mirror of Jordanes: Concepts of the Barbarian, Then and Now," in Philip Rousseau, ed., A Companion to Late Antiquity (London, 2009), 392-408.
68. Statement of Dr. Andrew Smith in B. J. T. Leverton, ed., Records of Natal, vol. 1: 1823-August 1828 (Pretoria, 1984), 31.
69. Robert Godlonton in the Grahamstown Journal, March 5, 1840.
70. In fact, the index to one substantial book does attempt to collate all the explanations yet advanced for the fall of the Western Roman Empire: Alexander Demandt, Der Fall Roms: Die Auflösung des romischen Reiches in Urteil der Nachwelt (Munich, 1984).
71. For Nixon's views, see his "Remarks at Ceremonies Honoring Billy Graham in Charlotte, North Carolina," October 15, 1971, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=3192: "I read the history of those civilizations, and I find that in the case of Greece, in the case of Rome, in the case of ancient Persia, that their civilizations died not when they were weak and not when they were poor, but when they were rich, when they were the best educated, and also when they thought they were strong militarily. They died because as they became wealthy, they became soft; as they became better educated, without principle, they became weak. And as a result, other civilizations, not as well-educated, not as wealthy, not really as strong, overran them."
72. Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire, xiii.
73. Ibid., 244, 308-309, 381, 408.
74. English forms are employed in this discussion to make it easier to understand. In practice, speakers of Bantu language indicated group identities by attaching the prefix Ama- or Ba- to the name of their chief or one of the chief's important ancestors. Thus they would have responded to colonial interrogators by saying we are BaMaNthatisi, or AmaMswati - in other words, we are the people of MaNthatisi or the people of Mswati. Deciphering the meaning of precolonial terminology of group identity is an ongoing historical and linguistic problem in sub-Saharan African research; see Landau, Popular Politics in the History of South Africa, 1-11.
75. G. M. Theal, History and Ethnography of Africa South of the Zambesi, from the Settlement of the Portuguese at Sofala in September 1505 to the Conquest of the Cape Colony by the British in September 1795, vol. 1: The Portuguese in South Africa from 1505 to 1700 (London, 1910), 55.
76. Walker, A History of Southern Africa, 20, 110.
77. As noted by Patrick J. Geary, "Barbarians and Ethnicity," in G. W. Bowersock, Peter Brown, and Oleg Grabar, eds., Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), 107-129.
78. Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire, 190;
79. J. M. Orpen, History of the Basutus of South Africa (Cape Town, 1857), 6.
80. Goffart, Barbarian Tides, 109. For a classic critique of treating social groups as objects, employing the billiard ball analogy,
81. see Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley, Calif., 1982), 6-7, 17.
82. Clement F. Goodfellow, Great Britain and South African Confederation, 1870-1881 (Cape Town, 1966), 59.
83. Goffart, Barbarian Tides, chap. 7.
84. Christopher Wickham confidently asserts that the "ethnogenesis model is now widely accepted"; Framing the Early Middle Ages, 83.
85. For a valuable discussion of some of the complex issues lately faced by anthropologists and archaeologists, see Ann Brower Stahl, "Concepts of Time and Approaches to Analogical Reasoning in Historical Perspective," American Antiquity 58, no. 2 (1993): 235-260.
86. See, for example, Leroy Vail, ed., The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa (London, 1989).
87. Patrick Harries documents one of the most extreme examples of missionaries and anthropologists collaborating to create an ethnicity - the so-called Gwamba - from "a dauntingly confusing pot pourri of refugees drawn from the length and breadth of coastal south-east Africa, who shared no common language and lived in scattered villages that were independent of one another. They had few important chiefs and no concept of themselves as a community." Harries, "The Roots of Ethnicity: Discourse and the Politics of Language Construction in South-East Africa," African Affairs 87, no. 346 (1988): 29-30.
88. While the application of ethnogenesis to the emergence of new kingdoms in late antiquity is widely credited to work done by Reinhard Wenskus, beginning with Stammesbildung und Verfassung: Das Werden der Frühmittelalterlichen Gentes (Cologne, 1961), and extended by Herwig Wolfram, notably in Die Geschichte der Goten, it began to acquire a wider enthusiastic following of scholars only in the 1990s.
89. See, for example, Walter Pohl, ed., Kingdoms of the Empire: The Integration of Barbarians in Late Antiquity (Leiden, 1997);
90. Walter Pohl with Helmut Reimitz, eds., Strategies of Distinction: The Construction of Ethnic Communities, 300-800 (Leiden, 1998);
91. Herwig Wolfram, The Roman Empire and Its Germanic Peoples, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Berkeley, Calif., 1997);
92. Hans-Werner Goetz, Jörg Jarnut, and Walter Pohl, eds., Regna and Gentes: The Relationship between Late Antique and Early Medieval Peoples and Kingdoms in the Transformation of the Roman World (Leiden, 2002);
93. Peter Heather, The Goths (Oxford, 1996);
94. Patrick Amory, People and Identity in Ostrogothic Italy, 489-554 (Cambridge, 1997), 33-39.
95. Patrick J. Geary, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton, N.J., 2002), 157-174.
96. Norman Etherington, Preachers, Peasants and Politics in Southeast Africa, 1835-1880: African Christian Communities in Natal, Pondoland, and Zululand (London, 1978), 80.
97. Shula Marks, The Ambiguities of Dependence in South Africa: Class, Nationalism, and the State in Twentieth-Century Natal (Baltimore, 1986).
98. Geary, The Myth of Nations, 171.
99. Most recently Wright has taken up the question of changing identity in "Beyond the 'Zulu Aftermath,'" 1-36.
100. For a superb example of how creative historical research can use present-day oral history to uncover hidden meanings in older collections of oral material, see Neil Kodesh, "History from the Healer's Shrine: Genre, Historical Imagination, and Early Ganda History," Comparative Studies in Society and History 49, no. 3 (2007): 527-552. (Pubitemid 47039801)
101. Andrew Gillett, "Ethnogenesis: A Contested Model of Early Medieval Europe," History Compass 4, no. 2 (2006): 253.
102. Walter Pohl, review of Goffart, Barbarian Tides, American Historical Review 112, no. 3 (June 2007): 912-913;
103. Geary, The Myth of Nations, 157. Geary appears to have considerably softened his presentation of ethnogenesis in The Myth of Nations, compared with the more strident formulations he presented in "Barbarians and Ethnicity."
104. See Goffart's lament in the opening pages of Barbarian Tides, 13.
105. These issues are canvassed from divergent points of view in Andrew Gillett, ed., On Barbarian Identity: Critical Approaches to Ethnicity in the Early Middle Ages (Turnhout, 2002).
106. Goffart, "Does the Distant Past Impinge on the Invasion Age Germans?" ibid., 37.
107. The literature is vast. See, for example, Hugh Seton-Watson, Nations and States: An Enquiry into the Origins of Nations and the Politics of Nationalism (New York, 1977);
108. E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge, 1992);
109. David A. Bell, "The Unbearable Lightness of Being French: Law, Republicanism and National Identity at the End of the Old Regime," American Historical Review 106, no. 4 (October 2001): 1215-1235;
110. Brian C. J. Singer, "Cultural versus Contractual Nations: Rethinking Their Opposition," History and Theory 35 (1996): 309-337;
111. Fritz Fellner, "The Problem of the Austrian Nation after 1945," Journal of Modern History 60 (1988): 264-289;
112. John Breuilly, "National and Nationalism in Modern German History," The Historical Journal 33, no. 3 (1990): 659-675.
113. David A. Bell, "Lingua Populi, Lingua Dei: Language, Religion, and the Origins of French Revolutionary Nationalism," American Historical Review 100, no. 5 (December 1995): 1403-1437.
114. From the Southeast Asian historian Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983);
115. and the Africanist Terence Ranger, who collaborated with Eric Hobsbawm as editors of The Invention of Tradition (New York, 1983).
116. Partly in reaction to these developments, some influential scholars pulled back from the constructivist model posited in Imagined Communities and The Invention of Tradition.
117. See, for example, Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Cambridge, Mass., 1987).
118. As some predicted; see Paul B. Rich, ed., Reaction and Renewal in South Africa (London, 1996), 263-276.
119. J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 4: Barbarians, Savages and Empires (Cambridge, 2005).
120. Harry Johnston made his name as an explorer in Central Africa before expounding his ideas on Bantu migrations. Arthur Gordon, later Lord Stanmore, was celebrated for developing ideas about indirect rule in Fiji based on his hypothesis that Fijian chiefs resembled nothing so much as his own Scottish barbarian ancestors; J. K. Chapman, The Career of Arthur Hamilton Gordon, First Lord Stanmore, 1829-1912 (Toronto, 1964), 182-183.
121. Bartle Frere, who had served the British Empire in India, Zanzibar, and South Africa, was keen to draw lessons from Rome's experience in dealing with the absorption of barbarian populations. His reading of ancient history led him to identify the "Trek Boers, like the rest of the white colonists in South Africa," as belonging "to the swarming European nations of northern Europe. They derive their impulse not merely from inherent love of independence or of change, but from the pressure outwards always felt by nations in the swarming or emigrant stage of existence." Frere, "On the Laws Affecting the Relations between Civilized and Savage Life, as Bearing on the Dealings of Colonists with Aborigines," Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 11 (1882): 318-320, 349-350.
122. A lecture on ancient and modern imperialism by Lord Cromer, who had governed Egypt during the early decades of British occupation, provoked a scholarly seminar on the subject in the Classical Review 24 (1910): 105-116.
123. Mahmood Mamdani, When Does a Settler Become a Native? Reflections of the Colonial Roots of Citizenship in Equatorial and South Africa (Cape Town, 1998).