The Other Zulus: The spread of Zulu ethnicity in colonial South Africa/The Griqua Past and the Limits of South African History, 1902-1994

The Other Zulus: The spread of Zulu ethnicity in colonial South Africa By Michael Mahoney. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2012.

The Griqua Past and the Limits of South African History, 1902-1994 By Edward Cavanagh. New York: Peter Lang, 2011.

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...