Nelson Mandela excepted, Shaka is probably the most famous southern African in history: sometimes the murderer of a million, sometimes the military genius, and frequently both. He is regarded as both the cynosure of Zulu nationhood, and the epitome of African brutality. At any rate, a household name, commandeered to lend a muscular glory to the aura of a pop singer, a Namibian traditional healer, a brand of Zimbabwean knives, or an African-American comicbook super-stalwart, not to mention the dozens of heroic German-Shepherd Shakas buried in Durban's police-dog cemetery.

The story of his brief and bloody, but nation-building career has been similarly invoked to support an astonishing variety of views.

"Zhi...zhi...zhi..." Out of the clamorous dark the fiendish chorus swelled louder and ever louder, more merciless and more murderous. It reached Tshaka, where, slightly to the rear, he was directing the battle. Tshaka heard! Frank saw his smile; and it was the smile of Satan himself hearing the hiss of hell's flames and the dying agonies of the damned. To Tshaka it was the very sound of coming victory.¹

As top executives, we can learn a great deal about planned change, strategic management, decision-making styles and problem-solving, from the rise of the Zulu nation. On the eve of the revolution, Shaka and his senior councillors had to identify the problem and the internal and external environmental factors in Nguniland...²

Against this backdrop
with the sun
an open fire
we rallied
on the steps
of the ceramics factory
blazed our rage
about Soweto
our deserts -
yet to be irrigated
our Shakas -
yet to be resurrected
and our victories
soon to be celebrated!³

In the first of these vividly different extracts, a South African historical novelist draws on a hundred and thirty years' accumulation of condemnatory rhetoric, and on a European stereotype of African monstrosity going back at least as far as Pliny, juxtaposing a bloodlusting Zulu devil with her squeaky-clean British naval hero. In the second extract, a black Zimbabwean academic and bureaucrat sets up a tough but impeccably organised, nation-building Shaka as a model for the local Institution of Engineers to follow in forging an "organisational culture". And in the third, a white African National Congress activist (ironically, given the widespread hostility between the Zulus and the ANC in 1990s politics) appropriates Shaka to a trans-ethnic symbolism of revolutionary victory over apartheid rule.

Nothing is more frightening than the culture of institutionalised and endemic violence out of which such views have grown. Elizabeth Paris Watt's novel projects the unacknowledged violence of white rule in South Africa: its pages are saturated with mingled fascination and disgust with "torrents of blood", the fear of black resurgence barely masked by the confident verbiage of a Christian self-righteousness. Dr David Chanaiwa's lecture, by contrast, tries to transcend the imputation of Zulu violence, not by denying it, but by assimilating the usual icons of Shaka's militarism (the invention of the stabbing-spear, the regimental system) to a justificatory ideal of organised nationhood. Here, a pragmatic kind of violence is sanitised by the bureaucrat's rhetoric of "behavioural control systems", "centralised remuneration", and "human resources planning". Barry Feinberg's vision, like Watt's, revels in rather than masks violence. But, like Chanaiwa, he also justifies it: Feinberg's sanctification is the ANC's "people's cause" (15). Compare this with the report that some Zulu chiefs in 1990 called for the "liquidation" of ANC youth elements because they were "making King Shaka's land dirty", and displaying "constant disloyalty to the memory of Shaka and Dingaan".⁴

The ironies of these interlocking, often contradictory depictions are many, and often tragic. Violent rhetoric does not remain merely abstract: we have to acknowledge "the power of various presumptive fictions of reformation or of reprisal that, put into action, can turn any civil community of learning into a theatre of cruelties".⁵ Kwazulu-Natal has in recent years been such a theatre, and at no time has reexamination of the links between representation and action been more vital. In my own work (which I can only summarise in this article), I have isolated what seems to me a distinct lineage, a relatively self-contained genealogy of white men and women's writing on Shaka from which the popularly accepted story has emerged. The cohesion of this genealogy is in large part the product of a core of almost incestuously close friends. For instance, A.T. Bryant was friends with, and drew material from, the early twentieth-century Natal administrator James Stuart, to whom Rider Haggard's Shaka novel Nada the Lily (1892) had been dedicated. James Stuart's brother, Philip, was inspired to produce his own bundle of Shaka horror stories in An African Attila (1927). James Stuart also edited Fynn's so-called "diary" (1950), and his co-editor, Daniel Malcolm, was nominated "attorney and agent" by Bryant for the latter's later works. Finally, James's nephew, Huntly Stuart, produced his own Shaka play (1981) starring Henry Cele, who later acted Shaka in the notoriously inaccurate but widely viewed 1986 television series Shaka Zulu. So it is hardly surprising that a certain commonality of attitude should persist over this period. There are also much deeper reasons, both long predating actual European incursions into southern Africa and closely aligned with the evolving political psychology of the broader hegemony of white imperial power. That psychology is in crucial respects out of touch with political realities, and the Shaka story, I would argue, is largely a self-sustaining myth supporting and expressing the most conservative, self-blinding aspects of that hegemony.

It could also be argued that this genealogy is stable simply because the facts are indisputable. But they are not: their disputable nature has merely been suppressed. In fact, the portrait of Shaka has largely been constructed in defiance of any valid historical evidence. White writers' treatment of the "facts", disputable or not, has rather functioned to reflect, and to cope with, underlying social and psychological attitudes and fears: put simplistically, the blinkered but often ambivalent defensiveness of the subliminally defensive conqueror.

This aspect of the literature is far more important, interesting, and dangerous, than the question of its putative fidelity to what "really" happened. In its language-use, its plot-lines, its generic boundaries, its ideological import, in short its social-psychological meaning, this lineage retains a remarkable consistency over one hundred and fifty years precisely because such attitudes have been everywhere sedulously preserved by a panoply of white supremacist structures both mental and pragmatic.

In examining the literature, I have tended to follow Nietzsche's dictum that "an isolated judgement is never 'true': only in the connection and relation of many judgements is there any surety". I have drawn eclectically on recent postcolonial and social-psychological theory, viewing historiography and fiction (as well as less central poems and dramas) as forms of cultural self-knowledge, as attitudes, as tools and icons of identity. These genres are themselves constitutive and reflective of a particular moral order and authority, existing fundamentally as "formal pacts made between the writer and society for the justification of the former and the serenity of the latter".⁶ "History" and "fiction", in their fluid interchange in the Shakan literature, become questionable distinctions. The case of E. A. Ritter's Shaka Zulu is a case in point.⁷

Shaka is nothing if not - or nothing other than - a textual construct, and textuality has a way of attaining an authority of its own which is unthinkingly followed and repeated despite historical changes or the surfacing of contrary evidence. If this happens for long enough, and strongly enough, the subject may be termed a "myth".

Though much-abused and loosely-applied, the concept of myth is nevertheless a vital one in dealing with literature in which so much material is drawn not from empirical evidence but from other reaches of the imagination - the legendary, the fictional, the poetic. I have been concerned with two definitions of the word "myth". The first is the common one of a story inherited from a more "primeval" past, what was once a possibly credible explanation of the cosmos now fossilised into an almost unregistered facet of a culture's thought-patterns. This is what the symbolic anthropologist, Roy Wagner, might call a "core metaphor" with a propensity to become a "structuring frame".

One such startlingly common structuring frame is the myth of Paradise, which inflects historical explanations of the Shaka phenomenon throughout the literature.⁸ What begins as a mere metaphor of comparison ends with historians being unable to understand Shaka's reign as anything other than the disruption of an original idyll by a Satanic marauder.

A second definition of myth is closer to Roland Barthes' conception of modern myth as a kind of textual screen for bourgeois power structures, as an "empty, parasitical form", growing out of history but necessarily incomplete, accepted as truth but effectively divorced from the contingency of events: "When it becomes form, the meaning leaves its contingency behind; it empties itself, it becomes impoverished, history evaporates, only the letter remains".¹⁰ Myth retains sufficient correlation with "what-happens" to continually reconfirm itself - "its function is to distort, not to make disappear".¹⁰ Essentially, myth is a value, a social-psychological paradigm catering for a particular anxiety in society which, in Northrop Frye's words, "when it urges the authority of a myth and the necessity of believing it, seems to be less to proclaim its truth than to prevent anyone from questioning it".¹¹

Drawing on these perspectives, I have made a start in addressing three main areas of neglect consequent on this refusal to question. The first area is historiographical. Neither the lives and predilections of the Zulu historians, from eyewitness Nathaniel Isaacs to doyen Leonard Thompson, nor the effects of their personal and societal biases, have been treated seriously. Despite, or because of, the popularity of Shaka as a cultural icon, historical accounts of the early Zulu have been both naive and largely overshadowed by the well-documented glamour of the Anglo-Zulu war of 1879. In the nineteenth century, accounts of Shaka were openly intended as ammunition for the hegemonic requirements of colonial settlement and government, as background to missionary autobiographies, or as merely ancillary introductions to early travelogues and amateur ethnographies.

All worked in concert to inform colonial administrators and settler attitudes, and all drew incestuously on a remarkably small pool of information, especially the two (then) known eyewitness accounts by Isaacs and Fynn. Subsequently, distillations of these earliest accounts were almost invariably included merely as a prelude to more substantial narratives: accounts of the 1879 war or 1906 rebellion; general histories of the Zulu or of colonial settlement; and numerous broad synthesising histories of South Africa, from Theal (1892) and Cory (1913) through to T R H Davenport (1977, 1991) and Leonard Thompson (1990).

Only a single, unsatisfactory, now methodologically outdated monograph on pre-Cetshwayo Zulu history has so far been published (Omer-Cooper 1966). Scholarly biographies of Shaka, Dingane, and Mpande remain unwritten. Paradoxically, perfunctory treatment has gone hand in hand with extravagant claims for the importance of Shaka's endeavours to sub-continental history.

A second area of neglect is in stylistic and narratological studies of both fictional and historical texts. South African historian Chris Saunders' local forays in this direction have not touched the sphere of the early Zulu. There has until recently been no detailed analyses of any kind of the eye-witness accounts of Shaka. No such studies have been published on the missionary writers, A. T. Bryant or E. A. Ritter, let alone on the minor historiographical accounts. Similarly, studies of the fictions, which conform unvaryingly to the "popular", romance/adventure mode (as well as poetry and plays about Shaka) are, if anything, even more scarce than commentaries on the histories. Yet it is now widely recognised, especially in the works of Hayden White and Michel de Certeau, that both historiographies and social identities of all kinds are fundamentally founded on narratological models.

Finally, nothing to my knowledge has been done to assess the social-psychological meanings of either fictional or historiographical accounts of the Zulu for the society that produced them. This is despite the growing body of scholarship in other areas taking either rhetorical or psychological approaches to the textualities of both imperial enterprise and Western intellectual disciplines. Here I have taken cues variously from the studies of imperial representations. These include Philip Curtin on West Africa (1965), Christopher Miller (1985) on Francophone Africanism, and Edward Said (1971) on Orientalism. The rhetorics-sensitive self-examination of the anthropology of James Clifford, Clifford Geertz, the Comaroffs and others has been particularly energising, as have psychologically-oriented interventions ranging from Albert Memmi and Frantz Fanon to Homi Bhabha.

Broader theorisations of social psychology also jostle for attention; there is neither space nor need to deal with these in detail here. Suffice it to say that I have found of particular usefulness J V Wertsch's marriage of the literary criticism of Mikhail Bakhtin with the social psychology of Vygtosky. I have been repeating to myself, as a kind of talisman, Bakhtin's recognition that "there is no neutral utterance".¹²

If there is one key-word on which my approach is centred, it is "identity". My primary interest is in the complex and many-layered ways in which the image of Shaka has been used by white writers to bolster their peculiarly situated sense of identity. Creating such an identity over time involves a continual tension between the impress of immediate "situatedness", and the stability of accepted "tradition" in ways of thinking, perceiving, and writing. It is a process at once ordinary and mystifying.¹³ As early as the 1960s, Bruno Bettelheim noted ways, then poorly studied, in which prejudice operates both "as a defense against identity diffusion or total loss of identity", and as a form of psychological projection.¹⁴ As R. D. Laing puts it: "The invention of Them creates Us, and We may require to invent Them to reinvent Ourselves".¹⁵ The Shakan story is a study in the process of such continuous reinvention.

To outline these areas of neglect is not to impugn the substantial, though still patchy, scholarship of the last decade. Interest in Shaka and the Zulu exploded after Julian Cobbing's ground-breaking article in the Journal of African History (1988). However, the belated publication of the proceedings of a major 1991 conference as The 'Mfecane' Aftermath,¹⁶ appears paradoxically to have suppressed the debate rather than energised it. John Wright's excellent PhD work remains largely unutilised. The publication of the James Stuart Archive of Zulu oral histories, though partially used by Stephen Taylor in his journalistic Shaka's Children (1995), has come to a halt since the death of Wright's co-editor Colin Webb. Current versions of the Shaka story, such as that in John Laband's Rope of Sand (1996), remain riddled with legends such as that of the so-called Battle of Qokli Hill, which simply never happened.

In the wake of kwaZulu's intense civil war, and in the light of recent Zulu claims to independent territory based on alleged pre-colonial (i.e. Shakan) "boundaries", it is astonishing and dangerous that more scholars are not engaged with this area, which is certainly now the most exciting, problematic and politically charged field in southern African historiography.

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