Reply #52: Strangest interpretation of the Zulu expansion: It never happened [View All]

That's a bit of an overstatement, but in the late 80s an historian, Julian Cobbing, went back to the original sources. He found that most of the sourcing for the idea that the Zulus went on a conquest rampage that set in motion famines, migrations and secondary wars -- the mfecane -- was based on the work of a somewhat racist colonial historian of the early 1900s named George McCall Theal.

Cobbing then discovered that contrary to what almost every professional historian had believed up until then, the Atlantic slave trade had affected South Africa. It had always been assumed that it came down the west coast as far as Angola and then skipped the already colonized Cape and picked up again in Mozambique. Cobbing and later others found extensive slave raiding from Europeans at the Cape up into not yet colonized Free State and Transvaal, a big slave trade from the Portuguese settlement at Delagoa Bay into the Transvaal. He proposed that the devastation in the interior of South Africa that missionaries and explorers found between 1790 and 1830 was caused as much by British, Dutch and Portuguese slave raiding as by Zulu expansion, and that the Zulu kingdom may have been a defensive kingdom trying to prevent the effects of slavers.

The consensus has swung back to significant Zulu agency, but despite a century of professional work on the area, it remains surpisingly murky.

Anyway, it's a great topic but difficult to generalize about given the state of research.