Hi Leendert,
I would like to debate a bit with several aspects of your post responding to Thami Madinane.
On history, you and others interested in the Xhosa cattle-killing should look to the works of Jeff Peires. His book, The Dead Will Arise (Ravan in S.A., Currey in U.K., U. Indiana in U.S., 1989) tells the story of the event & its aftermath itself; his earlier book The House of Phalo provides background on Xhosa history and culture, as well as on the effects of interactions with white colonizers (directly for close to a century, indirectly for longer) on Xhosa society. For those who want the short version, Peires published two articles on the event in the Journal of African History vols 27 #3 & 28 #1, 1986/87.
In those works, Peires makes two arguments relevant to this discussion. One is that the cattle-killing beliefs were not "traditional" in the sense you are using it, where there is a stark opposition between the traditional and the modern, nor were they an irrational reaction against modernity, science etc. Instead, he argues that the cattle-killing beliefs combined idioms drawn from indigenous culture and Christianity. They linked the relation of spiritual pollution and evil-doing to bad things happening in the community /nation /world, leading to a need for purification through sacrifice, with other idioms they adopted and transmuted from interactions with Christian missionaries, particularly that of resurrection of the dead (Nongqawuse's uncle was not only a "priest diviner" but had lived for several years in the household of Archdeacon Merriman of the Anglican church, and preached a version of Christianity, leaving when he realized that Merriman was incapable of respecting his ideas and beliefs). Peires shows that the beliefs were rational in the sense of internally consistent given certain assumptions about the way the world works, which is all "science" can claim too, as we understand better after the fall of Newtonian science. One might argue that modern science builds an orientation to testing assumptions into itself, testing being both empirical and theoretical. But I take it that part of your view would be that "science" is rather too self-congratulatory on that point (as Kuhn's argument in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions would suggest), so that scientific conventional wisdom becomes very persistent. Conversely, "traditional" medicines around the world tend to be highly empirical, in the sense that people do what seems to work. In that light, the cattle-killing was not "suicidal" at all. The Xhosa did not intend to destroy themselves, but the contrary, to save themselves. They were just wrong in thinking the chosen method would work, on the basis that smaller-scale applications of the same principles worked well enough. There are lessons here for industrial societies and their sciences which may be equally or more relevant than the comparisons to Khomeini (whose successors have no problem combining fundamentalist Islam with high-tech oil engineering) & Pol Pot (who after all is a "scientific socialist").
Peires' second major point supports Thami's reply to you, in a broad way. It is simply this: that the meaning (in the sense of social consequences) of the cattle-killing did not lie so much in the beliefs and conditions which caused it, or even in the deaths of the animals and burning of crops themselves, as in the advantage which the British Governor of the Cape Colony, Sir George Grey, took of the disaster. He makes what I find to be a persuasive argument that Grey used the destitution which resulted to on the one hand drive tens of thousands of Xhosa into labor for white farmers in the Eastern Cape, and on the other hand, to seize large areas of land for white "ownership." In a broad way this might be compatible with your argument about reactions against the "tyranny of science", since one justification colonialists all across the European diaspora used for dispossessing indigenous peoples was a claim that they would use the land "better" i.e. more scientifically, rationally, efficiently, productively etc. We are of course learning (although also hiding from) the ecological limits to such claims. But their social limits have been even more obvious for a long time to those who would see. The "scientific" prescriptions of the economists preaching "structural adjustment" to Africans are just the latest round of such ideological uses of an aura of scientific authority. A point which I think Thami is getting at which you seem to miss is that the problem isn't science but the claim of authority and in whose interest it is made. Apartheid was justified in terms of "scientific" ethnology and in terms of (heretical variants of) Calvinist theology; either would do. And it was the perversion of education to the ends of domination which made plausible a slogan suggesting that liberation and education were alternatives; the fault for that must lie with the old S.A. government.
Finally, if you will permit me an observation, which I don't mean in a bad spirit, because I don't think your comments are offered in a bad spirit. Nonetheless, I think that it needs to be said. Part of the problem you need to face is that a key feature of apartheid was some people (white Afrikaners & Anglos) telling other people (Africans) what their own "real" traditional culture was and who their own "real" traditonal leaders were. You seem to be at some risk of continuing the mistake & of failing to recognized that even "traditional" cultures always debate internally. Claims to any single "traditional" point of view are always power claims.
This is too long; will take up the "mfecane" on a separate post.
Sala kahle,
Chris Lowe <chris.lowe@reed.edu>
Hi Leendert,
Here is part two. You wrote:
In the North, Chaka had united the Zulu tribes and, according to current opinion, probably due mostly to population pressures, launched (in the 1820's) the Difaqane (Mfecane), a war of extermination that destroyed most of the Northern half of the present day South Africa, and initiated large scale migrations.
Actually, "current opinion" among professional historians (itself a scientistic authority claim of which we all ought to be aware) is that the story you have just relayed is a gross exaggeration. In particular, the idea that the wars of the 1810s - 1840s "destroyed most of the Northern half of the present day South Africa" would be almost universally rejected. It is a view rooted in the justifications of white colonists for taking African land, by claiming it was "empty" when whites came. But take for instance old Natal (the part between the Thukela & the Mzimkhulu rivers). The most extreme claims for depopulation in the white-produced historical documents, e.g. those by Henry Francis Fynn, would say that the African population was reduced to ca. 12,000. The maximum population of immigrant Voortrekkers was about 6000.
Why is land with 12,000 Africans "destroyed" or "empty," but counts as filled by half as many whites? But in any case research by John Wright of the University of Natal shows that shows that claims of the sort made by Fynn were self-serving distortions.
The question of the cause of "the mfecane /difaqane" has also moved on a lot. Julian Cobbing has shown convincingly that the term "mfecane" is a latter-day invention, the spurious African-soundingness of which lends it a false aura of authenticity. Less convincingly, he has tried to argue that the phenomena it labels did not really exist. If anyone is interested, I can give them cites about these debates. A good place to start is Elizabeth Eldredge's article "Sources of Conflict in Southern Africa, c. 1800-1830: the 'Mfecane' Reconsidered, Journal of African History 33 (1992), 1-35. But even Cobbing's critics agree (in varying degrees) that he is right to point to the influence of expanding markets for slaves, ivory & other goods, and at the intrusion of Cape-linked settler communities, in causing wars, disruptions and state-formations. Where they disagree is with his attempts to deny causes internal to African societies. (This attempt to place all the "blame" on whites winds up denying African agency in a very paternalistic way; on the other hand, it is a response to uncritical, ostensibly pro-African nationalist celebration of any form of state-formation as inherently progressive).
This sort of historical myth-making ties back to the Xhosa cattle-killing and tradition vs. science in an interesting way. Jeff Peires wrote a third article, published in Radical History Review in 1990 and then in a book called History from South Africa, ed. Josh Brown et.al., (Temple, 1991 - I think there's an S.A. publisher too, but am not sure). In it, he criticizes his own earlier work, of "scientific" history. It seems that when he told Xhosa friends about his theories and explanations, they tended to stick to the view that Sir George Grey, the Cape Governor, conspired to dupe Nongqawuse. Peires says that this is factually false, but in effect morally true, because it was Grey's responses to the cattle-killing which made is so devastatingly destructive. He argues that the Xhosa oral tradition effectively preserves the essential truth of the meaning of the event, making his own efforts to write "people's history" opposed to the official version redundant, as well as paternalistic. My personal view is that he undervalues his work with respect to other audiences who have been taught various distortions in school. But the larger point with respect to "scientific knowledge" and African "traditional knowledge" is that evaluating their quality very much depends on ends. "Science" in its modern sense serves some ends and hurts others; in itself it cannot tell us whether those ends are good or bad, desirable or undesirable. Values from other sources do that.
And of course, in its "traditional" (i.e. pre-1850 or so) English-language sense, African traditional knowledge is a "science", which used to just mean a "way of knowing". The question is, what do we want to know? My own preference would not be to write off any huge category of human experience ("African" or "Western", "scientific" or "traditional") ahead of time.
Cheers,
Chris Lowe <chris.lowe@reed.edu>
Chris:
Here is part two. You wrote:In the North, Chaka had united the Zulu tribes and, according to current opinion, probably due mostly to population preasures, launched (in the 1820's) the Difaqane (Mfecane), a war of extermination that destroyed most of the Northern half of the present day South Africa, and initiated large scale migrations.Actually, "current opinion" among professional historians (itself a scientistic authority claim of which we all ought to be aware)
Perfectly true - but the phrase emphasises the provisional, and always tentative, nature of scientific knowledge by using the word "current". It lays no claim to certainty.
is that the story you have just relayed is a gross exaggeration. In particular, the idea that the wars of the 1810s - 1840s "destroyed most of the Northern half of the present day South Africa" would be almost universally rejected.
As I have pointed out, my summary is rather more mild in this claim than the text that it summarises. I also get the impression that your phrasing in "almost universally rejected" implies concurrence among historians on this point that masks a much hotter debate than you imply - see below.
It is a view rooted in the justifications of white colonists for taking African land, by claiming it was "empty" when whites came.You might, at least, recognise that I did not make this claim :-)
I deliberately avoided doing so.
But take for instance old Natal (the part between the Thukela & the Mzimkhulu rivers). The most extreme claims for depopulation in the white-produced historical documents, e.g. those by Henry Francis Fynn, would say that the African population was reduced to ca. 12,000. The maximum population of immigrant Voortrekkers was about 6000. Why is land with 12,000 Africans "destroyed" or "empty," but counts as filled by half as many whites? But in any case research by John Wright of the University of Natal shows that shows that claims of the sort made by Fynn were self-serving distortions.
An interesting point is that, although the Voortrekkers moved to this part of Natal partly as a result of reports that it was depopulated, they clearly recognised that it was not ownerless. There is no other explanation for making the treaty they did with Dingane in order to settle on it.
PLEASE NOTE: I make no claims about their actions or motivations, other than that they explicitly recognised that the land was not ownerless and free for the taking. (One clearly has to spend much energy making one's statements flame-retardent here :-)
The question of the cause of "the mfecane /difaqane" has also moved on a lot. Julian Cobbing has shown convincingly that the term "mfecane" is a latter-day invention, the spurious African-soundingness of which lends it a false aura of authenticity. Less convincingly, he has tried to argue that the phenomena it labels did not really exist. If anyone is interested, I can give them cites about these debates. A good place to start is Elizabeth Eldredge's article "Sources of Conflict in Southern Africa, c. 1800-1830: the 'Mfecane' Reconsidered, _Journal of African History_ 33 (1992), 1-35. But even Cobbing's critics agree (in varying degrees) that he is right to point to the influence of expanding markets for slaves, ivory & other goods, and at the intrusion of Cape-linked settler communities, in causing wars, disruptions and state-formations.
Yes Edgecombe mentioned these, but came to the conclusion that the major factor probably was population preasure.
Where they disagree is with his attempts to deny causes internal to African societies. (This attempt to place all the "blame" on whites winds up denying African agency in a very paternalistic way; on the other hand, it is a response to uncritical, ostensibly pro-African nationalist celebration of any form of state-formation as inherently progressive).
I called the author of my source (Ruth Edgecombe) to see if she has changed her story. She has, but not much. She says that, at the time of writing the article for Cameron & Spies, she had read about three versions of Cobbing's article, but had not been convinced. In her words, the debate is still very hot, but the general idea seems to be that Cobbing had "dented" the idea of the Difaqane, but not destroyed it. This agrees, I think, with what you are saying. In any event, I shall get hold of the references you give, and Dr Edgecombe promised to mail me some recent overviews of the debate by Wright.
I am particularly interested to see what the effect is on the explanations for phenomena such as the arrival of the Mfengu in the Eastern Cape, the maKwena in the Northern Cape, and other groups of migrants as far away a central Africa, I believe.
This sort of historical myth-making ties back to the Xhosa cattle-killing and tradition vs. science in an interesting way. Jeff Peires wrote a third article, published in _Radical History Review_ in 1990 and then in a book called _History from South Africa_, ed. Josh Brown et.al., (Temple, 1991 - I think there's an S.A. publisher too, but am not sure). In it, he criticizes his own earlier work, of "scientific" history. It seems that when he told Xhosa friends about his theories and explanations, they tended to stick to the view that Sir George Grey, the Cape Governor, conspired to dupe Nongqawuse. Peires says that this is factually false, but in effect morally true, because it was Grey's responses to the cattle-killing which made is so devastatingly destructive. He argues that the Xhosa oral tradition effectively preserves the essential truth of the meaning of the event, making his own efforts to write "people's history" opposed to the official version redundant, as well as paternalistic.
This is why, in my view, the idea of nation building in the NSA has not much chance of success unless we can negotiate a common meaning to at least a major part of our history. (And that is not just common among Black and White.)
My personal view is that he undervalues his work with respect to other audiences who have been taught various distortions in school.
I can't blame my ideas on the Difaqane on school - never did it there, nor did I in three years of history at university (not this one :-)
But the larger point with respect to "scientific knowledge" and African "traditional knowledge" is that evaluating their quality very much depends on ends.
True. But we cannot extend this to the point where we invert the chain of causality - at least not deliberately.
"Science" in its modern sense serves some ends and hurts others; in itself it cannot tell us whether those ends are good or bad, desirable or undesirable. Values from other sources do that.
Thank you. This is a much more elegant formulation than my attempt to say the same thing in another post.
And of course, in its "traditional" (i.e. pre-1850 or so) English-language sense, African traditional knowledge _is_ a "science", which used to just mean a "way of knowing". The question is, what do we want to know? My own preference would not be to write off any huge category of human experience ("African" or "Western", "scientific" or "traditional") ahead of time.
To me it is more than a preference. I am convinced that cultural diversity, and diverse modes of knowing, thinking and being are as essential to human survival as ecological diversity is to the survival of the biosphere. The problem is that such a position has certain parallels in apartheid principles, which makes it very dangerous to hold such opinions if one aspires to PC purity - in the NSA at least :-)
Regards, Leendert
Kind regards,
Leendert van Oostrum
UNIVERSITY OF PRETORIA
(Which does not necessarily endorse opinions experessed here)
Telephone: 27-12-4203656
Fax: 27-12-432863
e-mail oostrum@scinet.up.ac.za
Chris Lowe:
I would like to debate a bit with several aspects of your post responding to Thami Madinane.
Thanks, I regard that as a compliment :-)
Thank you very much for the valuable references, which I shall certainly look up.
On history, you and others interested in the Xhosa cattle-killing should look to the works of Jeff Peires. His book, The Dead Will Arise (Ravan in S.A., Currey in U.K., U. Indiana in U.S., 1989) tells the story of the event & its aftermath itself; his earlier book The House of Phalo provides background on Xhosa history and culture, as well as on the effects of interactions with white colonizers (directly for close to a century, indirectly for longer) on Xhosa society. For those who want the short version, Peires published two articles on the event in the Journal of African History vols 27 #3 & 28 #1, 1986/87.
The source I used, Ruth Edgecombe, is not as recent (1986) as some of yours, but she does cite the ealier work of Peires (The House of Phalo).
In those works, Peires makes two arguments relevant to this discussion. One is that the cattle-killing beliefs were not "traditional" in the sense you are using it, where there is a stark opposition between the traditional and the modern,
Chris, I have not contrasted the traditional with the modern. I contrasted it with prescriptive, positivist views of the role of science. The latter is, indeed, not "modern" at all - that is what the term "post-modern" implies, I think.
nor were they an irrational reaction against modernity, science etc.
I think there is a useful distinction to be made between "irrational" and "non-rational" in this context.
Instead, he argues that the cattle-killing beliefs combined idioms drawn from indigenous culture and Christianity. They linked the relation of spiritual pollution and evil-doing to bad things happening in the community /nation /world, leading to a need for purification through sacrifice, with other idioms they adopted and transmuted from interactions with Christian missionaries, particularly that of resurrection of the dead. (Nongqawuse's uncle was not only a "priest diviner" but had lived for several years in the household of Archdeacon Merriman of the Anglican church, and preached a version of Christianity, leaving when he realized that Merriman was incapable of respecting his ideas and beliefs).
The kind of fusion between cultures that you hint at here, including between "traditional" and "science-based" cultures is, in my opinion natural, provided people have the option to accept or reject "new" customs without being called intellectual suicides.
Peires shows that the beliefs were rational in the sense of internally consistent given certain assumptions about the way the world works, which is all "science" can claim too, as we understand better after the fall of Newtonian science. One might argue that modern science builds an orientation to testing assumptions into itself, testing being both empirical and theoretical. But I take it that part of your view would be that "science" is rather too self-congratulatory on that point (as Kuhn's argument in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions would suggest), so that scientific conventional wisdom becomes very persistent. Conversely, "traditional" medicines around the world tend to be highly empirical, in the sense that people do what seems to work. In that light, the cattle-killing was not "suicidal" at all. The Xhosa did not intend to destroy themselves, but the contrary, to save themselves. They were just wrong in thinking the chosen method would work, on the basis that smaller-scale applications of the same principles worked well enough.
This is good stuff. It was Popper who described scientific thought as nothing but "ordinary human thought writ large". By the "writ large" he simply means that science builds in some controls to ensure that the "thinking" itself is not at fault. While this includes stuff like making sure to use the best available data, etc, it means that science itself can say nothing about it's own conclusions, other than that the are arived at by a process that can be checked by someone else.
There are lessons here for industrial societies and their sciences which may be equally or more relevant than the comparisons to Khomeini (whose successors have no problem combining fundamentalist Islam with high-tech oil engineering) & Pol Pot (who after all is a "scientific socialist").
Doesn't Thami claim to be one as well?
Peires' second major point supports Thami's reply to you, in a broad way. It is simply this: that the meaning (in the sense of social consequences) of the cattle-killing did not lie so much in the beliefs and conditions which caused it, or even in the deaths of the animals and burning of crops themselves, as in the advantage which the British Governor of the Cape Colony, Sir George Grey, took of the disaster. He makes what I find to be a persuasive argument that Grey used the destitution which resulted to on the one hand drive tens of thousands of Xhosa into labor for white farmers in the Eastern Cape, and on the other hand, to seize large areas of land for white "ownership."
And replaced traditional structures of government (chieftancies, etc) with magistrates - this very same aspect is a major point of contention in South Africa at the moment, which some argue may be a fundamental cause of thousands of deaths in "political violence" every year.
In a broad way this might be compatible with your argument about reactions against the "tyranny of science", since one justification colonialists all across the European diaspora used for dispossessing indigenous peoples was a claim that they would use the land "better" i.e. more scientifically, rationally, efficiently, productively etc. We are of course learning (although also hiding from) the ecological limits to such claims. But their social limits have been even more obvious for a long time to those who would see. The "scientific" prescriptions of the economists preaching "structural adjustment" to Africans are just the latest round of such ideological uses of an aura of scientific authority.
Thanks. I don't know enough about the dreaded SAPS to comment, but I agree with your argument.
A point which I think Thami is getting at which you seem to miss is that the problem isn't science but the claim of authority
I feel rather discouraged by this - that you got the impression that I had missed this. It is really the only point I have been trying to get across. I thought I had been consistent in pointing out that those who use or practise science (as I do, within my own limitations :- ) must recognise the limits of the authority of science.
and in whose interest it is made. Apartheid was justified in terms of "scientific" ethnology and in terms of (heretical variants of) Calvinist theology; either would do.
But I recognised this implictly as well as explicitly, as I try to prove by quoting myself in my response to Thami.
And it was the perversion of education to the ends of domination which made plausible a slogan suggesting that liberation and education were alternatives; the fault for that must lie with the old S.A. government.
Yes. Which is the only reason why this example has any value in the the argument that I presented in my initial response to Thami's ode - and that is why I used it.
But also no. The concept that old structures must be completely destroyed before true socialism can be established is also inherent in the "science" of Marxist socialism. This incompatible dichotomy of "old versus "new" is considered an historical inevitability, and in politics the lines of battle are drawn by labelling those advocating "new" customs "enlightened", and everyone else "reactionary". (Did you notice this particular slip showing in Robert's last post?)
In this sence, "liberation before education" demands the complete destruction of structures that existed before liberation - and Wits university seems to be the current epitomy of that. This is the only explanation that makes sense to me, for the fact that classes are still being disrupted, buildings damaged, and hostages taken at, of all places, Wits and UWC (bastions of anti-apartheid activism for decades).
The implication is that the establishement of the dichotomy liberation vs education was not achieved by apartheid alone. The delimitation and conceptualisation seems to have been ably assisted by science - in the form of marxist instruments of social analysis. (Before I get flamed - I have found many of them useful for understanding some social - and individual - phenomena :-)
Finally, if you will permit me an observation, which I don't mean in a bad spirit, because I don't think your comments are offered in a bad spirit.
Is there a patronising note to this, Chris? :-)))))
Nonetheless, I think that it needs to be said. Part of the problem you need to face is that a key feature of apartheid was some people (white Afrikaners & Anglos) telling other people (Africans) what their own "real" traditional culture was and who their own "real" traditonal leaders were. You seem to be at some risk of continuing the mistake & of failing to recognized that even "traditional" cultures always debate internally. Claims to any single "traditional" point of view are always power claims. This is too long; will take up the "mfecane" on a separate post.
Me too. This last section demands a seperate post.
Regards, Leendert
Kind regards,
Leendert van Oostrum
UNIVERSITY OF PRETORIA
(Which does not necessarily endorse opinions experessed here)
Telephone: 27-12-4203656
Fax: 27-12-432863
e-mail oostrum@scinet.up.ac.za