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Backstory, Biography, and the Life of the James Stuart ArchiveCarolyn Hamilton

History in Africa, Volume 38, 2011, pp. 319-341 (Article)

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https://doi.org/10.1353/hia.2011.0015

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/468183

BACKSTORY, BIOGRAPHY, AND THE LIFE OF THEJAMES STUART ARCHIVE1

CAROLYN HAMILTONUNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN

I

Why explore the life of an archive, and what might it mean to study its“life” as opposed to writing its history? The proposition of an archive hav-ing a life is, on the face of it, counter-intuitive. Once safely cloistered in thearchive, we imagine that a record, an object or a collection is preserved rel-atively unchanged for posterity. Under those conditions does it even havean ongoing history worth investigating, let alone a life?

The efficacy of archives in affording researchers a view of a past, ourawareness of the incompleteness of the glimpse offered, our gratitude forthe historical accident or deliberate act that preserved the fragments onwhich we depend, and our understanding that particular records reflect thebiases and interests of their writers, all of these recognitions concentrateour attention on the status, possibilities and limitations of records assources. The historical disciplines have a range of sophisticated methodsfor mining these sources, of attending to their biases, reading them againstthe grain, and filling in the gaps. As historians, we acknowledge our debtsto the archives, or archival configurations which house these sources,thanking fulsomely the skilled professionals who facilitate our enquiries.

History in Africa 38 (2011), 319–341

1I am grateful to my colleagues and students in the Archive and Public Culture ResearchInitiative at the University of Cape Town (UCT) for the robust debates that have assistedin the formulation of this paper. Marjorie “Bobby” Eldridge kindly shared her researchnotes with me and undertook some extra enquiries on my behalf at the Killie CampbellLibrary. Megan Greenwood provided valuable research assistance in the final stages ofpreparation of the paper for publication. I am especially indebted to John Wright for overthirty years of research support and engagement.

320 Carolyn Hamilton

We rue failing institutional contexts when the conditions of preservationand care deteriorate, and where we can, we organize interventions to sup-port archives.2 Much of the disciplinary practice of history depends on ideasabout archives as neutral, professional storehouses, committed to holdingdeposited records as far as is possible unchanged over time. Indeed, this isthe understanding of archives that underpins the professional practice of thearchivists. Thankfully, professional archivists mostly do an outstanding jobin ensuring conditions of preservation.

But archives, are of course, themselves historical artifacts, with oftencomplex conditions of production. Readings and interpretations of a“source” can shift in significant ways when considered in the light of theconditions of production of the particular record, a methodological step sel-dom taken by historians until the interpretation of the record becomes amatter of debate. When the South African historian Julian Cobbing madehis “case against the mfecane,” he claimed that the notion of the Zulu kingShaka as the devastator of regions around the Zulu kingdom was part of anelaborate alibi constructed by white writers in an effort to obscure the dis-ruptive effects of their participation in a local slave trade.3 This interventionsparked off a host of studies that scrutinized closely the circumstances ofthe making of the written records of early visitors to the Zulu kingdom aswell as a debate about the status of the relevant recorded oral evidence.4

Even when undertaken, all too often enquiry into the making of anarchive finds a seemingly natural endpoint in the moment when the recordenters the archive. This essay considers the methodological imperatives andpotentials that underlie investigation of the conditions of production of arecord, and of the archive set-up in which it comes to be lodged, where con-ditions of production are understood to be ongoing over time. The essayputs forward the argument that the conditions of production of the archivalhousing and what happens to the record once in an archive, allows us tounderstand much about how the archival housing changes and frames arecord.2See for example Archives at the Crossroads: Open Report to the Minister of Arts andCulture from the Archival Conference “National System, Public Interest,” NationalArchives, the Nelson Mandela Foundation and the Constitution of Public Intellectual LifeResearch Project, South Africa, 2007; and The Archival Platform (www.archivalplat-form.org) fostered jointly by the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative, UCT,and the Nelson Mandela Foundation.3Julian Cobbing, “The Mfecane as Alibi. Thoughts on Dithakong and Mbolompo,” Jour-nal of African History 29 (1988), 487-519.4See, inter alia, Carolyn Hamilton, Terrific Majesty: The Powers of Shaka Zulu and theLimits of Historical Invention (Cambridge MA, 1998); Dan Wylie, Savage Delight:White Myths of Shaka (Pietermaritzburg, 2000).

Backstory, Biography, and the Life of the James Stuart Archive 321

My use in this essay of the terms “archival configuration,” “archival set-up,” and “archival housing” seeks to alert the reader to the variety of, andchanging, forms of archive, including, but not confined to: formal archivalinstitutions, such as the provincial Pietermaritzburg Archive Repository,formerly known as the Natal Archives Depot; institutions with an archivalaspect, such as the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s Killie Campbell AfricanaLibrary (books and manuscripts collected by the incunabulist, Killie Camp-bell); institutions termed “museums” (such as the Mashu Museum of Eth-nology, the collection of material culture and material culture images col-lected by Killie Campbell and housed in the old Campbell home, the samebuilding as the books and manuscripts of the Africana Library); and pub-lished archives, like the published volumes (1976-ongoing) of the papers ofJames Stuart held in manuscript form in the Killie Campbell AfricanaLibrary, and published under the title “The James Stuart Archive of Record-ed Oral Evidence Relating to the History of the Zulu and NeighbouringPeoples.”5

There are many stages in the life story of a single record, and in the lifestory of an archive. Elsewhere, in an effort to grapple with that story, and tograsp conceptually and analytically the changes that are involved, I havedeveloped two linked concepts, viz. backstory and biography.6 I offer here asummary account of the two concepts with particular reference to the largebody of James Stuart notes in their various archival settings.

In the case of the James Stuart notes, and the published version, TheJames Stuart Archive, the archival backstory concerns the period beforeStuart made his notes of the oral accounts given to him by a variety ofinhabitants of Natal and Zululand. It is the history of the material before itwas captured in writing by Stuart. What form did it take, where did thematerial come from, what shaped it over time, who was interested in it andwhy? This involves reconstructing who the interlocutor7 was, and how he or

5Colin Webb, and John B. Wright (eds.), The James Stuart Archive of Recorded OralEvidence Relating to the History of the Zulu and Neighbouring Peoples (henceforth JSA)(Pietermaritzburg, 1976-2001) (volume 6 in progress).6Carolyn Hamilton, The Life of the Archive, book manuscript in preparation.7What term, or terms, best describe the people whose ideas and stories were recorded byStuart remains an open question. In this essay I deploy a range of such terms (intervie-wee, interlocutor, informant and so on), seeking in each case to find the term that is thebest descriptive fit for the relationship and the encounter between the particular personengaged by Stuart, and Stuart. In the case of “interlocutor,” I pick up on the term favoredby Wright (this volume). Using similarly specific criteria I deploy a range of terms for theStuart documentation, variously “notes,” “papers,” “testimony,” “account,” “evidence,”“material,” etc.


she came by the material, the political and other factors that reshaped it overtime, and provided the motivation for its preservation and circulation in oralform. It involves the reconstruction of the circuit of its transmission, and itsmany changes and adventures in oral form. John Wright (this volume)undertakes the task of establishing the background of one of Stuart’s mostsignificant interlocutors, Ndukwana kaMbengwana, thus making an impor-tant contribution to the backstory of one the texts laid down by Stuart. AsStuart worked with Ndukwana in the period 1897-1903, the formative earlyphase of his recording career, and as Ndukwana was also present on manyoccasions when Stuart interviewed other people, Ndukwana is of specialinterest for anyone concerned to probe questions of authorship and signaturein the Stuart notes. In the case of Ndukwana, Wright, of necessity, dependsentirely on Stuart’s notes, and Ndukwana’s contribution recorded there, toestablish who Ndukwana was in the fullness of his own life, and how heconnected with Stuart. Elsewhere, I have undertaken a similar exercise inexploring other of Stuart’s interviewees.8 In the case of Baleka kaMpitikazi,interviewed in 1919, I likewise relied largely on Stuart’s notes, and theinformation about her background and that of her chief informant, herfather, which she provided to Stuart. In that instance I was able to enhanceand augment the information which she provided through its contextualisa-tion in political events that shaped her life and that of her father. Thisinvolved an acquaintance with relatively well-known details of Zulu succes-sion disputes, and my own primary research into the history of the Qwabeunder Shaka. In the case of Baleka, the backstory work begins with therecognition that her major informant was her father Mpitikazi , who had achequered existence under Shaka, narrowly escaping being put to death bythe Zulu king.9 Although Mpitikazi was raised in the Langeni home of hismother, herself a relative of the mother of Shaka, he was by birth Qwabe,and in his life was closely linked into Qwabe affairs. Mpitikazi knew first-hand the brutal repressive measures which Shaka used to suppress ongoingQwabe rebelliousness.10 In later years, Mpitikazi seems to have allied him-

8Hamilton, Terrific Majesty, 59-71.9Baleka’s testimony is published in JSA, volume 1. I rely on the published version andnote that praises given by the interviewee have been excluded in that version, as have cer-tain of Stuart’s notes.10For a detailed discussion of Qwabe incorporation into the Zulu kingdom see my “Chap-ter 3 – ‘The Great Reed of the Mhlathuze:’ An Analysis of Qwabe Incorporation into theZulu State and the Invention of the Malandela Tradition,” in: “Ideology, Oral Traditionsand the Struggle for Power in the Early Zulu Kingdom,” MA thesis, University of theWitwatersrand (1985).


self with Mbuyazi’s unsuccessful challenge to Cetshwayo’s claim to theZulu kingship, probably fleeing the Zulu kingdom when Mbuyazi’s follow-ers crossed into Natal. All of this context explains areas of thinness andthickness in the information provided by Mpitikazi to Baleka, and subse-quently taken down by Stuart. Mpitikazi’s knowledge of Shaka’s earlyyears is much richer than that of many other narrators documented by Stu-art, presumably because he grew up in the same family as Shaka. The pow-erful indictment of Shaka presented in this account, replete as it is withgruesome tales told to Baleka by her father about Shaka’s wanton cruelty, islikely to have its roots in Mpitikazi’s narrow escape at Shaka’s hands andthe Zulu king’s persecution of the Qwabe. While highly condemnatory ofShaka, the account neither suggested that Shaka was illegitimate, nor that hewas responsible for the death of his father, two claims often made by theking’s enemies. This is understandable when related to Mbuyazi’s claim tothe Zulu kingship, which depended on a line of succession traced throughShaka. Any negative claims made about these issues would have alienatedMpitikazi from his latter-day principal, Mbuyazi. Careful contextualisationof Mpitikazi’s life, using sources well beyond the notes of the discussionwith Baleka undertaken by Stuart, brings to the fore the political and otherfactors that, over time, gave shape to the account eventually given to Stuart,and provided the motivation for its preservation and circulation in oral form.

Major elements of backstory to the testimony of another of Stuart’s inter-viewees, Ndlovu kaThimuni, can be reconstructed off Ndlovu’s testimonyas set down by Stuart.11 From the recorded text we learn that Ndlovu owedhis historical knowledge to one Sipika, a man of the Mkhangela regiment ofthe then Zulu chief and father of Shaka, Senzangakhona, and to Ndlovu’sown father, Thimuni. Sipika was actively involved in the death of Senzan-gakhona and the accession of Shaka, while Thimuni, a member of the left-hand side of the Zulu royal family, was himself the son of one of the mainprotagonists in Shaka’s accession, viz. Mudli, chief advisor to Senzan-gakhona. Comparison of what Ndlovu recounted to Stuart, with what hisbrother, Mhuyi, another son of Thimuni, told Stuart, reveals that Ndlovu’saccount was much richer in historical detail. Unlike Ndlovu, Mhuyi neverlived in the Zulu kingdom, while Ndlovu was a chief of a section of the

11Ndlovu’s testimony is published in JSA, volume 4. I rely on the published version andnote that praises given by the interviewee have been excluded in that version, as have cer-tain of Stuart’s notes In the following section I draw on the discussion of NdlovukaThimuni which appears in my Terrific Majesty.


royal house, based in the Maphumulo area. Not only was Mhuyi not operat-ing actively in political contexts in which royal history was contested, butMhuyi had heard about the accession of Shaka only from his father Thimu-ni, who had been an infant at the time of Shaka’s accession. The combina-tion of analysis of the relative “thickness” of the two historical accountsrecorded by Stuart, and the different life circumstances of the two brothers,points to the probable conclusion that Ndlovu’s knowledge about Shaka wassignificantly shaped by his interaction with Sipika. What emerges clearlyfrom Ndlovu’s conversations with Stuart is that Ndlovu was active insearching out historical information from informed persons, sometimesmeeting despondency and a reluctance to consider the lost past in the newand increasingly burdensome conditions of Natal colonial politics.

We can take the matter of backstory further to consider whether politicalconsiderations operating in Ndlovu’s life prompted or encouraged him toclaim that Shaka was illegitimate. It seems not to be the case. Ndlovu was asupporter of Mkhungo, the only surviving son of the house of Mbuyazi, thehouse whose claim to the kingship connected directly to Shaka. Early in hisfirst conversation with Stuart Ndlovu was careful to establish Mbuyazi’sclaim to be the rightful heir of Shaka. Ndlovu’s alignment with Mkhungowould have placed some pressure on him to acknowledge Shaka’s claim tothe kingship. This he did by claiming that Shaka was indeed the son of theZulu leader, Senzangakhona, but was born “esihlahleni” – literally, in thebushes, in other words, outside of a recognized socially-sanctioned liaisonand setting for a birth. Ndlovu elaborated further on the circumstances ofthe birth saying that it was hidden from Senzangakhona at the time byNdlovu’s grandfather, Mudli. In this way Ndlovu accounted for lacunae inthe story of Shaka’s early years and positioned Mudli as responsible forShaka’s survival, even though Mudli later fell foul of Shaka. Ndlovu con-sidered Shaka to have been responsible for the death of his grandfather andwould have had a clear motivation to speak negatively about Shaka. But hedid not. A strong possibility exists that Ndlovu’s father, Thimuni, derivedhis information not so much from the family of Mudli, but from a staunchShakan supporter, the renowned royal intelligence operative, NongilaMabaso, whose many and varied involvements over time all aligned himwith factions that promoted a positive historical memory of Shaka.12 We

12See the testimony of Jantshi kaNongila, published in JSA, volume 1. I rely on the pub-lished version and note that praises given by the interviewee have been excluded in thatversion, as have certain of Stuart’s notes For analysis of the necessary backstory to therecorded narrative of Jantshi from which this information is derived, and for a reading ofthe testimonies of Ndlovu and Jantshi in tandem, see Hamilton, Terrific Majesty, 62-64.


find further reasons for Ndlovu’s relatively positive view of Shaka as wedelve deeper into the backstory.

Thimuni and his brother Sigwebana were obliged to flee the Zulu king-dom during the reign of Shaka’s successor, Dingane, when the new kingsought to kill them for failing to join forces with him against encroachingBoer farmers. This turn of events presumably set them against Dingane,who was linked to the assassination of Shaka. In practice enmity towardsDingane tended to mean support for the house of Shaka, at least in retro-spect. If Thimuni’s branch of the royal family opposed Shaka during his lifetime as a result of the murder of their influential kinsman, Mudli, events inthe 1830s seemed to have drawn them into alliance with others who werehistorically allied to Shaka. We should note at this point that the house ofMudli, Thimuni and Ndlovu, as a left-hand branch of the royal house, wasprecluded from laying claim to the kingship in its own right. Once settledsouth of the Thukela river, Thimuni was recognized by the Secretary forNative Affairs, Theophilus Shepstone, as a colonial chief, and graduallyentered the newly colonial world of Natal politics.

Within a few years of having his account first taken down by Stuart,Ndlovu led an uprising in the Maphumulo district where he was chief, asequel to the rebellion launched by Bambatha Zondi in 1906 against thecolonial government.13 Indeed, in his interviews with Stuart in 1902 and1903, Ndlovu had already expressed dissatisfaction with the existing systemof political authority and showed a sharp grasp of the realities of colonialpower. Although the role of the then Zulu monarch, Dinuzulu, in the rebel-lion is difficult to specify, and although Ndlovu formally denied acting onthe Zulu king’s instructions, there is no doubt that he saw his actions as sup-portive of Dinuzulu. Increasingly, over time, Ndlovu regarded himself asthe bearer of the tradition of Shaka, and after him, the royalist uSuthu whosupported the claims of Dinuzulu’s father, Cetshwayo, against those of thecolonially-recognized house of Hamu and Zibhebhu. Shula Marks identifiesin the rebellion these kinds of embryonic stirrings of Zulu nationalism.14 By1919, when Stuart again interviewed Ndlovu by then returned from impris-onment and banishment, that nationalism, focused around the figure ofShaka, was present in his narrative in a more clearly articulated way. “We

13For a detailed account of the role of Ndlovu in the Maphumulo rebellion, see Jeff Guy,The Maphumulo Uprising: War, Law and Ritual in the Zulu Rebellion (Pietermaritzburg,2005).14Shula Marks, Reluctant Rebellion: The 1906-8 Disturbances in Natal (Oxford, 1970),336-37.


Zulu, too, were as nothing to Dingiswayo; we feared him. Then Tshakareturned from his place, and we developed and became a people.”15

While much of the backstory provided thus far can be read off Stuart’snotes of his conversations with Ndlovu, we gain a further sense of Ndlovu,and his engagement with the past, from the account of his political activityas a chief in the Mapumulo district. Historian Jeff Guy follows closely hischoices and strategies in the uprising period, describing him and his allyMeseni kaMusi as “strong men in a tough situation, having to control theirpeople while retaining their loyalty, even as their authority was underminedby the colonial government. They had for years used their political skill todefend, not just their own positions, but also Zulu custom, rights and tradi-tions even as the jaws of colonial rule closed on them.”16 Guy also refers tothreats to Ndlovu on the eve of the uprising to the effect that the Zulu hadnot forgotten that it was his grandfather who had refused to support Dinganein his resistance to Boer encroachment.17 The rebellion was a time of invo-cation of a better past. Ndlovu’s voice emerges powerfully in the archivesbeyond the text recorded by Stuart, notably in the court records of theMapumulo uprising trials, where, Guy notes, he triumphed in his courtinterrogation, showing himself as a responsible leader and as adroit in argu-ment.

Investigation of backstory allows us to begin to see how many of thetexts recorded by Stuart were complex accounts produced by his intervie-wees, making carefully crafted arguments about the past and the present inwhich the interview or discussion with Stuart took place. In many instancesthe notes are recorded in the first person, i.e. the voice of the interlocutor.Close textual analysis combined with an understanding of the changing con-texts in which views of the past were discussed, reveals much about theepistemological frameworks, rhetorical conventions and evidentiary tacticsutilised by the speakers to shape their accounts. Extensive and detailed, theinterviews provide valuable material that can be used to answer questionsabout local logics and pressures on arguments and the limits of evidencemanipulation, questions that were not consciously addressed by either Stuartor his interlocutors at the time of their discussions. Because there are somany interviews, it is also possible to compare one person’s account of asubject with another’s, and through the comparison, to learn much about theconditions and circuits of knowledge transmission that prevailed before the

15JSA, volume 4, 227.16Guy, The Maphumulo Uprising, 3.17Guy, The Maphumulo Uprising, 55.


interview. Close and detailed research yields considerable backstory and thebackstory often demands, and offers the means for, reading the Stuart notesin fresh ways.

James Stuart recorded the accounts offered to him, not as the carefullycrafted intellectual and political interventions that backstory work revealsmany of them to be, but as potential sources for administrative decisions.They were to be the evidence for informed administration. Subsequent actsof preservation, archive and the application to them of western historio-graphical procedures and concepts, notably those which established the cat-egory “oral tradition,” and proposed a specific method for their interpreta-tion, underscored their new status as “sources.” Backstory allows us to recu-perate their character as oral disquisitions.

Backstory is a concept mobilized in relation to a particular record. It isentirely possible, and desirable, to write a history of the conditions and cir-cuits of knowledge transmission in oral forms that prevailed within commu-nities in the nineteenth-century in what is today KwaZulu-Natal, in its ownright. Such a history would only be considered as “backstory” at the point atwhich it is mobilized in order to facilitate the interpretation of a recordedoral text. The concept of backstory alerts us to the change involved when aview of the past is drawn into a particular preservatory script, in Stuart’scase what he termed his “well.”

My object is to collect native custom so universally and thoroughly as tobecome an authority on it and compare that with existing legislation etc., etc.All will then be bound to come to my well to drink. Such work was neverdone in any country.18

The biography of an archive, or a component of an archive, covers the peri-od from when material is first engaged with a view to it entering some formof recognized preservatory housing. There is often a grey area betweenbackstory and biography, centered on the acts of recording or collection,when active preservation is not necessarily on the horizon. However, manycollections are made with an eye to a possible archival future. Historicalresearchers have generally paid more attention to this aspect of the creationof records than any other. In this regard, The James Stuart Archive has beenthe subject of considerable interrogation. A fluent Zulu linguist, James Stu-

18This jotting in one of Stuart’s notebooks (1902) was utilized by the editors of the pub-lished Archive in the Introduction to volume 1 as a primary framing device for Stuart’svast documentary assemblage.


art was a native administrator in the southern African British colonies ofZululand and Natal between 1888 and 1910. Across this period and inter-mittently thereafter, well into the 1920s, he met with and interviewed per-sons whom he regarded as knowledgeable about the history of the Zulu andneighboring peoples. His self-conscious goal, or great “Idea,” as heexpressed it in the early years of his recording career, was to undertakeintensive research into local institutions and customs19 and to make theresearch the basis for the administration of the indigenous populations ofthe colonies. He recorded detailed statements from over two-hundred infor-mants, sometimes in English, sometimes in the Zulu language, and some-times in a mixture of both. He meticulously recorded the names of his inter-locutors and other persons present at the interviews, the dates and oftenlocations of the interviews, and distinguished in his notes between his com-mentaries and the accounts of his interviewees.

Significant debate exists among modern commentators about how far theStuart notes reflect his own views and how far those whom he consulted. Ihave addressed this question at length in the chapter on Stuart in my book,Terrific Majesty. The Stuart notes were mostly produced under colonialconditions by a colonial bureaucrat steeped in the culture of colonial admin-istration and record keeping. Anne Stoler has demonstrated the value ofundertaking an ethnography of colonial archives that allows us to come togrips with the culture of record keeping at work, what she terms “its textureand granularity.”20 While Stuart’s records were assembled outside of work-ing hours and the formal structures of his bureaucratic commitments, thereare many indications that he brought to bear many of the same workingmethods and culture of record making and keeping in pursuing his avoca-tion as in his professional life, and indeed, he considered the interviews tohave administrative value. Both the formal record-keeping practices of thecolonial bureaucracy and his own working methods are open to what Stolerdescribes as a reading along the archival grain. In the notes of his conversa-tion with Jantshi kaNongila, Stuart made something of these working meth-ods explicit. He termed the material given to him by Jantshi “evidence,” andafter recording the evidence undertook “cross-examination” of Jantshi.When the interview resumed the next day, Stuart headed his page of notes,“Jantshi still under cross-examination.” In this way Stuart brought to his

19See Hamilton, Terrific Majesty, chapter 4.20Anne Stoler, “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance: On the Content in theForm,” in: Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Michèle Pickover, Graeme Reid, RaziaSaleh, and Jane Taylor (eds.), Refiguring the Archive (Dordrecht/Cape Town, 2003), 92.


interviewing the legal language and approach of the colonial magistrates’courts in which he worked in the early part of his career. Indeed, in TerrificMajesty, I made the argument that Stuart undertook this immense recordingproject precisely in order to undergird the colonial bureaucratic processesinvolved in what was termed then Native Administration. There can be nodoubt that the topics discussed and the informants selected were determinedby Stuart’s agendas and those of his closest assistants, like Ndukwana kaM-bengwana. Take the case of the thirty-five pages of published text of thenotes of Stuart’s conversation with Ndlovu. By far and away the bulk of thetext concerns the birth, youth and accession of Shaka, a topic that we knowfrom Stuart’s own compositions that he, Stuart, had a consuming interestin.21 Again, it is my argument in Terrific Majesty that this interest in Shakawas rooted in the way in which Stuart, following the Secretary for NativeAffairs, Theophilus Shepstone, before him, sought in Shakan rule a modelfor native administration. Indeed, the other major topic discussed by Ndlovuand Stuart, along with Ndukwana and others present in the conversations,was contemporary Natal colonial politics and society, and more specifically,forms of administration of the Zulu-speaking inhabitants of the Colony,issues that motivated not only Stuart’s “great Idea,” but also Ndlovu’s rebel-lion.

There can be no doubt then, that Stuart’s notes include ideas and topicsthat were of shared interest to all involved, as well as those that his infor-mants elected of their own accord to pursue, some of which were withoutclear meaning or significance to Stuart at the time of recording. Indeed, inthe interview with Ndlovu, Stuart says as much. The topic being discussedwas the significance of the attachment of the name Lubololwenja to theZulu. “But for the stress laid on the above words in Zulu by Ndlovu, ”com-ments Stuart, “I would not have gone into the matter.”22 The backstoriesdiscussed above underscore this point. They reveal the interests and motiva-tions that Stuart’s interlocutors had, outside of the interview situation, in thehistory of Shaka.

The handwritten collection of James Stuart’s notes that is lodged in theKillie Campbell Africana Library is thus a complex product of a complexset of encounters. That complexity has methodological implications thatgenerations of scholars will yet wrestle with. The paper in this volume byJohn Wright on the conversations between James Stuart and Ndukwana

21See Stuart’s numerous unpublished texts (draft manuscripts and lecture notes) on thetopic of Shaka’s life in the Stuart Papers at the Killie Campbell Africana Library.22JSA, Ndlovu, volume 4, 200.


kaMbengwana is an important new contribution to this discussion. Anotherrecent body of research focused on collections of material culture made inmuch the same period as Stuart’s notes, brings into sharp focus the densenetworks of connection between officials of the Natal Native Administra-tion and certain Natal chiefs and prominent individuals with long nine-teenth-century histories of active engagement in Native Administration poli-tics, networks of connections that underlay the assembly of material like theethnological collections of the Pitt-Rivers Museum and the Natal Museum.These networks intersected in multiple ways with the Stuart interlocutors,generating still more backstory for, and adding further insights into collec-tion processes of, the texts that make up the Stuart archive. This work, byNessa Leibhammer and myself, draws attention to an archival productionhotspot: a relatively short period of time in the late nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries when key records pertinent to the pre-industrial historyof the region were intensively laid down, by a relatively small cluster ofhighly active individuals – colonial officials, travelers and missionaries aswell as local chiefs and counselors – operating within fairly tightly circum-scribed networks.23

In short, much has already been written about the complexity of therecording encounter and the politics in which it was embedded. Furtherresearch and debate remains to be undertaken. For the purposes of the argu-ment which I seek to advance in this essay it is sufficient for us to acknowl-edge this complexity. For the purposes of the current argument about thelife of an archive however, what is more significant is the nature and extentof the archival aspiration at the time of recording.

In order to bring the significance of the latter questions into sharperfocus it is useful to pause and consider what is meant by the term “archive.”Conventionally oral accounts like those told to Baleka and Ndlovu by Mpi-tikazi, Thimuni, Sipika and Nongila are termed “oral traditions.” In the formrendered to Stuart by Baleka and Ndlovu they might be regarded as “oraltestimonies.” For many historians, though not all, the idea that circulatingoral texts could be described as an archive would not seem quite right. Inpointing to the way in which the term archive tends to be reserved for mate-rial understood to be in a state of fixity (such as occurs when oral texts arerecorded and lodged in a repository), I am not endorsing the reserved use of

23See Carolyn Hamilton, and Nessa Leibhammer, “Salutes, Labels and other ArchivalArtefacts,” in: Carolyn Hamilton, and Pippa Skotnes (eds.), The Curature Fingers (CapeTown, in prep.).


the term, but rather, I am drawing attention to it. On occasion the termarchive is indeed applied to materials in oral forms. When this happens thediscursive move itself creates a mindfulness that the move unsettles the nor-mative use of the term archive. To make this argument is to highlight theway in which the notion “archive” refers not simply to a resource for think-ing about the past but more specifically to processes of capture and fixingfor posterity in an original state. I would like to suggest that there is a taken-for-granted recognition within historical practice that an archive is under-stood to exist when materials are placed in an environment designed to pre-serve them in the state in which they entered the archive. There are clearindications in Stuart’s own commentaries that he saw his work in writingdown the ideas, stories and comments of his interviewees as a recordingproject of immense value, perhaps even an archive in the making. Indeed,we can see that the act of writing is a prefiguring act in the constitution ofarchive, even where extensive oral methods of record preservation exist.Stuart did not use the term archive, but his “well” echoed the records of thecourts in which he worked, and even before they were officially deemed anarchive, his notes manifested a potential archival destiny. There are alsosigns scattered through the testimonies that a number of his intervieweeswere actively interested in having their views taken down by Stuart, an actwhich they presumably saw as being taken account of.24

Some archives come into being as the record of government. An archivemight be deliberately assembled as collectors are sent out to acquire itemsand to bring them into the preservatory institution. Sometimes a private col-lection, or a found group of documents, is installed in a preservatory institu-tion and becomes an archive, or part of an archive. Somewhere in the greyarea between the moment of recording and the installation of the Stuartpapers in Killie Campbell’s collection of Africana, Stuart’s papers enteredan archival state. This may have been when Stuart recorded them with himpossibly privately conferring on them the inviolate state of court evidence.Certainly Stuart’s notes began formally to accrue the status of archive when,in the late 1940s, his widow Ellen sold them to Killie Campbell, an estab-lished collector, living in Durban. At this point the papers left the personalcollection environment and entered the more self-consciously custodialworld of an Africana collector with an incipient public mission. Preciselywhat was entailed in Killie Campbell’s custodial care is a topic that merits

24See for example JSA, volume 4, Ndlovu, 201, 212-13; also see volume 1, Kumalo, 241-42.


research in its own right. Muckleneuk, the Campbell home, was filled to thebrim with an eclectic Africana collection including paintings of Zulu kingsby Gerard Bhengu commissioned by Killie Campbell and watercolors byBritish army officers stationed in Natal and Zululand. There Stuart’s papersentered a different form of preservatory housing, with its own cultural val-ues and practices, itself open to a reading along the archival grain andethnographic investigation. On securing the papers, Killie Campbell almostimmediately formed the intention of acquiring a steel-lined fire-proof casefor their storage.25 She arranged for sections of the notes to be typed up andactively pursued projects for their publication.26 When, in 1965, the thenUniversity of Natal took over the Campbell collections and the home inwhich they were stored, the Stuart papers, along with the rest of the Camp-bell collections, were subjected to yet another custodial regime “as theadministration of this formerly privately run library was modified to con-form with standard library routines and practices.”27 Within that regimethere was a professional commitment to the obviation of intentional or acci-dental changes to the notes. There was also a commitment to active publicaccessibility.28

II

Good ethnography both describes how something is, how it works and thecore ideas underpinning it – in the case of archive drawing attention to thecultural practices of a particular archive – and how they change over time.The notion of biography, however, adds a further dimension: it asks us tofocus on the way in which the archive which is the subject of the enquiry,

25M. Eldridge, email communication, 26 April 2011, details taken from Eldridge’sresearch notes.26See Norman Herd, Killie’s Africa (Pietermaritzburg, 1982) 138, 139, 172; M. Eldridge,email communication, 20 May 2011, details taken from Eldridge’s research notes.27“Overview of the Manuscripts Collection 1762-2000,” KCAL Manuscripts Collection,<http://campbell.ukzn.ac.za/?q=node/45, accessed 4 April 2011. Also see Vusi Buthelezi,Mwelela Cele, and Emily Krige, “Treasures of the South: the History and Holdings of theCampbell Collections,” paper presented to History and African Studies Seminar, Univer-sity of KwaZulu-Natal, 1 June 2011.28See, for example, KCAL Advisory Committee Minutes, Book 1, minutes of variousmeetings from 1970-1974, recording discussions and decisions concerning the publica-tion of the Stuart Papers. I am grateful to M. Eldridge for her notes derived from thesereferences.


much like the human subject of a biography, acts upon the world around it,having effects, and is, in turn, acted upon by the world in which it isengaged, in an ongoing process in which the subject both retains coreaspects of its initial subjectivity and changes over time. The sensitive biog-rapher of a human subject seeks both to grasp the core of the biographicsubject set in place by primary acts of constitution, and which persist acrosstime, while exploring the ongoing relationship of subject and context,watching both changing over time. So too the biographer of an archive.

It is archival biography that allows us to discern motion, process andchange in and around archives and records at the same time as archivalprocesses and procedures work to preserve the record for posterity. In thediscussion of backstory and collection above we have established the com-plex conditions of the conception of the archive and quite a lot about the lin-eages of the various intellectual inheritances brought into the archive. Butthis is far from the end of the story of its production. First we need to notethat although the notes remained secluded while in Stuart’s primary custodi-al care, they were not without public effects. In 1924-1926 Stuart publishedfive Zulu language readers which were prescribed for vernacular use in pri-mary schools in Natal.29 While the praise poetry that was published in thereaders was a synthesis of material recorded by Stuart, the material in thehistorical sections largely reflected the individual accounts recorded by Stu-art.30 Rycroft and Ngcobo have pointed out how influential the books wereon Zulu-speaking readers, noting their take up in the work of key writerslike R.R.R. Dlomo and C.L.S Nyembezi.31 The readers were also sourcesfor A.T. Bryant’s Olden Times in Zululand and Natal.32 Bryant’s text isnoteworthy for the extent to which it distinguishes between the identitiesand histories of the many chiefdoms and other groupings that comprised thewider category of the Zulu-speaking inhabitants of the region between thePhongolo and Mzimkhulu rivers. There is little archival trace of Bryant’sworking methods, and any attempt to understand how he garnered his infor-mation must both track his activities and those of his collection-active asso-ciates at the Mariannhill Monastry where he was based during his time in

29James Stuart, uTulasizwe (London,1923); James Stuart, uBaxoxele (London, 1924);James Stuart, uHlangakula, (London, 1924); James Stuart, uKulumetule (London, 1925);James Stuart, uVusezakiti (London, 1925).30For a detailed discussion of these texts see Hamilton, Terrific Majesty, 162-4.31David Rycroft, and A. Bhekabantu Ngcobo (eds.), The Praises of Dingana (Durban/Pietermaritzburg, 1988), xii, 44.32Alfred T. Bryant, Olden Times in Zululand and Natal (London, 1929).


Natal, as well as work backwards from his text to trace connections to othersources such as the readers. This is a substantial task that remains to bedone.33 However, there are indications of direct contact between Stuart andBryant and of Bryant’s utilisation of the readers.34 In the face of the com-bined homogenizing effects of segregationist and later apartheid policies inidentifying a small number of core tribal identities such as “the Zulu,” therise of Zulu nationalism in opposition to new forms of oppression, and abroad tribe-based anthropology which produced studies of “the Zulu,” “theTswana,” and “the Swazi,” the published readers, Bryant’s book and an ear-lier work by Magema Magwaza Fuze were the primary bearers of a het-erogenous sense of the history and identity of the region.35 When, in the late1960s, scholars began to focus on not only the African aspect of SouthAfrican history, but on the precolonial history of the region, seeking signsof African achievement, and looking for detail able to reveal a historybeyond that of rulers and chiefs, the Stuart papers offered a unique resource.For the most part dormant in the archive following their acquisition byCampbell, though, not without ongoing public effects achieved primarilythrough the readers, the papers now became the focus of interest. The 1968publication of Trevor Cope’s edited compilation of selected praises record-ed by Stuart, Izibongo: Zulu Praise Poems, as well as Shula Marks’ Reluc-tant Rebellion, published in 1970,36 began to draw attention to Stuart andthe Stuart papers. In 1970, Colin Webb of the Department of History andPolitical Science at the University of Natal launched a project for their pub-lication. To date, five volumes comprising the chronologically-arranged andcarefully annotated and indexed notes of the testimonies of hundred andfifty-nine interviewees have been published, with a sixth volume almost atthe press.37

Across that period, and as the amount of published text expanded, so toodid the archive grow in stature, attracting ever increasing numbers and vari-

33See, however, John Wright, “A.T. Bryant and ‘the Wars of Shaka,’” History in Africa18 (1991), 409-25.34Hamilton, Terrific Majesty, 150-51.35Magema M. Fuze, Abantu Abamnyama, first published privately, Pietermaritzburg,1922, and then republished in an English translation by Harry C. Lugg, edited by A.Trevor Cope, The Black People and Whence They Came: A Zulu View (Durban/Pieter-maritzburg, 1979). See also Bryant’s citation of Fuze, Olden Times, 498.36A. Trevor Cope (ed.), Izibongo: Zulu Praise Poems (Oxford, 1968); Marks, ReluctantRebellion.37I draw here on John Wright’s sensitive account, “Making the James Stuart Archive,”History in Africa 23 (1996), 333-50, as well as on ongoing discussions with him aboutthe processes involved in the production of the published JSA.


eties of researchers. With publication came the capacity intensively to cross-reference across interviews and as the number of published interviews grew,so too did the variety of topics and issues being researched, exceeding sig-nificantly the issues that occupied the minds of Stuart and his interviewees.The density of the available text made it possible for researchers to pursuetiny clues of philosophical, intellectual, etymological, or cosmological sig-nificance across hundreds of pages of text and to begin to reconstruct andenter the world views that prevailed in the past, way beyond that which wasthe purpose of any single interview or conversation. In the 1980s, politicalshifts created a climate wary of Zulu nationalism, and the Stuart recordsoffered levels of historical detail capable of showing up local historiesopposed to central Zulu power.38 By the turn of the last century the numberof citations of the James Stuart Archive had expanded significantly.39 Thepublished Archive formed the basis of a growing number of research pro-jects into the precolonial and colonial history of southern Africa, and fuelleda series of volatile debates. Over the past two decades scholars haveexpended considerable energies in critiquing settler, colonial and imperialemphases of the Zulu kingdom and in the process have sought actively todowngrade the role of the Zulu kingdom in shaping the history of theregion. At the same time however, the existence of the Archive and itsgrowing status as a rich source, have effectively recentered the Zulu king-dom in southern African history. One result of its textual richness andextensive utilization is a marked bifurcation in the study of the southernAfrican precolonial past of farming societies, with research on the south-east heavily reliant on the recorded oral record, and the James StuartArchive in particular, and the interior and west more reliant on the excavat-ed archaeological record, with each form of record highlighting differentfeatures.

The most dramatic change in the life of this archive was surely its publi-cation. The published books have been widely acclaimed for their scholarly

38See for example, John B. Wright, and Carolyn Hamilton, “Inkulumo-mpikiswanoNgoShaka,” Injula 2 (1990), 17-20; John B. Wright, and Carolyn Hamilton, “The Makingof the Amalala: Ethnicity, Ideology and Relations of Production in a Precolonial Con-text,” South African Historical Journal (May 1990), 3-23.39A search undertaken by University of Cape Town librarians in 2011 using Publish orPerish, software developed by Anne-Wil Harzing (University of Melbourne), found thatof two hundred and twenty citations of the JSA, eighty-eight were from between 2000-2010, seventy were from between 1990-1999, and forty-five were from 1980-1989. Notethat the search included only sources available online and available to Google Scholar. Iam grateful to Alexander d’Angelo and William Daniels from the UCT Library, andMegan Greenwood, for these figures.


rigor, the transparent editorial work, meticulous attention to detail and use-ful indexes. So excellent are the published texts that citation of the originalpapers has all but ceased. We begin here to glimpse a key process that that abiographical approach to the archive reveals: the way in which the archive –in this case the original papers – enabled a few key studies and interventionspregnant with important effects for academic, public and political discourseand practice. As their potential significance began to be realized, they, inturn, prompted Webb to give further attention to the archive. When the firstvolume was published in 1976, a text very different from the handwrittenpapers appeared. To make this kind of point about the changes involved isnot a criticism of the published volumes. It is rather an opportunity to seewrit large and especially dramatically processes of change to which allarchival texts are subjected when they are curated, whether conservativelywithin the standard professional practices of archive (described, re-filed,catalogued, classified, augmented etc.) or when actively re-presented inpublished, edited form.

One of the most significant changes involved with the publication of thenotes was the substitution of a depersonalized typeface for Stuart’s hand-writing. Despite the editors’ careful prefacing of the first volume, and latervolumes with visual reproductions of Stuart’s handwritten notes, this singlechange obscured the immediate presence of Stuart in the text, a presencepalpable in the scribbles, crossings out, ink blotting, marginalia, and steadyscript of the originals. This effect was compounded by the way in which thepublished title, The James Stuart Archive of Recorded Oral Evidence…,together with the organization of the material under the names of the inter-viewees, worked to position Stuart as a collector, to efface the presence ofStuart in the recorded text, and to foreground “informants.” The effectbecame apparent in citations and how the evidence was utilized. Materialconsulted by scholars before publication typically used the form “StuartPapers” in citations, with the interviewees either unnamed or not fore-grounded. As the number of published texts increased, citation practicesshifted to the published texts. Increasingly over time the role of Stuart increating the texts faded from view. In much of the scholarship of the 1980s,the Stuart notes were cited as though they were verbatim or near-verbatimtranscripts of the words of his interviewees. Putting the name of the inter-viewee first was for some clearly a statement of their Africanist sympathies.This trend was only reversed when an explicit debate erupted over theextent to which Stuart shaped the text.40 Although the editors have been40See Julian Cobbing, “A Tainted Well. The Objectives, Historical Fantasies and Work-ing Methods of James Stuart, with Counter-Argument,” Journal of Natal and Zulu Histo-ry 11 (1988), 115-54; Hamilton, Terrific Majesty, chapter 4.


careful not to claim that they have reproduced Stuart’s notes in a publishedform, but rather that they have provided a particular rendering of them,scholars using the published Archive have paid less attention to the inter-ventions made by the editors.

In the “rendering” provided by the editors the changes involved are sig-nificant. Not only have the texts been organized chronologically and trans-lated, but, on a systematic and clearly signposted basis, elements of the orig-inal notes have been left out, notably the many praises recorded in thecourse of the conversations between Stuart and his interlocutors. As wehave seen in relation to backstory above, careful analysis of exactly howarguments were crafted and what materials were marshaled in the course ofthose arguments becomes a vital part of utilizing the texts. The omission ofthe praise poems is a telling for praise poetry is a genre with a preservatoryapparatus and an archival aspect. The role it played in the arguments pre-sented to Stuart is a topic of considerable interest and possible significance.The effects of these many excisions do not compromise the edited text. Theeditors provide a clear rationale for their excision and make every excisionvisible. However, they do compromise the kinds of readings essayed abovein the pursuit of backstories. An easily overlooked caveat to that effectappears in the footnotes above but its real weight only now emerges withfull force. In the case of the backstory work presented above I accept theproblem of unaccounted-for praise poetry as a limitation of my own argu-ment because translation and interpretation of the praise poetry is beyondmy limited Zulu-language skills and my disciplinary skills. Those tasksalong with research into the role of praise poetry in historical argumentationis a topic of immense future scholarship.

There are, of course, many other ways in which the published texts differfrom the handwritten notes. Under varied circumstances select aspects ofthese differences may become relevant. Rigorous historians will, of course,subject themselves to the discipline of returning to the originals wheneverthese differences become germane. I make these points not so much toadvocate that kind of rigor – a rigor that I fully support – but to point outthat the advantage of a biographical approach is that it highlights changeoutside of the debates that typically prompt such returns, allowing us to fac-tor in such effects outside, or in advance, of instances of dispute. To recog-nize that archives change in response to the world in which they move, and,in turn, change that world, is, in the case of the James Stuart Archive, toanticipate that the editorial decisions affecting the production of the pub-lished text themselves change across the extended period of publication,


conferring on the Archive a relatively fluid and varied character. For themost part these shifts are made explicit by the skilled editors, but the impli-cations of their effects are better understood when the changing nature ofthe Archive, and I would suggest, any archive, is foregrounded.

III

What we have discussed about the life of the archive thus far mostly seeksto be of methodological relevance to researchers. However, the Archive isnot simply a source book for historians. It is an object in contention in thecontemporary world of the politics of knowledge and the constitution ofpostcolonial subjectivities. A desire for material about the precolonial worldof ideas and events is not simply a scholarly ambition. It is post-colonialyearning that is a production of the mortification of the colonial subject,rendered historyless by the narrative of western civilization. In the case ofcontemporary KwaZulu-Natal fulfillment of that yearning is a priority pro-ject of the Heritage Unit of the office of the provincial Premier, which hascommissioned a mammoth project for the writing of the history of theregion from earliest times. The published Archive has much to offer in therestitution of that history. The James Stuart Archive, arguably more thanany other body of material, offers the possibility of a thick and rich oralrecord of the precolonial past of the societies of southern Africa, capable ofproviding historical detail as well as insight into indigenous forms of learn-ing, the local “–ologies” (epistemologies, cosmologies, ideologies, and soon) that the colonial sciences deemed myths, traditions, customs, cultureand beliefs, rather than branches of knowledge. It redeems precolonial soci-eties from their consignment to a historyless oblivion sans the trapping ofcivilized thought. It holds out the promise of rescuing colonial subjects fromthe mortification of colonial subjectivity. In a small way, and within limitedcommunity of scholars, and sometimes Facebook clan history researchers, ithas achieved a degree of iconicity.

But iconicity, even when modest, is a source of power, and is drawn intopolitical contestation. In the case of archive this usually takes some form ofpoliticized heritage. And as the icon enters the field of power and is mobi-lized in the pursuit of power, so too does it attract critique, is assailed andattacked. Icons are, by their nature, celebrated, scrutinized and attacked.Iconic archives, like celebrities, are hailed and reviled by their publics. TheJames Stuart Archive both allows scholars to recover some things which


colonialism and apartheid exiled from the historic record, and is burdenedby public wariness about the taint of the conditions of its inception asresource for the pursuit of colonial law and order. The method of biographybrings both of these aspects into focus at once. The biography of a humansubject at its best is more the story of an individual life: it is a literary his-torical genre that enables us to grapple meaningfully with ambiguities, con-tradictions and paradoxes of an era; the really difficult matters of the time. Itis a mode profoundly suitable to the postcolonial predicament of epistemo-logical uncertainty and suspicion around archive.

Iconicity is an effect of publicness. In the case of the Stuart notes, thewriting down of the texts of the interviews was the first act in the constitu-tion of their publicness as archive. The next step was the achievement of anaura of specialness as a treasure within the recognized Killie Campbell col-lection and the early preservatory attention accorded to it there. This in turnpositioned it for further intensive engagement as a publication project. Itssubsequent portability, and accessibility, as indexed, paginated books, alongwith its astonishing density, turned it into a circulating object, which in turngenerated scores of secondary texts, as the Archive was cited in publica-tions, and became the subject of scholarly debates in journal articles,debates which repeatedly spill out into wider settings and which are shapedby those engagements. The theorist of publics, Michael Warner conceptu-alises a public primarily as being called into being by a text and as existingonly by virtue of its imagining. The core of his argument is that it is the con-catenation of texts involved that constitutes publicness.41 The iconicity ofarchive in turn is an effect of this publicness combined with the yearningalready mentioned, the desire for things to be other than they are, with theicon as bearer of the promise of that other, desired, state. Publication andcirculation effectively consecrate certain archives and render them iconic.But iconicity is never simply celebration; it is the product of public desire inthe face of a lack. As with rock stars and football legends, the archive isboth buoyed up by public engagement and assailed in the public eye. Itspublicness is advanced by the febrile debates in scholarly journals and otherfora over its status and value as an archive. And with this escalation in itspublicness, an iconic archive fills the archival space, often overdeterminingit, making it hard for us to think outside of it, beyond it and into that whichit, by its lustre, throws into shadow. Here we do well to note in that shadowflourish a variety of cultural forms such as praise poetry, address names

41Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York, 2002), chapter 2.


(izitakazelo) and certain ritual performances, notably those that ensure thewell-being of ancestors, which work to ensure the survival of variousancient inheritances. The kinds of preservatory apparatuses which theyinvolve invite theorization along the lines that this essay has attempted inrelation to formally recognized archive.

Backstory and biography are monumental exercises in historical recon-struction; they are demanding prerequisites that enable us to grasp some-thing of the conditions of production of the material that we treat as archive,and allow us to read the archives as the artifacts that they are. For historiansseeking to mine archives for nuggets of fact that can be used in reconstruct-ing events in the distant past, backstory and biography are necessary movesin establishing the factors that over time have given shape to the materialthat is to be used as evidence. They are vital prerequisites in approachingthe Stuart notes as historical sources. For postcolonial intellectuals seekingto interrogate inherited Enlightenment epistemological practices, backstoryand biography offer critical tools with to approach established archives,qualifying their seeming immutability, and unsettling the concept of archiveitself.

ReferencesBryant, Alfred T., Olden Times in Zululand and Natal (London, 1929).Buthelezi, Vusi, Mwelela Cele, and Emily Krige, “Treasures of the South:

the History and Holdings of the Campbell Collections,” paper presentedto History and African Studies Seminar, University of KwaZulu-Natal,1 June 2011.

Cobbing, Julian, “The Mfecane as Alibi. Thoughts on Dithakong andMbolompo,” Journal of African History 29 (1988), 487-519.

Cobbing, Julian, “A Tainted Well. The Objectives, Historical Fantasies andWorking Methods of James Stuart, with Counter-Argument,” Journal ofNatal and Zulu History 11 (1988), 115-54.

Cope, A. Trevor (ed.), Izibongo: Zulu Praise Poems (Oxford, 1968).Fuze, Magema M., The Black People and Whence They Came: A Zulu View

(trans. Harry C. Lugg, ed. A.Trevor Cope) (Durban/Pietermaritzburg,1979).

Guy, Jeff, The Maphumulo Uprising: War, Law and Ritual in the ZuluRebellion (Pietermaritzburg, 2005).

Hamilton, Carolyn, “Ideology, Oral Traditions and the Struggle for Powerin the Early Zulu Kingdom,” MA thesis, University of the Witwater-srand (1985).


—, Terrific Majesty: The Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of HistoricalInvention (Cambridge MA, 1998).

—, The Life of the Archive, book manuscript in preparation.—, and Nessa Leibhammer, “Salutes, Labels and other Archival Artefacts,”

in: Carolyn Hamilton, and Pippa Skotnes (eds.), The Curature Fingers(Cape Town, in prep.).

Herd, Norman, Killie’s Africa (Pietermaritzburg, 1982).Marks, Shula, Reluctant Rebellion: The 1906-8 Disturbances in Natal

(Oxford, 1970).Rycroft, David, and A. Bhekabantu Ngcobo (eds.), The Praises of Dingana

(Durban/Pietermaritzburg, 1988).Stuart, James, uTulasizwe (London, 1923).—, uBaxoxele (London, 1924).—, uHlangakula (London, 1924).—, uKulumetule (London, 1925).—, uVusezakiti (London, 1925).Stoler, Anne, “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance: On the Con-

tent in the Form,” in: Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Michèle Pick-over, Graeme Reid, Razia Saleh, and Jane Taylor (eds.), Refiguring theArchive (Dordrecht/Cape Town, 2003), 83-100.

Warner, Michael, Publics and Counterpublics (New York, 2002).Webb, Colin, and John B. Wright (eds.), The James Stuart Archive of

Recorded Oral Evidence Relating to the History of the Zulu and Neigh-bouring Peoples (Pietermaritzburg, 1976-2001).

Wright, John, “A.T. Bryant and ‘the Wars of Shaka,’” History in Africa 18(1991), 409-25.

—, “Making the James Stuart Archive,” History in Africa 23 (1996) 333-50.—, and Carolyn Hamilton, “Inkulumo-mpikiswano NgoShaka,” Injula 2

(1990), 17-20.—, and —, “The Making of the Amalala: Ethnicity, Ideology and Relations

of Production in a Precolonial Context,” South African Historical Jour-nal (May 1990), 3-23.

Wylie, Dan, Savage Delight: White Myths of Shaka (Pietermaritzburg,2000).

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