SOURCE: Crais, Clifton C. “The Vacant Land: The Mythology of British Expansion in the Eastern Cape, South Africa.” Journal of Social History 25, no. 2 (winter 1991): 255-68.

[In the following excerpt, Crais explores the genealogy of the dominant political and historical myth posited by Whites in South Africa that the land they settled was empty and that Blacks had no prior claim to the spaces that were colonized, a myth that forged also the negative image of the African as Other.]

The historiography of South Africa over the past four decades is impressive for its lack of attention to the study of the changing image of the black in the white eye and the creation and historical transformation of a discourse on and about race. This glaring lacuna is particularly surprising given the obvious and acknowledged power of race in the shaping of the country's past and present. Perhaps because racism in South Africa is so commonplace, understanding its genesis and history is of secondary importance, an ugly heritage that can be wished away. The liberal school of the 1950s and 1960s tended to view racism as irrational, an atavistic relic of a frontier past which was antithetical to economic growth and to the spread of democratic institutions. The Marxisant historians of the 1970s and 1980s so emphasized class that race and racism declined into mere superstructural significance, racism being relegated to “a powerful legitimating tool” serving the interests of avaricious capitalists and the state institutions which supported them. It was as if the more idealistic on both sides of the historiographical divide believed that once class oppression disappeared, or modernization finally triumphed, racism would vanish.¹

Ironically, as race has become more muted in the discourse of the South African state a number of scholars have begun to take a fresh look at the history of race and racial ideology. In White Supremacy, his comparison of American and South African history, George Fredrickson emphasized the importance of European perceptions of Indians and Africans, though in the South African case he concentrated almost exclusively on settlers of Dutch, French and German descent, the Afrikaners. Following a tradition of earlier generations of scholars, Fredrickson returned to the early frontier of European settlement. Old wine in a new comparative bottle, White Supremacy signalled neither a fundamental historiographical departure in the study of the South African past nor even a new periodization of the country's history.

The most important recent contribution to the study of race and racial ideology is Leonard Thompson's The Political Mythology of Apartheid. Thompson examined the myths upon which a modern Afrikaner nationalism came to rest, and the extent to which such myths informed the construction of that country's policies of apartheid as formulated under the Nationalist Party since coming to power in 1948.² What is striking about both White Supremacy and The Political Mythology of Apartheid, however, is the conventionality of their approaches and the failure to explore the British contribution to South Africa's dubious legacy in the production of prejudice, especially during the nineteenth century. In the pre-industrial era, for example, Fredrickson presented the British as liberal and progressive in contrast to the “reactive” and conservative boers.³ What little work that has been undertaken has focused almost exclusively on the early twentieth centuries. Cell made the now customary and brief homage to the earlier colonial period in his comparative exploration of segregation. For Cell and, most recently, Dubow, British racism seems to only really begin with the rise of Social Darwinism. According to Dubow, the economic crisis in the British metropole during the 1880s led to a demise of “liberal ideals” and “the spectacular explosion of [a] biologically based racial science.” This “reflective” ideological transformation made its way down the Atlantic to South Africa where “similar processes were at work.” Reshaped to address the problems associated with industrial growth, rapid urbanization and the declining economic viability of the “reserves”, scientific racism as embedded in the “emerging discipline of anthropology … came to serve as a vital organising principle for the ideology of segregation.”⁴

Perhaps because the imperialism of the 1880s is so obvious and the racism of the early twentieth century so clear, historians have neglected the study of the first half of the nineteenth century. But this period witnessed significant British imperial expansion on the continent. In Southern Africa the British took control of the Cape Colony for a second time in 1806, extended the eastern borders of their new possession through a series of bloody frontier wars, annexed Natal in 1843, and in 1848 established a provisional government in the Orange River Sovereignty. Explorations of the land by scores of European travellers prefigured, and informed, the more violent conquest by British troops. European settlers, in turn, laid claims to newly conquered lands. In these complex and interlinked processes of exploration, conquest and settlement, Europeans assembled and communicated critical social intelligence on the land and its peoples. Particularly in their letters and memorials, in their ethnographic descriptions, political diatribes and serious historical works, and even in the ways in which they organized space, settlers built an archive and invented a conception of a colonial world which came to be centered around notions of race and the Manichean struggle of “civilization” and “barbarism”.⁵

Clearly European attitudes towards Africans, and especially those of British settlers and colonial officials, remain relatively uninterrogated in the historiography of South Africa. Yet what is most striking about recent attempts to give attention to ideas of race and racial ideology in South Africa is the extent to which they ignore questions of social and cultural history.⁶ Thompson confines his long treatise on political mythology to the activities of white intellectuals and politicians, overlooking the ways in which the myths he examined were inextricably tied to questions of locally-based identities and the daily exercise of power. Equally serious is the failure to explore the social historical and psychological basis of political and historical myths. For such myths do more than simply legitimize a given political regime; they also function to produce, sustain, and “naturalize” a social reality.⁷

This article begins to fill in this empirical and thematic lacuna in South African history through an exploration of one of the most dominant political and historical myths in South Africa: the myth of the Vacant Land.⁸ Cherished by Afrikaners and English-speaking South Africans alike, the myth posits that Europeans “settled” South Africa at roughly the same time Bantu-speaking Africans entered the region. As the South African government has long maintained, “the Blacks started settling into the northern part of the country more or less at the same time as the first White people began settling at the southern tip of the country during the 17th century.”⁹ The clash of the “races” began along the eastern frontier during the eighteenth century as the Xhosa began their intrusion into the area. A recent atlas of South African history provides a spatial display of this momentous contest. In the “The Black/White Frontier: 1785,” two thick black arrows descending from the east represent the expansion, and, in the words of the authors, the “incursion” of Bantu-speakers on the subcontinent. The “white” side of the frontier is devoid of such bold lines. Instead the early European colonization of the region is presented as a series of “District Boundaries,” farms and towns. The message seems clear, if rather implicit. The “incursion” of Africans—“a running in … when undesired … a sudden, brief invasion or raid”—is met with the opposing forces of a systematic and desirable settlement on the seemingly neutral space of the page.¹⁰

Archeological and historical research over the past two decades has dealt an empirical blow to the myth of the Vacant Land. The hunter-gatherers and pastoralists who inhabited the region around the port of Cape Town were not, to borrow Eric Wolf's words, a “people without history.”¹¹ Agriculturalists occupied parts of what is now the Republic of South Africa no later than the fourth century A.D. Over the course of almost a thousand years new and constantly changing ways of organizing social and economic life moved south. These migrations were less “incursions”, but, as elsewhere in Africa, were “calculated adventures to acquire land, honor, and status in new places.”¹² In the Eastern Cape, where the mythological clash of the “races” began, archaeologists have argued that an agro-pastoralist economy practiced by a people who employed a modified Bantu language unfolded not in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, but some 250 years earlier.¹³

This article, however, is concerned less with contributing to the further factual demolition of historical myth—that is, falsifying a previous truth—than with charting the genealogy of its creation and subsequent inscription in visual and written texts and conventional wisdom. I am interested in understanding the creation and reproduction of an apprehension of social reality. By genealogy I refer to Foucault's attempt to understand, diachronically, “the mutual relations between systems of truth and modalities of power” by addressing “representation as an activity or process.”¹⁴ I am concerned with the notion of vacantness in two inter-related senses of the word, and much of what follows analyzes precisely this discursive relation. Vacancy refers to the fact of geographical emptiness in the Western legal denotation of land being “unoccupied or unused.”¹⁵ The second notion of vacantness, as an “elision” or “emptying” of the humanity of the African and the formulation of a set of negative stereotypes, was embedded in this creation of empirical “fact”—the observation of the apparent materiality of an empty land.

These stereotypes centered around a chain of signifying dichotomies: “good” and “bad”, “us” and “them”, “self” and “Other”, and so on.¹⁶ These fundamentally symbolic oppositions, which suppress “the memory of their fabrication,” came to structure a narrative trope in early colonial historiography in which science spoke as truth and myth became reality.¹⁷ As Barthes argued some time ago, modern myth is a form of “depoliticized speech” that seemingly rests on acknowledged fact.¹⁸ Indeed, I will argue that the myth of the Vacant Land arose from the fusing and embedding of the stereotype of the African in the “fact” of geographical emptiness—the symbolic in the avowedly literal. In doing so, “representations of the social world” became the “constituents of social reality.”¹⁹ …

II

Historicization emerged as a central process by which the descriptive and negative images of Africans emerged as a constituent and fundamental element in the myth of the Vacant Land. For the synchronic had to be embedded in the diachronic, the symbolic in the literal, the unquestioned signifier in the accepted narrative. Here science, and early colonial historiography with which it was intimately related, played a crucial role. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries witnessed a revolution in clinical representations of the body and scientific appraisals of the human character.²⁰ Thomas Laqueur recently has written on the ways in which the case history and the autopsy came to “constitute humanitarian narratives,” and how “through the discourse of the body a common ground of feeling” was “established and the cognitive pathways for intervention laid in place.”²¹ But compassionate intervention was never very far away from callous denunciation, particularly as “Africa grew ‘dark’ as Victorian explorers, missionaries, and scientists flooded it with light.”²² For “just as the battle against slavery was being won by the abolitionists, the war against racism was being lost.”²³

Philip Curtin pointed out some time ago that the biological history of man had often rested on the “mistaken identity of race and culture.”²⁴ And this “mistaken identity” informed nineteenth century imperial expansion and, as Edward Said has argued, gave greater definition to a “Europe” opposed to a “non-European” world.²⁵ The colonial press in South Africa played a crucial role in communicating these sensibilities as science and history, in a sense producing truth, and in giving greater definition to the emergent British colonial identity. We have already mentioned The Graham's Town Journal, founded in 1831 and the political mouthpiece of the conservative elite in the Eastern Cape. Robert Godlonton, an important property owner in the area, assumed editorship of the paper in 1834 and subsequently became its owner.²⁶ In its overtly political role the paper, which frequently included the contributions of well-to-do farmers, lobbied for the granting of representative government, the enactment of coercive labor legislation and the British colonization of Southern Africa. In 1832, during the debates over the ending of slavery, the paper demanded the enactment of a vagrancy ordinance and suggested that the “peculiar nature” of the Khoikhoi predisposed them to idleness and violations of private property.²⁷ Throughout the next two decades the Journal continued its harangues against the character of the Khoikhoi and lobbied for coercive legislation which it finally won in 1856 with the enactment of the draconian Masters and Servants Act which exploited black South African workers until its repeal in 1974.

The Graham's Town Journal was by far the most widely circulated publication in the Eastern Cape, and one of the most important—if not the most important—publications in the entire colony. Its readership extended far beyond the nascent colonial elite and reached rural farmers and urban dwellers. From the early 1830s the paper embarked on an exploration and explication of the character of the Xhosa, explicitly linking cultural and psychological appraisals with the formulation of colonial policy: if Xhosaland should be conquered, special laws should be devised which were tailored to the peculiar psychological makeup of the African. These ideas and their political implications assumed a greater permanence during the shift from cross-cultural trade to agrarian capitalism and the outbreak of a protracted colonial war with the neighboring Xhosa in 1834.²⁸ For the first time settlers perceived the conflict as part of the larger struggle between “civilization” and “barbarism”. The Journal portrayed Xhosa society as “oppressive, tyrannical, and arbitrary,” the British government “liberal, just, and salutary,” and argued that the spread of “civilization” was moral and necessary since it aimed “to restrain the natural evils of a deprived mind.”²⁹ “Barbarism is the very antithesis of peace and good order; it is against this that British power must be determinedly directed. Independent barbarism is independent robbery and violence.”³⁰

The body of the African condemned it to conquest and constraint; it was imperative that the African be “coerced”. “To subdue Kaffirland we must occupy it; society must there be remodeled; new elements must be introduced, and a strong controlling power be exercised over the whole country. … The Kaffirs without civilization are a doomed race, and they never will be civilized until subdued.”³¹ The innate character of the black and the superiority of the British “race” thus imparted a morality to colonial expansion, a South African version of Manifest Destiny. Not only was colonization “the march of mankind,” as The Graham's Town Journal wrote, but “to be permanently successful” this moral enterprise “must have room for expansion.”³² Colonization thus was constructed as an inevitable and infinitely expansive process. The Cape Colony formed “as it were the grand connecting link between Great Britain and the … sons of Ham.” It was absolutely necessary that colonists “fulfil the high destiny which the British nation appears designed by Providence to fulfil in working out the moral regeneration of dark, and wretched, and debased Africa.”³³

The negative stereotypes disseminated by writers such as Niven or The Graham's Town Journal were ahistorical, as demonstrated by the consistent insertion of the present tense in descriptions of the past.³⁴ And yet what gave the negative representations of the black such power was precisely the manner by which they were substantiated by history. For connected to the newspaper rhetoric and the scientific explanations which dissected and condemned the African was an emergent historical explanation. The Graham's Town Journal argued in 1838, for example, that Xhosa had been “the usurpers of the whole of the territory between the Kye and the Fish River” and that the British had more of a right to the land than a people who “had gained a footing in it by treachery and violence.”³⁵ That Xhosa employed Khoikhoi place names suggested, so the line of thinking went, that they had only recently arrived in the region. It had been common knowledge as early as the late 1830s, as Boyce wrote in his humanitarian Notes on South-African Affairs, that prior “to 1776, the Kaffers had no regular settlements west of the Fish River.”³⁶ The discovery of hunter-gatherer rock paintings and other artifacts in the interior further certified that Bantu-speakers were new to Southern Africa. Not only were they new to the region, however, but “the right … by which the” Xhosa “hold” the land, as one settler put it, was the right “of conquest.” The frontier war of 1834-5 thus had nothing to do with colonial expansion but with the attempt of conquering barbarians to extend “their territory.”³⁷ Or as Sir Harry Smith, who commanded the colonial invasion, wrote, if Xhosa were “the possessors of this soil by right of conquest,” they should “be ejected by the same right.”³⁸

The biologically violent and procreative nature of the Xhosa suggested that they were an expansive, conquering and violent people. The image of the African in the colonial eye was “correct” precisely because it rested on a history which presented itself as based on scientific truths and unequivocal empirical evidence. The widespread perception that Xhosa “kept” other Africans in a state of “slavery” further reinforced this view. And writings such Godlonton's 1836 Narrative of the Irruption of the Kaffir Hordes into the Eastern Province of the Cape of Good Hope not only elaborated and communicated racist sensibilities and legitimated colonial conquest, but entrenched and gave greater definition to the belief that conquering Bantu-speakers had only recently arrived in the region.³⁹ In 1847, again just after yet another frontier war, Godlonton published his Case of the Colonists. Republished in 1879, the author castigated colonial policy-makers who were reluctant to extend British control in the interior. In the preface to the first edition Godlonton repeated the now well-known argument that the frontier wars erupted as a consequence of African aggression.⁴⁰

By mid-century the fiction had become a truth. The first colonial history of the Cape Colony, Wilmot and Chase's influential 1869 History of the Colony of the Cape of Good Hope from Its Discovery to the Year 1819, noted that Xhosa “first arrived near the Kei River in the seventeenth century,” but the authors were unsure of when and from where they had originally migrated. Subsequent writers further popularized the idea that Africans were recent arrivals to the region, a number of authors going so far as to suggest that Africans crossed the Limpopo River at roughly the same time Europeans settled the Cape in the seventeenth century: the territory in-between was a vacant land. Of particular importance was the work of George McCall Theal, the acknowledged grandfather of South African history. A teacher during the late 1860s, a labor agent and colonial official during the '70s and '80s, between 1882 and 1893 Theal was a bureaucrat in the newly-formed Native Affairs Department. In 1895, the colonial founder of Rhodesia, Cecil Rhodes, who was also interested in understanding the “early movement of the Bantu tribes,” supported Theal's historical research. Over the course of his career Theal became South Africa's most prolific historian, producing among other works his monumental eleven volume History of South Africa.

Understanding the African character and the related movements of Africans on the sub-continent were central themes in Theal's historical writing. In Boers and Bantu, for example, Theal argued that the “Bantu … are probably the most prolific people on the face of the earth,” capable of an impressive three-fold increase in fifty years.⁴¹ Keeping with the established trend in representing the black as inherently libidinous, Theal “sexualized” the African and connected their fecundity with their “conquering” character which produced only violence and anarchy. For Theal, if only implicitly, history became a manifestation of biology, an association which would occupy a central place in the Social Darwinian thought of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.⁴²

More than any other single person Theal popularized the myth of the Vacant Land. “Theal presented a near unmitigated picture of black barbarism,” Saunders has written, where “blacks had accomplished nothing significant; everything of importance had come from outside Africa.”⁴³ In tracing Bantu-speakers back to North Africa Theal found “evidence to prove that Bantu-speakers arrived in South Africa relatively late, and therefore had no more right to land in the country than whites.”⁴⁴ Theal thus continued an already established tradition in situating the Other within a social scientific “model”. It is hardly surprising that his works were translated into Afrikans and used in schools in the Orange Free State, and “Afrikaner nationalist historians of the 1930s and 1940s … took over many of Theal's racial ideas.”⁴⁵

III

In the writings of Wilmot and Chase, and particularly in the works of George McCall Theal, local perceptions rooted in the racial conflict of the first half of the nineteenth century received a scientific proof and a narrative demonstration. The races were innately different, the gap between them could never be filled, the black remained a constant outsider for as long as the identity of the settler rested on the chimera of the Other. Ethnology, history and biology re-stated conventional wisdom in new but familiar ways. Sciences born in the metropole in a sense simply confirmed what every white settler in the periphery already “knew”.

The rise of sciences which stressed classification, but which typically collapsed culture into biology, informed and reinforced the construction of difference in the colony. (From the beginning of the 1840s, for example, phrenology became popular in the Eastern Cape.) Biology, the social sciences and history made the fiction true so long as there was not clear and accepted evidence to the contrary.⁴⁶ But colonial perceptions were not simply derivative of stereotypes forged in the metropole. There was, instead, a complex and ongoing dialogue between metropolitan thought and colonial perception, a dialogue whereby settlers employed narrative history and the language of science in the ideological legitimation of a new and racially-divided world.

Nor was the idea of the African as Other merely a settler fantasy or sinister plot that would vanish as easily as it first appeared out on the veld. Creating the Other was all about the creation of enduring boundaries which involved questions of power and social definition. In this sense the emerging intellectual community occupied a central position in not only giving a gloss of objectivity to the narrative of colonial expansion but in further concretizing an emergent colonial identity in which the “black” remained—and in an important sense remains—a perpetual outsider.

The reconstruction of the creation and historicization of a negative image of the African brings race as a socially constructed category to the center of analysis and raises a number of troublesome issues concerning the production of South African history. Political economy has long dominated the resuscitation of the South African past. This historiographical agenda has to a large extent displaced an engagement with the ways in which the worlds of the colonizer and the colonized became inextricably intertwined. This silence is worth considering given the fact that South African history is still largely written by the dominators, for perhaps as Nandy has written the approach of history as political economy “is a view of [the] human mind and history promoted by colonialism itself,” a view that may have “a vested interest in denying that the colonizers are at least as much affected by the ideology of colonialism” as are the colonized.⁴⁷ The genealogy of the myth of the Vacant Land awakens this silence and points to the crucial role of culture in the making of the South African past and present.

Lastly, the approach outlined here—a genealogy of the production and reproduction of representation—speaks to current discussions on and about literary analysis and cultural history. There is a certain ahistorical quality to many contemporary studies which approach history as a sort of ethnography of past. The problem resides less in the analysis of culture as composed of a series of texts—those proverbial Geertzian webs of signification—but in bringing into play the less fashionable and more henpecking questions of context and causality.⁴⁸ Ultimately the accepted and unquestioned assumptions of the myth of the Vacant Land were rooted in a specific political and economic order, the continuation of which depended on transforming “history into nature,” what Bourdieu has termed the “habitus”. In that sense the myth of the Vacant Land was “never anything other than the forgetting of history which history itself produces.”⁴⁹

Notes

1. The quote is from Shula Marks and Stanley Trapido, “The Politics of Race, Class and Nationalism,” in their edited collection The Politics of Race, Class and Nationalism in Twentieth Century South Africa (London, 1987), 7. I am not of course rejecting the place of racism in legitimating a capitalist and colonial order in South Africa. Rather I am pointing to the psychological dynamics within which racial ideology developed. The most systematic attempt to explore such issues is found in I. D. MacCrone, Race Attitudes in South Africa: Historical, Experimental and Psychological Studies (Johannesburg, 1937), who focused considerable attention on the early frontier of European expansion. For a criticism of MacCrone and others see Martin Legassick, “The Frontier Tradition in Southern African Historiography,” in Shula Marks and Anthony Atmore, eds. Economy and Society in Pre-Industrial South Africa (London, 1980). Saul Dubow recently has taken up the historical study of racial ideology in South Africa. See below and his “Race, Civilization and Culture: the Elaboration of Segregationist Discourse in the Inter-War Years,” in Marks and Trapido, eds. The Politics of Race, Class and Nationalism in Twentieth Century South Africa. For a liberal position see Leonard Thompson and Monica Wilson, eds. The Oxford History of South Africa, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1969 and 1971), and Jeffrey Butler, Richard Elphick and David Welsh, eds. Democratic Liberalism in South Africa: Its History and Prospect (Middletown, 1987). For a useful overview of the “race-class” debate see D. Posel, “Re-thinking the Race-Class Debate in South African Historiography,” Social Dynamics 9, 1 (June 1983): 50-60. There is no equivalent in South Africa to Winthrop Jordan's White Over Black: American Attitudes towards the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill, 1968) or George Fredrickson's, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (New York, 1971).

2. See George Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (New York, 1981); Leonard Thompson, The Political Mythology of Apartheid (New Haven, 1985). Unfortunately Fredrickson's book suffers from the fact that it was based almost exclusively on secondary sources and was not able to take advantage of a range of new writing on the South African past. For a critical assessment see R. Elphick, “A Comparative History of White Supremacy,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 13, 3 (Winter, 1983): 503-13.

3. See Fredrickson, White Supremacy, 43-52.

4. Dubow “Race, Civilization and Culture,” 71, 73, 88-9. Also see his recently published Racial Segregation and the Origins of Apartheid in South Africa, 1919-36 (New York, 1989) and “The Idea of Race in Early 20th Century South Africa: Some Preliminary Thoughts,” paper presented to the Africa Seminar, Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town, 26 Apr. 1989; John Cell, The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: The Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the American South (Cambridge, 1982); David Welsh, The Roots of Segregation: Native Policy in Colonial Natal, 1845-1910 (Cape Town, 1971).

5. See Clifton Crais, White Supremacy and Black Resistance in Pre-Industrial South Africa: The Making of the Colonial Order in the Eastern Cape, 1770-1865 (Cambridge, 1991). Also see John Galbraith, Reluctant Empire: British Policy on the South African Frontier, 1834-54 (Berkeley, 1963); Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians: The Climax of Imperialism in the Dark Continent (London, 1961); Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914 (Ithaca, 1988).

6. See below. Dubow's Racial Segregation and the Origins of Apartheid, which centers around the recreation of ethnicity during the 1920s and 1930s, avoids any exploration of the ways in which African uses of ethnicity influenced the practices and policies of the segregationist state.

7. Crais, White Supremacy and Black Resistance in Pre-Industrial South Africa. Also see Jean Comaroff, “The Diseased Heart of Africa: Medicine, Colonialism, and the Black Body,” in Margaret Lock and Shirley Lindenbaum, eds., Analysis in Medical Anthropology (Boston, forthcoming.)

8. This article forms part of a wider project under construction and provisionally titled “The World We Have Made: Essays on Colonial Culture in South Africa.”

9. Quoted in Thompson, Political Mythology, 199.

10. Jan Visagie and Jan Berg, The Eastern Cape Frontier Zone: 1660-1980 (Durban, 1985); Webster's New World Dictionary, 2nd edition (New York, 1970).

11. See Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1982).

12. David W. Cohen, Womunafu's Bunafu: A Study of Authority in a Nineteenth-Century African Community (Princeton, 1977), 5.

13. The very category “Bantu” is at best questionable, referring not to a “people” but to a set of linguistic formulations. See Crais, White Supremacy and Black Resistance in Pre-Industrial South Africa; Martin Hall, The Changing Past: Farmers, Kings and Herdsmen in South Africa (Cape Town, 1987).

14. Arnold Davidson, “Archaeology, Genealogy, Ethics,” in David Hoy, ed., Foucault: A Critical Reader (Oxford, 1986), 224, 227; Johannes Fabian, “Presence and Representation: The Other and Anthropological Writing,” Critical Inquiry 16 (Summer 1990): 753-772. Also see Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York, 1979), esp. 23-4. Also see Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983).

15. As defined in the second edition of the Webster's New World Dictionary (New York, 1970).

16. See Sander Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca, 1985), esp. 11-35.

17. See Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York, 1972).

18. “Myth does not deny things, on the contrary, its function is to talk about them … [myth] abolishes the complexity of human acts, it gives them the simplicity of essences.” Barthes, Mythologies, 143.

19. Roger Chartier, Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Ithaca, 1988), 44.

20. See Michel Foucault, The Archeology and Knowledge and The Discourse on Language (New York, 1972) and his Discipline and Punish. Also see [George L. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (New York, 1978)].

21. Thomas W. Laqueur, “Bodies, Details, and the Humanitarian Narrative,” in Lynn Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1989), 182, 190.

22. Brantlinger, [Rule of Darkness, 173].

23. Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800-1960 (London, 1982), 1.

24. Curtin, The Image of Africa [: British Ideas and Action, 1780-1850 (London, 1965)], 330.

25. Said, Orientalism [New York, 1978].

26. For over three decades the conservative settler published numerous articles and books and led an impressive political career, becoming a member of the Legislative Council in the 1840s and in the following decade a member of the newly established colonial parliament.

27. GTJ [Graham Town Journal], 27 Jan. 1832.

28. For a detailed exploration of the development of capitalism and increasing British ascendancy over the Xhosa see Crais, White Supremacy and Black Resistance in Pre-Industrial South Africa.

29. GTJ, 15 Sept. 1836; 1 Dec. 1836; 25 Feb. 1836.

30. GTJ, 27 Feb. 1847.

31. GTJ, 22 May 1847.

32. GTJ, 13 Feb. 1840; 21 Jan. 1854. Horsman's claim that “Governmental dreams of an Indian policy based on Enlightenment ideals were in disarray by 1815 and were shattered by 1830. It was easier to blame Indian incapacity for this failure than it was to condemn the American desire for lands and profit” could easily be applied to the Cape Colony as well. See Ronald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), 300.

33. GTJ, 12 Sept. 1844. Also see GTJ, 6 July 1843.

34. Or as Bhabha writes the stereotype “is a simplification because it is an arrested, fixated form of representation.” [“The Other Question: Difference, Discrimination, and the Discourse of Colonialism,” in Francis Barker et. al, Literature, Politics and Theory (London, 1986),] 162. Interestingly, “stereotypy” formed part of the early discourse on the mentally insane.

35. GTJ, 1 March 1838.

36. W.B. Boyce, Notes on South African Affairs (London, 1839).

37. CO [Colonial Office] 2756, Campbell, Notes, 28 Jan. 1835 [sic, 1836].

38. British Parliamentary Papers 503/1837, Smith to D'Urban, 17 Apr. 1836, encl. in D'Urban to Glenelg, 19 Sept. 1836.

39. Robert Godlonton, A Narrative of the Irruption of the Kafir Hordes into the Eastern Province of the Cape of Good Hope, 1834-5 (Graham's Town, 1836).

40. A psychological quality which he analyzed in more detail in his 1879 preface. See Robert Godlonton, Case of the Colonists of the Eastern Frontier of the Cape of Good Hope, in Reference to the Kaffir Wars of 1835-6 and 1846 (Grahamstown, 1879).

41. George McCall Theal, Boers and Bantu (Cape Town, 1886), 22. The present tense inserted in historical narrative appears to have become a convention in early colonial historical writing, a convention which continues in some of the more reductionist radical writings of today. For a modern example see Jeff Guy, “Analyzing Pre-Capitalist Societies in Southern Africa,” Journal of Southern African Studies 14, 1 (1987): 18-37, where class strugle becomes the unchanging motor force in the history of South Africa for over the past 1500 years. On nineteenth century European historiography see Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, 1973).

42. On Theal see Christopher Saunders, The Making of the South African Past (Cape Town, 1988), 27.

43. Ibid, 36.

44. Ibid, 38.

45. Ibid, 42; Thompson, Political Mythology, 54-8.

46. Also see Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1962).

47. Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (Bombay, 1983), 30. Also see Gyan Prakash, “Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 32, 2 (April 1990): 383-408.

48. See Gabrielle M. Spiegel, “History, Historicism, and the Social Logic of the Text in the Middle Ages,” Speculum 65 (1990): 59-86. Also see Harold Veeser, ed., New Historicism (London, 1988). The problem is addressed, though only partially resolved, in the substantive essays in Hunt, The New Cultural History.

49. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge, 1977), 78-9.

An early draft of this article was presented at the 1989 meetings of the American Historical Association in a panel entitled “The Political Mythology of Racial Conflict.” I would like to thank the members of the panel and the audience, and Melissa Dabakis, Ellen Furlough, Pam Scully, Brian Balogh, and two anonomyous readers for critical comments and suggestions.