External links
- State Formation in Nineteenth-century South Africa
- Kicking the hornets' nest: a third view of the Cobbing controversy on the Mfecane/Difaqane
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Julian Raymond Dennis Cobbing (born June 1944, London) is an English historian, and professor of History at Rhodes University (Grahamstown, South Africa), known best for his controversial and groundbreaking research into Zulu culture of the early 19th century.
Cobbing gained a BA from the University of London and a PhD from Lancaster University. He is regarded as the first historian to attempt to discredit conventional historical beliefs about the 'Mfecane' - a period of wars during the 1820s and 1830s that resulted in the emergence of the Zulu Kingdom. In a paper published in the Journal of African History in 1988, Cobbing argued that the Mfecane had been the construct of Apartheid politicians and historians attempting to justify the longstanding oppression of black South Africans by the white minority. Instead of an internally induced process of black-on-black destruction, Cobbing argued that much of the violence had been brought about by European slave traders and settlers, who had contracted local tribal leaders to capture slaves for sale at Delagoa Bay (now Maputo). The rise of the Zulu state, under Cobbing's hypothesis, was thus more of a defensive reaction to the slave-trading activities of other tribes in the region, rather than a process of active internal aggression, as argued by some contemporary scholars.
Cobbing's hypothesis was highly controversial when first published. Several books and articles have been written focused on rebutting Cobbing's arguments – a prominent example being Roger B. Beck's Slavery in South Africa: Captive Labor on the Dutch Frontier, which featured a collection of articles challenging Cobbing's contentions. Often now referred to as the "Cobbing controversy", historians are still very much divided on the issue of the emergence of the Zulu nation and the accuracy of conventional accounts of the Mfecane. Most agree however that Cobbing's analysis offered several key breakthroughs, and offered a robust alternative to accounts of the Mfecane that had been taught in school history curricula during Apartheid.[ citation needed ]
Cobbing spent two months as a visiting fellow at the University of Oxford in 2002. He currently lives in Grahamstown, South Africa, and recently retired from lecturing in history at Rhodes University, where his course "The Origins of the Modern World Crisis" was very popular. Cobbing's current work focuses on a variety of subjects including the history of Homo sapiens as a species and the modern world crisis.
Julian Cobbing. "The Mfecane as Alibi: Thoughts on Dithakong and Mbolompo". Journal of African History, 29, 1988.
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Shaka kaSenzangakhona, also known as Shaka Zulu and Sigidi kaSenzangakhona, was the king of the Zulu Kingdom from 1816 to 1828. One of the most influential monarchs of the Zulus, he ordered wide-reaching reforms that reorganized the military into a formidable force.
The very first modern humans are believed to have inhabited South Africa more than 100,000 years ago. In 1999, Unesco designated the region the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage site. South Africa's first known inhabitants have been referred to as the Khoisan, the Khwe and the San. Starting in about 1,000 BCE, these groups were then joined by the Bantu tribes who migrated from Western and Central Africa during what is known as the Bantu expansion.
Nandi KaBhebhe was a daughter of Bhebhe, a past Elangeni chief and the mother of Shaka kaSenzangakhona, King of the Zulus.
The Great Trek (Afrikaans: Die Groot Trek was a northward migration of Dutch-speaking settlers who travelled by wagon trains from the Cape Colony into the interior of modern South Africa from 1836 onwards, seeking to live beyond the Cape's British colonial administration. The Great Trek resulted from the culmination of tensions between rural descendants of the Cape's original European settlers, known collectively as Boers, and the British Empire. It was also reflective of an increasingly common trend among individual Boer communities to pursue an isolationist and semi-nomadic lifestyle away from the developing administrative complexities in Cape Town. Boers who took part in the Great Trek identified themselves as voortrekkers, meaning "pioneers", "pathfinders" in Dutch and Afrikaans.
Jonathan Paul Clegg, was a South African musician, singer-songwriter, dancer, anthropologist and anti-apartheid activist.
The Mfecane, also known by the Sesotho names Difaqane or Lifaqane, is a historical period of heightened military conflict and migration associated with state formation and expansion in Southern Africa. The exact range of dates that comprise the Mfecane varies between sources. At its broadest, the period lasted from the late eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, but scholars often focus on an intensive period from the 1810s to the 1840s. The concept first emerged in the 1830s and blamed the disruption on the actions of Shaka Zulu, who was alleged to have waged near-genocidal wars that depopulated the land and sparked a chain reaction of violence as fleeing groups sought to conquer new lands. Since the latter half of the 20th century, this interpretation has fallen out of favor among scholars due to a lack of historical evidence.
Neil Aggett was a Kenyan and South African doctor and trade union organiser who was killed, while in detention, by the Security Branch of the Apartheid South African Police Service after being held for 70 days without trial.
Rhodes University is a public research university located in Makhanda (Grahamstown) in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. It is one of four universities in the province. Established in 1904, Rhodes University is the province's oldest university, and it is the sixth oldest South African university in continuous operation, being preceded by the University of the Free State (1904), University of Witwatersrand (1896), University of South Africa (1873) as the University of the Cape of Good Hope, Stellenbosch University (1866) and the University of Cape Town (1829). Rhodes was founded in 1904 as Rhodes University College, named after Cecil Rhodes, through a grant from the Rhodes Trust. It became a constituent college of the University of South Africa in 1918 before becoming an independent university in 1951.
Makhanda, formerly known as Grahamstown, is a town of about 140,000 people in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. It is situated about 110 kilometres (70 mi) northeast of Gqeberha and 130 kilometres (80 mi) southwest of East London. It is the largest town in the Makana Local Municipality, and the seat of the municipal council. It also hosts Rhodes University, the Eastern Cape Division of the High Court, the South African Library for the Blind (SALB), a diocese of the Anglican Church of Southern Africa, and 6 South African Infantry Battalion. Furthermore, located approximately 3 km south-east of the town lies the world renowned Waterloo Farm, the only estuarine fossil site in the world from 360 million years ago with exceptional soft-tissue preservation.
The amaMfengu were a group of Xhosa clans whose ancestors were refugees that fled from the Mfecane in the early-mid 19th century to seek land and protection from the Xhosa. These refugees were assimilated into the Xhosa nation and were officially recognized by the then king, Hintsa.
The Covenant is a historical novel by American author James A. Michener, published in 1980.
"Rainbow nation" is a term coined by Archbishop Desmond Tutu to describe post-apartheid South Africa after South Africa's first democratic election in 1994.
The Rhodes Memorial is a monument on Devil's Peak in Cape Town, South Africa, a memorial to the English-born South African politician Cecil John Rhodes. It was designed by architect Herbert Baker.
South African Bantu-speaking peoples represent the majority ethno-racial group of South Africans. Occasionally grouped as Bantu, the term itself is derived from the English word "people", common to many of the Bantu languages. The Oxford Dictionary of South African English describes "Bantu", when used in a contemporary usage or racial context as "obsolescent and offensive", because of its strong association with the "white minority rule" with their Apartheid system. However, Bantu is used without pejorative connotations in other parts of Africa and is still used in South Africa as the group term for the language family.
The Nguni people are a linguistic cultural group which migrated to South Africa, made up of Bantu ethnic groups from central Africa, with offshoots in neighboring countries in Southern Africa. Swazi people live in both South Africa and Eswatini, while Ndebele people live in both South Africa and Zimbabwe.
Prior to the arrival of the European settlers in the 17th century the economy of what was to become South Africa was dominated by subsistence agriculture and hunting.
Dithakong is the name of a place east of Kuruman in the Northern Cape, South Africa, which had been a major destination for several of the earliest nineteenth century expeditions from the Cape to the interior of the subcontinent. In colonial literature the name is often rendered in such ways as Litakun, also Litakoo or Lattakoo.
Racism in South Africa can be traced back to the earliest historical accounts of interactions between African, Asian, and European peoples along the coast of Southern Africa. It has existed throughout several centuries of the history of South Africa, dating back to the Dutch colonization of Southern Africa, which started in 1652. Before universal suffrage was achieved in 1994, White South Africans, especially Afrikaners during the period of Apartheid, enjoyed various legally or socially sanctioned privileges and rights that were denied to the indigenous African peoples. Examples of systematic racism over the course of South Africa's history include forced removals, racial inequality and segregation, uneven resource distribution, and disenfranchisement. Racial controversies and politics remain major phenomena in the country.
Rhodes Must Fall was a protest movement that began on 9 March 2015, originally directed against a statue at the University of Cape Town (UCT) that commemorates Cecil Rhodes. The campaign for the statue's removal received global attention and led to a wider movement to "decolonise" education across South Africa. On 9 April 2015, following a UCT Council vote the previous night, the statue was removed.
Jeffrey Brian Peires is a South African historian at the University of Fort Hare. His book about the Xhosa cattle-killing movement of 1856–57, The Dead Will Arise, won the Alan Paton Award in 1990. Peires has also worked as a civil servant in the Eastern Cape and represented the African National Congress in the National Assembly for a brief period from 1994.
