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Ndukwana kaMbengwana as an Interlocutor on the History of the Zulu Kingdom, 1897–1903

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 May 2014

John Wright
John Wright*
Affiliation:
University of KwaZulu-Natal University of the Witwatersrand
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Extract

In the six years from October 1897 to October 1903, Ndukwana kaMbengwana engaged in scores of conversations in numerous different locations with magistrate James Stuart about the history and culture of the nineteenth-century Zulu kingdom. In the 1880s Ndukwana had been a lowranking official in the native administration of Zululand; at an unknown date before late 1900 he seems to have become Stuart's personal induna or “headman,” to give a common English translation. Stuart's handwritten notes of these conversations, as archived in the James Stuart Collection, come to a total of 65,000 to 70,000 words. As rendered in volume 4 of the James Stuart Archive, published in 1986, these notes fill 120 printed pages, far more than the testimonies of any other of Stuart's interlocutors except Socwatsha kaPhaphu. From 1900, Ndukwana was also present during many of Stuart's conversations with other individuals.

In the editors' preface to volume 4 of the James Stuart Archive, after drawing attention to the length of Ndukwana's testimony, Colin Webb and I wrote as follows:

Since these were the early years of Stuart's collecting career, it is probable that Ndukwana exercised a considerable influence on the presuppositions about Zulu society and history which Stuart took with him into his interviews. No less likely, however, is the reverse possibility that Ndukwana in turn became a repository of much of the testimony he heard while working with Stuart, and that, increasingly over the years, the information which he supplied would have been a fusion of data and traditions from a variety of sources.

Type
The Making of an Archive
Information
History in Africa , Volume 38 , 2011 , pp. 343 - 368
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 2011

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