If Julian Cobbing is right in his contention that the root causes of the mfecane lie not in the Zulu kingdom but in disruptive forces emanating from Mozambique and the Cape, then rethinking the mfecane means rethinking the Great Trek. One of the oddest circumstances in historical writing about South Africa is that those contemporaneous phenomena, each of which has been called ‘the central event in South African history’, have been treated as isolated occurrences. According to the dictates of a peculiar historiographical apartheid, the only recognised linkage is the supposition that the mfecane cleared the highveld of people at the very moment the Voortrekkers decided to go and live there. This essay offers some revisionist propositions about the 1830s developed from a bird's-eye view of the historiographical landscape. The word ‘revision’ is used in its original sense. No new archival research findings which change our picture of the past are reported here. Instead, some familiar and obvious sources are re-examined with a view to changing standard versions of history. In particular, an attempt is made to explain the remarkable persistence of certain narrative structures in accounts of the Great Trek and mfecane written by historians working in different periods and informed by dramatically different ideologies.

When Cobbing finds the same story repeated in different eras, he suspects historians of complicity in a lie which serves the interests of dominant groups in South African society. Such explanations, whether cast in terms of interest group theory or structuralist theory, have much to be said for them but are less than totally satisfying because they have flourished not just at home but also abroad. Why should foreign scholarship dance to the favourite tunes of South African politicians, miners and farmers? What could move John Omer-Cooper in Nigeria or Kent Rasmussen in California to serve among the legions of ‘settler history’? Are there not other possible reasons for the persistence of certain story-lines?