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A WIDE-RANGING HISTORY OF AFRIKANER

NATIONALISM Oxwagon Sentinel: Radical Afrikaner
Nationalism and the History of the Ossewabrandwag. By
Christoph Marx. Pretoria/Berlin: University of South Africa
Press/LIT, 2008. Pp. xii+654. Paperback, R400 (isbn
978-1-86888-453-7); €49.90 (isbn 978-3-8258-9797-4).

REINHART KÖSSLER

The Journal of African History / Volume 50 / Issue 02 / July 2009, pp 313 - 315
DOI: 10.1017/S0021853709990223, Published online: 07 September 2009

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0021853709990223

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REINHART KÖSSLER (2009). The Journal of African History, 50, pp 313-315 doi:10.1017/
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 REVIEWS 313
Scarnecchia deftly portrays, however, is the ways in which generation, class, and
gender tensions became tools for political mobilization. Nationalist leadership
sanctioned violent campaigns against specific categories of township residents to
solidify support. The relationship with contemporary politics is all too evident.
Another telling contribution of this book is the illustration of the extent to which
violence between nationalist supporters was driven less by fundamental political
differences than by the struggle for dominance between leadership cliques. This
historical development also has obvious parallels in the more recent violence.
For all its strengths, The Urban Roots of Democracy and Political Violence left
this reader with several unanswered questions. In an account that stresses the long-
term implications of hostilities between rival supporters of ZAPU and ZANU
there is relatively little detail on these campaigns of violence. How did the parties
mobilize their constituencies for violence ? How did local power brokers interact
with national leadership ? Harare and Highfield are described as battlegrounds and
petrol-bomb attacks were seemingly ubiquitous, yet casualties were relatively
light. How does one account for the absence of significant numbers of fatalities ?
Interviews with surviving party members and leaders might have provided at least
partial answers to these questions and offered a perspective on the continuities and
changes that have marked nationalist approaches to violence.
In summary, Scarnecchia’s exploration of the roots of nationalist violence in
Zimbabwe is an important and provocative work that is sure to incite debate, not
least because of its salience for the current crisis in Zimbabwe.

Dalhousie University GARY KYNOCH

A W I DE -RAN G I N G H I ST ORY OF A FRIKAN ER

N AT I O N AL I S M
doi:10.1017/S0021853709990223
Oxwagon Sentinel : Radical Afrikaner Nationalism and the History of the
Ossewabrandwag. By CHRISTOPH MARX. Pretoria/Berlin : University of South
Africa Press/LIT, 2008. Pp. xii+654. Paperback, R400 (ISBN 978-1-86888-453-
7) ; e49.90 (ISBN 978-3-8258-9797-4).
K E Y W O R D S : South Africa, apartheid, nationalism, politics/political, race/racism.

The history of Afrikaner nationalism in South Africa remains a vital topic, not
least because it is indispensable for a solid understanding of the apartheid system
that evolved out of its trajectory of movements, politics, and ideas. Christoph
Marx, a professor for Extra-European History at the University of Duisburg-
Essen in Germany, pinpoints his account on the most extreme wing of Afrikaner
nationalism, an organisation that flourished mainly during the Second World War,
quite openly siding with Nazi Germany and setting its stakes on a German victory
over Britain. However, his account is much more than a mere social history of the
Ossewabrandwag, an analysis of its shifting social basis and its eventual dissolution
in the broader stream of the National Party, in power after 1948. Marx bases his
account on both a discourse analysis and forays into the social history of the dif-
ferent currents of Afrikaner nationalism, reaching back to the aftermath of the
South African war and the creation of the Union of South Africa in 1910.
Marx begins from basic premises of mentality, tenets of Neo-Calvinism, and
varieties of nationalism in the South African situation. For his exposition of ethnic,
314 JOURNAL OF AFRICAN HISTORY

Afrikaner nationalism that later radicalized in the various currents that form the
centre of the book, Marx uses the three-phase template provided by Miroslav
Hroch, which includes the mobilisation of an intelligentsia around ‘national ’ is-
sues and recuperation of the past ; radicalisation and broadening of the social base ;
and mass mobilisation. Roughly, these phases also correspond to the three parts of
the book, which address basic issues as well as the foundations of Afrikaner
nationalism, its radicalisation in the 1930s and 1940s, and, lastly, a particularly
source-oriented account of the Ossewabrandwag itself and its aftermath up to the
1990s.
One important feature concerns the overall trajectory of nationalism in South
Africa: the attempt to forge ‘ conciliation ’ nationalism, uniting the white Afrikaans
and English speakers on the grounds of a constitution whose premises were based
on a Westminster system that was equally little understood by protagonists and
adversaries. Among these were J. Smuts and B. Hertzog, both of whom framed
their politics around personal loyalties that harked back to the ‘commando ’
structures of the frontier and the Boer war and relied on a number of shared
motives: engrained notions of honour ; the ethnicisation of social issues, above all
the ‘ poor white’ question, pitting impoverished white Afrikaans speakers against
blacks and thus forestalling solidarity based on class ; concomitant strong anti-
Semitic sentiments ; the notion of the Christian mission of the Afrikaner people;
and, increasingly, an idealised notion of an idyllic, patriarchal past embodied in the
Boer extended family and the nineteenth-century republics.
These motives coalesced in the seminal event of the eeufees, the centennial
commemoration in 1938 of the Battle of Blood River, presented as the culmination
of the Great Trek from the British-ruled Cape to the later Boer republics of
Orange Free State and Transvaal. The concept of the Trek itself was largely con-
structed in the course of a symbolic rehearsal of the ox-wagon trek, which turned
out to be effective beyond expectation in mobilising Afrikaner national sentiments
across the country. The campaign culminated in the laying of the foundation stone
for the Voortrekker Monument near Pretoria. It was instrumental in establishing
the symbol of the ox-wagon as a national epitome for Boer steadfastness, per-
severance, and enterprise.
The eeufees also reflected the passage of radical nationalism into a mass move-
ment, itself the outcome of both intricate processes on the levels of party politics
and a host of activities in the cultural, social, and economic fields. These activities
were mainly connected with the Broederbond, a half-secret association that ef-
fectively managed to control and coordinate various initiatives to strengthen
Afrikanerdom. After the formation of the Great Coalition and subsequent merging
of Hertzog’s National Party and Smuts’s South African Party in 1933–34, the
former effectively split, at the same time that a number of non-party organisations
leaning more or less towards fascism developed, partly under the direct influence
of Nazi Germany and professing to ‘ national socialism ’. The Ossewabrandwag
emerged as the most successful of these organizations, flourishing by opposing
South Africa’s war effort after 1939, while increasingly turning into a regular fas-
cist organisation owing to a number of checks sustained in particular by the
Herenigde Nasionale Party. As Marx stresses, this was an innovative, modern
party, which overcame personalised politics. Despite its demise, the Ossewa-
brandwag’s lasting influence is seen in the large contingent of leading politicians
and administrators who later rose in the ranks of the apartheid regime.
Integrating such a wide range of perspectives, and weaving it into a convincing
history of one of the most important background developments to apartheid, is an
enormous feat. Sticking to a topical rather than chronological exposition, Marx at
 REVIEWS 315
times makes rather high demands on readers’ patience. Yet such patience is defi-
nitely worthwhile.

Arnold Bergstraesser Institute, Freiburg REINHART KÖSSLER

A REVISIONIST VIEW OF SHAKA

doi:10.1017/S0021853709990235
Myth of Iron : Shaka in History. By DAN WYLIE. Woodbridge, Suffolk : Boydell &
Brewer, 2006. Pp. xviii+615. £19.95, paperback (ISBN 978-0-85255-441-8).
K E Y W O R D S : South Africa, historiography, method.

In 1988, Julian Cobbing published an article in this journal that questioned the
conventional wisdom regarding the consolidation of Shaka’s Zulu kingdom and its
aftermath (referred to as the mfecane). Cobbing argued that raiding and aggression
from the Cape Colony to the west and from slave trading at Delagoa Bay to the east
initiated a wave of violence across southern Africa. Instead of causing the violence,
Shaka’s kingdom was a defensive response to it. Dan Wylie’s Myth of Iron, which
was published in 2006 and is now available in paperback, is the most thorough
defense of Cobbing’s thesis to date.
To reverse the widespread belief in the mfecane, revisionist historians have had
to demonstrate the unreliability of both the eyewitness accounts of the European
Port Natal traders (especially those of Henry Fynn and Nathaniel Isaacs) and also
Zulu oral traditions. Wylie details the racist stereotypes, clichés, repetitions, and
contradictions of the Port Natal traders’ accounts. He also claims that Zulu oral
traditions have been irredeemably infected by the conventional mythology – and
hence he does not utilize any recently conducted interviews. But Myth of Iron is
more than a criticism of prevailing sources and myths. Wylie attempts a careful
historical reconstruction by introducing underused and untapped sources. He
relies on a set of lengthy interviews conducted by the Natal administrator and
chronicler of the Zulu, James Stuart, at the beginning of the twentieth century,
supposedly before the conventional mythology molded oral accounts. While the
interviews do not confirm the details of the revisionist case, they increase its
plausibility by offering a more qualified view of the Zulu consolidation and after-
math.
Using these and other sources – accompanied by some speculation – Wylie
concludes that Shaka was a decisive and strong leader, not a megalomaniac. He was
responsible for occasional acts of violence, but not the widespread cruelty of which
the white traders accused him. When genocidal violence undeniably came from the
Zulu, Wylie blames uncontrollable amabutho regiments rather than Shaka himself.
Shaka brought innovations to political and military formations, especially in the
regimental system, but this was not a military revolution and it had nothing to do
with the short stabbing spear. The Zulu state developed mostly as a defensive
response to Ndwandwe aggression from the north, which was in turn connected to
the Delagoa Bay slave trade. Only after the decisive defeat of the Ndwandwe in
1826 did Shaka’s polity initiate more aggressive raiding and expansion, managed
through an ‘ autocratic partnership ’ (pp. 270–7) with local lords (izinduna). Even
then, Wylie contends, Shaka attempted to incorporate his enemies rather than kill
them. Overall, Wylie presents the most sympathetic portrait of Shaka that his
evidence allows. The villains of the story are the European traders, who fraudu-
lently claimed that Shaka ceded land to them, stole Shaka’s gifts to the Cape