Despite his deserved reputation as one of Africa's most influential colonial officials, Theophilus Shepstone has yet to attract a biographer; nor has there been a major study of the Department of Native Affairs which he headed in Natal during the mid-Victorian period. Mahmood Mamdani and others credit him and his department with creating the framework of indirect rule deployed by the British Empire over much of sub-Saharan Africa. True or not, this is an important claim that should have spurred on legions of researchers. Shepstone's relative neglect among colonial administrators remains a puzzle, for voluminous and readily accessible archival materials on Shepstone fill long shelves in the KwaZulu-Natal Archives and cabinets of the Killie Campbell Africana Library. A number of books have tackled aspects of Shepstone's life and work. Back in 1933 C. J. Uys lambasted his role in the 1877 annexation of the Transvaal from the point of view of an Afrikaner nationalist. Ruth Gordon's Shepstone: the Role of the Family in South Africa, 1820–1900 (1968) combined genealogical research with biographical sketches. David Welsh's Origins of Segregation (1972) showed how the so-called ‘Shepstone system’ laid the groundwork for twentieth century structures of segregation and apartheid. This reviewer contributed a chapter on the Shepstone system to the 1989 new history of Natal and Zululand from Earliest Times to 1910. More recently, John Lambert's Betrayed Trust: Africans and the State in Colonial Natal (1995) chronicled the way the Department of Native Affairs operated in conjunction with other branches of government to curtail African access to land and cattle in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Now Thomas McClendon has produced a gem of a book focused on Shepstone's dealings with three recalcitrant chiefs. His objective – admirably achieved – is to see how the inner workings of Shepstone's administration revealed themselves in crisis situations.
McClendon begins with a deft analysis of the huge gap separating Shepstone's early aspirations from the bureaucratic apparatus he actually built by trial and error over three decades. Most revealing of all his dreams was the Kiplingesque project of ruling his own African kingdom as a benevolent autocrat under the British flag. The author succeeds better than any previous writer in exposing the hidden and conflicted psychological, anthropological and economic assumptions that underlay the ill-fated Black Kingdom project. Unlike most of his contemporaries among the white settlers and officials of Natal, Shepstone felt comfortable and contented in the company of Africans. While paying lip service to contemporary ideas about Christianity and civilization he never evinced any serious intention to interfere with the basic fabric of customary life. At the same he insisted firmly that he be the unquestioned master – in McClendon's words, ‘the man who would be inkosi’. Nor was he blind to the eminently unZulu commercial possibilities that would open to him as absolute ruler of a potentially rich territory ‘that might have become known as KwaSomsewu’ (after the Zulu version of his name). Though the scheme foundered on the rock of Colonial Office scepticism, Shepstone carried its underlying premises into his ongoing administration in Natal.
That required above all that he maintain his hold over the subordinate African chiefs upon whom he depended to keep their people in line. How he managed that feat is shown through the treatment accorded to three who defied his authority: Sidoyi, Matshana and Langalibalele. These are precisely the cases I used for the same purpose in my doctoral dissertation on religious change in KwaZulu-Natal. Subsequent advances in our understanding of African societies under colonialism are amply demonstrated by McClendon's far more nuanced and sophisticated analysis. Whereas I had presented the three cases as examples of Shepstone's determination to defend at all costs the white man's prestige, McClendon sees them as the logical but unintended consequences of the decision to make Natal's governor ‘supreme chief’. Officials viewed this as simply a political choice about governance. McClendon demonstrates that it entailed entering into African conceptions of the role of chiefly authority. This is why he renders the Zulu word inkosi as lord rather than chief in his title ‘because of the sense of dignity, reciprocity, and heritability it conveys’ (p. 38). Because each inkosi performed ritual and supernatural functions believed vital to the well-being of the community, Natal's governor – and his representative, Shepstone – were assumed to have taken on similar responsibilities. This included such work as identifying and destroying witches. Misunderstandings were bound to ensue, such as those that led to the clashes with Sidoyi, Matshana and Langalibalele.
The paradoxical result of McClendon's argument is to follow Carolyn Hamilton's Terrific Majesty (1998) in rehabilitating the once questionable proposition that Shepstone did indeed ‘know the Native mind’ (now shorn of its implied racial judgment). His compact 133 pages of text do not, however, exhaust the subject. We still await analysis of Shepstone's relations with the overwhelming majority of compliant izinkosi, especially the inner circle to whom he turned time and again, including those occasions on which they accompanied government troops into battle against their recalcitrant fellows.
