University of Western Australia
      <nether@arts.uwa.edu.au>

x-posted from H-SAfrica

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-SAfrica@h-net.msu.edu (October, 2000)

Benedict Carton. _Blood from Your Children: The Colonial
Origins of Generational Conflict in South Africa_.
Reconsiderations in Southern African History. ix + 215pp.
Photographs, maps, bibliography, and notes.  Charlotte:
University Press of Virginia, 2000. $55.00 (cloth), ISBN
0-8139-1931-2; $19.50 (paper), ISBN 0-8139-1932-0.

Reviewed for H-SAfrica by Norman Etherington,
nether@arts.uwa.edu.au, Department of History, University of
Western Australia.


Enacting one of the historical profession's venerable
rituals, young historian Benedict Carton challenges the
authority of the elders in this study of the Natal
disturbances of 1906-1907.  Thirty years ago Shula Marks
argued in _Reluctant Rebellion_ that colonial taxation and
other exactions triggered a truncated peasants' revolt which
went nowhere because it lacked credible leadership.  Without
disputing the role played by the Natal government's policies
on land and taxation, Carton believes that Marks overlooked
the contribution of conflict between 'generations'.
Building on Jeff Guy's insight that the transition to
colonial rule in KwaZulu Natal was marked by an
'accommodation of patriarchs', Carton sees young men and
women challenging policies which maintained white and black
patriarchal power - including, of course, older women whose
authority depended on the patriarchs.

This is not a difficult case to argue because of the wealth
of evidence showing that conflict between sons and fathers
was structurally embedded in all levels of Nguni
pre-colonial social organization.  Young men could not hope
to acquire the cattle required for marriage without help
from their fathers.  In a household with many wives, no son
knew who would succeed as head until his father chose a
chief wife.  Lineage heads, chiefs and kings often delayed
nominating a principal wife - and therefore the heir - for
years, lest a disappointed sibling foment a patricidal plot.
Carton reviews these conflicts in elegant prose in the first
third of his text.

Next he sketches the way young men and women found
opportunities to circumvent patriarchal power through wage
labor and affiliation with Christian missions.  The young
men acquired means for earlier marriage, and many young
women found ways to avoid marrying the men whom parents had
chosen for them.  The patriarchs found an improbable ally in
Natal's white magistrates because the system of 'Native law'
and administration developed by Theophilus Shepstone
depended on cooperative chiefs. When disputes between
fathers and sons reached courts of law, the magistrates were
likely to side with the fathers.  According to Carton, the
contradiction between the disruptive effects of the colonial
economy on traditional family life and the administration's
dependence on chiefs reached crisis point when Natal imposed
a poll tax on unmarried men over eighteen years of age.
Because this threatened young men's newly won gains, they
threw their support behind Bhambatha and a few other chiefs
who were willing to risk the consequences of an open
rebellion.  Carton argues that the rebels failed because the
two-headed monster of white and black patriarchal power
combined to defeat them.

Although the argument is plausible, Carton lacks the
necessary evidence to prove his case. This is not because he
has failed in his research.  He read the right books,
ransacked the archives, learned Zulu and interviewed old
people. The main problem is his inability to translate the
subjective evidence he has accumulated into numbers.  In a
single family it is easy to see generational conflict.  In
society at large, the existence of thousands of families in
different stages of development makes it more difficult to
draw lines between generations.  The young shade gradually
into the mature, the mature shade gradually into the old.
In this case the problem is exacerbated by the inevitable
tendency of wars to enlist mainly young fighters. Were the
rebels of 1906 fighting because they were young men
aggrieved by the poll tax, or did they do the fighting
because they were young and therefore fighting fit?  In the
absence of firm figures it is very hard to say.  Even when
Carton can use Natal government statistics, he finds it
difficult to draw the line, as on page 120 when he writes
that "nearly 1,800 young men and several hundred older men
were found guilty of sedition between 1906-1908."

The book is as attractive as sympathetic editors, good
proof-reading and the guidance of a fine university press
can make it.  As time goes by, historians must begin to
wonder why notes must still be consigned to the end pages,
rather than set out in footnotes on each page. It cannot be
because of the expense, because digital page setting
eliminates the cost which once made type-setters rend their
garments and tear their hair.  Nor is it reasonable to use
the old excuse that footnotes distract the attention of
casual readers. The use of the so-called 'Harvard system' of
parenthetical referencing - i.e. (Lenin, 1985) - is far more
intrusive.  A book like this one would be much easier to
read with footnotes.

Carton did a fine job of providing helpful maps and
diagrams.  He also found a number of interesting
photographs, which have not been very well reproduced by the
publisher.  The mat finish dims the images and reduces
contrast to unacceptable levels.  If the author's intention
was to carry his argument forward with the photos, it has
been subverted by the printers.

Like everyone who writes in English on African subjects,
Carton faced the inevitable problem of orthography.  Like
everyone else who has written serious history of Southern
Africa in the last forty years, he includes a note
explaining that he has used 'recent orthography' for
'isiZulu' words.  The trouble is, the orthography keeps
changing.  Thus Carton feels compelled to write Bhambatha
instead of Bambata, Dingana instead of Dinagane, etc. This
is not because the Zulu language itself has been changing
but because the linguistic gatekeepers continually change
their minds.  It is high time scholars got together to adopt
a code of practice on spelling and grammar.  Even the
spelling of words in Wright and Webb's magnificent _James
Stuart Archive_ has changed as each succeeding volume has
reached the press.  Spoken American and British English have
undergone great changes during the last two hundred year
without producing concomitant changes in spelling.  Writers
have held the advocates of phonetic spelling at bay.  Why do
we treat printed African languages differently?
Orthographical shiftiness is a form of orientalizing
knowledge which operates to keep Zulu speakers in their
place as 'the other'.  This reviewer has had enough.


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