Founding and Crushing: Narrative Understandings of Political Violence in Pre-modern and Colonial South Africa

Abstract

The significance of violence in the founding of states and the quest for democracy is a basic concern not only for general and abstract political theory but also at the level of particular political discourses in their historical contexts. South Africa has had a long and varied history of political violence from pre-colonial times, through conquest, slavery and a century of frontier wars to apartheid, the liberation struggle and the violent funding of a post-apartheid democracy. Some, but by no means all, of this proliferating and destructive violence can be accounted for in instrumental or strategic tenns. For the rest, though, this violent history was not understood, either at the time or in retrospect, as simply that of random violence or of endemic strife, a succession of arbitrary and irrational conflicts. Significantly, this often took the form of narratives of political violence whether at the level of oral histories, of popular legends, of J?artisan accounts, of official findings, of stories of nation-building or of academic histories. These diverse narratives may themselves be interrogated for the implicit understandings of the significance of political violence in the founding