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This thesis explores how various African and European actors experienced projections of imperial power, and the subsequent – though not synonymous – processes of colonial state-formation, in what was a relatively remote area on the margins of empire. Situated far away from established centres of authority in Cape Town or Pietermaritzburg, Pondoland was largely of parochial interest to imperial and colonial officials for much of the nineteenth century. As the last independent chiefdom to be annexed by the Cape, the transformations that marked the diminishing of empire and the consolidation of colonial rule had relatively little impact upon Mpondo political structures until 1894. Of course, the country was not immune to wider economic shifts or the conflagrations that erupted along an ever expanding eastern frontier. But these broader patterns of change modified, rather than undermined, the existing foundations of Mpondo political authority. Consequently, this thesis explores how these broader historical developments were perceived in Pondoland. Specifically, it seeks to examine how various Mpondo and other actors understood these processes by highlighting the contentious debates about the exercise of political authority and subjecthood they provoked. Such conversations varied across the polity; they expressed the latent loyalties and long-term rivalries within the country – cleavages which themselves reflected its jurisdictionally heterogeneous nature and the processes of differential incorporation which bound its composite communities in various ways to the Mpondo paramountcy. In examining the political dialogue that took place during Pondoland’s transition from independence to annexation, this thesis foregrounds the reconfiguration of intra-Mpondo political relations as central in determining the nature of the country’s incorporation. Moreover, it explores how these intra-Mpondo shifts were both facilitated by, and foundational to, the intersection of indigenous, colonial and imperial jurisdictional disputes in ways that fundamentally shaped the administrative and institutional character of the early colonial state.

This thesis takes as its subject the millenarian movement of 1856-7, commonly known as the Xhosa Cattle-Killing. My project examines a range of literary representations of this seminal moment in South African history: novels, plays, and short stories in English or English translation. The period under consideration encompasses the earliest literary responses to the Cattle-Killing and includes critical historical-political moments such as: the incorporation of the last independent black territory into the Cape Colony, the creation of the Union of South Africa, the passing of the Land Act, the enfranchisement of white women and the enactment of Hertzog's 'native bills'. The project consists of close, contextual readings, and the approach is cross-cultural and interdisciplinary. In this dissertation I examine the meaning that has accrued to the Cattle-Killing, and the role that literary accounts have played in interpreting and defining this pivotal event in the historical consciousness of their sometimes considerable audiences. In some cases, these creative works have anticipated trends in formal historiography and suggested new ways to interrogate the evidence. But the accounts do more than creatively reconstruct the past. They are also implicated in their respective presents and use the Cattle-Killing to 'write out' contemporaneous concerns: be it female emancipation, 'native education' or Black Nationalism. The various manifestations of the Cattle-Killing story chart not only the shifting 'truth' of the event but also the ways in which it has been made relevant and useable for different communities at various points in South Africa's history. To read these accounts of the Cattle-Killing, I argue, is to 'read' the history of this period. While taking as its subject an event from 150 years ago, and literary responses from shortly after, my project contributes to wider, on-going conversations relating to history as a field of argument and literature as a social and historical force. A related aim is to contribute to the revaluation of early South African literature, which has been neglected or homogenized in recent years. My dissertation seeks to recuperate and complicate by representing a variety of subject positions and resuscitating voices discarded or forgotten.

South African historiography has tended to follow the Great Trek and to avoid the area between the Kei River and Natal. As a result, hardly any attention has been given to an unspectacular but significant chapter in the story of relations between black and white in the nineteenth century. The purpose of this thesis is to explore this by-way, and to examine the relations of the Amampondo and the Colonial authorities at the Cape and Natal between 1830 and 1886. For the greater part of this period these relations were governed, nominally at least, by the Treaty of 1844, and an attempt has been made to assess its value as an Instrument regulating the dealings of a European power and a native tribe. The Treaty System, of which it formed a part, was the creature of a day. Built up between 1334 and 1844, it was swept away by the Frontier War of 1846 and the Bloemfontein Convention of 1854. It has therefore been necessary to ask why the Mpondo Treaty remained a living force for so many years after its counterparts had been abandoned.