Barbarian Migrations & the Mfecane

[Owen]

This post was prompted by correspondence with Justin Swanson (with whom I share a southern African upbringing). I commented to Justin that I found a knowledge of 5th century Europe useful in understanding southern African politics, and he suggested I should try to explain why.  So I thought I'd try it out!
The key event that created the current distribution of ethnic groups in southern Africa was the so-called Mfecane ("crushing") in the early 19th century, connected to the creation of the Zulu kingdom.  Historians disagree on the cause of the Mfecane (famine, war, competition over grazing land etc), but the key outcome was the dispersion of losing factions across the bottom half of Africa.  What characterized all of them was the use of Zulu military techniques, which gave them military superiority over most African enemies.  These factions all had an Ngoni (the linguistic group of which Zulu is a member)core.  The most notable group that survives today are the Ndebele, who still describe themselves as "Zulus".
The factions included women and children, but not many, and had to be replenished from conquered people.  A class system survived, so that Ndebele had "pure" Ngoni at the top, then a group whose name translates as "those picked up along the way" (I.e in what is now South Africa) , then at the bottom, their Shona (an ethnic group in Zimbabwe) subjects.  What's interesting is that - even now - everyone aspires to be Ndebele, because it has connotations of being a warrior.  Even though the Shona "subjects" (Kalanga) kept their language, they are now seen as Ndebele.  So the late Joshua Nkomo, nationalist leader and hero of the Ndebele - and portrayed almost as a king - was in fact Kalanga.  Similar processes happened across southern Africa: in some places tribes who had nothing to do with Ngoni started dressing and behaving like them.
I hope the parallels with the Barbarian Migrations are obvious, but two things in particular strike me. First, the process whereby a dominant minority imposes its ethnic identity on a subject majority with the latter's active collusion.  Second, the way in which relatively small groups of warriors, with their families in tow, could turn into "nations" in a couple of generations.
This is obviously a hugely simplified account, but I'd welcome comments from those of you who know more about the 5th century than I do.  I recommend Guy Halsall's blog "Historian on the Edge" (which currently has a draft piece on the Gothic army in Italy), which I've found very thought provoking.

[Jim Webster]

It's at http://600transformer.blogspot.co.uk/ :-)

Thanks for the heads up

Jim

[Patrick Waterson]

Thanks for posting, Owen.

I recall Mzilikazi as being the key figure in the Mfecane: he seems to have been the one who started the process which essentially went as follows:

1) Have your warriors creep up on an unsuspecting kraal by night, then go in with the cold steel, killing men, killing or taking women and children but above all taking the corn and cattle.

2) Induct captives into tribe.

3) Repeat procedure at next kraal.

The result of this was to produce numerous displaced populations: Bantu society had a quite fragile economic basis, and where a European population would have tried to rebuild and restart farming, the Bantu peoples had no 'reserve' with which to attempt this: once a tribe's corn and cattle were gone they were gone.

There was just one way to get some more: raid another tribe.  This was accordingly done, usually as per step 1) above.  The net result was that now, instead of one destitute and one settled tribe there was one temporarily sated tribe and one destitute tribe.  The temporarily sated tribe would not remain sated for long - rather than try to settle and restart, they would consume what they had taken and then raid again.  Now there were two raiding groups: soon there would be four.  Eventually some would coalesce and form a super-group.

The ripples spread: before long, three principal trends were observable.

1) A large horde (estimates vary, but 40,000 warriors and innumerable hangers-on seems to be the norm) of coalesced wandering raiders under one Mantatisi swept across southern Africa like a plague of locusts, ravaging everyone and everything in their wake, until stopped by a force of 400 griquas (half-Hottentots who had taken up a semi-Europeanised way of life, living mainly as hunters and possessing ponies and elephant guns).

2) Several pockets of cannibals remained where the horde had passed; some of these continued this custom after the Mfecane because they had come to enjoy the taste of human flesh.

3) The isolated mountain stronghold of the baSotho under Moshoeshoe managed to fend off all comers.  (This would later become the kingdom of Lesotho.)

4) The Transvaal was seriously depopulated, allowing the Boer voortrekkers to settle in their 'promised land'.

This was the experience of the territories that today broadly constitute South Africa.  Mzilikazi pushed up into what later became Rhodesia and there established his kingdom, from which he made periodic excursions against the Shona (bad blood from this came back to roost after 1979).  His kingdom came under British rule in the days of Lobengula, his successor.

The principal differences from the barbarian migrations towards the end of the western Roman Empire are that there was no 'Empire' to be invaded, to derive culture from or to form alliances against other barbarian peoples, and that in the barbarian conquests in Europe there seems to have been no shockwave displacement of the indigenous populations (although one does see this in the Saxon conquest of Britain).  The similarities are, however, worth investigating further.

[aligern]

Thanks for the reverence to the guy Halsall blog. He does not like Heather, whereas I do. Heather comprehensively destroys Amory's argument about the Goths being just a Roman army which takes on wives in Italy and has an ethnicity that is actively created by Theoderic to create a unit. ( No doubt that Theoderic stimulates ethnic identity, but the evidence for this fits just as well with the arrival of the Goths in Italy with an ethnic identity which Theoderic works to maintain so that he can hold the Goths together to orovide an army.  Being the army is the Goths raison d'etre in Italy and thus the reason that Theoderic is king. If he is not there to control the Goths the Italian senators could replace him. lije Odivacar he is king of the army.
Guy misses out the history of both groups of Goths that are the primary components of Theoderic's army. His own people come across from Hunnic domination into the Empire, there is every reason to believe that they already have women and children with them, one of whom is Theoderic. Same for Theoderic Strabo's group, the other major contributor. Not that I do not see them picking up some ladies as they go, but only a small proportion, because thaey are already moving as a people.
We know that in Italy the Goths are clustered. Whatever mechanism you pick for settlement has to account for that. It also has to account that the Goths take over the settlement of Odovacar's men and thus the Italian landowners have already been despoiled.
Guy also fails to address Heather's big point about Gothic social composition. Heather sees them as composed of nobles, optimates and half free. So a Gothic group will have a leading family, a group of free men attached to them and half free attached to the free. That means that the land settlement has to take this structure into account. (that social structure is very similar to the Lombard and of course the Goths also own slaves. So settlement will give estates to the top Gothic families, it will probably also give land to a wide number of the optimates. The half free are unlikely to get land at all, they are attached to the lords and so are many of the free.
Heather makes the point that the Goths fight on until the upper groups are too depleted to continue. I buy Guy's point there that a crushed army needs time to recoup and the Goths do not get this, they are defeated and deracinated because they run out of leaders, space and time.
Roy

[Jim Webster]

To a certain extent the clustering of Goths (and their predecessors) could be because of the way that agri deserti may have existed in comparatively large swathes, rather than in penny packets well scattered.
If it had been the latter it would have probably been seamlessly absorbed into neighbouring estates, I suspect it's really only when it's in large chunks that it survives.
Also from what I remember reading there is also the effect of confiscated estates. Whilst a wealthy man could have estates scattered across a number of provinces, there was always an incentive to link up individual estates wherever possible, if only to ease management and benefit from the economies of scale.
So a single confiscated estate might well be split up to reward a number of Gothic notables.

Jim

[aligern]

 It might be Jim, depending upon how Liberiys arranged the sorting of Gothic allotments. However, I base my clustering of Goths upon Procopius mentions of them. There are clearly few or No Goths settled in Sicily . In Southern Italy Evremud has few Goths, certainly not enough to face Belisarius who may have 7-9000 men. So few that he surrenders and joins Belisarius.
The major Gothic settlements are in the North West where there are garrisons against the Franks  and in Picenum where they are settled to be available for Ravenna and around Theoderic's stronghold of Verona. There are also groups settled in Dalmatia. This is all very logical because the main threat to Italy is of an overland attack from Gaul or from the Balkans. So I would see the main driver for settlement being to keep the Goths together as an army and prevent too much assimilation. Bierbrauer's map of Gothic finds accords well with this. One can doubt individual finds, but overall it makes. sense because it maps with Procopius'text.

Roy

[Jim Webster]

That deployment makes sense for previous regimes as well.
But it does rather assume that you don't need many of your field army to defend the south
The lack of Goths in Sicily might be explained as much by the Vandals holding it meaning that Odoacer didn't have any men there.
Lack of settlement in Southern Italy is less easy to explain away, as you would have thought that men would have been needed in the south to protect against Vandal raids etc. Perhaps this was done by local Militia/limitanei forces with field army support if needed

Jim

[aligern]

You only need to defend the South against a seaborne attack and the Goths were not expecting one, well at least not one as dangerous as that of Belisarius. The Vandals were neutralised by treaty and good relations wit the Empire were maintained.  However, in 507 the Imperials raided along the coast and this was enough to delay Theoderic from entering Gaul to aid Alaric II at Vouille.
In 535 When Belisarius invades it is in conjunction with an invasion from the Balkans led by Mundo which the Goths beat off. I have long suspected that Mundo is the main event ad Belisarius, from Africa is there to sweep  Up the unguarded South and get to Rome because Rome is the prize Justinian wants. J being quite content later to have a Gothic buffer/tributary state across the Po.

Sicily is very lightly garrisoned because the Gothic army is not that big and the country is run on a deal between the Goths and the Romans in which, if the Romans pay their taxes , they are governed with a light touch. Totila, I think refers to this when he retakes Sicily. The Goths had been expecting the Sicilians to be rather more resistant to the  Imperial armies in 535.

You would be correct Jim that the settlement pattern likely represents the military dictates of the pre Odovacrian administration , but we should note that the desire of Odovacar's  tribesmen was to be given land rather than wages. That initiated a revolt and seizure of power and means that new land must have been transferred at that point.
Roy

[Jim Webster]

Yes, Odovacar's  'revolt' is probably the reason why the Goths didn't have to confiscate land, the spadework had already been done, and confiscating it off other barbarians probably didn't bring tears to the eyes of many Roman Senators :-)

Jim

[aligern]

Which is something that Guy seems to miss completely, along with the other academics. Generally he comes from understandingl the anthropology which is a good start point. However, none of the settlement or compensation models for the barbarians in the West really get to grips with the fact that these tribes have social structures and that they settle with their social structures intact and so it cannot be a case of just everyone getting some land. The king's nephew has to have estates befitting a prince, the chaps who have client relations to him have to remain so or bang goes his princely status.  A key understanding is the nature of the numerous class of Optimates. I suspect that they get land.
This will have been just the same for the Vandals , the Burgundians, the Visigoths in Gaul and the Sciri and Heruls who were there before the Theoderican army.
To refer back to an earlier debate, the barbarians, even where they came as conquerors had to have a working society so they could not just dispossess all the Roman landowners because these ran the law, tax collection, town and road maintenance and the Church and given the existence of the Eastern Empire, they all had somewhere to run to. So there must have been partnerships. As you say a large chunk of the lands used were state land so no problem there and in other situations  landowners may have been willing to trade some land for security, especially in border regions. Out in Dalmatia and beyond I imagine large amounts of derelict land too.
Roy

[aligern]

Actually, Owen, how did the Boers allocate the land that they took? Is there a parallel there?
Roy

[Jim Webster]

Also when giving land I see no reason why the land couldn't be given to the 'prince' who then settled his followers as tenants on his land.
This happened in Iceland where the original settler would take a large area, but to farm it efficiently would set up farms on parts of his area and put his people in them as tenants.
Given they weren't paying tax on the land, the rent would be accepted as just something you paid, and the tenants would largely be farming their land either with labourers or tenants of their own.

That way the 'prince' has a suitable income from his land, his followers are linked to him by a closer relationship, physical and financial, and there is flexibility here. I've noticed that there is a lot in the literature about trying to take ownership of the land, but actually the important bit about the land is its earning potential, and exploitation of the land by having tenants on it is a very old technique. It can be far less hassle and at times even more profitable that putting managers in and suchlike

Jim

[Owen]

Gosh, I'm both gratified and surprised to have prompted a debate! I'm actually in Zimbabwe at the moment (and have just got back from Matabeleland) so I'm not well placed to comment.  I'm not completely convinced by Patrick's account of the Mfecane (but these were all pre-literate societies so it's impossible to be sure), but it raises a key point which is that Africa couldn't sustain the settled economy that even early medieval Europe could, so people moved around a lot more.  But in that sense it seems very similar to the economic model of Europe east of the Rhine that Heather seems to present.  The Boer's technical superiority (and racism) means they're not really a useful comparator.  The Griqua enjoyed the same technical superiority (horses and guns) too.
In what is now Zimbabwe, though, the population displacement was quite localized. And what is intriguing - in light of Halsall's thesis (that the empire had already fallen when the migrations occurred) is that the Ndebele moved into a political vacuum that had once been occupied by a powerful and sophisticated empire (evidenced by the ruins at Great Zimbabwe).  There's an equally interesting comparison in what is now western Zambia, where the Lozi/Barotse kingdom was overrun by a mixed horde of Basothos and others from the south displaced by the Mfecane.  After a couple of decades the displaced Lozi monarchy reconquered their kingdom.  But in those few decades the  Lozi people had adopted the language of their conquerors which they have kept to this day.  The Lozi court uses titles etc inherited from the Basotho as well. Its subject people, though, kept their original languages and cultural identity and even now complain of Lozi "imperialism".  So in Barotseland you see an empire that was centuries old when it was taken over by "barbarians" but assimilated them (including their language) and continued on in much the same form as before and with with the same ruling elite, but looking - superficially - like a new polity.  The battle in which the former monarchy recovered the kingdom was a sort of African Chalons, with subject tribes and mercenaries recruited from far and wide on both sides
I don't  find Halsall convincing because he seems to want to argue for the sake of it, but he knows his stuff and is always thought provoking. As I said I think the Mfecane  provides an intriguing model of how the migrations might have worked that doesn't contradict either him or Heather.
I'm heading back to UK tomorrow where I'll have more time to reflect.  I was taught by Bryan Ward-Perkins and John Matthews as an undergraduate and - ironically given my current job - found it a lot more interesting than the Imperialism and Nationalism in Africa course I also did

[Justin Swanton]

Are you in Harare? My home town. 

I've been to the Great Zimbabwe a couple of times. The debate goes on as to why it fell and why it was built in that area to begin with - the lowveld in the southeast, not exactly prime land.

I wonder where the Mashona featured in all this. They are supposed to be the degenerate descendants of the Rozwi, themselves heirs of the empire of Matuto Tapa (Monomatapa), if I haven't got it wrong. Not sure if that had anything to do with the Great Zimbabwe. I never paid much attention to African history. Far too Eurocentric.