Abstract
The arguments presented here are offered in critical appraisal of Guy’s contribution to the
scholarship of colonial Natal and are informed by two primary concerns: the first is a politics
of producing desegregated historiography, and the second is the need for local historical
studies to relate to areas of wider scholarly concern, in this instance relating Shepstonian
politics to liberalism and the nineteenth-century British Empire.
Theophilus Shepstone and the Forging of Natal is Jeff Guy’s magnum opus and a
meticulously researched and richly detailed book. Guy’s finely considered archival narrative
builds a vision of a colony forged out of the local contingencies of Native administration
centred around Shepstone’s mediations of power. In this telling, it is out of the struggles
between the powerful Shepstone; a small, fractious settler elite – his friends and enemies; and
an intricate network of chiefly authorities that Natal is made.1 It is clear from this tome, as it
is in his considerable body of earlier work, that Guy was not one to countenance theoretical
generalizations about Shepstone’s Natal. It is the contention of this essay that Guy’s writing
of this history of the colony is, at best, a history in part, and that connections and
generalizations beyond these groups and beyond the colony are political and scholarly
imperatives. In addressing this, I will draw on instances of my own research on race, sex,
marriage and state-making to demonstrate the necessity of, and the possibilities for, a
broader, more complex telling of the history of colonial Natal.