The Dust Rose Like Smoke: The Subjugation of the Zulu and the Sioux. - book reviews

Journal of Social History, Summer, 1997 by George M. Fredrickson

Most previous historical comparisons of the United States and South Africa have focused on policies directed at conquered Africans and ex-slaves of African descent, especially legally-enforced racial segregation. A major exception is the symposium edited by Howard Lamar and Leonard Thompson. The Frontier in History: North America and South Africa Compared (New Haven, 1981), which juxtaposes essays on analogous aspects of the expansion of white settlement at the expense of indigenous peoples without, except in Lamar and Thompson's introduction, making direct and systematic comparisons. The governing conceptions in this volume are that frontiers have two sides and that they open and close as a function of the power differential between the competing groups. James O. Gump's The Dust Rose Like Smoke fulfills the promise of The Frontier in History by making the first detailed, in-depth comparison of the closing of the American and South African frontiers.

His points of departure are the dramatic defeats suffered by the forces of white expansionism at roughly the same time - Little Big Horn in 1876 and Isandhlwana in 1879. The independence or quasi-independence of the Zulus and Sioux constituted the last major obstacles to the completion of white domination. After the annihilation of Custer's cavalry and a force of British regulars at Little Big Horn and Isandhlwana, respectively, the agents of imperial domination reacted swiftly and decisively to avenge these defeats and close the frontier.

If Gump had simply drawn these parallels, the book would have made little contribution to our understanding of American and South African history. But he does more than this. He steps back from the similar events of the late nineteenth century to analyze the larger historical processes that gave them meaning. Like any good comparative historian, he is sensitive to differences as well as similarities. Tracing the earlier history of the Sioux and Zulus, he shows that both peoples had been expansionist and imperialistic, having extended their domains by warring on their neighbors. But the Zulus had achieved their domination over what is now Natal province through political centralization under an absolute monarch, whereas the Sioux had split into several virtually autonomous migratory bands that fanned out over the northern Great Plains. The warlike traditions of these peoples made them formidable military adversaries of the whites, but their aggressive and domineering treatment of other tribes had created a pool of potential collaborators with the white invaders.

In his analysis of the motivations at work on the white side of the frontier, Gump stresses economic interests. Conceiving Western imperialism as primarily a scramble to gain control of physical and human resources, he differentiates between the aim of the British in South Africa to extort from the Zulu labor for European farms and mines and the desire of American expansionists to gain access to mineral deposits and grazing lands in territories previously allotted to the Sioux by treaty. There may be an element of post hoc proper hoc in this analysis, at least in the case of South Africa. Gold had not yet been discovered on the Witwatersrand at the time of the Zulu Wars, and British policy in southern Africa prior to the late 1880s vacillated between expansion and contraction in response to changing fiscal, strategic, and ideological considerations. But mine and farm labor under coercive conditions would clearly be the lot of many of conquered Zulus. The Sioux, on the other hand, suffered the normal fate of American Indians - progressive loss of land, impoverishment, enforced idleness, and confinement to relatively small reservations that lacked both economic viability and political autonomy. Unlike the permanent and explicitly segregationist "Native Reserves" that the British set up in South Africa, the official aim of the American reservation system was gradual acculturation and the eventual assimilation of Indians into American society. But, as many historians before Gump have pointed out, a combination of white greed and Indian cultural resistance stymied the assimilationist project.

By locating the conquest of the Sioux within an international context - the rise of a capitalist-driven Western imperialism - Gump strikes another blow against American Exceptionalism. Too many historians of Indian-White relations have ignored this broader canvass. I would question the full adequacy of Gump's economic interpretation of imperialism and give more attention to cultural and ideological factors. Ethnocentric hubris may have played a greater role in the actions and reactions of white political and military authorities than he acknowledges. But Gump has performed a valuable service by showing that the events surrounding Little Big Horn and Isandhlwana were comparable incidents in a global narrative - the story of how whites conquered, subjugated, and dispossessed the indigenous peoples that stood in the way of their imperial ambitions.