Conclusions

By the mid-1850s, when Wilhelm Bleek arrived in Natal to begin his South African researches, British control throughout the region was becoming confidently consolidated. Natal had been annexed and its African inhabitants incorporated as colonial subjects. Soon the eastern Frontier, too, was rendered relatively secure, after the Cattle Killing and events surrounding it had weakened Xhosa resistance, and consequently the Xhosa also came to be appropriated more fully into the colonial order. As we have already seen, the extension of this control had been accompanied by the gathering of knowledge: since the beginning of the century, missionaries and others had been describing and demarcating the people of the region and their languages in ever more assured ways. In other words, a nexus of power and knowledge had been established before Bleek reached South Africa. The Nguni-speakers who had been so new to Western travellers at the beginning of the century when they were incorporated into the tentative typologies of Barrow and Lichtenstein were now largely colonized people, apparently suitable and containable objects of knowledge within Western discourses.