Picture: Canva
Mphuthumi Ntabeni wrote the article below as a means of keeping notes for his next project. But since it could be of interest to LitNet’s readership as well, it is now published on LitNet.
I
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There is a familiar scent at the beginning of every long research project – a mixture of anticipation, conviction, even the quiet dread that one might discover too much truth for one to stomach. I have entered that phase now, reopening the rooms of my mind where historical ghosts have always felt at home. The working title of the new historical novel I am beginning is "The covenant of dust", and, like most covenants, it comes with obligations: to look squarely at the past, to understand the myths that shaped it, to resist the consolations of received wisdom and to contend with the disingenuousness of unhealthy silences.
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There is a familiar scent at the beginning of every long research project – a mixture of anticipation, conviction, even the quiet dread that one might discover too much truth for one to stomach. I have entered that phase now, reopening the rooms of my mind where historical ghosts have always felt at home. The working title of the new historical novel I am beginning is "The covenant of dust", and, like most covenants, it comes with obligations: to look squarely at the past, to understand the myths that shaped it, to resist the consolations of received wisdom and to contend with the disingenuousness of unhealthy silences.
I have tentatively begun its research with four books stacked like cartographic instruments on my desk: Tecumseh: A life by John Sugden, The earth is weeping by Peter Cozzens, The invention of the white race by Theodore Allen and The intellectual origins of American slavery by John Samuel Harpham.
The first two are self-evident invitations to the North American frontier – the Shawnee world of Tecumseh and the tragic breadth of indigenous resistance. They are, for now, supporting actors in the early stages of my thinking. It is the other two – Allen and Harpham – who have opened the subterranean questions about the invention of race as an instrument of governance, the moral alibis that fashioned slavery into a rational institution, and the slow crafting of a Western civilisational lie.
"The covenant of dust" is conceived as a transhistorical, comparative novel, a weaving of two prophetic resistances:
- Chief Sandile of the Rharhabe Xhosa, confronting the tightening coils of British expansion (1830-1878), and
- Tecumseh, the Shawnee visionary, attempting a pan-indigenous confederacy to halt the American settler tide (1770-1813).
Their worlds are divided by vast oceans but conjoined by the frontiers that swallowed them. Both men stood at the threshold of empires that used native land dispossession as a means to fulfil their destiny of finding a new world. Their stories form twin axes crossing three temporal landscapes: the Eastern Cape, the Ohio Valley and the uneasy present – Cape Town, London, Ohio, 2025 – where the myths of the frontier still mutate and metastasise.
The novel’s premise is simple: What if these two histories, traditionally understood as local tragedies, are in fact iterations of a single settler-colonial cosmology? To pursue this, I need to understand how Americans created the racial scaffolding of their republic, and how that scaffolding compares with Britain’s racial architecture on the Cape frontier. That is where the reading of Theodore Allen and John Samuel Harpham will be most helpful.
II
Ordinarily, I work in the opposite direction by beginning first with the sources and then reading historians’ interpretations later, because modern interpretations, however insightful, carry the imprint of their time’s anxieties. I prefer to let the dead speak for themselves before the living paraphrase them. But, lacking archival access to the early American material, I have permitted myself to begin with the scaffolding before touching the source stones.
By contrast, I know the Eastern Cape sources well enough – the letters, dispatches, missionary journals and colonial blue books of the frontier era. Nkosi Sandile of the Ngqika shoot of the Rharhabe is no stranger to me; the land he defended still breathes its furies into our modern political air of the Eastern Cape. And it is precisely this familiarity – this haunted intimacy – that makes the comparative project so urgent.
Allen’s work is a ferocious, slow-burning demolition of America’s racial mythology. His thesis is just as stark: When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, there were no “white people”. There were only Europeans – English, Irish, Scots, Dutch – fractured by class, religion and colonial wounds. “Whiteness” had to be invented.
Its second premise is equally unsettling: It was not colour that produced slavery, but slavery that produced colour. The ruling class, shaken by the multiracial solidarity of the labouring poor – most dramatically during Bacon’s Rebellion – needed a new tool for social control. Their solution was as elegant as it was monstrous: creating a buffer caste of poor whites, granted just enough symbolic privilege (exemption from enslavement) to identify upwards with their oppressors rather than sideways with their fellow exploited.
Volume one pulls a surprising mirror into view: Ireland. Allen argues that the Anglo-Irish relationship was the prototype of racial domination before race was chromatically defined. The Irish were colonised through cultural, religious and moral denigration – racial terms in everything but colour.
What fascinates me is how when this Irish precedent travelled across the Atlantic, many who resisted British domination in Ireland became defenders of racial slavery in America. Whiteness, so newly forged, offered them a compensatory citizenship no previous empire had granted them. Thus whiteness becomes the American covenant, binding democracy to exclusion, liberty to hierarchy.
Volume two intensifies the argument into the transition from African bonded labour to deliberate hereditary chattel slavery. Legal distinctions hardened slowly – restrictions on movement, punishments, denial of testimony, the barring of baptism as a path to freedom. Each step chiselled human beings into property. Race, in Allen’s account, is not an idea but a management system.
All this is au fait to anyone versed in British frontier colonialism, which evolved into a blatant apartheid system. For my novel, Allen will provide the structural logic of settler colonialism, of how empires on frontiers do not merely expand but engineer societies of white dominion so their expansion serves the white race and settler class. European expansion is crudely used as the buffer to protect white interests. And native resistance is regarded as barbarism or, in modern terms, terrorism.
This echoes with eerie fidelity across the Eastern Cape. If Allen explains how race was invented, Harpham explains why Americans believed they could morally justify it. His book is an intellectual archaeology of a shameful certainty.
Harpham traces a genealogy of ideas back to Roman law, where slavery was conceptualised as the fate of captives in war. This idea travelled through medieval thought, resurfaced in early modern natural law, and lodged itself in the writings of thinkers like Grotius and John Locke. Locke, often worshipped as the apostle of liberty, emerges here in the ambiguous light of depraved reasoning: contractual freedom at home, dispossessive conquest abroad.
For English thinkers confronting the question “How can a free person become a slave?”, Roman precedent offered a ready-made answer. The Romans enslaved war captives. But slavery, for them, was not race-based but consequential to regional or global conquest by the Roman empire.
Once European accounts of Africa were filtered through this Roman lens, a grotesque circular logic took shape. Because Africans practised forms of servitude after their tribal wars, Europeans felt justified in purchasing captives from African slave sellers. Thus the Atlantic slave trade fit within an “ancient”, “natural” and “legal” framework.
Harpham’s point is devastating: America’s slave empire was built not on ignorance, but on deliberate intellectual appropriation. Slavery was not a tragic aberration of Western civilisations, but one of its inheritances.
For my own research, Harpham exposes the deeper symmetry of Europeans arriving on Xhosa and Shawnee frontiers. They did not bring only guns and diseases (smallpox, rinderpest, etc). They brought philosophical templates for dominion. The frontier became the place where European jurisprudence grew unfettered, spectacularly violent and intellectually self-justifying. As with the Irish in America, so with the persecuted Huguenots in South Africa – they failed to oppose the degradation they had fled from, and instead became instruments of a new hierarchy over African natives.
To place Sandile and Tecumseh side by side is not to flatten their differences, but to illuminate the global architecture of dispossession. Both confronted empires that rationalised expansion as destiny, civilisation or protection. Both endured the psychological terror of watching treaties dissolve in the heat of settler hunger. Both died believing, with prophetic clarity, that the land was a moral subject whose silence would one day condemn those who stole it.
The 2025 strand of the novel exists because the frontier never ended. It merely changed its metaphors. In South Africa, the ghosts of the “empty land” myth still stalk our political debates. In Trump’s America, the covenant of whiteness remains the republic’s unburied cornerstone.
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To write across these worlds is to wager that comparative history can break open our provincialism. That the moral imagination, stretched across continents, can diagnose the disease of racial modernity. That the land, whether Ohioan or Eastern Capetonian, remembers the blood that was spilled in dispossession of the natives, which in America was genocidal.
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To write across these worlds is to wager that comparative history can break open our provincialism. That the moral imagination, stretched across continents, can diagnose the disease of racial modernity. That the land, whether Ohioan or Eastern Capetonian, remembers the blood that was spilled in dispossession of the natives, which in America was genocidal.
When the novel is finished, I hope readers will see what I am beginning to glimpse – that Sandile and Tecumseh were not defeated chieftains of local tragedies, but theologians of land and dignity, whose warnings echo into our century.
For now, I continue reading – lifting the dust of archives, tracing the moral DNA of empires. The covenant demands it. And dust, after all, is where every story of human belonging begins.
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