Olden Times in Zululand and Natal …depends primarily on tribal lore garnered during four decades of exhaustive interviews with native elders.…[I]t is safe to say [Bryant's] work will never be exceeded. Almost everything published on the subject since depends on him.…This paper needs to be read against the background of the critique which has gradually been gathering force over the last half-dozen years or so of the concept of the mfecane. By the mfecane is meant the idea that in the 1820s much of the eastern half of southern Africa was thrown into turmoil by a series of wars and population migrations set in motion by the explosive expansion of the Zulu state under Shaka. Ever since Theal first popularized it in the late nineteenth century, this idea has remained one of the bedrock concepts around which the history of southern Africa in the later eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century has been written. The term mfecane itself did not become widely used until as recently as 1966, when, in his widely influential book, The Zulu Aftermath, Omer-Cooper repackaged what had previously been called “the wars of Shaka” for an emerging Africanist readership. Since then the concept of the mfecane has permeated the literature, both popular and academic, inside and outside southern Africa, to the point where it is regarded as a fixed fact of the sub-continent's history.