Academic literature on the topic 'Raid On Bungeling Bay'

The ‘mfecane’ is a characteristic product of South African liberal history used by the apartheid state to legitimate South Africa's racially unequal land division. Some astonishingly selective use or actual invention of evidence produced the myth of an internally-induced process of black-on-black destruction centring on Shaka's Zulu. A re-examination of the ‘battles’ of Dithakong and Mbolompo suggests very different conclusions and enables us to decipher the motives of subsequent historiographical amnesias. After about 1810 the black peoples of southern Africa were caught between intensifying and converging imperialistic thrusts: one to supply the Cape Colony with labour; another, at Delagoa Bay, to supply slaves particularly to the Brazilian sugar plantations. The flight of the Ngwane from the Mzinyathi inland to the Caledon was, it is argued, a response to slaving. But they ran directly into the colonial raiding-grounds north of the Orange. The (missionary-led) raid on the still unidentified ‘Mantatees’ (not a reference to MaNtatisi) at Dithakong in 1823 was one of innumerable Griqua raids for slaves to counter an acute shortage of labour among Cape settlers after the British expansionist wars of 1811–20. Similar Griqua raids forced the Ngwane south from the Caledon into the Transkei. Here, at Mbolompo in 1828, the Ngwane were attacked yet again, this time by a British army seeking ‘free’ labour after the reorganisation of the Cape's labour-procurement system in July 1828. The British claim that they were parrying a Zulu invasion is exposed as propaganda, and the connexions between the campaign and the white-instigated murder of Shaka are shown. In short, African societies did not generate the regional violence on their own. Rather, caught within the European net, they were transformed over a lengthy period in reaction to the attentions of external plunderers. The core misrepresentations of ‘the mfecane’ are thereby revealed; the term, and the concept, should be abandoned.

When a target’s board decides to fight an unsolicited takeover attempt, the raider must go over directors’ heads, directly to shareholders. It must overcome a free-rider problem that would otherwise force it to pay such a high price for the target’s shares that the raid would be unprofitable. This chapter shows how to overcome this free-rider problem using the story of how Malcolm Glazer, the owner of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers NFL team, was able to acquire the Manchester United soccer club in the UK in the face of strong opposition from the target’s board. It describes strategies raiders use to persuade small shareholders to sell their shares at prices lower than their post-takeover value.

This chapter describes widespread skepticism regarding the value of assessing uncertainty in international politics. “Agnostics” argue that assessments of uncertainty in international politics are too unreliable to be useful for shaping major foreign policy decisions. “Rejectionists” argue that attempting to assess uncertainty in international politics can be counterproductive, surrounding foreign policy analyses with illusions of rigor or exposing foreign policy analysts to excessive criticism. “Cynics” claim that foreign policy analysts and decision makers have self-interested motives to avoid assessing uncertainty. The chapter explains how these ideas lead many scholars, practitioners, and pundits to avoid holding careful debates about the risks surrounding major foreign policy choices. The chapter describes how this aversion to probabilistic reasoning appears in several high-profile cases, such as President Kennedy’s decision to authorize the Bay of Pigs invasion and President Obama’s decision to raid Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.