From the very article you mention, there are respected counter-points: "In 1988, Rhodes University professor Julian Cobbing advanced a controversial new hypoth

From the very article you mention, there are respected counter-points: "In 1988, Rhodes University professor Julian Cobbing advanced a controversial new hypothesis on the rise of the Zulu state; he contended the accounts of the Mfecane were a self-serving, constructed product of apartheid politicians and historians. According to Cobbing, apartheid historians had mischaracterised the Mfecane as a period of internally induced black-on-black destruction. Instead, Cobbing argued that the roots of the conflicts could be found exclusively in the labour needs of the Portuguese slave traders operating out of Delagoa Bay, in modern-day Mozambique, and of the British colonists in the Cape. The resulting pressures led to massive displacement, famine, and war in the interior, allowing later Afrikaner settlers to seize control of most land.[11] Among those involved were European adventurers such as Nathaniel Isaacs (who was later accused of slave trading)[12]"