Shaka's Children: A History of the Zulu People

by StephenTaylor (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  1994

  $6.33

  The Zulu are an extraordinary people. Their history, military genius and imperious bearing won them the respect of the 19th-century European colonists, characterized as they were by the Victorians as a warrior tribe and the embodiment of the noble savage , but today their mystique is as great as ever and their political hegemony is poised to be returned. From the original encounters with two British fortune-seekers who described a hospitable, friendly host in 1824 to the infamous slaughter of the Voortrekkers a dozen years later, from the Zulu War against the British which spawned the lasting icon of the Zulu warrior as a kind of black superman - magnificent in defeat as they courageously challenged the Gatling gun with their spears - through to the urban, radical force politically united as Inkatha today, the tribal orders of this indomitable southern African nation are legendary. This book is a reappraisal of this distorted past of infamy and caricature, a study of the changing tribal orders that have left the elders bewildered, the young disaffected. It is also a portrait of Shaka Zulu, an African Tamburlaine, the founder of the Zulu nation, whose expansionist dreams turned a small tribe of 2000 people into one of the greatest warrior peoples the world has known.

• Used

  Paperback
  1995

  $3.29

  Shaka, founder of the Zulu nation, has been portrayed as a pitiless and savage conqueror who depopulated much of southern Africa. Yet in the 1820s, British fortune-seekers who came upon the Zulu described a civilized and dignified people whose martial skills were tempered by generosity and hospitality. As expanding colonial populations entered Zuluterritory, an image grew up of the Zulu warrior as a regimented man-killing machine. Only from the ashes of Isandlwana and Rorke's drift was the Zulu resurrected as a noble savage, magnificent, particularly in defeat. This account conjures the atmosphere of the past through close adherence to contemporary oral sources. The Zulu world - its passions, intrigues and ideals, the sly white traders, the sqabbling Boers, the thunderous battles and the bright African landscape are all explored in detail.