A detailed history explaining how and why, in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, Africans from the British colony of Natal transformed their ethnic self-identification, constructing and claiming a new Zulu identity.

This volume is the third of The James Stuart Archive. In it, the editors present a further twenty-eight documents compiled from material in the James Stuart Collection of the Killie Campbell Africana Library in Durban. James Stuart was an official in the Natal colonial civil service in the 1890s and early years of the present century. In meticulously recorded interviews with hundreds of informants, the great majority of them Africans, he assembled a vast and unique collection of notes on the traditions and customs of the Zulu and neighbouring peoples. The documents published in the successive volumes of The James Stuart Archive represent edited, annotated and translated renderings of Stuart's notes and transcriptions. The testimony which he assembled piecemeal has been arranged by the editors under the names of the informants from whom it was obtained, and is being published in alphabetical name-order. The present volume carries the sequence from Mbokodo to Mpatshana, and brings to ninety-nine the number of informants whose statements have so far been published in the series.

From roughly 1818 to 1867, Faku was ruler of the Mpondo Kingdom located in what is now the north-east section of the Eastern Cape, South Africa. Because of Faku’s legacy, the Mpondo Kingdom became the last African state in Southern Africa to fall under colonial rule. When his father died, Faku inherited his power. In a period of intense raiding, migration and state formation, he transformed the Mpondo polity from a loosely organized constellation of tributary groups to a centralized and populous state with effective military capabilities and a prosperous agricultural foundation. In 1830, Faku allowed Wesleyan missionaries to establish a station within his kingdom and they became his main channel of communication with the Cape Colony, and later Natal. Ironically, he never showed any serious inclination to convert to Christianity. From the 1840s to early 1850s, this Mpondo king played a central, yet often understated, role in the British colonization of South Africa. While over the years his territory and power declined, Faku remained quite astute in diplomatic negotiations with colonial officials and used his missionary connections to optimum advantage. Timothy J. Stapleton’s narrative and use of oral history paint a clear and remarkable portrait of Faku and how he was able to manipulate missionaries, neighbours, colonists and circumstances to achieve his objectives. As a result, Faku: Rulership and Colonialism in the Mpondo Kingdom (c.1780-1867) helps illuminate the history of the entire Cape region.

Between 1838 and 1888 the recently formed Zulu kingdom in southeastern Africa was directly challenged by the incursion of Boer pioneers aggressively seeking new lands on which to set up their independent republics, by English-speaking traders and hunters establishing their neighboring colony, and by imperial Britain intervening in Zulu affairs to safeguard Britain's position as the paramount power in southern Africa. As a result, the Zulu fought to resist Boer invasion in 1838 and British invasion in 1879. The internal strains these wars caused to the fabric of Zulu society resulted in civil wars in 1840, 1856, and 1882-1884, and Zululand itself was repeatedly partitioned between the Boers and British. In 1888, the old order in Zululand attempted a final, unsuccessful uprising against recently imposed British rule. This tangled web of invasions, civil wars, and rebellion is complex. The Historical Dictionary of the Zulu Wars unravels and elucidates Zulu history during the 50 years between the initial settler threat to the kingdom and its final dismemberment and absorption into the colonial order. A chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, maps, photos, and over 900 cross-referenced dictionary entries that cover the military, politics, society, economics, culture, and key players during the Zulu Wars make this an important reference for everyone from high school students to academics.

In 1910 Isaiah Shembe was struggling. He had left his family and quit his job as a sanitation worker to become a Baptist evangelist, but he ended his first mission without much to show. Little did he know that he would soon establish the Nazaretha Church as he began to attract attention from people left behind by industrial capitalism in South Africa. By his death in 1935, Shembe was an internationally known prophet and healer, described by his peers as “better off than all the Black people.” In A Prophet of the People: Isaiah Shembe and the Making of a South African Church, historian Lauren V. Jarvis provides a fascinating and intimate portrait of one of South Africa’s most famous religious figures, and in turn the making of modern South Africa. Following Shembe from his birth in the 1860s across many environments and contexts, Jarvis illuminates the tight links between the spread of Christianity, strategies of evasion, and the capacious forms of community that continue to shape South Africa today.

In this riveting new book, John Laband, pre-eminent historian of the Zulu Kingdom, tackles some of the questions that swirl around the assassination in 1828 of King Shaka, the celebrated founder of the Zulu Kingdom and war leader of legendary brilliance: Why did prominent members of the royal house conspire to kill him? Just how significant a part did the white hunter-traders settled at Port Natal play in their royal patron's downfall? Why were Shaka's relations with the British Cape Colony key to his survival? And why did the powerful army he had created acquiesce so tamely in the usurpation of the throne by Dingane, his half-brother and assassin? In his search for answers Laband turns to the Zulu voice heard through recorded oral testimony and praise-poems, and to the written accounts and reminiscences of the Port Natal trader-hunters and the despatches of Cape officials. In the course of probing and assessing this evidence the author vividly brings the early Zulu kingdom and its inhabitants to life. He throws light on this elusive character of and his own unpredictable intentions, while illuminating the fears and ambitions of those attempting to prosper and survive in his hazardous kingdom: a kingdom that nevertheless endured in all its essential characteristics, particularly militarily, until its destruction fifty one years later in 1879 by the British; and whose fate, legend has it, Shaka predicted with his dying breath.

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