Shaka's children: A history of the Zulu people - Hardcover

Taylor, Stephen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0002551446 ISBN 13: 9780002551441

Publisher: HarperCollins, 1994

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review:

Western literature abounds with histories of nations and their leaders, but few texts have been offered on Africa's fierce and enduring Zulu people. Stephen Taylor, a writer for The Times of London, tells of the rise to power of Shaka, who engineered a bloody conquest of African lands and struggle against British imperialism. In addition, Taylor folds the remarkable history of the Zulu nation into an examination of the tribe's burgeoning nationalism and its relationship with the Xhosa people and whites in present-day South Africa.

Review:

A concise and up-to-date history of the Zulu people intended for a wide readership ... welcomed, all the more so because Shaka's life and heritage have renewed significance in modern South Africa. -- The New York Times Book Review, Noel Mostert

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0002551446
• ISBN 13: 9780002551441
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 416