9.A.T. Bryant, Olden Times in Zululand and Natal, London, 1929, 48. See also V. Ridgway, Stories from Zulu History: Izindaba zakwaZulu, Pietermaritzburg, 1946, 40; S. G. Millin, The King of the Bastards,London, 1950, 125;E.A. Ritter, Shaka Zulu, London, 1955, 1 6 ; J. Michener, The Covenant, New York, 1980, 539; P. J. Schoeman, Pamphata: The Beloved of King Shaka, Cape Town, 1983, 17; W. Faure, director, Shaka Zulu, South African Broadcasting Corporation, Television Series, part 1, 1986; L.B. Hall, Shaka: Warrior King of the Zulu, Cape Town, 1987, 2. To judge by the testimonies in C. de B. Webb and J. B. Wright, eds, The James Stuart Archive, 4 vols., Pietermaritzburg, 1976–86, the 'beetle' story did exist before Bryant's popularisation of it (vol. 1, 179); but cf. vol. 1, 5, 188; vol.2, 230, 246; vol.4, 198, 202, 213, 202. Cetshwayo asserted in 1880 that Shaka meant 'bastard', C. de B. Webb and J.B. Wright, A Zulu King Speaks, Pietermaritzburg 1987, 3 and 3n.
10.H. Stuart, unpubl. play 'Shaka', first performed at the Foundation Theatre, Durban, 7 July 1981, with Henry Cele as Shaka; ms. in Killie Campbell Africana Library, Durban, James Stuart Collection, 38. Hall, Shaka: Warrior King of the Zulu, 2.
11.C. Ballard, The House of Shaka, Durban, 1988, 15. Cf. J.L. Döhne, A Zulu-Kafir Dictionary, Cape Town, 1851, xiv (this etymology is supported by nothing in the body of the dictionary); Holden, The Past and Future of the Kaffir Races, 9.
12.Ballard, The House of Shaka, 16.
13.I have dealt in more detail with some of the 'diachronic' gestures in a revised 1990 Natal History Workshop paper, 'Textual Incest: Nathaniel Isaacs and the Development of the Shaka Myth', History in Africa, 19 (1992), 411–33.
14.D.J. Darlow, Tshaka: King of the Amazulu, Lovedale, 1937, 40–1.
15.Isaacs, Travels and Adventures, vol. 1, 269.
16.Holden, The Past and Future of the Kaffir Races, 25.
17.N. McMenemy, Assegai!, London, 1973, 62, 66.
18.G. Cory, The Rise of South Africa, vol.2, London, 1913, 230.
19.E. Walker, A History of Southern Africa, London, 1928, 182; Omer-Cooper, The Zulu Aftermath, 2.
20.Omer-Cooper, The Zulu Aftermath, 6.
21.T.R.H. Davenport, South Africa: A Modern History, 3rd ed., Johannesburg, 1987, 15.
22.Ballard, The House of Shaka, 16.
23.Omer-Cooper, The Zulu Aftermath, 3–4, 41.
24.E.P. Watt, Febana, London, 1962, 128.
25.L.M. Thompson, A History of South Africa, New Haven and Sandton, 1990, 83–86.
26.Watt, Febana, 130.
27.Isaacs, Travels and Adventures, vol. 1, 281.
28.A.T. Bryant, A Zulu-English Dictionary, Pinetown, 1905,49; Bryant, OldenTimes, 532; A. T. Bryant, A History of the Zulu and Neighbouring Tribes, Cape Town, 1964, 98.
29.S.R.J. Martin, 'British Images of the Zulu c.1820–1879', Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge, 1982, 51.
30.Isaacs, Travels and Adventures, vol.1, 269.
31.Isaacs, Travels and Adventures, vol. 1, 266.
32.Holden, The Past and Future of the Kaffir Races, 9.
33.Holden, The Past and Future of the Kaffir Races, 23.
34.G.M. Theal, History of South Africa from 1795 to 1872, vol. 1, London, 1915, 438.
35.E.H. Brookes and C. de B. Webb, A History of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 1965, 8.
36.Quoted in D. Hammond and A. Jablow, The Africa that Never Was: Four Centuries of British Writing about Africa, New York, 1970, 107.
37.Bryant, Olden Times, 156.
38.Bryant, Olden Times, 219.
39.Brookes and Webb, A History of Natal, 11–13.
40.McMenemy, Assegai!, 73.
41.J.M. Coetzee, White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa, New Haven, 1988, 3. Cf. Isaacs, Travels and Adventures, vol. 1, 8, 2 0 , 58; also W. F. W. Owen, Narrative of Voyages to Explore the Shores of Africa . . ., London, 1833, 7. An unnamed officer of Owen's, writing as early as 1823, was perhaps the first to characterise Shaka as disruptor of a paradisal land, a 'tyrannical monster' whose 'bloody proceedings promised soon to leave the whole of this beautiful country . . . totally desolate'. But his practical experiences prompted him to scorn the Romantics' vision of beneficent primitivism:
The state of these countries, which have scarcely had any intercourse with civilised nations, is a direct proof in refutation of the theories of poets and philosophers, who represent the ignorance of the savage as virtuous simplicity – his miserable poverty as frugality and temperance – and his stupid indolence as a laudable contempt for wealth. How different are the facts! We ever found uncultivated man a composition of cunning, treachery, drunkenness and gluttony.
42.Bryant, A History of the Zulu, 74.
43.This is strongly reminiscent of another missionary's view that Shaka was a 'scourge of God', an integral part of His plan to 'desolate nations, and pour out the vials of his wrath upon offending men', Holden, The Past and Future of the Kaffir Races, 42. This of course was part of Holden's justification for his own Salvationist project, very like the kind of 'theodicy of occupation' which informed both the 'mfecane' concept and the pragmatics of apartheid.
44.Bryant, Olden Times, 640. Doubtless Bryant is also indulging here in a kind of logographia – a term I take from Thucydides, meaning a compilation 'aimed at audience entertainment rather than truth' (Woodman, Rhetoric, 8) – which permeates all narrative history (see D. Wylie, 'Textual Incest').
45.This also originates with Isaacs, Travels and Adventures, 269; it is implicit in this description of the 'faulty Paradise' in C. Eden's 1871 novel, An Inherited Task, or, Early Mission Life in Southern Africa, Oxford, which functions as a prelude to Shaka's own predations:
The scene was indeed most attractive. The swallows skimmed the surface of the lake; flocks of guinea fowl . . . sought refuge from the heat of the plains . . .; the ravens croaked from the pliant boughs of the weeping-willows; hawks and vultures poised themselves in mid-air, swooping down with lightning rapidity on the young duckling incautious enough to stray from its mother . . .; the green serpent ascended the trees to suck the eggs and devour the young, while the parent birds, uttering piercing cries, fluttered round the enemy . . . (40–1).
46.Bryant, Olden Times, 446.
47.Bryant, Olden Times, 128.
48.Bryant, Olden Times, 477.
49.Bryant, Olden Times, 537.
50.Bryant, Olden Times, 637.
51.I am grateful to Malvern van Wyk Smith for this insight.
52.Elsewhere, contradictorily, Bryant adulates Dingiswayo for bringing peace to a far-from-Edenic 'tumultuous and disintegrated mass of humanity' who are 'powerless and unproductive, because of continuously wasting their thought and energy on fighting each other', Olden Times, 96–7.
53.Bryant, Olden Times, 380–1.
54.Bryant, Olden Times, 237, 390.
55.Bryant, Olden Times, 236–7.
56.Bryant, Olden Times, 237.
57.For example, Olden Times, 78, 162, 297, 300, 563, 580.
58.Bryant, Olden Times, 235.
59.Bryant,