Shaka's children - Stephen Taylor

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.