lways been matched by accomplishment, as well-publicized accounts of interethnic violence demonstrated in the 1990s. But political institutions by their nature seem less likely to capture popular imagination and enthusiasm than towering charismatic leadership. Hamilton (1998) cites the violence surrounding Mandela's invitation to a 1994 Shaka Day celebration, just after the new South African government had made a land grant to the Zulus, a nationalistic people whose territory was inside that of South Africa. In response, and apparently to mend fences between Zulu nationalists in the province KwaZulu-Natal and the national government, the Zulu king Goodwill Zwelithini, a blood descendant of Shaka, invited Mandela to the festival. This appears to have alarmed the king's uncle, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, a leading Zulu nationalist and goad of Mandela's African National Congress party. Not of royal blood, Buthelezi had long functioned as a political boss exercising de facto control of the royal family and whose power was linked to perception of continuing rivalry between Mandela and Zwelithini. Buthelezi publicly declared that he could not guarantee Mandela's safety at the festival, and Mandela did not attend. But now the rivalry was between Zwethlini and Buthelezi, each declaring on television that he and not the other was the true heir to the legacy of Shaka Zulu and the true meaning of Zulu nationalism.
Such incidents need not be used to declare Mandela's achievement and the dismantling of colonial structures and apartheid a failure, for emerging nation-states around the world and throughout history have had problems in their formative years. Indeed, Mandela's political fate at the closing of British colonialism in Africa in the 1990s can be favorably compared to Shaka's fate in the 1820s, when British colonialism was in the process of being constructed. Mandela and Shaka also have a certain mythic status. But whereas the myth of Mandela--...