The short life and amazing career of Shaka Zulu (1795-1828), the first king of the Zulus, has been one of the most enduring and flexible legends of modern history. In the intense mixture of conflicting interests--tribal, racial, colonial--in southern Africa over the last two centuries Shaka's image has been shaped and re-shaped to serve an amazing variety of purposes ranging from calling his own people to battle to justifications for the apartheid policies of the state of South Africa.
Carolyn Hamilton has shown that the development of ideas about Shaka--which continue to have an impact today--is more complex than even recent re-examinations of the colonial legacy have shown. Hamilton demonstrates some of the ways in which this image has been shaped in order to meet the needs of groups that, very often, have completely opposite goals in mind. Most tellingly, she demonstrates that nineteenth-century European views of Shaka had their roots in early African views of the man and--even at their most negative--were not entirely the invention of the dominant Europeans, meant solely to serve the ends of colonial administrations. She shows that, in Natal, both Theophilus Shepstone and James Stuart were convinced that "effective native policy had to be based on an accurate understanding and in-depth analysis of indigenous institutions and practices" and. to this end, both of these colonial administrators sought information about and explanations of the Shakan administrative system from those who knew it best (206-7). While it is certainly true that the biases of these colonial authorities affected their interpretation of their sources, Hamilton argues that their conception of Natal administration and the data they gathered demonstrates that their interpretation of Shakan rule was not solely an invented for purposes of colonial domination and provide valuable information--if read with due care--about indigenous conceptions of the meanin...