Since his assassination in 1828, King Shaka Zulu—founder of the powerful Zulu kingdom and leader of the army that nearly toppled British colonial rule in South Africa—has made his empire in popular imaginations throughout Africa and the West. Shaka is today the hero of Zulu nationalism, the centerpiece of Inkatha ideology, a demon of apartheid, the namesake of a South African theme park, even the subject of a major TV film.
Terrific Majesty explores the reasons for the potency of Shaka’s image, examining the ways it has changed over time—from colonial legend, through Africanist idealization, to modern cultural icon. This study suggests that “tradition” cannot be freely invented, either by European observers who recorded it or by subsequent African ideologues. There are particular historical limits and constraints that operate on the activities of invention and imagination and give the various images of Shaka their power. These insights are illustrated with subtlety and authority in a series of highly original analyses.
Terrific Majesty is an exceptional work whose special contribution lies in the methodological lessons it delivers; above all its sophisticated rehabilitation of colonial sources for the precolonial period, through the demonstration that colonial texts were critically shaped by indigenous African discourse. With its sensitivity to recent critical studies, the book will also have a wider resonance in the fields of history, anthropology, cultural studies, and postcolonial literature.
Carolyn Hamilton is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Orthographic and Terminological Notes
Abbreviations
Map
Introduction
1. Painted Chests, Academic Body Servants, and Visions of Modern Airlines: Shaka in Contemporary Discourses
2. The Origins of the Image of Shaka
3. The Men Who Would be Shaka: Shaka as a Model for the Natal Native Administration
4."The Establishment of a Living Source of Tradition": James Stuart and the Genius of Shakan Despotism
5. Shaka as Metaphor, Memory, and History in Apartheid South Africa
6."The Government Resembles Tshaka"
Glossary
Notes
Bibliography
Index
What People are Saying About This
Hamilton has brilliantly and with great clarity used the literary methodology of deconstruction to counter those who would see in colonial writing simply inventions of the "other." What Hamilton says has far wider implications for the possibilities of writing the history of preliterate peoples.There are historical constraints and limits attached to themetaphorical use of Shaka and of "Zuluness" which leave it open to different interpretations, but which have an irreducible core recoverable through careful sifting. The great value of Hamilton's work is that she shows how this can be done by actually doing it herself.
Anthony Appiah
There is absolutely no doubt that this material deserves a wide audience. I am sure that on her central point Carolyn Hamilton is correct. That central point seems to me a commonsensical one, one that is only striking in the current moment in which it has been influentially denied: namely, that African (in this case, both Zulu and non-Zulu) representations shaped what V. Y. Mudimbe calls "the colonial library." Anthony Appiah, author of In My Father's House
Adam Kuper
The great originality of the book is that it demonstrates the way in which later representations of Shaka remain broadly true to the original discourse, formulated during Shaka's reign. This book also challenges post-modernist historiography, not by a lot of positivist tub-thumping, but by using the methods of discourse analysis to bring out the historical constraints on the various images of Shaka, and their roots in the actual situation of his reign. This book has no competitors: it is the first of its kind, certainly in precolonial and colonial studies. Adam Kuper, author of The Chosen Primate
Shula Marks
Hamilton has brilliantly and with great clarity used the literary methodology of deconstruction to counter those who would see in colonial writing simply inventions of the "other." What Hamilton says has far wider implications for the possibilities of writing the history of preliterate peoples.There are historical constraints and limits attached to themetaphorical use of Shaka and of "Zuluness" which leave it open to different interpretations, but which have an irreducible core recoverable through careful sifting. The great value of Hamilton's work is that she shows how this can be done by actually doing it herself. Shula Marks, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London
Shula Marks
What Hamilton says has far wider implications for the possibilities of writing a history of pre-literate people…The great value of Hamilton's work is that she shows how this can be done by actually doing it herself. (Shula Marks, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London)