The Destruction of the Zulu Kingdom

This splendid book fills a great gap. The romantic reputation of the Zulu ensures that students regularly wish to write essays on them rather than on any other African people; one knows that a great deal of sound work has been done on them; and yet until the publication of this book there was very little reading that one could securely recommend for the history of the Zulus in the nineteenth century.

Of course, Dr. Guy would not claim that this book adequately fills the whole nineteenth-century gap; it is focused on the period 1879 to 1884. But he also offers by far the most stimulating account yet available of the formation and the institutions of the Zulu state and in particular of its political economy. And his book does full justice to a tragic period of Zulu history which has hitherto been treated in terms of colourful set-piece battles.