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The story of the African Choir, Zulu Choir, and Ladysmith Black Mambazo is a story about the disjunctures and ambiguities of racial, national, and personal identities. As such, this story highlights the specific black forms of modernity emerging from the diasporic connections between Africa and the West.

In the previous chapter, the invariability of metropolitan and colonial ideologies of the Zulu throughout the fraught period of the Anglo-Zulu war was examined. Henry Rider Haggard's non-fictional writings of the Zulu during this time are significant for a number of reasons. Their contradictory logic reveals an intense fantasy of a harmonious relationship between Britain and Zulu, which is unwilling to recognize the fact of an armed political conflict between the two and the fact of British responsibility for the eventual destruction of the Zulu nation with its sovereign king. Haggard's serious attempts to analyse the situation reveal him to be torn. He views the war and subsequent destruction of the Zulu nation as inevitable — a tragic fate — and at the same time sees this situation as entirely avoidable, if only the right people had been in charge of government decisions or history itself.

Between 1892 and 1893, in a parallel venture modeled on the African Choir, a group of singers from Natal toured England, billing themselves as the Zulu Choir. This chapter tells their story, highlighting some of the political and cultural differences between the predominantly Cape-based African Choir and the Zulu Choir.

In South Africa, there are some significant examples of alliance and imperial patronage by co-optation of Zulu chiefdoms for warfare, and in using client chiefs to bring about the downfall of King Cetschwayo in 1883. Lesotho, Botswana, and Swaziland, as High Commission territories, became imperial clients under traditional chiefs and assemblies, forming their own patron parties in the 1960s to protect traditional lineages that predominated over small educated elites in states that became nominally independent, 1965-66. Thus, in the former High Commission territories the politics of patronage triumphed over constitutional blueprints. There is also evidence that neo-traditonal forms of clientage have survived among Xhosa communities and in peri-urban slums in South Africa.

This chapter discusses the military leadership at the close of the nineteenth century in southern Africa. Here, the parallel cases are the British army's defeat at Isandhlwana at the hands of the Zulu army, and the repulse of the latter by the former, within twenty-four hours, at Rorke's Drift. Since the armies were identical and the tactics for both sides had been firmly established by their respective senior leaders, this chapter examines why the first battle went so badly for the British but the second so badly for the Zulus. It provides an outline of the background to the Anglo–Zulu conflict.

The Natalians established a tightly knit society in Natal, similar to British settlements elsewhere in the empire. Predominantly English and middle‐class and imbued with concepts of white racial and cultural supremacy, their sense of identity was informed by Britishness. Although outnumbered by Zulus, the Natalians dominated the colony, receiving responsible government in 1893. From 1910, Natal was a province of the Union of South Africa and until 1961 the Natalians fought unsuccessfully to protect themselves and their British heritage from Afrikaner domination. Increasingly defined by what they were against rather than what they were, they developed into an idiosyncratic, separatist and impotent community with their identity defined by their province. With the advent of democracy in 1994, the Natalians lost political control of the province, undermining their sense of identity. Yet, unlike other British communities in this volume, few Natalians have gone into exile, reflecting deep roots sunk in Natal's soil.

Sol Plaatje described his novel Mhudi as ‘a love story after the manner of romances; but based on historical facts … with plenty of love, superstition, and imaginations worked in between the wars. Just like the style of Henry Rider Haggard when he writes about the Zulus’. Plaatje evidently has Nada the Lily in mind, and there is more than a loose resemblance between the two novels. Indeed, Plaatje closely modeled Mhudi on Nada the Lily, something that has escaped critical attention to date. Mhudi dramatically revises, and critiques, the imperialist textual politics of Nada. Haggard writes as a British imperialist concerned exclusively with the Zulu people. Plaatje writes from a position which was neither imperialist British nor Zulu; he was Rolong, part of the Tswana people, and one of the early activists of the ANC.

When the British embarked on a series of campaigns to unify southern Africa under imperial control, several African polities resisted the British by force of arms. In 1879, the Zulu kingdom under the leadership of King Cetshwayo kaMpande might have been the most powerful African state in southern Africa. This chapter recounts the heroism of the Zulu warriors who sacrificed their lives to preserve their land and kin against the European conquerors. The Zulu victory at Isandlwana in 1879 is an exception to the rule that Europeans, with their technological superiority, always prevail in in battles.

This chapter examines the ways that white appropriation gave Zulu its power and value relative to other African signifiers. It first provides an overview of the legacy of John William Colenso, who, as Church of England Bishop of Natal from 1855 until his death in 1883, made it his business to refine, correct, and amplify existing grammars and dictionaries in Zulu. It then considers the distinction between Zulu and Kitchen Kafr—or Fanagalo, as it was called later. It also reflects on what stands in the way of learning Zulu and how Fanagalo becomes a substitute not only for Zulu, but also for other African languages. The author concludes by charting his history of attempts at learning Zulu in South Africa by citing Sibusiso Nyembezi's 1970 language manual, Learn More Zulu.

In Shaw's early, fiction-writing days, when his travels were limited by lack of means to London and environs, he placed the Zulu chieftain Cetewayo in one of his novels—in England, where, indeed, he had briefly and incongruously turned up in 1882 while Shaw was writing Cashel Byron's Profession. As the British were brutally expanding their African colonial holdings, Cetewayo had vainly defended his kingdom against modern weaponry. In defeat he had been taken captive. To impress him further with British power and ensure his docility, he was taken to London, even to Queen Victoria, then returned to Africa as a vassal. When Shaw discovered that his novel, largely about the prizefighter Cashel Byron, was being pirated as a play for post-career boxers, he wrote, to protect his stage copyright, The Admirable Bashville (1901), named for the ambitious butler of the hero's inamorata, but largely about Cetewayo in London. It became a satire, in verse, of British imperialism, and turned Cetewayo into a tragicomic hero.

Two Bantu language-speaking groups, the VaShona people, who entered the southern African region as early as the ninth century ce and established the state known as Great Zimbabwe by the thirteenth century, and the AmaNdebele people, who came to what is now western Zimbabwe during the first half of the nineteenth century in the wake of the disturbances caused by the state consolidation associated with the rise of the Zulu state, primarily populated the territory of modern Zimbabwe. This chapter gives a brief sketch of the establishment of the institutional foundations of the Catholic Church in Southern Rhodesia, it is possible to see the outline of many fault lines come into relief: tensions among Africans: VaShona and AmaNdebele, Christian and “pagan”; tensions among Europeans—British, German, Swiss, and Irish—and between Jesuit and Mariannhill; tensions between Africans and Europeans: converts and missionaries, women and men, settlers and chiefs.

This chapter examines New Age enthusiasts' rites to reconnect with the wild religion of Africa. This wild religious experience—the wild extrasensory encounters with Africans as well as wild encounters with aliens from outer space—had been organized through global networks of Zulu neoshamanism, which cultivates ecstasy techniques by transacting with Africans. Zulu neoshamans used their sensory experience to determine limit, potential, and to validate reality. Exploring Zulu neoshamanism as material religion, the chapter analyzes the nexus of religious dreaming, sensory repertoires, and electronic mediation. It suggests that electronic media can also be understood as both extensions and limitations of the human sensorium.

This chapter examines the themes of crisis and ceremony as the Colony of Natal matured and the garrison of Fort Napier faced greater threats, particularly from beyond its borders, during the period 1860s–1890s. In 1856, the Crown granted the Charter of Natal in which the settlers received elected representation in the Legislative Council, and the district became the fully fledged Colony of Natal. This chapter first describes the raids carried out by the Basotho border chief Lesaoana against the new colony and the reaction of British generals before discussing the ceremony, whereby a detachment of the 99th Regiment fired a Royal salute, to mark Natal's annexation of the small territory that was named Alfred County. It also considers the British military's brutal suppression of the Hlubi chiefdom and the banishment and imprisonment of their leader, Langalibalele ka Mtihimkulu, on Robben Island. Finally, it explores the events of the Anglo-Zulu War, which bring the themes of pageantry and panic, ceremony and crisis into acute focus and into close relationship with each other.

In the Zulu kingdom, the most successful of the warring chiefs was Shaka, who seized the throne of the little Zulu chieftainship in the valley of the White Mfolozi River from his half-brother in 1816. This chapter discusses Shaka's rule over the entire region and the ways in which he exemplified the warrior hero as conceived by the amaZulu.

This chapter discusses how King Cetshwayo kaMpande gathered intelligence to learn the true strength and intentions of the British. The British were aware that they were under Zulu surveillance but did not realize until some time that the people they employed as camp servants were actually spies.

Ever since Isandlwana and the disembowelling of the slain, the British attitude to amaZulu had hardened considerably. The British attacked the Zulu people's basic means of survival. Through a scorched-earth policy, the British were able to demoralize ordinary amaZulu and sap their desire to resist.

Beginning with the 1905 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in South Africa, this chapter illustrates the imperial, colonial, and indigenous mediations that produced knowledge about Zulu religion and by extension indigenous religion. A Zulu war dance provides an occasion for considering theories of indigenous religion in shifting political contexts. This chapter examines relations among imperial theorists, especially Alfred C. Haddon and E. Sydney Hartland, and local experts, such as Henri-Alexandre Junod and W. C. Willoughby, in theorizing religion, but also introduces local interested parties, particularly John Dube and Mohandas Ghandi, who participated in the visit of the British Association. In these engagements, a key imperial category, totemism, was differently defined by imperial and colonial actors. The chapter concludes by highlighting the importance of imperial conferences—the International Congress for the History of Religions (1908), the World Missions Conference (1910), and the Universal Races Conference (1911)—in mediating knowledge about indigenous religion in Great Britain.

Concentrating on the work of Friedrich Max Müller, who is often identified as the founder of the modern study of religion, this chapter shows how Max Müller's classification of religions based on language was both reinforced and undermined by evidence from South Africa. The chapter recovers relations among imperial theorists, colonial experts, and indigenous informants to examine the colonial classification of religions advanced by W. H. I. Bleek and Henry Callaway, who distinguished between the poetic Khoisan religion of the sky and the prosaic Zulu religion of ancestors. By attending to Max Müller's relations with South Africa, this chapter identifies basic features of imperial comparative religion—its global scope, centralized intellectual production, and complex intercultural mediations that linked theorizing at the imperial center with colonized peripheries of empire.