Dear Mr. Stuart, For twenty years, I believe I am right in saying, you, as Assistant
Secretary for Native Affairs in Natal, and in other offices, have been
intimately acquainted with the Zulu people. Moreover, you are one of
the few living men who have made a deep and scientific study of their
language, their customs and their history. So I confess that I was the
more pleased after you were so good as to read this tale--the
second book of the epic of the vengeance of Zikali, "the
Thing-that-should-never-have-been-born," and of the fall of the House of
Senzangakona[*]--when you wrote to me that it was animated by the true
Zulu spirit.
[*--"Marie" was the first. The third and final act in the
drama is yet to come.].
I must admit that my acquaintance with this people dates from a period
which closed almost before your day. What I know of them I gathered
at the time when Cetewayo, of whom my volume tells, was in his glory,
previous to the evil hour in which he found himself driven by the
clamour of his regiments, cut off, as they were, through the annexation
of the Transvaal, from their hereditary trade of war, to match himself
against the British strength. I learned it all by personal observation
in the 'seventies, or from the lips of the great Shepstone, my chief and
friend, and from my colleagues Osborn, Fynney, Clarke and others, every
one of them long since "gone down."
Perhaps it may be as well that this is so, at any rate in the case of
one who desires to write of the Zulus as a reigning nation, which now
they have ceased to be, and to try to show them as they were, in all
their superstitious madness and bloodstained grandeur.
Yet then they had virtues as well as vices. To serve their Country in
arms, to die for it and for the King; such was their primitive ideal. If
they were fierce they were loyal, and feared neither wounds nor doom; if
they listened to the dark redes of the witch-doctor, the trumpet-call
of duty sounded still louder in their ears; if, chanting their terrible
"Ingoma," at the King's bidding they went forth to slay unsparingly, at
least they were not mean or vulgar. From those who continually must face
the last great issues of life or death meanness and vulgarity are
far removed. These qualities belong to the safe and crowded haunts of
civilised men, not to the kraals of Bantu savages, where, at any rate of
old, they might be sought in vain.