Child of Storm - Page 1/192

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.