ABSTRACT
Much has changed since the appearance of African Political Systems, both in anthropology, and in the world at large. In particular, the European empires have been swept away. But in the 1940's and 1950's they were still very much in business. Moreover, in each of the three cases described in the previous chapter there had been major disruption as a result of colonial “annexation.” The Zulu were conquered in 1880 in a brief but bloody war. At Isandhlwana, the classic enveloping tactics of the Zulu impis destroyed an English regiment. But firepower eventually won out, and the fourth Zulu king, Cetshawyo, was forced to surrender. The state was dismantled into thirteen chiefdoms. As for the Nuer, punitive raids were still in progress when Evans-Pritchard was doing his fieldwork, and he recounts waking up one morning to discover the village where he was living surrounded by British troops. “I felt that I was in an equivocal position,” he says dryly, and he left Nuerland in protest.
