ABSTRACT
The occupation of India was unlike that of Africa because it was enacted on a society and state which had ‘recognisable’ and ‘significant’ cultural, political, imperial and military traditions of its own. The reinterpretation of Mughal customs and authority reflected a grafting of alien experience onto the Indian tradition. British trade in India ensured a certain familiarity with the Mughal empire even before her rule over the sub-continent; the development, evolution and domination of India was made easier by the exploitation of previous knowledge of native government. While the nineteenth century saw a gradual cognizance of the Zulu, not simply as a ‘Kaffir’ race but as a distinct political and social group, Zulu culture and history did not figure prominently in popular or scholarly work until the middle of the nineteenth century. The Anglo-Zulu war changed this; the war resulted in a flood of literature not only detailing the war effort but also also ethnographic and historical accounts of Zululand.1 Thereafter, the name ‘Zulu’ entered the popular European imagination and was ‘widely identified with an idea of African savagery, bravery and a barbarous nobility’ (Guy, 1979: xx). Haggard’s novels did much to popularise this romanticised account of the Zulu noble savage for an established readership interested in romance and adventure fiction. His work provides readers at home with a narcissistic and symmetrical fantasmatic reflection of empowered manhood, detailing a clean, taut, heroic and militarised masculinity in an African land ‘whereof none know the history’.
