Savage Delight

About this book

"Shaka, the Zulu 'founder-king', is one of southern Africa's best known leaders. He is also one of the most powerful symbolic figures in all South African history and literature. Yet we know almost nothing about Shaka - not even what he looked like, let alone what his politics were, or how his mind worked." "Despite this, stories about Shaka are given the status of fact in innumerable textbooks, histories, encyclopaedias, novels, and films. These stories - particularly those spread by white writers - have almost no basis in demonstrable evidence. Savage Delight: White Myths of Shaka argues that the stories about Shaka have become a complex but normative myth serving interests other than fidelity to historical truth." "Why have the stories of Shaka developed by white writers from earliest eyewitnesses through to contemporary novelists, poets and historians become so entrenched and uniform despite the evidence? Why have white writers written about Shaka in the way that they have? What does their approach reveal about their own conceptualisations of white identity?" "In answering these questions Savage Delight explores the social and psychological dimensions of the literary mythology of Shaka in an astonishingly coherent genealogy of white writers. A broad survey of how the myth solidified between the 1830s and the present is supported by four case studies of the most influential white writers on Shaka: eyewitnesses Nathaniel Isaacs and Henry Francis Fynn, anthropologist A.T. Bryant, and novelist E.A. Ritter."--BOOK JACKET.