Content area
Full Text
Carolyn Hamilton, Terrific Majesty. The`Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical Invention (Cape Town and Johannesburg, David Philip; Boston, Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. xii + 278, ISBN 0-86486-421-3.
This is an important and complicated book. Carolyn Hamilton writes lucidly and without jargon. But she is dealing with so many important intellectual issues and with such detailed narratives of Zulu history that her opening chapter - `Painted Chests, academic body servants, and visions of modern airlines: Shaka in contemporary discourses' - repays repeated reading. Hamilton remarks that general readers may find the Zulu detail confusing. Most Zulu readers will no doubt find her debate with post-modernism and post-colonialism equally impenetrable.
Yet her method is the only one open to her. As the tributes quoted on the back cover say, she `challenges post-modernist historiography, not by a lot of positivist tub-thumping, but by using the methods of discourse analysis to bring out the historical constraints on the various images of Shaka'; she shows that it is possible to arrive at `an irreducible core' of Zulu tradition `by actually doing it herself.' Her intellectual ambitions are very wide indeed but they can only be realised by the presentation of a deep case study.
Hamilton is confronting, as she says, `influential literatures on the invention of tradition, the "West's" definition of the colonial "Other", and the constructed nature of knowledge itself'. At one extreme these literatures result in an insistence that `history is but text and that history's sub-project is fundamentally implicated in textual process'; or they insist on the power of imperialism to impose images of `the Other' irrespective of the subject's own perceptions; or they focus on autonomous European 'inventions' of African traditions. In response, Hamilton emphasises the priority of Zulu texts themselves and the ways in which they have constrained colonial 'invention'. She insists that the study of `the various ways in which Africans engaged with, sometimes...