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Terrific Majesty: The Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical Invention. By Carolyn Hamilton. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. xiv, 278 pp. Cloth, $39.95, ISBN 0-674-87445-5. Paper, $18.95, ISBN 0-67487446-3.)
Terrific Majesty focuses on the changing image of the first Zulu king, Shaka> during the past two centuries, from European accounts in the 1820s depicting a savage tyrant to a 1990s theme park, Shakaland, fashioned as a venue in which South African whites could experience a supposedly authentic African culture in a postapartheid era. Shaky has long been a powerful and contradictory presence in writings about Africa, serving as a model for the barbarous African potentates in H. Rider Haggard's imperial reveries (especially King Solomon's Mines, 1885), as well as the indigenous nation builder celebrated in 1960s African accounts of the promises of postcolonial independence...