Magema Magwaza Fuze came from an important Zulu family. He was educated by Bishop Colenso at the famous Ekukhanyeni mission station, trained as a compositor and printer (like Sol Plaatje) and remained in Colenso's circle, becoming a teacher and a notable early writer and journalist in the Zulu language. He met Cetshwayo a number of times, and acted as tutor to Dinuzulu's family during their exile on Saint Helena.

Fuze's book Abantu Abamnyama, written around 1900 and eventually published with the help of contributions from Zulu and European supporters shortly before his death in 1922, is usually cited as the first major original work to be published in the Zulu language. It seems to have been conceived mostly as a permanent record of the oral knowledge of tribal history that had been handed down to him in his youth. There's a fairly speculative general introduction about the early history of black Africans, interesting more as a record of popular received opinion at the time than anything else. It also gives an interesting insight into the sort of speculative discussions that must have gone on in Colenso's liberal Anglican circles: Fuze demonstrates logically that Adam and Eve must have been black, for example, and tells us about one particular tribe that is said to have given up agriculture and evolved into baboons, in an odd bit of reverse-Darwinism.

When he comes to the Zulu and their direct ancestors, Fuze speaks with much more conviction, and we get pages and pages of genealogies which must be gold-dust for specialists, if rather dry for the rest of us. But there's also plenty of interesting information about traditional customs and their variations, and some entertaining anecdotes explaining where particular names come from. From Shaka onwards, we get a detailed historical account from the Zulu point of view: as an enlightened Christian, Fuze obviously finds it necessary to disapprove of the excesses committed by Shaka and Cetshwayo, but he's nowhere near as critical as non-Zulus like Mofolo and Plaatje. And of course, when we get to Cetshwayo and Dinuzulu, Fuze is talking about events and people he was very close to himself, so it's a very interesting story, if a slightly rambling one. Zulus are thoroughly blamed for their many internecine wars, but wars between Zulus and non-Zulus are always somehow the fault of the outsiders.

This English translation was made in the 1970s for the University of Natal by Harry Lugg, a former Commissioner for Native Affairs in Natal, who had known Fuze well (and was in his nineties when he did the translation). He rearranged Fuze's rambling text slightly to give a more logical sequence, and the text is peppered with Lugg's comments on the words used in the Zulu original as well as the editor's notes on the historical background, so it's not the easiest of books to read. To add insult to injury, it's printed like a thesis, as a photographic reduction of the typescript (the expert compositor Fuze would not have been amused). But there's a nice 1970s look and smell to it. ( )