A detailed history explaining how and why, in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, Africans from the British colony of Natal transformed their ethnic self-identification, constructing and claiming a new Zulu identity.

Small and isolated in the Colony of Natal, Fort Napier was long treated like a temporary outpost of the expanding British Empire. Yet British troops manned this South African garrison for over seventy years. Tasked with protecting colonists, the fort became even more significant as an influence on, and reference point for, settler society. Graham Dominy's Last Outpost on the Zulu Frontier reveals the unexamined but pivotal role of Fort Napier in the peacetime public dramas of the colony. Its triumphalist colonial-themed pageantry belied colonists's worries about their own vulnerability. As Dominy shows, the cultural, political, and economic methods used by the garrison compensated for this perceived weakness. Settler elites married their daughters to soldiers to create and preserve an English-speaking oligarchy. At the same time, garrison troops formed the backbone of a consumer market that allowed colonists to form banking and property interests that consolidated their control.

This volume is the third of The James Stuart Archive. In it, the editors present a further twenty-eight documents compiled from material in the James Stuart Collection of the Killie Campbell Africana Library in Durban. James Stuart was an official in the Natal colonial civil service in the 1890s and early years of the present century. In meticulously recorded interviews with hundreds of informants, the great majority of them Africans, he assembled a vast and unique collection of notes on the traditions and customs of the Zulu and neighbouring peoples. The documents published in the successive volumes of The James Stuart Archive represent edited, annotated and translated renderings of Stuart's notes and transcriptions. The testimony which he assembled piecemeal has been arranged by the editors under the names of the informants from whom it was obtained, and is being published in alphabetical name-order. The present volume carries the sequence from Mbokodo to Mpatshana, and brings to ninety-nine the number of informants whose statements have so far been published in the series.