Book Description

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.