Child of Storm

Child of Storm
by H. Rider Haggard

DEDICATION
Dear Mr. Stuart,
For twenty years, I believe I am right in saying, you, as Assistant
Secretary for Native Affairs in Natal, and in other offices, have been
intimately acquainted with the Zulu people. Moreover, you are one of
the few living men who have made a deep and scientific study of their
language, their customs and their history. So I confess that I was the
more pleased after you were so good as to read this tale--the second
book of the epic of the vengeance of Zikali, "the
Thing-that-should-never-have-been-born," and of the fall of the House
of Senzangakona*--when you wrote to me that it was animated by the
true Zulu spirit.
[*--"Marie" was the first. The third and final act in the drama is yet to
come.].
I must admit that my acquaintance with this people dates from a period
which closed almost before your day. What I know of them I gathered
at the time when Cetewayo, of whom my volume tells, was in his glory,
previous to the evil hour in which he found himself driven by the
clamour of his regiments, cut off, as they were, through the annexation
of the Transvaal, from their hereditary trade of war, to match himself
against the British strength. I learned it all by personal observation in
the 'seventies, or from the lips of the great Shepstone, my chief and
friend, and from my colleagues Osborn, Fynney, Clarke and others,
every one of them long since "gone down."

Perhaps it may be as well that this is so, at any rate in the case of one
who desires to write of the Zulus as a reigning nation, which now they
have ceased to be, and to try to show them as they were, in all their
superstitious madness and bloodstained grandeur.
Yet then they had virtues as well as vices. To serve their Country in
arms, to die for it and for the King; such was their primitive ideal. If
they were fierce they were loyal, and feared neither wounds nor doom;
if they listened to the dark redes of the witch-doctor, the trumpet-call of
duty sounded still louder in their ears; if, chanting their terrible
"Ingoma," at the King's bidding they went forth to slay unsparingly, at
least they were not mean or vulgar. From those who continually must
face the last great issues of life or death meanness and vulgarity are far
removed. These qualities belong to the safe and crowded haunts of
civilised men, not to the kraals of Bantu savages, where, at any rate of
old, they might be sought in vain.
Now everything is changed, or so I hear, and doubtless in the balance
this is best. Still we may wonder what are the thoughts that pass
through the mind of some ancient warrior of Chaka's or Dingaan's time,
as he suns himself crouched on the ground, for example, where once
stood the royal kraal, Duguza, and watches men and women of the Zulu
blood passing homeward from the cities or the mines, bemused, some
of them, with the white man's smuggled liquor, grotesque with the
white man's cast-off garments, hiding, perhaps, in their blankets
examples of the white man's doubtful photographs--and then shuts his
sunken eyes and remembers the plumed and kilted regiments making
that same ground shake as, with a thunder of salute, line upon line,
company upon company, they rushed out to battle.
Well, because the latter does not attract me, it is of this former time that
I have tried to write--the time of the Impis and the witch-finders and the
rival princes of the royal House--as I am glad to learn from you, not
quite in vain. Therefore, since you, so great an expert, approve of my
labours in the seldom-travelled field of Zulu story, I ask you to allow
me to set your name upon this page and subscribe myself,
Gratefully and sincerely yours,

H. RIDER HAGGARD.
Ditchingham, 12th October, 1912.
To James Stuart, Esq., Late Assistant Secretary for Native Affairs,
Natal.

AUTHOR'S NOTE
Mr. Allan Quatermain's story of the wicked and fascinating Mameena,
a kind of Zulu Helen, has, it should be stated, a broad foundation in
historical fact. Leaving Mameena and her wiles on one side, the tale of
the struggle between the Princes Cetewayo and Umbelazi for
succession to the throne of Zululand is true.
When the differences between these sons of his became intolerable,
because of the tumult which they were causing in his country, King
Panda, their father, the son of Senzangakona, and the brother of the
great Chaka and of Dingaan, who had ruled before him, did say that
"when two young bulls quarrel they had better fight it out." So, at least,
I was