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James Stuart was one of the most remarkable Natalians of his day. Though there was nothing outwardly spectacular about his career as a colonial official, in 25 years of single-minded labour he built up what is now regarded as the most valuable collection of African oral traditions in existence in southern Africa. As a magistrate in some of the remotest corners of the Natal colony in the 1890s and early 1900s. Stuart sought out old people who remembered the times of Dingane and Mpande, and whose fathers and mothers had been ruled by Shaka. Interviewing them in fluent Zulu, he painstakingly filled hundreds of notebooks with their reminiscences and the traditions which older generations had handed down to them. The statements which Stuart recorded from nearly 200 informants are now housed, together with his own writings on Zulu customs, language, and praise-poetry, in the Killie Campbell Africana Library in Durban. Since 1971 the department of Historical and Political Studies at the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, has been engaged in a project which aims to publish all the historical evidence collected by Stuart in a series of volumes collectively entitled The James Stuart Archive. This book represents the first volume in the series.
