The Zulus by Ian Knight (signed)

INSCRIBED & SIGNED BY IAN KNIGHT, Osprey Elite Series, softcover, illustrated, 64 pages, condition: very good.

'A very remarkable people, the Zulu', the British Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, said on hearing of a fresh disaster in the war of 1879, 'They defeat our generals; they convert our bishops; they have settled the fate of a great European dynasty'. Remarkable indeed, to have taken on the full might of the British Empire at its height, and won, if not the war, at least some of the battles. This book explains who the Zulus were, and how they achieved the fame as warriors which they enjoy to this day.

Ian Knight's first Osprey knocks the Brit out of the ballpark. While the main notions of Zulu warfare under Shaka's reforms are necessarily retold in every book on the 1879, here they are placed firmly within the context of dynastic struggle and demographic pressure on grazing lands over three generations.

The two rebellions, one under the last scion of the royal house in the 1880s and a romantic one against the taxation by the South African Union in 1906, are not ignored here; they occured soon enough for veterans of the British invasion to wash their spears again.

There is more room for photos of full battle dress and while Angus McBride's artwork of the disembowled corpses at Islandwana is a double, the other plates are fittingly Afrocentric.