Zulu Identities to the Fore at Durban Launch
The verandah of the Killie Campbell Collections was a suitably spacious venue for the launch of Zulu Identities: Being Zulu, Past and Present – a text that has already made significant inroads on the SA historiography scene.
Arguably the most important discussion of Zulu ethnicities since John Laband’s definitive Rope of Sand (published in 1995), this is a book that “takes risks,” said Benedict Carton, Associate Professor of History at George Mason University, one of the volume’s three editors. The others are Jabulani Sithole and Laband himself.
Carton used a Zulu idiom to explain his hopes for the book: “All sorrow will be dispatched by learning”.
Officially introducing the book, Jabulani Sithole, a lecturer in Historical Studies at the University of KwaZulu Natal, acknowledged that the subject of Zulu identity is “polemical”, and argued that in a time of nation-building, South Africans needed to probe such notions with especial rigour. He explained that the book does not aim to promote Zulu chauvinism, but to accept diversities within “Zuluness”.
He joked that at times he and the two other editors (Laband is Professor of History at Wilfrid Laurier University, Ontario) considered calling the book “Zulu Refractions” due to the complex and at times contradictory nature of the debate that arose from their labours. He invited the audience to buy the book and criticise it – to help spark a conversation that could only benefit democracy in South Africa.
The book was first conceptualised in 2001, so, as UKZN Press’ Glenn Cowley said, “it has been a long walk” to publication! The launch was well-attended, by contributors to the book (there are 30 altogether), their colleagues and SA history enthusiasts. The dignified powerful male voices of the Table Mountain Messengers, a Zulu choir from Khamatini which sang and danced in the lush darkening Campbell gardens, set an appropriately disciplined and hopeful tone for the unveiling of such thorough scholarship.
Book Details
- Zulu Identities, Being Zulu Past and Present edited, by Benedict Carton, John Laband and Jabulani Sithole
EAN: 9781869140465
Find this book with BOOK Finder!
Please register or log in to comment