Myth of Iron: Shaka in History (review)

Dan Wylie calls Myth of Iron an "anti-biography" of Shaka because "it's scarcely possible to write a biography of Shaka at all" (3). By this Wylie means that, despite all the historical works that discuss Shaka, there are very few undisputed facts about his personal life and actions. "Shaka" seems to exist as a collection of historical contradictions supporting the contending agendas of those who have written about him.

A reader can approach Myth of Iron at two different levels: one is as a detailed discussion of various historical accounts about both Shaka and the broader region in the early 1800s; the second is as the most recent sortie in the historiographical debate concerning the motivating forces behind the construction of the Zulu state.

On the first level, Wylie has combed the collected oral histories of Zulu-speakers contained in the published James Stuart Archives for stories relating to Shaka's childhood, his early adulthood, his rise to power, and the conduct of his rule as well as the aftermath of that rule. He has also gone through the numerous memoirs written by white traders, missionaries, officials, and adventurers who had contact with Shaka or who were living in southern Africa at the time. Wylie is sensitive to the various issues of fact and bias raised by the sources, as well as ways in which popularizers of the Shaka legend have sometimes replaced historical fact with anything, true or not, that might make the story livelier. Wylie is somewhat disingenuously shocked (shocked!) at the contradictions contained in these documents and accounts, but they are the reason that he insists that a true biography of Shaka is not possible. Despite the problems with the sources, however, he writes something that looks very much like a comprehensive biography (no "anti-" required).

On the second level, Wylie is sometimes a bit coy. He insists that the line between popular writers about Shaka (such as E. A. Ritter, who wrote a fictional pseudobiography) and historians is thin; and he repeatedly castigates most previous historians of Shaka for their mythological construction of the African leader as either an innovative military genius or brutal dictator/ dangerous lunatic (take your pick). His criticisms are mostly leveled at the earliest historians of the Zulu state whose influence on popular culture still resonates. While Wylie uses the more recent historical work on this period as source material, he rarely engages with it explicitly at the analytic level. For example, he discusses the issue of possible slave-trading out of Delagoa Bay both before and after 1823 as one possible cause of the political upheavals often—erroneously—attributed to Shaka. But he does this without explicitly addressing the debate over historical sources generated by Julian Cobbing's influential (unpublished) 1990 paper, "Grasping the Nettle: The Slave Trade and the Early Zulu," which Wylie cites in the notes. Although Wylie is aware of this debate and others, he has chosen to sidestep some of the thornier historiographical issues.

Myth of Iron stresses the difficulties inherent in writing a biography of a figure whose life has been overshadowed by his own legend. Wylie's tone is sometimes a bit snide about the shortcomings of other writers, and while this can be entertaining it also sometimes takes the place of analysis and detracts from the book. Overall, however, the book succeeds in pulling together a vast amount of material on Shaka and does so in a very accessible way.