The James Stuart Archive

James Stuart was an official in the Natal colonial civil service in the 1890s and early years of the twentieth century. In meticulously recorded conversations with some 200 interlocutors, the great majority of them Africans, he assembled a vast and unique collection of notes on the history and customs of the Zulu and other peoples of what is now the KwaZulu-Natal region. This sixth volume presents a further twenty-six sets of testimonies drawn from material in the James Stuart Collection of the Killie Campbell Africana Library in Durban.

The testimonies published in the successive volumes of The James Stuart Archive represent edited, annotated and (where the original appears in Zulu) translated renderings of Stuart’s notes and transcriptions. The testimonies that he recorded piecemeal have been arranged by the editors under the names of the interlocutors from whom they were obtained, and have been published in alphabetical name-order. The present volume carries the sequence from Socwatsha kaPhaphu to its ending with Zwayi kaMbombo, bringing to 185 the number of interlocutors whose testimonies have been published in the series.

The previous five volumes of The James Stuart Archive were published successively in 1976, 1979, 1982, 1986 and 2001. Volume 7, which will carry the praises that were omitted from the previous six volumes, is in preparation.