The violent struggle in South Africa between supporters of Inkatha and the ANC, focusing on the distribution of power and resources in the "new South Africa," is accompanied by another, lesser-known battle over symbols, representations of the past, and the reconstruction of history. This book looks at an image at the center of many of these struggles: that of King Shaka, the renowned nineteenth-century Zulu emperor, an image used by Inkatha to assert its authentic right to shape South Africa's future.

Golan explores the image of King Shaka as constructed and reconstructed in historical texts from the 1830s until today. Analyzing the formation of colonialist images in the nineteenth century, the emergence in the early twentieth century of the first generation of Africans to write about their own past, the anticolonial historiography of the late 1950s, the reconstruction of the past by Inkatha, and the more recent historical works that mark the struggle for liberation, she argues that the story of Shaka is but an invention of the oral tradition, created by Zulu society to capture revolutionary changes that occurred during Shaka's reign, and then taken literally by Europeans, albeit colored and changed to suit their own images and interests.