A LONG PERSONAL ENGAGEMENT

Go into a good library and ask for help in finding out about the history of KwaZulu-Natal before the colonial period. It is very likely that the librarian will hand you a copy of a book called Olden Times in Zululand and Natal. It is a big, thick book – 700 pages long. When you open it, you will find that it was written by someone called the Rev. A.T. Bryant, and that it was published in London in 1929, nearly a century ago. You probably will not know that, until the 1970s, Olden Times was by far the most important book used by academic historians, and also by members of the public, to find out about the history of the KwaZulu-Natal region in the time before the establishment of European colonialism. Many people today still turn to it to find out more about their family histories.

I first learnt of the importance of Olden Times as a sourcebook on history when I was an undergraduate student at the University of Natal in Pietermaritzburg in the early 1960s. I came to know it better when I used it in my postgraduate research. Later, in 1971, I began work on the same campus, with the rank of junior lecturer, as a research assistant in the James Stuart project (described in chapter 13 of this book). The library copy of Olden Times became a more or less permanent fixture in my office. I finally managed to buy a second-hand copy in February 1977. I see that I paid R55 for it. In today's prices, that would be a couple of thousand rand – a lot of money for a junior lecturer. It has been one of my most frequently used research tools ever since, and has been rebound at least twice. The book's pages carry the marks of my long engagement with it in the form of a growing number of pencilled annotations.

Alfred Bryant worked as a missionary and writer in what were then Natal and Zululand from the 1880s to the 1920s. Olden Times gives us an account of the history, as he saw it, of the people who lived in the region from the 1500s to the reign of Shaka in the 1820s.