Filled with colorful characters, dramatic battles like Isandhlwana and Rorke's Drift, and an inexorable narrative momentum, this unsurpassed history details the sixty-year existence of the world's mightiest African empire; from its brutal formation and zenith under the military genius Shaka , through its inevitable collision with white expansionism, to its dissolution under Cetshwayo in the Zulu War of 1879.

    This is the book which, when first published in 1965, caused such an uproar in the US State Department that a sharp note of protest was sent to Kwame Nkrumah and the $25million of American "aid" to Ghana was promptly cancelled.

    Infantino and published by the Continuum Foundation of Chino Valley, AZ in 1986.

    It begins on August 4th, 1964, when an enraged band of Congo Rebels closes in on Stanleyville. It ends on November 24th with the massacre in which Dr. Carlson and other missionaries lost their lives minutes before Belgian paratroops arrived to rescue them.

    Here, as she sees them, are the complexities, the agonies and joys, the textures of African life and society.The collection, bridging as it does Mrs. Lessing's entire writing career, contains much of her most extraordinary work. Beyond that, it is a brilliant portrait of a world that is vital to all of us, shadowy to most of us - perceived by an artist of the first rank writing with passion and honesty about her native land.It is a central book in the work of one of the most important of today's writers.