An outcast boy with no right to anything took a cattle-clan of a few thousand souls and, inside a single lifetime, forged it into a nation, one strong enough, sixty years after his death, to hand the British Empire the worst defeat it had ever suffered on a battlefield.
In Part Two we go back to the beginning: to a fatherless child mocked with a name that meant beetle, cast out with his mother Nandi to live at the edge of someone else's fire, and to the cold rage that boy carried into the making of the most formidable fighting machine Africa had ever seen. But we tell it with our eyes open — because almost everything the world "knows" about Shaka reaches us through two English adventurers, one of whom advised the other to make him "as bloodthirsty as you can… it helps sell the work." So we hold the whole contradictory man in view at once: genius and butcher, founder and tyrant, and follow his spear all the way to the hill called Isandlwana.
A story of empire and invention, terror and grief, and, above all, of a boy and his mother, cast out together, a very long way from home.
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