The writer remembers talking to an aged Zulu woman, however, who told him that she was married when Chaka was king .-- ED.
Before the Zulus were a people--for I will begin at the beginning--I was born of the Langeni tribe.

We were not a large tribe; afterwards, all our able-bodied men numbered one full regiment in Chaka's army, perhaps there were between two and three thousand of them, but they were brave.
Now they are all dead, and their women and children with them,--that people is no more.

It is gone like last month's moon; how it went I will tell you by-and-bye.
Our tribe lived in a beautiful open country; the Boers, whom we call the Amaboona, are there now, they tell me.

My father, Makedama, was chief of the tribe, and his kraal was built on the crest of a hill, but I was not the son of his head wife.

One evening, when I was still little, standing as high as a man's elbow only, I went out with my mother below the cattle kraal to see the cows driven in.