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 (1787–1828), through its inevitable collision with white expansionism, to its dissolution under Cetshwayo in the Zulu War of 1879.