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In late nineteenth-century Natal, members of the family of the missionary Bishop John William Colenso established relations with members of the Zulu royal family that were recognised as ties of kinship, mutually acknowledged by the reciprocal use of kinship terms between the two families. The Colenso family played a part in the struggle to defend Zulu sovereignty in the face of a colonial government intent on undermining the Zulu nation by diminishing the authority of the Zulu King. The visit by the Zulu king, Cetshwayo, to Queen Victoria in 1882 was seen by subsequent generations of Zulu as evidence of a connection between the British and Zulu royal families. While in exile on the island of St Helena, through adopting western dress and lifestyle, Cetshwayo’s son, Dinuzulu, sought to model his family on the British royal family. Bishop Colenso’s daughter, Harriette, played a role in facilitating this image, appearing as if a matriarch of Dinuzulu’s family in photographs which were perhaps intended to compare the two royal families, while also conveying a strong message that succession to the throne was secured by heredity, a message conveyed in representations of the British royal family from the sixteenth century to the present.

This article sketches a series of events that link the lives of contrasting personalities. It leads from a Cambridge academic theologian to a German philologist who recorded the lives and beliefs of nineteenth-century San people, and then on to the present-day, post-apartheid South African national coat of arms. Along the way, events, some momentous, some apparently trivial, brought these two men together and situated them in a network of conflicting interests and the people who worked to realize those interests.

There were deep expressions of sorrow, of course - but what Colenso said was peppered with nuggets of good sense: \"We ourselves have lost very many precious lives, and widows and orphans, parents, brothers, sisters, friends are mourning bitterly their sad bereavements,\" he said. \"But are there no griefs - no relatives that mourn their dead - in Zululand? And shall we kill 10 000 more to avenge the losses of that dreadful day?\" \"The Zulus attacked the red-coated British because they feared for their land and their independence. The British soldiers, drawn from the very poorest level of the working classes, fought back because they had been lured, like Private Moss from Wales, to 'take the Queen's shilling'.\" \"How is it,\" he asked, alluding to the fact that [Theophilus Shepstone] had backed his ascension to the Zulu throne, \"that they crown me in the morning and dethrone me in the afternoon.\"

John William Colenso, the Bishop of Natal, became a notorious theological and colonial figure. His life and career are well documented, but his converts' views have hardly featured in these commentaries and biographies. Magema M. Fuze's published series 'Ukutunywa kukaSobantu' provides an alternative account of Colenso's career as a missionary bishop. In a series of articles published in the Zulu-English newspaper \"Ilanga lase Natal\", Fuze sketched a portrait of Colenso that reflected his personal history as Colenso's convert, an Ekukhanyeni resident and also his aspiration to be a kholwa2 intellectual and a historian.