In pursuit of the nightwatchman across the centuries and vagaries of colonial and imperial policies, one constant remains – no matter the race and ethnicity of the nightwatchman, the battles over the ‘soldier of fortune’ remained largely pecuniary. As stated in earlier arguments, the assumption in much of the literature on colonial conflict and warfare is that colonial and imperial governments invested and expended large amounts of money and resources in defence of the colonial empire or territory. As the lives of David Stuurman, Andries Botha, Johnny Fingo and now ‘Cash’ demonstrate, the opposite is true. Colonial and imperial governments were loath to spend money on warfare, especially when the prize was a scattered and incoherent conglomeration of colonies and republics. The defence of the colony, it has been demonstrated, rested on the shoulders of black and brown men who were often paid meagre wages and were awarded measly booty to engage in the dangerous and capricious business of war work. Even when there was what could be called a formal declaration of war – the Anglo-Boer War, World War I and World War II – the participation of black and brown men was largely still contingent, informal, and ultimately auxiliary.

The pictures of Cetshwayo taken on the deck of the British steamer the SS Natal are iconic. They have appeared in several accounts of his reign. Specifically, they are used to illustrate the end of the Zulu kingdom and the 1879 exile of Cetshwayo to Cape Town. As a moment of photographic capture, Cetshwayo's image also fits into the continental and regional story of the photographing of captured monarchs and rulers. In her book, Photography and Africa, Erin Haney dedicates several pages to what she terms ‘Majestic Prerogative’. As she perceptively notes, ‘sending African rulers into exile was part of colonial expansion particularly wellsuited to spectacle and these events were often ceremoniously photographed for posterity’.

When John William Colenso wrote about the ‘official record’, he meant a report titled The Kafir Revolt in Natal in the Year 1873: Being an Account of the Revolt of the Amahlubi Tribe Under the Chief Langalibalele and the Measures Taken to Vindicate the Authority of the Government: Together with the Official Record of the Trial of the Chief and Some of His Sons and Indunas. It is the contents of this report that prompted him to pen his own counter report – a minority report, to be sure. His first line of attack was that the imprimatur and status accorded the ‘official record’ were premature and self-serving. He began by stating that although the Kafir Revolt in Natal, especially the ‘Introduction’, was purported to have been written and published independently by the publishers Keith and Co., ‘it is thought to exhibit in many places strong signs of an official pen’. From the beginning, then, Colenso announced that what he was about to perform was a textual and forensic analysis of the way in which the ‘official pen’ had sought to vindicate the authority of government by unfairly trying and banishing Langalibalele.

The ‘Preface’ of Colenso's Remarks explains not just his scepticism regarding the official report but sets out his motivation for speaking on behalf of the deposed chief. As with the transcript of the trial of Andries Botha, the frontier dandy and a mission station convert, the military tribunal emerges as a tool used by a colonial government to at once remind the accused of his vanishing life as a ‘warrior of empire’ while at the same time silencing him by refusing him legal representation.

No one had looked forward to the commencement of the American Civil War as much as Frederick Douglass, the former fugitive slave, abolitionist and newspaper editor. The schism between North and South and the South's rebellion against the Union warranted decisive and violent action to teach the South a lesson. In Douglass's thinking, the ‘arm of the slave’ was the most appropriate tool to use against the machinations of the slaveholder. He noted that:

But, more importantly, the ‘black hand’ would once and for all deal a death blow to slavery in America. It was, to his mind, a righteous war, conducted for the sake of the enslaved. The old republic, governed by the Fugitive Slave Act and the Dred Scott decision, would be buried under the rubble of savage war and a new republic would rise out of the ashes. He told his expectant audiences:

Lao She begins his 1939 novel Rickshaw Boy with a description of rickshaw pullers that is useful as our starting point. He writes, ‘I’d like you to meet a fellow named Xiangzi, not Camel, because, you see, Camel is only a nickname. After I’ve told you about Xiangzi, we’ll deal with his relationship with camels, and be done with it.’

The subsequent images of rickshaw pullers of different ages and circumstances do not create a pretty picture.

In 1940, Max Gluckman – the famed founder of the Manchester school of anthropology – published the article, ‘Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand’, in which he described what looked, superficially, like the opening of a bridge in Northern Zululand. The events took place in pre-apartheid South Africa, known then as the ‘Union of South Africa’. On the surface, the ceremony seems to oscillate between the strict protocols of officialdom and the informalities that emerge with prolonged contact between those in power and the people over whom they rule. For Gluckman, this was the meaning of a social situation.

As might be expected of this approach to culture and society, Gluckman spends most of the article describing who belonged to which community or social structure, and his preference was for distinguishing between ‘European’ and ‘Zulu’ even though he admits that, by virtue of daily and continuous contact, all could be called ‘Zululanders’.

The interstitial lives of the frontier dandies, David Stuurman and Hermanus Matroos, epitomised the contradictions of freedom, manhood, nationhood and autonomy in colonised, borderland identities. Their association, at various times of their lives, with Christian missions meant that their militancy and belief in the righteousness of their actions was tinged with the spirit of redemption. We turn now to a different kind of biography, that of a levy recruited for his fighting prowess.

The conventional history of the Cape Colony has created the impression that the emergence of what Stanley Trapido evocatively called ‘Hottentot Nationalism’,2 and the institutionalisation of Islam, were two separate and distinct processes. In military terms, however, the imam and the missionary, the mosque and the chapel, were adjacent. The recruitment of men of colour into military service implicated both Islam and Christianity. Colonial categories such as ‘Mardijckers’, ‘Bastaards’, ‘Pandoers’ and ‘Hottentot-Bastaards’ conceal a history of religious compromise and accommodation.3 The argument offered here concerns the role played by religion and faith in the Dutch and British military policies towards black and brown men. Since the extant literature contains ample historiographical references and accounts of warfare, I will not attempt to replay every colonial conflict. Instead, I concentrate on the biographies of the men of colour who were recruited into military service.