Recensioni dei lettori

• shawnd_72

  (1/5)

  This is a somewhat unreadable book detailing the life of Chaka, a unifying king of previously unaffiliated and often warring Southern African communities/kingdoms. The book is halting and the flow is strained. The author has jumbled spurts of accounts of the daily life of 19th century African tribal life, spiritual rituals, political philosophy, and other detail. This winds around the life story of Chaka, an orphan of sorts, born into a situation where everyone around him in power wants him dead or sent away. The story follows his life and extreme struggles to become the most powerful tribal king in recent memory in Southern Africa. The story is filled with myth almost enough to seem cosmological. One especially painful recurring gush is the repetitive, repeating discourses of Chaka's spiritual mentor/witch doctor, who says the same five sentences more than twenty times throughout the book. Ultimately Chaka returns to a small kinghood and slowly accumulates and stretches his realm. In the process, he betrays the one closest to him and becomes something very far from his original innocent self.