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Zulu   /zˈulˌu/   Listen
Zulu

noun
1.
A member of the tall Negroid people of eastern South Africa; some live in KwaZulu-Natal under the traditional clan system but many now work in the cities.
2.
A community of Negroid people in eastern South Africa.
3.
A Bantu language of considerable literary importance in southeastern Africa.



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"Zulu" Quotes from Famous Books



... the iron-clad "Thunderer" utter thunders of God—which facts if you had had the grace or sense to learn from Byron, instead of accusing him of blasphemy, it had been better at this day for you, and for many a savage soul also, by Euxine shore, and in Zulu and ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... circumstance may be fallen upon without going so far as Africa to seek for it. JOHN ALLEN, of Water Street, was, once upon a time, the Zulu Kaffir of DANA of the Sun and his fascinating Satellite, ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 22, August 27, 1870 • Various

... compelled the victor to take his paw from the throat of his victim and submit the treaty to a congress of the powers at Berlin, where its terms were modified and England was admitted to its benefits. The Second Afghan War (1878-80), and the Zulu War (1878-79), and the Boer War, which brought little glory to Britain, were the direct result of the Prime Minister's desire to extend the empire and strengthen its frontiers. It may have been theatrical, but it was certainly impressive to the assembled princes of India when ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy

... the first place, he does not make the too common mistake of allowing the black populace to insert the thin end of the wedge. This is a mistake too often fraught with serious results, and the Boer knows it. A native, no matter if he be Swazi, Zulu, Basuto, or any other nationality, will always take advantage where such is offered, and he will follow it up with enough persistence to warrant ultimate success. In Natal, at the present time, this mistake is very apparent, and, in consequence, one very seldom encounters ...
— The Boer in Peace and War • Arthur M. Mann

... after a long course of conversations in a sleepy old borough, for he would see that a mildew may attack the human intelligence, and that the manners of a puffy well-clad citizen may be worse than those of a Zulu Kaffir. The indescribable coarseness and rudeness of the social intercourse, the detestable forms of humour which obtain applause, the low distrust and trickery are quite sufficient to make a sensitive ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman

... have been called "The Palms," for I can't see an oak anywhere, whilst there are some lovely graceful trees with rustling giant leaves on the lawn; but I cannot look beyond the wide veranda, where Zulu Jack is waiting to welcome me with the old musical cry of "Jakasu-casa!" and my little five-o'clock tea-table arranged, just as I used to have it in Natal, on the shady side of the house. Yes, it is home at last, and very homelike and comfortable it ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various

... and we are driven to admit that what we now call an optative or potential mood, was originally a kind of future, formed by ya, to go, very much like the French je vais dire, I am going to say, Ishall say, or like the Zulu 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 ngi-ya-ku-tanda, I go to love, Ishall love.[20] The future would afterwards assume the character of a civil command, as "thou wilt go" may be used even by us in the sense of "go;" and the imperative ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller

... the park, is another pet, which was presented to Her Majesty by Lord Wolseley, a peculiarly tall, deerlike-looking animal, a Zulu cow, bred from a bull which was originally the property of Dabulamanzi, Cetewayo's brother. Cetewayo, curiously enough, when paying a visit to the Shaw Farm, saw his brother's cattle, but did not ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... are naturally held in the highest esteem. To be told that he is light- coloured, or like a white man, would be deemed a very poor compliment by a Kaffir. I have heard of one unfortunate man who was so very fair that no girl would marry him." One of the titles of the Zulu king is, "You who are black." (61. Mungo Park's 'Travels in Africa,' 4to. 1816, pp. 53, 131. Burton's statement is quoted by Schaaffhausen, 'Archiv. fur Anthropologie,' 1866, s. 163. On the Banyai, Livingstone, 'Travels,' p. 64. On the Kaffirs, the Rev. J. Shooter, 'The Kafirs ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin

... at present a party of Zulu Kaffirs exhibiting at the St. George's Gallery, Hyde Park Corner, London. These noble savages are represented in a most agreeable manner; they are seen in an elegant theatre, fitted with appropriate scenery of great beauty, and ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens

... shoes. As might have been expected, the great folk did not seem surprised at his presence, or to take any particular notice of his attire, the fact being that such people never are surprised. A Zulu chief in full war dress would only excite a friendly interest in their breasts. On the contrary they recognised vaguely that the old gentleman was something out of the common run, and as such worth cultivating. Indeed the Prime Minister, hearing casually that he was a clergyman from Wales, asked ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard

... his cause, be that cause what it will; but for Catiline none!" I think there is a mistake in the sentiment expressed here. To die readily when death must come is but a little thing, and is done daily by the poorest of mankind. The Romans could generally do it, and so can the Chinese. A Zulu is quite equal to it, and people lower in civilization than Chinese or Zulus. To encounter death, or the danger of death, for the sake of duty—when the choice is there; but duty and death are preferred to ignominious security, or, better still, to security which shall bring with it self-abasement—that ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope

... Elsewhere I would forget it lightly enough, as soon as ever I left the cabin, at the saloon table, where plate and cup fretted themselves up and down against the table frames, in the skipper's basket lounge chair wherein I read contrasted romances, East End and Zulu, on the deck where I groped from hold-by to hold-by, longing to change grey sky and green sea-trenches for sunshine and blue levels of sea and sky. The weather calmed and brightened, but the presence was unaffected. It remained to my perception eager and sanguine, no less, no more, ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps

... apparatus for every kind of murder known to the fertile brain of man. There were European rifles, revolvers, bayonets, and swords; Italian stilettos, Turkish scimitars, Greek knives, Central African spears and poisoned arrows, Zulu knobkerries, Afghan yataghans, Malay krises, Sumatra blow-pipes, Chinese dirks, New Guinea head-catching implements, Australian spears and boomerangs, Polynesian stone hatchets, and numerous other weapons the names of which ...
— A Bid for Fortune - or Dr. Nikola's Vendetta • Guy Boothby

... mother were devoured by a monster. The hero "attacked the creature and was swallowed whole, but cutting his way out he set free all the inhabitants of the world." At the same page is the story of the Zulu Princess Untombinde who was carried off by a dreadful beast. "The king gathered his army and attacked it, but it swallowed up men, and dogs, and cattle, all but one warrior; he slew the monster, and there came out cattle, ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Anonymous

... Kota-Kota on the opposite coast, and having received no reply to his request to be ferried across the lake, he started off and marched by land round the southern end, crossing the Shire River at its entrance. He continued his journey round the south-western gulf of Lake Nyassa, till rumours of Zulu raids frightened his men. They refused to go any farther, but just threw down their loads and walked away. He was now left with Susi and Chuma and a few boys with whom he crossed the end of a long range of mountains over four thousand feet in height, and, pursuing a zigzag track, reached ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge

... to another exile in Eugenie, the widow of Napoleon III, who resides at Chiselhurst, and who makes no pretensions to royal grandeur. Since the death of her son by Zulu assegais she has lived the ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls, Vol. XII, Jan. 3, 1891 • Various

... Wolf," went on Tom. "Dance! Dance or Big Wolf shoot!" And the fun-loving Rover set the pace in a mad, caper that would have done credit to a Zulu. ...
— The Rover Boys in the Jungle • Arthur M. Winfield

... are something gorgeous. They are on the first floor, looking into Piccadilly from a court, and they are filled with Hogarth's prints, old silver, blue and white china, Zulu weapons and fur rugs, and easy chairs of India silk. You never saw such rooms! And a very good servant, who cooks and valets me and runs errands and takes such good care of me that last night Cust and Balfour called at one to get some supper and he would not let them in. Think ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis

... about Exsheff? He went down into South Africa, and he's come home a regular repository of Zulu spearheads ...
— The New Pun Book • Thomas A. Brown and Thomas Joseph Carey

... other permanent members on the domestic staff—a gigantic native named Paulus, and a young Zulu who went by the name of "Gentleman Jim" on account of his dandified appearance and the aristocratic "drawl" affected by him. American darkies say, "Dere's some folk dat is slow but shua, and some dar is dat's jes' slow!" Well, Gentleman Jim was "jes' slow." He was ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt

... from the undefiled spring, that I exercise the right and duty of free judgment on the part of every man, mainly for the purpose of inducing other laymen to follow my example. If the New Testament is translated into Zulu by Protestant missionaries, it must be assumed that a Zulu convert is competent to draw from its contents all the truths which it is necessary for him to believe. I trust that I may, without immodesty, claim to be put on the ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley

... "I'm a little rusty in the language, and, besides, you talk like an idiot. You might as well speak of the human language as the Simian language. There are French monkeys who speak monkey French, African monkeys who talk the most barbarous kind of Zulu monkey patois, and Congo monkey slang, and so on. Let Johnson send his little Boswell out to drum up information. If there is anything to be found out he'll get it, and then he can tell it to us. Of course he may get ...
— A House-Boat on the Styx • John Kendrick Bangs

... and so on—flaunting these fluttering rags of poverty in the reader's face and imagining he will be ass enough to take them for the sign of untold riches held in reserve. I will let your 'learning' remain in your report; you have as much right, I suppose, to 'adorn your page' with Zulu and Chinese and Choctaw rubbish as others of your sort have to adorn theirs with insolent odds and ends smouched from half a dozen learned tongues whose A-B ABS they don't ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... walked back from the office in the Strand by Piccadilly. "I won't trust any more to these private detectives. It's my belief they're a pack of thieves themselves, in league with the rascals they're set to catch, and with no more sense of honour than a Zulu diamond-hand." ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen

... answered my friend, "nothing easier. I know Vincey; I'll introduce you," and he did, and for some minutes we stood chatting—about the Zulu people, I think, for I had just returned from the Cape at the time. Presently, however, a stoutish lady, whose name I do not remember, came along the pavement, accompanied by a pretty fair-haired girl, and these two Mr. Vincey, who clearly knew them ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard

... has not, I beg him to lose no time in supplying the deficiency. It is full of promise; but I should like to know his age. There are things in it that are very clever, to which I attach small importance; it is the shape of the age. And there are passages, particularly the rally in presence of the Zulu king, that show genuine and remarkable narrative talent - a talent that few will have the wit to understand, a talent of strength, spirit, capacity, sufficient vision, and sufficient self-sacrifice, which last is the chief ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson

... nation in 1882. It was the Sullivan-Ryan prize-fight. I had no great objection to find with it, as did so many other ministers. It suggested a far better symbol of arbitration between two differing opinions than war. If Mr. Disraeli had gone out and met a distinguished Zulu on the field of English battle, and fought their national troubles out, as Sullivan and Ryan did, what a saving of life and money! How many lives could have been saved if Napoleon and Wellington, or Moltke and McMahon had emulated the ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage

... had any Rosalind traced with such shy wonder the writing of her lover upon the bark, nor any Orlando won such laughter for his not really sportive dalliance. Fairer than the mummers, it may be, were the ladies who sat and watched them from the lawn. All of them wore jerseys and tied-back skirts. Zulu hats shaded their eyes from the sun. Bangles shimmered upon their wrists. And the gentlemen wore light frock-coats and light top-hats with black bands. And the aesthetes were in velveteen, ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm

... stimulated to too great an activity by unhealthy excitement, you think of the most curiously assorted things—in fact, of absurd things which are quite out of place. I have been thinking the whole time of something very stupid which is only fiction: That a Zulu, named Umslopagas, rode and ran one hundred miles in a single night and then refreshed himself sufficiently by a couple of hours' sleep to deliver battle with such vigour at the head of a marble staircase, that ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale

... her poor dead child, Lies the heart of her heart — let her alone Under the rod With her infinite moan, O my God! He was beautiful, pure, and brave, The brightest grace Of a royal race; Only his throne is but a grave; Is there fate in fame? Is there doom in names? Ah! what did the cruel Zulu spears Care for the prince or his mother's tears? What did the Zulu's ruthless lance Care for the hope of the ...
— Poems: Patriotic, Religious, Miscellaneous • Abram J. Ryan, (Father Ryan)

... designed, and I doubt if even Mr. WEEDON GROSSMITH could have given us anything funnier than the spectacle presented by the Egyptian monarch when making his announcement of an Ethiopian raid. Nor shall I easily forget the figure of the King of Ethiopia, with a head of hair like a Zulu's, and swathed in a tiger-skin. I should myself have chosen the hide of a leopard, for the leopard cannot change his spots nor the Ethiopian his skin, and when you get the two together you have ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Apr 2, 1919 • Various

... Prince wondered how old Connie thought he was, his hair was a little thin, not from age—always had been that way—and he was as brown as a Zulu, but it was only sunburn. He'd figure out a way of letting her know he was only thirty-two before the evening ...
— Sunny Slopes • Ethel Hueston

... the neighbourhood of the Biobio River that he first encountered the Araucanian warriors of the true stock. Here his forces met with a rude awakening. In discipline and fighting merit the companies of the Araucanians stood to the remaining tribes of South America in the same relation as did the Zulu regiments to the other fighting-men of Africa. A furious struggle began which was destined to last for generations and for centuries. But at no time were the fierce Araucanians subdued, although it fell to ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel

... me the way to the Biggersbergen I will give you 5s. on account." My amiable and dusky friend insisted on 7s. 6d., but after I had intimated that if he did not accept 5s. I should certainly burn his entire outfit, slaughter all his women and kill all his cattle, he acquiesced. A young Zulu was deputed as my guide, but I had to use my fists and make pretty play with my revolver, and generally hint at a sudden death, or he would have left me in the lurch. He muttered to himself for some time, ...
— My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War • Ben Viljoen

... much the same tone she would have used if her hostess had informed her that she was to be paired with a Zulu. ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm

... been an attempt of any importance, neither has there ever been any organized effort, for the regeneration of the Greek people, and while the Home and Foreign Missions of America for the last 25 years have given the best of their spiritual leaders for the conversion of the Zulu and the Mogul and millions of American dollars have been expended, with insignificant returns, in trying vainly to make real Christians out of a barbarous and semi-human race of people, and trying to civilize the jungles of Africa, the most urgent duty has been neglected, and some spasmodical efforts ...
— Conversion of a High Priest into a Christian Worker • Meletios Golden

... pro-consul deeply pathetic. Rhodes was, I believe, genuinely "haunted" by the problem which he could not solve. I and The Spectator got on his nerves. But perhaps if he saw me he could get the solution he desired. He had squared Boers and Governors and high British Officials, and Generals and Zulu Chiefs, and missionaries, and miners, and Jewish diamond-dealers by talk and nothing more. Why not this journalist? He would try. He would worry his secretaries to within an inch of their lives till they got ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey

... him, for during the remainder of the morning he hardly let him out of his sight. He took him to see the stables, though Carr openly declared that he did not understand horses; he showed him his collection of Zulu weapons in the vestibule; he even started a game of billiards with him till the arrival of the doctor. I did not think Carr took his attentions in very good part, though he was too well-mannered to show it; but he ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley

... such things in Adelaide. The kindness and hospitality that were shown to me—an absolute stranger—by all sorts of people were surprising. Mr. and Mrs. Westlake took me on Sunday to see Bishop Colenso. He showed me the photo of the enquiring Zulu who made him doubt the literal truth of the early books of the Bible, and presented me with the people's edition of his work ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence

... Daily Chronicle, speaking of the first performance of Mameena, observes, "Mr. Oscar Asche, jutting, preponderant and softly corrugated, was a splendid Zulu chief." ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 7, 1914 • Various

... Chinatown, San Francisco. Instead of hailing from the rice-fields of Quangtung, this fellow is a native of Kashga-ria, a country almost as wild as Afghanistan. A moment's scrutiny of his face removes him as far from the civilized seaboard Celestials of our acquaintance as is the Zulu warrior from the plantation-darky of the South. Except for the above-mentioned comparative neatness of appearance, it is very evident that the Mongolian is every bit as wild as the Afghans ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens

... waggon, and gave her a 'tot' of Cape smoke, and then, as soon as it was ready, poured about a pint of beef-tea down her throat, made from the flesh of a blue vilderbeeste I had killed the day before, and after that she brightened up wonderfully. She could talk Zulu—indeed, it turned out that she had run away from Zululand in T'Chaka's time—and she told me that all the people whom I had seen had died of fever. When they had died the other inhabitants of the kraal had taken the cattle and ...
— Long Odds • H. Rider Haggard

... what we expect; but anthropology, never glancing at our 'survivals,' never interrogating them, goes to the Aquarium to study a friendly Zulu. The consistency of this method laisse a desirer! One says to anthropologists: 'If all educated men who have had, or believe they have had "psychical experiences" are mere "survivals," why don't you friends of "survivals" examine them and cross examine them? ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang

... eminent High Commissioners, endeavoured to pacify the Boer malcontents, and drafted the scheme of a liberal Constitution for the Transvaal. But one of the last acts of the Tory Government, at the end of 1879, was to recall Frere for an alleged transgression of his powers in regard to the Zulu War, and to pigeon-hole his scheme. Mr. Gladstone, who in opposition had denounced the annexation with good enough justification, though in terms which under the circumstances were immoderate, found himself compelled to confirm it when he took office in April, 1880. But he, too, allowed the liberal ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers

... about sanctimonious Cromwell and his ironsides that put the women and children of Drogheda to the sword with the bible text God is love pasted round the mouth of his cannon? The bible! Did you read that skit in the United Irishman today about that Zulu ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce



Words linked to "Zulu" :   natal, community, African, Nguni



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