The Zulu are among the most written-about peoples in southern Africa, and almost all of that writing was produced in the course of conquering, converting or governing them.
The nineteenth-century record is dominated by missionaries and colonial officials. Some of it is detailed and some of it is careful, and all of it was gathered by people who had already decided what the religion was for. The single most influential early collection was compiled by a missionary who worked closely with Zulu informants and who was, in the process, converted to the view that the tradition contained more than he had been sent to replace; his material remains valuable and remains shaped by the encounter that produced it.
Colonial administration added another archive with its own purposes, and the wars of the later nineteenth century generated a literature interested in the Zulu as adversaries.
The tradition's own transmission runs through izibongo, the praise poetry that records lineage, character and event and that is performed by trained praise singers, and through the instruction given within families and within the offices of diviner and herbalist. It was not composed for outsiders and much of it does not travel.
From the twentieth century onward, South African scholars, including Zulu scholars writing about their own tradition, have supplied the corrective. The atlas records the structure of the religious order and leaves what families and office holders hold with them.