"Magepa the Buck"
The Editor is in Allan Quatermain's home in Yorkshire, with Quatermain, Sir Henry Curtis, and Captain Good. They are telling stories of heroism. As might be expected Quatermain has a good one to tell. At the beginning of the Zulu war (1877), when he was a transport rider, providing the army with three waggons and teams of.salted oxen, he met an old aquaintance Magepa. He had met Magepa, known as the Buck for his great speed as a runner, 30 years earlier at the Battle of Tugela (see "Child of Storm"), when he was in the Amawombe regimentunder Prince Umbelazi - and just escaped the vengeance of the victorious Cetywayo.
Quatermain visited Magepa near Rorke's Drift, and they spoke of old times, as well as the coming war. Magepa confided to Quatermain that he feared that Cetywayo would eventually be avenged on him, and wanted to save his sole descendants, his daughter Gita and grandson Sinala, then less than two years old. He asked Quatermain to taken them into safety in Natal, which Quatermain promised to do. Unfortunately a spy overheard their talk.
Next morning - when Gita and Sinala were to have come to him, Quatermain sees the distanyt krall of Magepa on fire. But Magepa escaped, cutting a hole in his hut and running away with Sinala bound on his back, while Gita held the door of the hut agaisnt the King's slayers. Although now an old man, and burdened by the weight of the child bound on his back, Magepa managed to outrun the soldiers and head for the river which marked the border with Natal - the Tugela. However, war now having opened, a regiment of allied kaffirs was attacking isolated Zulus - including the regiment of slayers - on the Zululand side of the river. Quatermain saw a pary of them try to cut off Magepa, whom they didn't recognise as a friend. Running very swiftly he managed to escape, though wounded, at one point turning from an asagai so that he received it in the breast rather than in the back - which would have killed his grandson. He swam the river, and Quatermain helped drag him to dry land. Magepa is dying of his injury and of exhaustion, but he has saved his grandson. Haggard promises to look after the child.
Haggard told his friends at his dinner table that he send the boy to an institution in Natal, and that he is now being trained as an interpreter. He doesn't add that this is at his own expense, though it is doubtless so. For him the desparate run by Magepa, to save his grandson - he cared not for himself - was the epitomy of heroism. He might have saved himself by flight, he could have dropped the boy at any time and so got away, and he might have received the blow of the assagai in the back and so saved himself. But he did none of these things.
Haggard continually extols what he saw as the uncorrupted virtue of the African - especially the Zulu - people. Life wasn't easy, and there was certainly injustice - see any number of his African romances - but there were plenty examples of chivalry, dedication, loyalty and devotion which he greatly admired. Those modern commentators who insist as Europeans had a sense of superiority and looked down upon the Africans as primative savages who had to be saved and civilised, ignore the sentiments of men such as Haggard, who was not alone in his attitudes.