He explains how Chief Shaka (Zulu) created a highly centralized and powerful Zulu empire by destroying, driving out, or demanding submission of the Bantu tribes throughout the eastern coast of southern Africa. Gump presents the development of these Indigenous empires prior to European confrontation. Gump organizes his synthesis around three themes: the empires the Lakotas and Zulus formed prior to European contact the stunning defeats of European imperial armies by Native forces at Little Big Horn (1876) and Isandlwana (1879) and how the conquerors reconstructed the images of these Indigenous peoples and their cultures into an image of the "noble savage." The majority of the book addresses the first two themes. In order to challenge the concept of American exceptionalism, Gump compares two expansive Indigenous societies and their interactions with imperial agents and white settlers.
His stated purpose is "to interrogate the exceptionalist narrative in American historiography … by comparing America's western expansion with Britain's imperial exploits in southern Africa" (xvi). Gump, a professor of history at the University of San Diego, does an admirable job of juxtaposition, formulating an intriguing synthesis of the interactions between Zulus and British and Lakotas and Americans. Now, two decades later, in a revised and expanded second edition, Gump compares and contrasts the rise and fall of the Zulu and Lakota Sioux nations from Indigenous perspectives, chronicling the events that culminated in their subjection to British and American imperialism toward the latter end of the nineteenth century.
Gump's comparative monograph, The Dust Rose Like Smoke: The Subjugation of the Zulu and the Sioux, was first published in 1994. Comparative history, they argued, yields rich dividends in viewing the process of cultural interactions in different regions, modifying impressions that can be misleading and calling attention to considerations previously overlooked. They challenged historians to employ comparative historical analysis of the American and South African frontiers to discover commonalities on how Indigenous cultures responded to the onslaught of capitalistic settler colonial expansion of imperial Britain and America.
SOME THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO, historians Howard Lamar and Leonard Thompson published an edited collection of essays entitled The Frontier in History: North America and Southern Africa Compared(Yale University Press, 1981).
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