Books: A Black, A Briton, A Boer

AGAINST THESE THREE—Stuart Cloete —Houghton Mifflm ($3.50).

The Matabele, a savage offshoot of the Zulu tribe, named their warrior king Lobengula ("He Who Drives Like the Wind"). But by 1880 the fat, short-winded monarch preferred to lie on his bed toying with the stolen diamonds he kept in a couple of kerosene cans, while his wives covered his naked body with gold sovereigns.

Lobengula was a conservative man who liked the old ways best: "making rain" out of goats' entrails, gossiping with his witch doctors, snuffing the air in the royal courtyard, where his dogs...