Ten years ago this month, apartheid ended with the election of Nelson Mandela to the South African presidency. Graham Boynton considers the past, present, and future of the continent's most compelling country

The early light of an African dawn splashes a golden hue over the wheat fields, the rolling mountains of the southern Drakensberg, and the pine forests of Zululand. I have just spent a raucous evening with old friends at a trout farm in the Kamberg, the southern part of the great Drakensberg Range, and I am now driving northeast toward Isandlwana, the sphinx-shaped mountain where the defining battle of the old Zulu kingdom took place 125 years ago. It was the greatest military defeat Britain suffered in its entire colonial history, and it was inflicted, according to the British high commissioner at the time, Sir Bartle Frere, "with impunity by a bunch of savages armed with sticks."

History weighs heavily on this particular corner of South Africa. In the late twentieth century, as the country was beginning to emerge from apartheid, the Zulus found themselves again engaged in a bloody war. This one was an ugly, seething affair that raged mainly out here in rural Zululand between supporters of the African National Congress (ANC) and those of the Zulu Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP). In the 1980s and early 1990s, the conflict threatened to plunge the country into full-scale civil war and to devour the postapartheid peace process; it ended with more than 14,000 dead and with power in the hands of Nelson Mandela's Xhosa people. Now the Zulus occupy the margins of South African politics, and the province of KwaZulu-Natal potters along aimlessly, forgotten by all but travelers like me who want to wallow in its magnificent geography and history.

I accelerate across glass-smooth asphalt, the R622 from Mooi River to Greytown, then head toward Tugela Ferry, a small, shabby village of collapsing buildings, people in rags shuffling down dirt roads alongside goats and dogs and chickens. I'd been warned that if my car broke down in these hardscrabble backwaters of the new South Africa my life would not be worth a fig, but all I have seen are smiling, waving people and indifferent animals. At Tugela Ferry, I stop and buy a Coke at a stall run by a man named Amos. A wizened old Zulu, he tells me that although his tribe does not rule South Africa, "we will always rule this place, because we are the aba KwaZulu, the children of the heavens."

I keep driving north, following the road along which Lord Chelmsford led his occupying army in 1879, toward the Buffalo River, the colonial border with the old Zulu kingdom. He, too, was headed for Isandlwana, for catastrophic defeat at the hands of King Cetshwayo's Zulu army. It was that defeat, on the Day of the Dead Moon (January 22 of that year, so-called because no moon was visible in the sky), which aroused the imperial army and in the following months sent it crashing deep into Zululand to finally overwhelm the warrior nation. I am booked at Fugitives' Drift, the lovely safari-style camp that overlooks the Zululand plains, where I will drench myself in the stories of the Anglo-Zulu war. That is why visitors come here from all over the world—to listen to the camp's owner, the great storyteller David Rattray, and his assistant, Rob Caskie, take them through the Shakespearean dramas that are the Battle of Isandlwana, the subsequent stand at Rorke's Drift, when a garrison of 130 British soldiers fought off wave upon wave of Zulu warriors, and the Battle of Ulundi, which saw the defeat of the Zulus and the surrender of King Cetshwayo.