Attention should, in the first place, be drawn to the fact that during his stay at St. Helena (1889-1897), Dinuzulu was subjected to influences that contributed in no small degree to his subsequent undoing. The Governor of the island, with no sense of the fitness of things, treated him just as he might have done Napoleon. The result was that when he returned to the land of his fathers, he was neither savage nor civilized. He had been "spoilt." With a "spoilt" young Zulu the Government of Natal had to get on as well as it could. Without going into the terms of his repatriation, which will be dealt with later, it may be pointed out that, after spending a few weeks at Eshowe, he was allowed to return to his tribe near Nongoma, where he erected his Usutu and other kraals. As soon as he got away from the restraining influences of civilization, he relapsed more or less into a state of barbarism. He became a "freethinker." He married more wives than one, and kept more concubines than a dozen. He cast aside the European clothes he had so long worn, not, however, to don once more the picturesque garb of his youth, but something which was neither one thing nor the other. His morals became lax. He grew indolent. His life, being of an unsettled, invertebrate and isolated type, caused many of his actions to appear ambiguous and mysterious. This, in a man naturally cunning, was ascribed to duplicity. He wallowed in such luxury as the £500 a year allowed by the Government and what remained of his patrimony could command at his semi-barbarous, semi-civilized kraal, and sated himself with inordinate quantities of European spirits. He presently became so extraordinarily obese, that it was with difficulty he could move about unassisted. The affliction of "expansion," to which members of the Zulu royal house are notoriously liable, came upon him at an age earlier than usual. The sorry picture that has been drawn of a man, not without estimable qualities, could not, we venture to think, have existed had better judgment been exercised by the authorities and his friends in St. Helena, and, to some extent, those in Zululand as well. And yet, in St. Helena, counter influences had not been wanting. Ndabuko, for instance, strenuously resisted all endeavours for his own so-called "improvement"; if Tshingana was less obdurate, he had sufficient judgment and sagacity to prevent his benevolent preceptors from carrying him too far. This aspect of Dinuzulu's private life, well known to many Europeans and thousands of Natives in Natal and Zululand, has not been repeated for the sake of blackening his character, but--by showing that his European friends were primarily responsible for the _debâcle_--to serve as a warning, for it was out of conditions such as these that the crime, of which he was later on convicted, came to be hatched.