In her book "Eyes in the Night," Nomavenda Mathiane chronicles her grandmother's experiences during the Anglo-Zulu War, revealing a narrative born from a post-funeral conversation, tracing the challenges of displacement, loss, and cultural complexities faced by her grandmother as a child during the war. While Mathiane's meticulous historical account invites readers to question their own family histories for the purpose of enhancing one’s understanding of cultural identity, it delves into a lens of the Anglo-Zulu war which changes the dominant idea of how the Zulu nation emerged from the war as a nation as well as how it presents in everyday life to this day.