When John William Colenso wrote about the ‘official record’, he meant a report titled The Kafir Revolt in Natal in the Year 1873: Being an Account of the Revolt of the Amahlubi Tribe Under the Chief Langalibalele and the Measures Taken to Vindicate the Authority of the Government: Together with the Official Record of the Trial of the Chief and Some of His Sons and Indunas. It is the contents of this report that prompted him to pen his own counter report – a minority report, to be sure. His first line of attack was that the imprimatur and status accorded the ‘official record’ were premature and self-serving. He began by stating that although the Kafir Revolt in Natal, especially the ‘Introduction’, was purported to have been written and published independently by the publishers Keith and Co., ‘it is thought to exhibit in many places strong signs of an official pen’. From the beginning, then, Colenso announced that what he was about to perform was a textual and forensic analysis of the way in which the ‘official pen’ had sought to vindicate the authority of government by unfairly trying and banishing Langalibalele.

The ‘Preface’ of Colenso's Remarks explains not just his scepticism regarding the official report but sets out his motivation for speaking on behalf of the deposed chief. As with the transcript of the trial of Andries Botha, the frontier dandy and a mission station convert, the military tribunal emerges as a tool used by a colonial government to at once remind the accused of his vanishing life as a ‘warrior of empire’ while at the same time silencing him by refusing him legal representation.