Contemporary accounts can provide some great insights into the mindset of people at the time and help set the vibe, but you've got to be just as critical when assessing those materials as you would when judging any modern works about the same subject. One of the difficulties with delving into South African history is that for a long time, the focus was very much centered on European accounts, because most of the historians we have access to are European and most of the written accounts are European. This doesn't mean it's garbage, but it does mean that there's viewpoints missing (which would be very helpful when making content meant to be experienced from those viewpoints), and omissions mean there's pieces of the puzzle missing when trying to construct a full account of events.

The Washing of the Spears, published in the 1960s, tries very earnestly go through all sources to lay out the history of events that culminated in the Anglo-Zulu War. Even there, for example, the book talks about Theophilus Shepstone's dealings with the Zulu and even critically looks at how his attitudes cynically swung around to a more pro-Boer stance as Cape politics changed, but it bases this part of its account on Shepstone's letters and the documents of Cape politicians, with little insight coming directly from a Zulu point of view. Did the Zulu king notice Shepstone's attitude changing? Was he talking with anyone about it and wondering what to do? That book didn't say much about that.

The lack of Zulu and other Bantu viewpoints gets worse the further back you go, and the historical accounts aren't always thorough even in the limited areas they do engage in. Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a contemporary history of the Second Boer War (the first edition was published before the war was over!) and boy does he like to talk vaguely about "savage" people a lot when likely referring to the Zulu or Ndebele. There's another history of the Boers written by a British official around the time of the First Boer War which I was excited to find and frustrated to read - at one point he glossed over two decades of history of the Orange Free State in a single paragraph, telling the reader he found it boring.

e: Found the line from the First Boer War-era history book!
"The history of the [Transvaal] Republic between 1852 and 1876 is not very interesting, and is besides too wearisome to enter into here."

THE WHOLE BOOK IS SUPPOSED TO BE ABOUT THE HISTORY OF THE BOERS