Born near Pietermaritzburg, Colony of Natal, he was brought up from about 12 years of age by Bishop John William Colenso and was baptized into the Anglican Church of Southern Africa.

He wrote for a number of Zulu newspapers and in 1896 travelled to the island of Saint Helena to be the secretary to Dinuzulu kaCetshwayo, exiled king of the Zulus, before returning to Natal in 1898.

His birth name was Manawami but he was given the nickname Skelemu, possibly derived from the Afrikans word skelm for rascal or trickster.

[2] Some time after 1900 Fuze wrote Abantu Abamnyama Lapa Bavela Ngakona at the request of the readers of his journalism, but it was not immediately published due to lack of money.

[4] It was published in English in 1979 by the University of Natal Press in the Killie Campbell Africana Library as The Black People and Whence They Came: A Zulu View in a translation by Harry Camp Lugg edited by professor Trevor Cope.

[2] Hlonipha Mokoena of the University of the Witwatersrand describes the book as significant not just for its use of the Zulu language and its historical content which makes it one of the principal sources of Zulu history, but as an example of the work of one of the group of mission-educated converts to Christianity known in South Africa as the amakhowla (believers) who marked the transition from an oral tradition to a literate culture.

[2] In 2011, he was the subject of a biography, Magema Fuze: The Making of a Kholwa Intellectual, by Hlonipha Mokoena published by the University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.