Ndebele Kingdom

A king's death sentence

formationDrafted from Theal, History of South Africa since September 1795, Vol. I: The Cape Colony from 1795 to 1828, the Zulu Wars of Devastation and the Formation of New Bantu Communities (1908)

Umsilikazi's father had once been an independent chief in his own right, until the threat of annihilation drove him to surrender his people into Tshaka's Zulu tribe rather than be destroyed by it. His son grew up inside that tribe instead, rising on ability alone to command a large and important division of Tshaka's army - tall, well-formed, close-shorn but for the ring that marked a man of rank, and by every account a favourite of the king he served.

Favour did not survive one act of disrespect. Sent to exterminate a tribe and seize its cattle, Umsilikazi kept back part of the booty rather than forward the whole of it to Tshaka. The king, enraged that a trusted officer would treat him this way, sent an army with orders to kill Umsilikazi and every one of his followers. Warned in time, Umsilikazi crossed the mountains north of Zululand with the soldiers under his own command before the punitive force could reach him - turning a single Zulu regiment, in the space of one royal grudge, into an independent nation with nowhere to go but forward.

Theal, History of South Africa since September 1795, Vol. I: The Cape Colony from 1795 to 1828, the Zulu Wars of Devastation and the Formation of New Bantu Communities (1908) · William Cornwallis Harris · Public domain

A desert between himself and his old king

What followed was deliberate devastation on a scale the tribes north of Zululand had never faced. Umsilikazi's men, trained to Zulu discipline and armed with the same short stabbing spear that had made Tshaka's own regiments unstoppable, killed everyone who could not escape them, sparing only the most attractive girls and young men fit to be absorbed as porters and, eventually, soldiers of his own. His object, plainly stated by those who observed him, was to put a great desert between Tshaka and himself - and by the time he judged the distance sufficient and halted to build military kraals on the Zulu pattern, the country he had crossed was, in the words of one contemporary account, left with "literally no human beings" in it at all. From that emptied ground, Umsilikazi began sending regiments out in every direction to gather more.

Driven across the Limpopo

expansionDrafted from Theal, History of South Africa since September 1795, Vol. II: The Cape Colony from 1828 to 1846, Natal from 1824 to 1845 and Proceedings of the Emigrant Farmers from 1836 to 1847 (1908)

By the mid-1830s Moselekatse, as the Betshuana called him, had built his kingdom's centre at Mosega, in the Marico district, from which his regiments ranged out to plunder the tribes of the highveld with almost no resistance - until a new kind of enemy began crossing the Vaal river from the Cape Colony. Voortrekker families, emigrating north in search of land beyond colonial rule, brought horses and firearms that Moselekatse's spearmen had never had to face. In October 1836 a Matabele raiding party, sent after a hunting party led by Stephanus Erasmus had strayed into territory Moselekatse considered his own, massacred two families outright and then turned on a larger group of emigrants encamped at Vechtkop.

Theal, History of South Africa since September 1795, Vol. II: The Cape Colony from 1828 to 1846, Natal from 1824 to 1845 and Proceedings of the Emigrant Farmers from 1836 to 1847 (1908) · William Cornwallis Harris · Public domain

The Vechtkop lager held. Forty men and boys with firearms, drawn up behind fifty wagons lashed into a circle, broke a Matabele division several thousand strong under Moselekatse's favourite captain Kalipi - losing only one man killed inside the laager, against a third of the attacking force left on the ground before the Matabele withdrew. It was the first check Moselekatse's kingdom had suffered since its founding, and it cost the emigrants nearly all their cattle - but it proved, for the first time, that his regiments could be stopped.

Theal, History of South Africa since September 1795, Vol. II: The Cape Colony from 1828 to 1846, Natal from 1824 to 1845 and Proceedings of the Emigrant Farmers from 1836 to 1847 (1908) · Charles Davidson Bell · Public domain

Nine days on the Marikwa

The Voortrekkers did not let the lesson end there. In November 1837 a combined commando of one hundred and thirty-five farmers under Hendrik Potgieter and Pieter Uys found Moselekatse's forces on the Marikwa river, about fifty miles north of Mosega, and spent nine days riding up in line to fire a volley and falling back before the Matabele could close with spears at all - tactics that made the fighting, in one participant's words, barely deserving the name of warfare, and that nonetheless broke Moselekatse's army so thoroughly that his kraals stood abandoned when the farmers finally found them.

Theal, History of South Africa since September 1795, Vol. II: The Cape Colony from 1828 to 1846, Natal from 1824 to 1845 and Proceedings of the Emigrant Farmers from 1836 to 1847 (1908) · Unknown photographer · Public domain

Potgieter proclaimed the whole territory Moselekatse had occupied and now abandoned forfeited to the emigrants - the greater part of what would become the South African Republic, half of the future Orange Free State, and all of southern Bechuanaland besides. Moselekatse did not stay to contest the proclamation. He led his people north across the Limpopo, through disaster - an entire vanguard division was lured onto an island in the Zambezi and abandoned there by its own paddlers, and every man drowned, starved or was killed - and did not halt again until he was safely beyond the Matopo hills, ready to begin building a kingdom for the second time.

A kingdom refounded

peakDrafted from Theal, History of South Africa since September 1795, Vol. IV: The Orange Free State, the South African Republic, Zululand, Basutoland, Bechuanaland and Matabeleland from 1854 to 1872 (1908)

Beyond the Matopo hills, Moselekatse built a second kingdom that outlasted the first by three decades. His regiments raided Mashonaland much as they had once raided the Betshuana country, reducing much of its population to poverty and forcing survivors to live among rocky hills where cattle could not easily be seen or stolen. European hunters and traders came and went under his protection, so long as they observed his notion of proper courtesy and brought suitable gifts; missionaries of the London Missionary Society were permitted to settle at Inyati from 1859, though none of them made a single convert, and the old military system Moselekatse had brought from Zululand went on unchanged beneath the visitors' presence.

He died in October 1868, and the kingdom he had built twice discovered it had no settled way to choose a third ruler. His acknowledged heir, a son named Kuruman, had disappeared years earlier under circumstances no one could agree on - killed by his father's own order, by some accounts, or fled to another country and still living, by others. The aged induna Nombati, appointed regent while the question was resolved, sent messengers in every direction to search for him, and a man was eventually found in Natal claiming to be Kuruman himself. Examined closely, his own account of his life convinced most of the indunas, Nombati included, that he was not Kuruman at all, but a son of Moselekatse's of far lower rank hoping to claim a throne that was not his.

Theal, History of South Africa since September 1795, Vol. IV: The Orange Free State, the South African Republic, Zululand, Basutoland, Bechuanaland and Matabeleland from 1854 to 1872 (1908) · SpiderFitz · CC BY-SA 4.0

One battle, and a pardon

The indunas turned instead to Lobengula, a son by an inferior wife whom Moselekatse had nonetheless had adopted by his great wife - making him, in Ndebele reckoning, his father's chosen successor after all. Lobengula accepted the position reluctantly, and was installed with the full ceremony of a war-dance nine or ten thousand strong on January 24, 1870. Not every regiment accepted the outcome: the veteran Sokindaba, the most famous fighting band in the kingdom, backed the Natal claimant instead, and the dispute was settled the only way Ndebele succession disputes were ever settled - in a single battle, which Lobengula's forces won outright.

Theal, History of South Africa since September 1795, Vol. IV: The Orange Free State, the South African Republic, Zululand, Basutoland, Bechuanaland and Matabeleland from 1854 to 1872 (1908) · Thomas Baines · Public domain

What he did with the victory said as much about him as the victory itself. Where Moselekatse would have exterminated a defeated rival faction, Lobengula drafted the surviving Sokindaba soldiers into regiments that had fought against them, and let his beaten rival live out his years in exile rather than hunting him down. It was the same mildness, foreign visitors would later note, that made Lobengula reluctant to fight at all when the next serious threat to his kingdom finally arrived - one that no single battle would be enough to settle.

Theal, History of South Africa since September 1795, Vol. IV: The Orange Free State, the South African Republic, Zululand, Basutoland, Bechuanaland and Matabeleland from 1854 to 1872 (1908) · Ralph Peacock · Public domain

Burned and abandoned

endDrafted from Norris-Newman, Matabeleland and How We Got It: With Notes on the Occupation of Mashunaland, and an Account of the 1893 Campaign by the British South Africa Company (1895)

The British South Africa Company had been settling Mashonaland, land Lobengula's own regiments still claimed the right to raid, for three years when the incident that ended his kingdom began with a cut telegraph wire. In July 1893 Lobengula sent an impi under the induna Umgandine to punish the Mashona he blamed for the damage - but the soldiers, whether exceeding their orders or simply carried away, fell on Mashona now under Company protection and chased the survivors into Fort Victoria itself. Dr. Jameson, the Company administrator, gave the impi an hour to withdraw across the boundary or be fired on; when a patrol sent after the slow-departing Indunas was itself fired on, the skirmish that followed killed several of Lobengula's men and gave Jameson the pretext for war he had, by most accounts, already been quietly preparing for.

Norris-Newman, Matabeleland and How We Got It: With Notes on the Occupation of Mashunaland, and an Account of the 1893 Campaign by the British South Africa Company (1895) · Unknown artist · Public domain

Lobengula, for all his annoyance, still did not want to fight. He warned the Europeans living in Matabeleland to leave while they could and sent messages to Jameson seeking to avoid war even as Company columns from Salisbury, Victoria and Tuli converged on Bulawayo through October. He could not hold what firearms and organised columns were coming to take. On the morning of November 3, as the lead column neared Bulawayo, its scouts saw smoke and heard an explosion rising from the town: Lobengula had burned his own royal kraal and fled north rather than let it fall into Company hands intact. Company troops occupied the ruins the following day.

Norris-Newman, Matabeleland and How We Got It: With Notes on the Occupation of Mashunaland, and an Account of the 1893 Campaign by the British South Africa Company (1895) · Sidney Paget · Public domain

The Shangani and the end

Retreat did not save him. A small patrol of some thirty-four men under Major Alan Wilson, sent ahead to press the pursuit, was cut off by the Shangani river in December and wiped out to the last man - a disaster remembered ever after as the Shangani Patrol, and one that briefly threatened to unravel the whole campaign, but bought Lobengula only weeks, not survival. Ill for some time with fever or a mild case of smallpox, and reportedly heartbroken as the men still loyal to him drifted away to their own kraals one by one, he collapsed while walking near his camp in late January 1894 and died early the next morning without regaining consciousness - on or about the 22nd or 23rd of the month, by the account of the traders travelling with his fugitive court. Within weeks his surviving chiefs, queens and children came in to surrender, and the kingdom Umsilikazi had built twice, first on the highveld and then beyond the Limpopo, did not build itself a third time.

Norris-Newman, Matabeleland and How We Got It: With Notes on the Occupation of Mashunaland, and an Account of the 1893 Campaign by the British South Africa Company (1895) · Unknown artist · Public domain