Zulu Kingdom

Malandela goes forth

formationDrafted from Bryant, Olden Times in Zululand and Natal (1929)

Around the year 1670, by the tradition Bryant collected from the clan's own elders, a man named Malandela led his wives and children south out of the Ngoni homeland, driving his cattle before him through a mid-summer downpour. He crossed the Mpembeni and Mkhumbane streams - ground his own descendants would one day call their motherland - then the Mthonjaneni heights, and down into the Mfule valley beyond, making for the coast for reasons no tradition preserves.

Bryant, Olden Times in Zululand and Natal (1929) · JMK · CC BY-SA 3.0

A river that split a family

The crossing of the Mfule split Malandela's own party for good. He and the foremost of his people forded the swollen river before it became impassable; the stragglers behind, trapped by the flood, spent the delay foraging a field of wild melons and, when the waters dropped, refused Malandela's call to break camp and march - they had, they said, better work to do. "Stay where you are, then, with your dirty old melons," Malandela is said to have shouted back, and they did: building huts, taking wives, and becoming in time an independent clan of their own, the people of the Water-melons.

A tradition the historian himself distrusts in its details

Bryant is candid that only the broad outline of this story can be trusted - that Malandela's party did trek down from the interior by way of the Mfule valley and settle on the Mhlatuze is, he judges, about as certain as anything in oral tradition gets; the color and incident wrapped around it may or may not have happened as told. What is not in doubt is the outcome: from this same Malandela the people who would one day call themselves Zulu - "the Heavens" - traced their own beginning as a distinct clan among the many scattered across the Natal hill country.

The boy the eLangeni despised

formationDrafted from Bryant, Olden Times in Zululand and Natal (1929)

Shaka was born out of wedlock to Nandi, a daughter of the eLangeni clan, and Senzangakhona, chief of the small Zulu clan descended from Malandela; dismissed in disgrace, mother and son went home to eLangeni-land to live among a people who never let either of them forget it. Shaka grew up unpopular and mocked - other boys burned his porridge-stirrer to a coal and dared him to eat from it "if he were indeed a chief," forced scalding food into his cupped hands, and jeered without mercy at his crinkled ears and his other bodily peculiarities - taunts Bryant records Shaka never forgot and never forgave. When his own father tried to present him with his first loin covering, the mark of Zulu manhood, Shaka rejected it with such open disdain that his return to his mother became unavoidable.

A famine, and a search for anywhere that would have them

Around 1802 famine struck eLangeni-land hard enough that Nandi could no longer feed her children, and she and her family took to the road again, this time to kinsmen at the sources of the Mtungulu river. Even there Shaka, now about fifteen, found no lasting welcome; both his father's people and his mother's were pressing for his return, and a stay with a neighboring chief nearly ended when Senzangakhona, by one account, tried to bribe that chief into killing his own unwanted son outright - a request the chief refused. As a last resort Nandi brought the boy to a great-aunt among the Mthethwa near the coast, where a headman named Ngomane treated the destitute pair with simple kindness. Shaka never forgot it, and in his own day of power raised Ngomane to the highest rank in his kingdom next to himself.

A duel with a madman on a hill

Under the Mthethwa chief Dingiswayo, Shaka spent six years as a soldier of the iziCwe regiment and grew into the army's most celebrated fighter, rejecting the standard practice of throwing an assegai from a distance in favor of closing to hand-to-hand combat - reckless against a prepared enemy, devastating against one caught by surprise. Bryant records one duel that made his name: a raider had taken to terrorizing a district from a hilltop refuge, driving off whole herds and defeating every party sent against him. When Shaka's commander asked in his hearing who would rid them of the man, Shaka volunteered, met the raider in single combat before the assembled troop, and killed him - the exploit that first marked him out, in the army of the chief who had taken in his own destitute family, as a soldier meant for greater things.

Bryant, Olden Times in Zululand and Natal (1929) · James King · Public domain

A brother killed while bathing

formationDrafted from Bryant, Olden Times in Zululand and Natal (1929)

Senzangakhona died in 1816 without naming an heir - there was no right of primogeniture among the Nguni, Bryant notes, only the reigning chief's own choice, and Senzangakhona made none before he died. Dingiswayo, recognized as the Zulu clan's overlord, claimed the right to choose in his place, and his choice was Shaka, the exiled son serving in his own army. Word reached Dingiswayo's court of two things at once: the old chief's death, and that a favored son, Sigujana, had already assumed the chieftainship at the Zulu capital in his stead.

A half-brother recruited to murder

Shaka moved against the usurper without confronting him directly. He turned to a younger half-brother, Ngwadi - Nandi's son by her second marriage - who had grown close to Sigujana despite his own illegitimate standing, close enough to join him bathing at the river. On the appointed day Ngwadi hid two accomplices in the grass along the bank; as Sigujana sat in the water, two spears took him from behind and pinned him where he sat, and the killers fled for the coast. Bryant judges it unlikely Dingiswayo knew nothing of the plot - the outcome suited him too well - and Dingiswayo promptly arranged Shaka's own escort home: his trusted headman Ngomane, a Mthethwa nobleman as companion, and a company of Shaka's former comrades from the iziCwe regiment.

A throne taken without a fight

With that armed and imposing company behind him, Shaka met no resistance at all on reaching the Zulu capital, and settled in at once as the clan's lawfully established chief. He never saw his patron Dingiswayo again. Behind him he left the two people who had shaped him - the mother who had carried him through exile and the chief who had given a destitute boy a home - and ahead of him lay a small clan he now meant to turn, by whatever means proved necessary, into something no one in the country had yet seen.

Bryant, Olden Times in Zululand and Natal (1929) · JMK · CC BY-SA 3.0

The Augean stable

expansionDrafted from Bryant, Olden Times in Zululand and Natal (1929)

With a new army built and loyal to him alone, Shaka turned first on his own household - uncles, nephews, anyone against whom he held a grievance real or invented, dispatched without trial or delay into graves three feet deep dug for the purpose. Only once his own kraal was, in his own reckoning, cleaned did he turn outward, and the first target he chose was personal: the eLangeni clan, his own mother's people, among whom he and Nandi had spent the hardest years of their exile two decades before.

A debt paid to the people who once mocked him

Shaka marched the umBelebele regiment twenty-five miles over the Mthonjaneni heights to the same country that had once treated him with such open contempt, surrounded the eLangeni capital, and had every man against whom he held an old grudge impaled alive on the palisade around the cattle enclosure and burned. Makhedama, the eLangeni chief who had once, by tradition, ruled over the household that scorned him, was spared outright and even permitted to rebuild elsewhere - though Shaka had him killed later regardless. Near the site of the massacre he built a kraal of his own and named it, with grim satisfaction, "the place where he swallowed his own spittle" - a monument, in his own telling, to a debt finally settled in full.

Bryant, Olden Times in Zululand and Natal (1929) · George French Angas · Public domain

Justice by the standard of the court, not the missionary

Bryant, writing for a European readership a century later, does not flinch from calling the killings awful - but pairs the judgment with a reminder that impalement and burning were the tools of statecraft in "highly civilized" ancient Assyria and Egypt too, not some special mark of Zulu savagery. What mattered for Shaka's own kingdom was the lesson every surviving clan took from it: the boy once despised as a nobody now commanded an army capable of reaching any clan in the country, and meant to be believed the first time he gave an order.

Is, then, a king summoned?

peakDrafted from Bryant, Olden Times in Zululand and Natal (1929)

Shaka's own rise to unrivaled power in the region owed as much to his former patron's death as to his own campaigns. Dingiswayo, the Mthethwa chief who had sheltered Shaka's family and backed his claim to the Zulu throne, marched against the rival Ndwandwe chief Zwide in 1818 and was captured after wandering, by one account already befuddled with drink, into an enemy patrol. Brought to Zwide's own capital, he was received at first with the courtesy due a royal prisoner - a beast slaughtered for his entertainment, beer served in proper state - before the true purpose of his captivity began.

A summons a king would not answer

Zwide's own mother, Ntombazi, described by the source in Shakespeare's own words as "a tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide," pressed her son not to let the prisoner go. When Zwide's men came to summon Dingiswayo with deliberate contempt, mangling his name in the address, the Mthethwa chief answered simply, "Is, then, a king summoned?" - defiance that cost him his life. His bodyguard of armed women fought to keep his captors from the hut where he sat and died alongside him rather than leave; Dingiswayo himself was killed on Zwide's order, his head kept by Ntombazi as a trophy and the rest of his body dismembered for parts believed to carry power.

An empire built on the space his death left open

Dingiswayo's death removed the one authority in the region Shaka had still formally answered to, and left the Mthethwa federation he had built leaderless at the exact moment Shaka commanded the region's most disciplined army. Shaka moved into the vacuum directly, absorbing Mthethwa territory and turning the military machine Dingiswayo had given him room to build against every neighboring clan in reach - Ndwandwe included, in a war of retribution for his patron's death that would run for years and leave the whole eastern seaboard of southern Africa reordered under Zulu rule by the time it was over.

Bryant, Olden Times in Zululand and Natal (1929) · George French Angas · Public domain

The greatest elephant of all

contractionDrafted from Bryant, Olden Times in Zululand and Natal (1929)

Shaka never risked taking a wife, fearing sons who might one day contest his own throne - but he loved his mother without qualification, and in October 1827, while hunting elephants sixty miles from his capital at Bulawayo, he was told Nandi lay dying. Despite the lateness of the hour he ordered the whole hunting party to march through the night, covering the distance by noon the next day. The trader Henry Francis Fynn, present throughout, left a direct eyewitness account of what followed - one of the few moments of Shaka's private life recorded by a European who actually saw it happen rather than heard it secondhand.

Two hours of silence, then a cry

Fynn found Nandi's hut full of mourning women and smoke thick enough that he had to ask them to leave so he could breathe; her illness, he told Shaka directly, was hopeless, and she would not survive the day. Shaka had his regiments withdrawn to their barracks and sat in complete silence for two hours, saying nothing, before rising the instant word came that she had died. He appeared before her hut in full war dress, stood with his head bowed on his shield for twenty minutes with tears visibly falling, and then broke into the wailing cry that was the signal for public mourning to begin.

Peabody Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts · Bryant, Olden Times in Zululand and Natal (1929) · Daderot · Public domain

Sixty thousand mourners, and a massacre that outran any order

What followed, in Fynn's own account, went far beyond ordinary mourning. Tens of thousands converged on the kraal over the following day and night, wailing without rest, until Shaka ordered a first round of executions and the crowd - as if determined to prove its own grief to him - broke into a general, self-perpetuating massacre, neighbors killing neighbors under cover of communal frenzy, the dying and the merely exhausted cut down alike by those "mad with excitement." Fynn estimated seven thousand dead by the afternoon of the first day alone, in mourning that continued for days afterward - a spasm of violence that even Shaka's own killings, the source notes, had never before required a direct order to sustain.

Caesar falls

contractionDrafted from Bryant, Olden Times in Zululand and Natal (1929)

The massacres following Nandi's death turned private grief into open revolt. Mkabayi, Senzangakhona's own sister and one of the last surviving elders of the royal house, was convinced Shaka had deliberately killed his own mother, and carried that conviction to his half-brothers Dingane and Mhlangana - "How long shall your mother lie unavenged?" - and from them to Mbopa, Shaka's own trusted head-servant, without whose access to the king no plot could succeed. By the time Shaka ordered the entire adult male population marched north on campaign, leaving himself effectively alone at his Dukuza capital surrounded only by women, the conspiracy was already formed around him.

A dream confided to the wrong ear

Shaka's own instincts seem to have warned him something was wrong. He dreamed he was already dead and that Mbopa served another king, and confided the dream to a woman of his household who repeated it to Mbopa within the hour. If the warning registered, it came too late to matter. Dingane and Mhlangana, ordered north with the army, doubled back on the pretext of illness, and on 22 September 1828 approached Shaka's kraal along with Mbopa while he sat receiving a report from messengers just returned from Mpondoland.

Bryant, Olden Times in Zululand and Natal (1929) · Allen Francis Gardiner · Public domain

Killed by the men closest to him

Mbopa created the opening, storming in with a weapon in each hand and driving off Shaka's attendants under cover of feigned loyalty. In the confusion Mhlangana struck first, his spear catching Shaka's arm rather than his side; Dingane's thrust followed. Shaka turned to find himself face to face with his own brothers' weapons and fled toward the gate, pleading, "Ye children of my father, what is the wrong?" - and received no answer. He fell a few yards outside the kraal, begged for his life, and was finished off by Mbopa. Bryant is careful to note that no European witnessed the killing directly, and that surviving Zulu accounts differ on nearly every detail - who struck first, where exactly Shaka stood or sat, even whether Dingane took any direct part at all - leaving only the outcome itself beyond real dispute: the boy once despised by his own mother's clan, who had built the most formidable kingdom southern Africa had yet seen, was dead at forty-one, killed by the two brothers and the servant he had trusted most.

The throne behind the throne

contractionDrafted from Colenso, History of the Zulu War and Its Origin (1880)

By 1856 the Zulu throne belonged, in name, to Mpande - the half-brother who had turned against Dingane a generation before with Boer backing, and who had ruled since without ever naming which of his own many sons would succeed him. Two of them settled the question themselves. Cetshwayo and his brother Mbulazi each gathered a following among the kingdom's regiments and fought for the succession outright; Mbulazi's party was broken in battle and its leader killed, with great slaughter among his followers and a stream of refugees fleeing across the border into Natal.

What followed the victory was, by the standards of the dynasty, restrained. Cetshwayo carried the nation with him and held every practical lever of power from that year forward, but he never moved against his father's life or formally seized his throne. Mpande lived on for sixteen more years, reigning in little but name - his own great size, by the end, too much for him to walk unassisted - while his son governed in fact. It was, the record of the time notes, a strikingly restrained arrangement for a dynasty whose own founder had died at his brothers' hands within twelve years of taking power.

Colenso, History of the Zulu War and Its Origin (1880) · Unknown artist · Public domain

A coronation with strings attached

Mpande died of natural causes in 1872, and Cetshwayo - already king in every sense but the title - was proclaimed to rule outright. The following year, colonial authorities from Natal staged what was officially styled a friendly expedition to mark the occasion, sending Theophilus Shepstone to preside over a coronation ceremony in Zululand itself. The gesture carried a deliberate second meaning: it was used to establish, on the colonial side at least, that Cetshwayo held his crown by the neighbouring colony's own sanction rather than by right - a claim of authority over the kingdom's own succession that the coronation's hosts intended to make use of again before the decade was finished.

Colenso, History of the Zulu War and Its Origin (1880) · Unknown photographer · Public domain

Isandhlwana

contractionDrafted from Colenso, History of the Zulu War and Its Origin (1880)

An ultimatum delivered to Cetshwayo in December 1878 demanded, among other terms, the effective dismantling of the Zulu military system itself within thirty days - a condition no Zulu king could accept and remain king in anything but name. When the deadline passed unanswered on the 11th of January, 1879, British columns crossed into Zululand from several directions at once, the central column advancing under Lord Chelmsford toward a camp it made no effort to fortify, beneath a hill called Isandhlwana.

Ten thousand men over the hills

On the morning of the 22nd, with Chelmsford and half his force away scouting for the Zulu army he believed still distant, that army - some ten thousand strong by the defenders' own estimate - came over the hills to the camp's left in a wave the pickets had no time to give proper warning of. The defending line, a few companies of British infantry with native levies and a handful of artillery, held for a time; the guns threw shellfire into the packed ranks and the massed volleys of the 24th Regiment told heavily enough on the front of the Zulu advance that it wavered and, for some minutes, lay down in the grass rather than close the distance.

National Army Museum, London · Colenso, History of the Zulu War and Its Origin (1880) · Charles Edwin Fripp · Public domain

It was the flanks, not the front, that broke the defense. The Zulu right worked around behind the camp under cover of the broken ground, and when the native contingent covering that side of the line gave way and fled, the whole position was opened from the rear. The camp was overrun; the retreat toward the Buffalo River became a running slaughter, with the assegai doing its work among fugitives both mounted and on foot the whole distance to the water, and the river itself claiming more of the wounded and the drowning than any single volley had. No one left in the camp when the position finally broke survived to tell of it directly - the full scale of the defeat was only pieced together from what could be read on the ground itself, months afterward.

Colenso, History of the Zulu War and Its Origin (1880) · RedNovember82 · CC BY-SA 3.0

It was the heaviest defeat inflicted on a British army by any colonized people in the whole of the nineteenth century, and it did what the ultimatum's own thirty-day deadline had not: it stopped the invasion of Zululand in its tracks, for a time.

A noble specimen of a man

endDrafted from Colenso, History of the Zulu War and Its Origin (1880)

Isandhlwana bought the kingdom months, not survival. A reinforced British column resumed the advance on Ulundi, Cetshwayo's own royal capital, through the following spring, and on the 4th of July, 1879, the two armies met on open ground outside the town. The British force

• some four thousand Europeans and a thousand native troops, with guns and Gatlings - formed a hollow square and let the Zulu attack, estimated at fifteen to twenty thousand men, break against it. Artillery and volley fire held the advance at a distance the assegai could never close; within half an hour the attack wavered, and the cavalry rode out through the broken ranks to complete the rout. Ulundi itself was set alight before the day was over, and with it burned the last massed Zulu army the kingdom would ever field.

Colenso, History of the Zulu War and Its Origin (1880) · Unknown artist · Public domain

Found in the forest

Cetshwayo did not surrender. He fled north into the Ngome forest with a small party of attendants, and it took a mounted patrol under Major Marter more than a month to run him to ground, on the 28th of August, in a stockaded kraal deep in the trees. Warned that resistance would mean the kraal burned over his head, the king came out at last and stood before his captor - "quite the king," in the account of the men who took him - and offered the closest thing to an explanation he had: "You would not have taken me, but I never thought troops could come down the mountain through the forest."

Colenso, History of the Zulu War and Its Origin (1880) · Carl Rudolph Sohn · Public domain

He was marched back to the ruins of his own capital, given barely three hours among them, and put aboard a coasting vessel bound, though he was not told so at first, for exile rather than for the Pietermaritzburg he expected. When the road proved wrong he grew withdrawn, telling his escort more than once that it would have been better to be killed than sent over the sea. He was landed at Cape Town on the 4th of September and held there under guard - the last king of an independent Zulu kingdom, a man his own captor described, without apparent irony, as a noble specimen, entirely a king in manner even in the hour of his capture.

Colenso, History of the Zulu War and Its Origin (1880) · The Graphic · Public domain