Untold Story; Shaka Zulu and The History of the Zulu Kingdom

Victor Wairiuko February 18, 2023

 Shaka kaSenzangakhona was the man's name at birth; he was known to history as Shaka Zulu. Shaka Zulu was born at some unknown period in the summer of 1787 in the center of the Zulu empire, which mostly encompassed Natal province in the northeast of contemporary South Africa.

shaka zulu


Shaka Zulu

Shaka’s Zulu Father

Shaka's father was Senzangakhona, the chieftain of the Zulu clan in present-day Natal into which he was born. Senzangakhona had taken over the clan's leadership around 1781, a few years before Shaka Zulu was born. As the clan's head, he had several wives as was customary in Zulu society and sired numerous children, many of whom were male, so Shaka Zulu had a large number of half-brothers,

Shaka’s Zulu Mother

Shaka’s mother was Nandi, the daughter of Bhebhe, a chief of a tribe of the Langeni people, a neighbouring clan of the Zulus, Nandi, though, was not one of Senzangakhona’s wives at the time of Shaka’s conception and birth, this made Shaka Zulu illegitimate in the eyes of the clan and as a result, Nandi and Shaka were cast out during his childhood.

Shaka Zulu During His Childhood

After a nomadic existence for a period of time, in the late eighteenth century, Nandi and her son eventually settled with the Mthethwa people, here Shaka Zulu excelled in his youth as a fighter and soon joined the warrior class of the Mthethwa. 

Shaka Zulu's skills were still remarkably advanced for his age, but there were also disturbing indicators regarding the level of violence. It was common for males in the area to become involved in military matters once they reached adolescence. 

King Dingiswayo, who was once the head of the Mthethwa and served as a sort of mentor to the future king of the Zulus, sent Shaka Zulu and a number of others to attack the nearby amaMbata people. 

This was supposed to be a straightforward cattle raid with only minimal violence, but Shaka Zulu had his troops attack the tribe, pursue them, and kill many of them before returning to Dingiswayo with the stolen cattle. The king was extremely angry.

Mthethwa and Zulu are subgroups of the larger Bantu ethnic group, which historically dominated much of Sub-Saharan Africa from the Congo to Kenya in the east and all the way down to the Cape of Good Hope in the south. 

Before delving more into Shaka Zulu's life and the founding of the Zulu empire, it is important to comprehend the factors that shaped how Zulu society and larger Bantu culture were structured and operated in the early nineteenth century.

The Bantu Peoples of Africa

The Zulu lived in the northeast of modern-day South Africa, occupying the lands between the Tugela River in the south and the Pongola River in the north. The Zulu, like other Bantu peoples of Africa, were united by their use of the Bantu languages and largely based their economies and societies around cattle.

The Zulus were not a single nation in the eighteenth century; instead, they were divided into a number of small clans, each of which held small swathes of land that were just big enough to support their people and livestock. 

These cattle provided a significant portion of their diet in the form of meat and milk, and by the second half of the eighteenth century, the Zulu population and the herds of livestock under their control had increased so much.

The Ndwandwe were the chief of the Nguni people about the year 1800. The Nguni were a fellow Bantu people who lived to the northwest, near what is now the boundary between South Africa and Mozambique.

The small Zulu clans were each ruled over by an inKosi, a king or paramount chief, whose household consisted of his wives and typically many children; society further down was divided into the kraals or isibaya, which were homesteads or economic units, inhabited by individual families, and these kraal in turn were focused on the cattle owned by the families; and finally, the larger Zulu clans were divided into a number of sub-clans.

Furthermore, because milk curds were the main component of the Zulu diet, society was fully centered around cattle, and to a lesser extent, the sheep and goats that each clan controlled. As a result, cattle served as both the major indicator of wealth and the form of currency in Zululand.

In addition, the polygamous Zulu culture valued religion above all else, placing great emphasis on magic and ancestral spirits that, according to the Zulu people, manifested themselves in the physical world, especially during fire rituals and other ceremonies led by witch doctors, who were the equivalent of priests in Bantu societies.

The majority of the tools used in this society were made out of wood and other malleable materials to make spoons, bowls, and other household items. 

What iron ore could be found nearby was typically smelted using simple forges to make spear tips and other weapons, which is not surprising given that all adult males in Zulu society were warriors.

The primary weapon was a six-foot long spear known as an assegai, and battle tactics were essentially nonexistent. As a result, Shaka was born into a kingdom that was built around the idea of controlling cattle and manpower. 

They fought in large massed formations of fighters called impis. They also wore no real clothing or armour to protect themselves, other than wooden shields covered in cowhide.

Shaka’s Zulu Rise to Power

Senzangakhona, a Zulu chieftain, had named another of his many sons, Sigujana, to succeed him when he passed away in 1816. However, Shaka Zulu, the outcast son, was determined to sever this line of succession, and so, with the assistance of Dingiswayo and his adopted clan of the Mthethwa, he was able to do so.

In 1816, Shaka Zulu pushed for the leadership of the Zulu people and displayed a ruthlessness that would characterize his rule for the ensuing years. 

Shaka Zulu did this by hiring another of his half-brothers, Ngwadi, to kill Sigujana. Once this was accomplished, Shaka Zulu returned to his birth tribe in the lead of a fearsome military escort that Dingiswayo had supplied for him of Mthethwa men.

Shaka Zulu became the ruler of the Zulu people and would govern as a member of a powerful confederacy of Bantu tribes in southeast Africa that was centered on the alliance of the Zulu and the Mthethwa. They now executed any men openly linked with the previous regime.

We have already seen how Dingiswayo had reprimanded Shaka Zulu for his excessive use of force in prosecuting the amaMbata people nearby the Mthethwa, so this alliance may have proved to be a moderating influence on Shaka Zulu moving forward. However, if this was the case, then this restraining presence was quickly lost, as in 1817, just months after Shaka Zulu assumed the leadership of the Zulus, the Mthethwa ended up in conflict.

These events not only caused Shaka Zulu to lose his friend and mentor Dingiswayo, but they also signaled the escalation of the conflict between the Zulus and the Ndwandwe, the latter of which had previously exerted some control over the Zulus. 

The Mthethwa now placed themselves under Shaka Zulu's over-lordship, essentially subsuming their clan under the auspices of the Zulus.


The Ndwandwe-Zulu War

Following minor skirmishes in 1817, the two sides—the Zulus and the Mthethwa led by Shaka Zulu on one side, and the Ndwandwe and their allies to the north led by Zwide on the other—finally came face to face in a significant pitched battle in April 1818. The Ndwandwe-Zulu War would last for two years through until 1819 and was the most significant period in the development of the Zulu kingdom as well as the establishment

In April 1818, the Battle of Gqokli Hill took place near Ulundi in the northeast of what is now South Africa. Shaka and his allies were significantly outnumbered in the conflict; Zwide may have sent as many as 12,000 warriors into the fray and was advancing south into Zululand, while Shaka Zulu and his allies had as few as half as many. However, thanks to a number of military innovations, the Zulus and their allies were able to win the day.

To prevent the Ndwandwe from invading Zululand, Shaka Zulu first placed guerrilla groups in strategic areas to disrupt Zwide's advancing army, preventing the Ndwandwe from amassing more resources as they pushed south. The majority of his force was then gathered around the Gqokli Hill in an attempt to compensate for his numerical inferiority by controlling the high ground and gain an advantage in the ensuing conflict.

As a result, when Nomahlanjana, the commander of Zwide, and his warriors arrived at Gqokli Hill, the Ndwandwe's numerical advantage actually proved dangerous because Nomahlanjana's forces had overtly gathered together, making them an ideal target for bullets fired down the slope by Shaka's Zulus. The Ndwandwes' scarcity of resources, especially fresh water supplies, became a problem as the conflict continued.

After several hours of fighting, Shaka Zulu became weary and dissatisfied with the situation. He sent a signal to a reserve column of his best warriors hidden nearby, telling them to advance on Gqokli Hill and attack one of the exposed rear columns of the Ndwandwe.

It caused a catastrophic breakdown of the Ndwandwes' defenses, which were then relentlessly pursued by the Zulus in the hours that followed. By the end of the battle, it was estimated—possibly exaggerated—that up to 7.5 thousand Ndwandwe host members had perished, marking a significant military victory for Shaka Zulu and cementing his status as a warlord among the larger Bantu population of Sub-Saharan Africa.

Following Shaka Zulu's following military triumph at the Battle of the Mhlatuze River in 1819, the Zulu king and his impis pushed northward into the territory of Ndwandwe. The Battle of Gqokli Hill changed the trajectory of the Ndwandwe-Zulu War. 

When they arrived at King Zwide's headquarters outside of Nongoma, the outcome of the conflict was already decided, and Zwide and a number of other Ndwandwe senior leaders had fled to the north.

As a result of the Ndwandwe-Zulu War of 1817 to 1819, Shaka Zulu carved out a sizable Zulu Kingdom that stretched from Natal all the way north to close to the modern border between South Africa and Mozambique. 

While other kings, like Zwide, were content to create new principalities further to the north in modern-day Mozambique and Tanzania.

How on earth had Shaka Zulu defeated such a vastly outnumbered foe and pulled off such a remarkable string of military wins in such a short time? The solution can be found in the military revolution he sparked in Zulu civilization, which swiftly spread to Bantu society in Sub-Saharan Africa.


Shaka’s Military Conquests 

As we have seen, for decades, the Zulu people had fought using the long assegai, a six foot long spear with an iron or steel tip, which could be used in close quarters combat but was primarily used as a long range throwing spear. Shaka's military conquests were fueled by a series of military reforms which the Zulu king initiated in the late 1810s and early 1820s.


Shaka Zulu started armed his warriors with the shorter, sword-like iklwa in order to obtain a tactical advantage in close quarters battles; this weapon was heavily utilized at the Battle of Gqokli Hill.

Moreover, Shaka Zulu is credited with introducing the bullhorn formation into Zulu field strategy, possibly after learning it from Dingiswayo and the Mthethwa before becoming the Zulu king.

Zulu warriors, known as impis, formed into the shape of a bull's horns through this formation, with two sizable wings of troops on either side of the ranked formation. The bullhorn moved forward in the field of battle, with the center of the formation, known as the "chest," facing the enemy. The troops positioned on the wings or horns to the left and right, who were typically the younger and faster warriors, moved around the enemy troops and started encircling them.

If all went as planned, the horns would completely encompass the adversary, positioning the Zulu impis to slay their trapped target inside the contained bullhorn. The most seasoned and hardened Zulu warriors fought in the middle of the bullhorn formation, while the younger and faster soldiers were positioned on the horns on the left and right of the battlefield.

Shaka Zulu also implemented ruthless military discipline and oversaw a system whereby Zulu males had to start fighting at the age of 12.


Shakan Military Revolution,

Other aspects of the Shakan military revolution, however, are mythical. For example, despite claims that he did, there is no real evidence to suggest that Shaka Zulu forced his warriors to fight and live largely barefoot in order to toughen their feet, and the suggestion by many historians that he drilled his troops to march up to 80 kilometers in a single day is implausible.

Although they could be able to travel up to 20 kilometers, this is still a respectable amount of mobility for a culture that did not use horses for transportation or had carriages. Shaka Zulu reformed Zulu society to move away from the more traditional hierarchy where individuals were promoted according to blood and clan structure to one in which people were promoted to senior positions within the military and administration, based on merit, rather than blood birth. 

Shaka Zulu's military reforms could only be accomplished through a simultaneous reform of Zulu society to make it more conducive to supplying the army.

In order to co-opt Zulu children as carriers of military supplies for the armies, he even undertook reform of the social structure imposed on children. All of this improved the mobility of the army and created a more organized and centralised state headed by Shaka and his close followers, who also confronted the powerful caste of witchdoctors.

Within a few short years after becoming the Zulu King, it was this that allowed him to unify the areas ruled by the Zulu, Mthethwa, and Ndwandwe. Up until this point, Shaka's rise has largely taken place inside a vacuum of African tribes, primarily those of the larger Bantu people of Sub-Saharan Africa. But, after consolidating the Zulu position in the late 1810s, Shaka has since risen to prominence.

In the 1820s, Shaka and the Zulus would find themselves needing to interact with the many Europeans who had recently arrived in southern Africa; these people could be found to the southwest at the Cape of Good Hope and gradually further north and northeast. 

When the Portuguese entered southern Africa in the late fifteenth century as part of their ongoing naval operations to try and circumnavigate Africa and locate a maritime passage to Asia from Europe, European contact with the region was first made.

As part of their strategy to establish supply and trading stations along the African coast during the sixteenth century, the Portuguese eventually established small settlements here. 

However, like a large portion of the Portuguese colonies elsewhere in Asia and the Americas, these were ultimately attacked by the Dutch Republic in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, leading to the Dutch East India Company's establishment of the first significant European settlement.

Similar to the Portuguese before them, this was initially a waylay station for ships traveling from Europe to Asia around Africa. However, in the decades that followed, the Cape Colony, as it came to be known, grew into a sizable colony of its own, attracting increasing numbers of Protestant refugees from Germany and France, as well as Dutch settlers.


Cape of Good Hope

By the late eighteenth century, the Cape Colony had grown to well over 50,000 residents, known as "Boers" from the Dutch and Afrikaans words for "farmer," but events back in Europe soon caused the region's political landscape to drastically change. The French Revolutionary Wars in the 1790s pitted Britain and the Dutch Republic on opposing sides; as a result, in 1795.

When the Napoleonic Wars came to an end nearly twenty years later, the British and the Dutch signed the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1814, under whose terms the Cape Colony officially and legally passed into British possession, making the British the dominant European power at the Cape of Good Hope. 

The British had invaded the Cape Colony and quickly won the Battle of Muizenberg in the early autumn.

Although the Zulus faced considerably more urgent problems as a result of British conquest, the Cape Colony remained somewhat of a distant issue for them. In the course of the nineteenth century, this would bring successive generations of Boers ever closer to the Zulu kingdom, with implications for both Shaka's rule and especially that of his successors. 

Many of the Boers, the predominantly Dutch settlers, started migrating north and northeast away from the Cape Colony, where they could move outside the jurisdiction of the British and establish new independent colonies.


European Encroachment

Beginning in 1822, when Francis Farewell, a former lieutenant in the British Royal Navy, and numerous other merchants from the Cape Colony decided to start trading with the Zulus and other indigenous people from the Natal region at the location of the future city of Durban on the Natal coastline, signs of this European encroachment into the Shaka and Zulu-dominated regions began to appear.

For the history of the Zulus and our understanding of Shaka's reign, this location—which was formally established as a trading station in 1824—and the Europeans who came here as a result established the first tangible channels of trade and communication between them and the expanding European population in southern Africa.

The writings of contemporaneous Europeans who knew Shaka and lived in the area are a major source of information about Shaka and the rise of the Zulu kingdom in southern Africa during this time. Chief among these was Nathaniel Isaacs, an English adventurer and merchant who arrived in the Cape Colony in 1825 and soon left for the northeast. 

Following that, the purpose of the second trip was to trade with the Zulus in Natal, primarily in ivory, and to try and find Henry Francis Fynn, an Englishman with some medical training who had vanished in the area earlier. 

What they discovered was unexpected: Fynn was living among the Zulus and had just recently treated Shaka for a serious wound using his training in European medicine.

Along with receiving estates in Zululand, Fynn also adopted Zulu customs, most notably marrying four different Zulu women—a polygamous society's accepted norm. After spending several years residing among the Zulus, Isaacs and Fynn wrote a two-volume book titled Travels and Adventures in Eastern Africa, which Isaacs later published in 1836. This was the first description of King Shaka and the Zulu Empire written by a European.

However, despite these early interactions between the Zulu nation and the European settlers who began arriving in the Natal region in the early 1820s, Shaka's main point of contention was with his fellow Bantu people. 

During these years, he continued to wage war with nearby tribes and incorporated them into the Zulu state's rapidly expanding borders. Some of this involved ongoing conflict with these tribes while using the military strategies he had developed earlier in his reign.

King Zihlando of the Mkhize tribe, King Jobe of the Sithole, and King Mathubane of the Thuli tribe were all brought into the Zulu sphere of influence during the 1820s thanks to Shaka's skill as a diplomat. 

This ability was due to his success in incorporating several additional tribes into the expanding Zulu kingdom, not through military aggression, but rather through a complex system of alliances.


Shaka’s Reign Zulu Kingdom


While accurate estimates of the number of people killed during the wars Shaka commanded, between 1816 and 1828, are notoriously difficult to obtain due to the lack of death records, censuses, army lists, and other records which would allow us to calculate the mortality rate in southeast Africa during his reign, the Zulu kingdom Shaka created was achieved at an enormous human cost.

The war with the Ndwandwe between 1817 and 1819 almost certainly resulted in over 25,000 deaths, and scholars of Sub-Saharan Africa during the nineteenth century refer to this time period as the "Mfecane," which means the "crushing" or "scattering," a name applied to the decades from the late eighteenth century. However, we can make some effort to assess the general level of death associated with Shaka's rule.

Due to the tremendous levels of destruction and death that took place over this half-century in the region that includes modern-day South Africa, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Rwanda. through to the middle of the nineteenth century. Experts concur that between one and two million people died as a result of the "Mfecane" in total.

Given that Shaka's wars played a key role in this, we may reasonably assume that the conflicts Shaka engaged the Zulus in, coupled with the establishment of the Zulu Kingdom, resulted in the deaths of at least 100,000 people and probably a lot more. There is no doubting Shaka's personal hunger for violence, which led to his forces raiding towns and destroying numerous kraals and other structures when they captured an area.

It is not surprising to learn that recent studies have suggested that Shaka was a borderline genocidal ruler, given the numerous accounts of his armies' brutal violence and refusal to spare lives when they conquered a region. If our sources are accurate, children, old men, and women in the conquered region would frequently be murdered indiscriminately, with those who survived and were of a suitable age being forced to serve in the ranks of the Zulu military.

This only served to further destabilize the surrounding area as several of Shaka's top generals made the decision to flee their lord and establish their own principalities. For instance, Mzilikazi chose to leave the Zulu homelands in the middle of the 1820s, taking large quantities of cattle and troops with him to establish his own Ndebele kingdom.

Zwangendaba, another of Shaka's commanders, moved north and created his own dominion in an area that is roughly equivalent to modern-day Zimbabwe. Shaka had established a sizable Zulu kingdom as a result of his military reforms, which led to a transformation of Bantu civilization in southeast Africa, and the nearly constant conflicts of the late 1810s and 1820s.

By 1825, he had established control over an area that was about 11,500 square miles (30,000 km2) in size, extending from the Pongolo River in the south to central Natal and from the coast all the way inland to the Drakensberg Mountain range. Here, he oversaw perhaps a quarter of a million Zulus and hundreds of thousands of other subordinate peoples, who were all involved in an increasingly complex system of administration where tributes in the form of food, cattle, ivory, textiles.

Despite the accounts that have been passed down to us from Isaacs, Fynn, and others, as the 1820s went on, some aspects of Shaka's reign as it continued eluded exact description. One of the most challenging aspects to comprehend concerns Shaka's family life. As we have seen, Zulu society was polygamous, and a warrior king like Shaka would have been expected to have many wives, as well as dozens of concubines, and a very large number of offspring.

However, to the best of our knowledge, Shaka did not have any children, male or female, at least none that he acknowledged. As a result, it has variously been assumed that he was either sterile or perhaps homosexual, but this might not have been the case at all.

Shaka Zulu who was in his thirties and still in good health, might have been reluctant to reveal the identities of his children in order to prevent conflicts between them and the emergence of political factions. If this was the case, it would have been detrimental to his lineage because Shaka died relatively young. While this could account for Shaka's absence of a recognized male heir.

Shaka's rise to power and early reign are most notable for the astronomical success he seemed to enjoy; not only was he able to return to his homeland and, against great odds, establish himself as head of the Zulus, against the competing claims of his numerous half-brothers in 1816; the setbacks that otherwise began to beset the Zulu kingdom in the mid-1820s, may need further explanation.

but soon after, he was able to exterminate a large number of rival tribes and found the biggest kingdom southeast Africa had seen in recent memory. This feat was largely made possible by the military revolution Shaka and his allies, the Mthethwa, introduced into Zulu society. However, the popularity of this system led to imitators, and the Zulus faced opposition in the 1820s.


 ‘The Melon Campaign’

One of Shaka's most skilled military leaders, Mdlaka kaNcidi, led a sizable Zulu army into the Mpondo lands in April 1824 by traveling south along the foothills of the Drakensberg Mountains and then east through the valley of the River Mzimvubu. Mdlaka may have commanded between three and five thousand Zulu warriors, though our records are unclear on this number.

But, since this was primarily a livestock attack, Mdlaka attempted to flee with a sizable percentage of King Faku of the Mpondo's herd. However, Faku's impis soon replied and defeated Mdlaka's raiding party, then pursued them all the way back to the Zulu Kingdom while using guerrilla tactics.

The campaign, the first significant Zulu horde defeat under Shaka's rule, became known as the "amabece impi," or roughly "the melon campaign," and this incident lived long in the memory of the Zulus. 

Eventually, Mdlaka abandoned the captured cattle, and his warriors were so short of rations during their retreat, that they had to rely on their stores of watermelon for water.

In 1824 and 1826, as a result of these and other military and political setbacks for Shaka in the months that followed, he exhibited increasingly spiteful and aggressive behavior. One instance of this was an attack he oversaw against the Qwabe tribe. 

The Qwabe had been one of the earliest smaller tribes in Zululand to come under his rule in the early 1820s, but now, in response to a number of political assassinations within his kingdom, Shaka sent a sizable army against the Qwabe; this army, however, was not one of conquest with some hard and clear military or political goals; rather, it was an army of extermination.

It was later revealed that Shaka's mother Nandi, a stern woman who had never before scolded her son, was horrified by her son's behavior on this occasion when the impis spread out across the countryside and massacred the Qwabe wherever they could find them. 

We have a particularly detailed description of the Zulu court that was established here, and how the kingdom Shaka had built over the previous ten years had developed, at the time, provided by accounts from people like Isaacs and Fynn, who witnessed it in 1827 and 1828. Following the Qwabe campaign, Shaka moved the Zulu capital to their conquered lands.


 ‘The Place of Death’

The Zulu royal capital that Shaka had built here would have been a larger town than most settlements in the Zulu kingdom, which were largely villages. Shaka had his new capital built just south of the River Mhlathuze, on a ridge of hills that lay about 27 kilometers to the north of the modern-day settlement of Eshowe. It is perhaps symbolic of Shaka's entire reign that the location was known as kwaBulawayo, which means "the place of death”.

The isogodlo, a kind of royal palace reserved for Shaka and his harem of wives and concubines, was located in the middle of the capital at kwaBulawayo. It was heavily guarded and almost no one was allowed to enter; anyone found inside without a royal summons from Shaka himself would be put to death. However, the isogodlo did not only serve as a Zulu harem.

Also, this served as the seat of government, and Shaka's closest advisers and government officials lived in cabins that were next to the isogodlo. Even though kwaBulawayo's administration and technological advancement were primitive, by 1826 and 1827 the same systems that ruled Europe's royal courts during the Middle Ages were in place.

The court life was very ceremonial. A gatekeeper of the isogodlo would call out in the mornings when Shaka arose, alerting the larger community of kwaBulawayo, that the Zulu king had risen. After that, throughout the day, events were marked by formal processes. Banquets with hierarchies of seating and dining were scheduled for the evenings, when people were ushered into the royal presence for formal greetings and drinks.

Insofar as this was a hierarchical society, it is conceivable that when British officials started to arrive in the 1820s and the decades that followed, they would have been able to recognize the formality and rigid societal structure as something that also existed in Georgian and Victorian Britain, even though they might have found many aspects of the Zulu court profoundly alien. 

This describes the Zulu court that Shaka Zulu established at the heart of the kingdom he created in the ten years that followed his first coup d'état in 1816.

However, it would have grown more uncomfortable for Shaka Zulu to live there psychologically as he grew more tyrannical in his later years. Shaka had always been known for his brutality; for example, one infamous tale about the Zulu warlord describes how he would lock enemies in a kraal with some starving hyenas or jackals and wait until the animals inside had attacked and killed the victim of Shaka's enmity.

However, in the last year of his life, Shaka's behavior became more and more erratic. This change in his behavior was sparked by the passing of his mother, Nandi, in October 1827. The hut or kraal would then be burned to the ground with the remains of the party who had offended him inside, as a warning to all, not to resist the power of the King of the Zulus.

Shaka Zulu and she were particularly close during the course of his childhood, which was marked by the expulsion of Nandi and the disavowal of Shaka by his father Senzangakhona. 

Shaka Zulu is said to have taken the death of his mother particularly hard and to have descended into madness in the days and weeks that followed. His people were ordered to spend a long time grieving for the king's mother, and those who were judged to be displaying an inadequate level of grief were punished.

The main problem, according to later chroniclers, was that Shaka ordered a suspension of fundamental tasks like planting crops and milking cows during the grieving process. This decision led to a temporary famine in Zululand as the months passed. The people who planned Shaka's death in the fall of 1828, a year after Nandi's passing, may have invented these latter assertions about his behavior in the latter months of his life.


Shaka Zulu’s Assassination

Two of Shaka's half-brothers, Dingane and Mhlangana, were the masterminds of the plot, which had its roots in his own extended family. The brothers had previously tried to assassinate Shaka in the fall of 1828, but their attempt had failed and they had not been caught. Now, they had new allies, including Mkabayi, Shaka's aunt and the sister of the late King Senzangakona.

On the afternoon of September 22, 1828, the two and a group of other conspirators showed up at kwaNyakamubi, one of Shaka's other royal mansions. Angered by their presence, Shaka Zulu ordered them to leave, claiming it was late in the day, at which time several of them attacked him.

The King of the Zulus is said to have turned to them and asked, "Children of my father, what is wrong?"; however, some reports claim that he more prophetically questioned, "Are you stabbing me, kings of the earth? ", as Dingane and Mhlangana rushed out from behind the kraal fence to join in. As they stabbed the King of the Zulus to death, he is believed to have said. Via one another's murder, you will perish.

Whatever is accurate, we all know what happened next: the Zulu King, who had unified and expanded the country during the previous ten years, passed away there at the age of 41. Dingane, Shaka's half-brother and murderer, took over the Zulu kingdom after his death. 

His paranoia drove his rule, and in the weeks and months that followed, he carried out a widespread purge of the members of the extended royal family in order to secure his position and get rid of any potential rivals. However, the biggest threat to Dingane's rule came from outside the Zulu kingdom.

Originally led by Piet Retief, these Voortrekkers, or Boer Trekkers, as they were known, initially allied with Dingane's Zulus, but after a falling out and the ascent to power of Andries Pretorius among them, the Zulus faced a growing threat from the Voortrekkers. 

In 1836, the Boer communities further to the southwest started moving northeast and inland to avoid coming under British rule.

A half-brother of Pretorius named Mpande, who had been spared in Dingane's early purges, joined with Pretorius after the Zulu leader moved north toward Swaziland in the wake of Pretorius's decisive military victory against Dingane in 1839.

Mpande's rule is probably best characterized by its relative peace because, after the British conquered Natalia in 1842, he allied with Queen Victoria's government, a relatively cunning move that ensured the Zulu kingdom remained independent through to the end of his reign in 1872. 

A short campaign later saw Dingane killed and Mpande proclaimed as the king of the Zulus in 1840, while Pretorius and his Voortrekkers established the state of Natalia.

Storm clouds were beginning to form at this time, and the British presence on the southern tip of the African continent continued to grow throughout the 1850s, 1860s, and 1870s. In the area that is now South Africa, multiple nations rose throughout the 1850s and 1860s. 

At the center of these states was the British-ruled Cape Colony, and we have already seen how Natalia quickly rose under the Voortrekkers before being swiftly absorbed into the British state.

However, other Boer states emerged in the 1850s as a result of the British being preoccupied with events elsewhere, particularly the Crimean War in southeast Europe between 1853 and 1856 and the Great Mutiny in India in 1857. 

These Boer states, known as the Orange Free State and the South African Republic, would endure for almost fifty years, acting as a crucial alternative enemy for the British and the Zulus.

The issue for the Zulus, however, was the ever-increasing discovery of minerals in the area, such as gold and diamonds, which drove ever-increasing numbers of settlers to the region, notably Cecil Rhodes, a prominent supporter of British imperialism in Africa. 

From the moment he succeeded his father in 1872, Cetshwayo, Mpande's successor, faced increasing pressure from the British to the southwest. This would culminate in the Anglo-Zulu War, which broke out in 1879 and has gained significant notoriety in the history of European imperialism in nineteenth-century Africa.


The Anglo-Zulu War

The Anglo-Zulu War lasted six months, from January 1879 to June 1879. Western audiences are very familiar with the conflict thanks to the 1964 film Zulu, starring Michael Caine, and the 1979 sequel Zulu Dawn, starring Burt Lancaster and Peter O'Toole. However, these movies gave the impression that the Zulu side had won the conflict.

The reality of the larger conflict, however, was very different, with a quick six month campaign in 1879, resulting in a complete British victory and the effective destruction of the Zulu kingdo, depicting a small British garrison fighting against overwhelming odds when attacked by thousands of Zulu warriors. 

Zulu Dawn covered the famous battle of Isandlwana, one of the most significant defeats inflicted on a British colonial army during the nineteenth century.

Sir Bartle Frere, the high commissioner of the British Empire in the Cape Colony, put pressure on King Cetshwayo in 1878 in an effort to incite a war with the Zulu kingdom. Frere orchestrated a boundary dispute with the Zulus during 1878, and then in December, he sent Cetshwayo an ultimatum, the terms of which were outrageous.

The most egregious requirement, however, concerned the appointment of a British Resident as Queen Victoria's representative at the Zulu king's court. It was obvious that this "Resident" would be much more than an ambassador, as the ultimatum made clear that the Zulu army must be completely disbanded and that the entire military caste of Zulu society must be abolished.

 Christian missionaries were also given protected status and permitted to preach in Zululand.

Cetshwayo was unable to accept these conditions because doing so would have effectively made him a vassal of the British government of the Cape Colony. 

Despite this, he tried to avoid rejecting Frere's ultimatum outright because he wanted to prevent a war, but it was useless because Frere's intention had been to incite one, and when Cetshwayo hesitated, the British crossed the border with thousands of soldiers in January 1879.

On January 11th, 1879, the British under Lord Chelmsford began their invasion of Zululand. Initially, it was planned to send about 16,000 soldiers into Zululand in five different contingents, but less than 10,000 troops were eventually mobilized in three divisions. Cetshwayo had about 35,000 warriors, but they fought mostly with spears, shields, and some limited use of firearms.

The Zulus managed to draw first blood and fend off the initial invasion of Zululand despite having inferior technology. The British underestimated the Zulus and failed to set up a defensive perimeter at Isandlwana; the Zulus' lack of military technology compensated for it by outnumbering the British eleven to one, while the Zulu bullhorn battle formati was in use. 

On January 22, roughly 20,000 Zulu warriors attacked a column of 1,800 British and colonial troops who were camped near the hill of Isandlwana, in the northeast of modern-day South Africa.


The Battle of Isandlwana

The British ran out of ammunition during the final exchanges of fire, and the conflict turned into ferocious hand-to-hand combat, in which the Zulus were less at a tactical disadvantage. The Battle of Isandlwana resulted in only a small fraction of the 1,800 British and colonials surviving, with about 1,300 of them lying dead throughout the battlefield.

Although there are no precise counts of Zulu casualties, it is thought that the earliest estimates put the number in the thousands. The next day, 150 British soldiers at the neighboring mission post of Rorke's Drift successfully repelled a force of about 3,500 Zulus. 

This was the largest defeat a British force had ever experienced against such a weakly armed indigenous army.

The battles of Isandlwana and Rorke's Drift serve as the focal points of the movies Zulu Dawn and Zulu, respectively.

Although some of the other detachments continued to operate along the border with Zululand into the spring of 1879, the defeat at the Battle of Isandlwana insured that the initial invasion of Zululand could not succeed.

After the failure of Isandlwana, then, in the early summer, Lord Chelmsford, who knew he would soon lose his command, led a second invasion into Zululand. This one was significantly more successful, not least because Chelmsford brought a much larger army with him—more than 20,000 soldiers.

An organized advance by ranks of British gunmen, assisted by Gatling guns, rendered the Zulu battle tactics completely ineffective, and the Zulu warriors eventually fled the area. In the end, only ten British soldiers had been killed, while more than 500 Zulu warriors had fled the area.

The Anglo-Zulu War was essentially ended by victory at Ulundi, which also put an end to the independence of the Zulu country that Shaka Zulu had established more than fifty years before.

After the war, Cethswayo was essentially reduced to the status of a puppet king, one who was briefly flown to England to meet Queen Victoria. Cethswayo passed away in 1884, and despite Dinuzulu, his son and heir, doing everything in his power to keep the Zulu kingdom intact, the kingdom was ultimately lost.

Zululand was seized by the British in 1887, in part thanks to unsuccessful alliance attempts with the Boer nations. It was the start of a time when the British presence in South Africa was rapidly centralized and expanded, leading to two wars with the Boers between 1880 and 1881 and, more significantly, from 1899 to 1902.

The kingdom Shaka Zulu had established between 1816 and 1828 lasted for fifty years against British encroachments, but eventually, like the various Boer states, it could not resist the advance of British dominion in southern Africa. 

After the latter conflict, known as the Second Boer War, the British had become the hegemonic power in the region roughly corresponding to the modern state of South Africa.

How should Shaka Zulu be rated in light of the kingdom he established and what happened to the Zulu empire after his passing? 

Today, there may be a desire to romanticize Shaka Zulu as a hero who valiantly attempted to establish a centralized Zulu empire that could survive the impending assault of the European aggressors, but this would be giving Shaka far too much credit.


Scramble for Africa

There is no denying the brutality of European imperialism in Africa during the nineteenth century, but this only really began with Shaka Zulu's ascent to power. 

During Shaka's rule in the first half of the nineteenth century, the European presence in Sub-Saharan Africa was largely confined to some limited coastal regions like the Cape Colony, the Gold Coast, as well as the port towns along the west coast. It was not until the 1860s and 1870s that the racial tensions and the real Scramble for Africa began.

 As a result, even while the British and the Boers in the southwest were aware of the Zulus and Shaka and were coming into greater direct contact with them as traders, they would not have seen them as an existential danger to their way of life in the 1810s and 1820s.

Given this, we might view Shaka Zulu as a power-hungry individual who expanded the Zulu kingdom solely for his own gain rather than as a means of opposing the white man. 

Almost all of his career was spent at war with other Bantu people, and while there is no denying his prowess as a military commander and his centralization of the Zulu state to make it a more effective war machine was undoubtedly impressive for its time, the simple fact is that Shaka was a After gaining that power, he subsequently resorted to violence and delusional behavior like so many other autocrats throughout history.

Shaka established the Zulu kingdom; however, there is no denying that during the nineteenth century, that same kingdom was able to inflict one of the most significant military defeats on British forces in Africa. This, more than anything else, has left an imprint on the public imagination regarding the Zulu kingdom that Shaka Zulu first established in southern Africa.

What do you think of Shaka Zulu? 

Was he a cruel warlord who rose to power by subjugating other Bantu people, or was he an African hero who succeeded in founding a kingdom that was able to fend off European incursions for decades after his own passing? 

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