Titans of History

SHAKA

1787–1828

It became known to us that Shaka had ordered that a man standing near us should be put to death for what crime we could not learn: but we soon found it to be one of the common occurrences in the course of the day.

Recollections of a surgeon visiting Shaka in 1824

Shaka was the founder of the Zulu empire and the creator of the Zulu nation but he was also a vicious, paranoid, vindictive, cruel and self-destructive tyrant.

Shaka was raised with an absent father and a strong, devoted and wronged mother in an atmosphere of instability, violence and fear. His father, Senzangakona, was chief of the Zulu tribe, but, unusually, opted to marry a lower-class woman from the neighboring eLangeni clan. The marriage broke up when the young Shaka was six, and his mother took him back to the eLangeni; however, she was ostracized there because of her marriage. Not only did the future leader spend the rest of his youth without a father, he also had to deal with the social stigma that resulted from a marriage that brought disgrace upon his mother. Unable to cope, his mother went into exile, eventually finding a home with the Mtetwa clan in 1802.

Shaka’s fortunes began to change when, at twenty-three—already tall, muscular and striking—he was called up to perform military service by Dingiswayo, a chief of the Mtetwa. As a warrior Shaka soon achieved a reputation for brilliance and bravery, and he helped the Mtetwa establish their dominance over many smaller clans, including the Zulus. He also witnessed, at first hand, Dingiswayo’s efforts to reform the organization and attitude of the armed forces—lessons he did not forget.

In 1816 news arrived that Shaka’s father had died. Dingiswayo now released him from his service so that he might return and claim his birthright as Zulu chief. Although the Zulu were, at that time, one of the smaller clans on the east coast of southern Africa, Shaka had big plans for the future.

On his return, he immediately crushed internal opposition to his rule. He then set about remodeling the Zulu into a warrior people. The army was re-equipped and reorganized, embracing the horned buffalo battle formation that would become its trademark. When deployed, the objective of this formation was always the same: the annihilation of the enemy’s troops.

At a time when most battles were little more than skirmishes, with no real sense of strategic direction, Shaka’s disciplined and ruthless approach constituted a revolution in clan warfare. His armies quickly established a terrifying reputation, and Shaka began to use them to redraw the map of southern Africa.

The first to feel his wrath were those clans closest to the Zulu along the eastern seaboard, including the eLangeni. Shaka brought down a terrible vengeance on those who had inflicted misery on his mother when he had been a boy, impaling the clan’s leaders on wooden stakes cut from their own fences.

Other victories followed, and after each one Shaka incorporated the men of the vanquished clans into his own armies. Within a year he had quadrupled the size of the forces at his command. When in 1817 Dingiswayo—still Shaka’s nominal overlord—was murdered by a rival, Chief Zwinde of the Ndwandwe clan, the way was clear for untrammeled Zulu expansion.

Thereafter, one clan after another was conquered and their lands devastated. Those who lay within Shaka’s path faced a stark choice: submit, flee or die. The major clans in the area, including the Ndwandwe, were overwhelmed, as were numerous smaller clans to the south of the Zulu. By 1823 Shaka had devastated much of southeastern Africa.

It was not just those who came into immediate contact with Shaka and his forces who were affected. The flight inland of thousands who feared Shaka’s marauding armies tore up the established clan structure and social framework of the African interior. In the Mfecane (crushing) that followed, as many as 2 million people may have died as this internal “scramble for Africa” spiraled out of control.

The worst was yet to come. In 1827 Shaka’s mother died, and the warrior-chief abandoned all sense of restraint. He was no longer concerned with establishing a huge Zulu empire, but instead sought to inflict the pain he himself felt at his mother’s death on as many others as possible. In the first phase of this public mourning process, some 7000 Zulus were slaughtered. Pregnant women were killed, along with their husbands, while even cattle were butchered by the agents of Shaka’s rage.

Death and destruction now became the only phenomena that gave meaning to Shaka’s life, and he unleashed his armies to carry fire and slaughter far and wide. The violence only ended when Shaka was assassinated by his half-brothers Dingane and Mhlangana in 1828. A life that had promised so much ended in dishonor: stabbed to death with spears, the once great chief was buried without ceremony in a pit.

At time of his death, Shaka governed over 250,000 people and could raise an army of 50,000. He had built a huge kingdom out of almost nothing, but the price paid by ordinary Africans was vast. Millions had died as a consequence of Shaka’s unbridled ambition. Prior to his death, Shaka had established friendly relations with the British, but not with the Afrikaners (Boers), and under his half-brother successor, Dingane, the first armed clashes occurred with Boer settlers in Natal. After an initial victory, a Zulu force of several thousand suffered a decisive defeat at the hands of a much smaller contingent of Boers at the Battle of Blood River in December 1838—an event that triggered a Zulu civil war with Mpande—another of Shaka’s half-brothers—who formed an alliance with the Boers and succeeded in overthrowing Dingane. Over the following couple of years, much of the Zulu empire fell under Boer control, but Britain’s formal annexation of Natal in 1843 led to the restoration of these lands to the Zulus.

Thereafter, until the second half of the 19th century, the British made no concerted effort to confront the Zulus. Indeed, government policy was to safeguard the integrity of the Zulu empire from Boer expansionism. All this changed, however, in January 1879 when, to placate the Akrikaners after the annexation of the Transvaal two years earlier, the British instigated the Zulu War, aiming to seize Zululand as an area ripe for Afrikaner settlement. They ordered the Zulu king Cetshwayo—Mpande’s son—to disband his army within thirty days; when he failed to comply, hostilities began.

By September 1879, Cetshwayo had been captured and the territory brought under British control (though not before the British had suffered a famous defeat at the Battle of Isandhlwana and been pinned down at the siege of Rorke’s Drift—an incident forever commemorated in the 1964 film Zulu). Though unrest continued in the years that followed, prospects for an independent Zulu homeland had suffered fatal damage. In 1887, Zululand was formally annexed to the crown—a move that signaled the permanent dissolution of the Zulu empire.