Shaka's Zulu kingdom and the Mfecane

In 1816 Shaka kaSenzangakhona became chief of the Zulu, then a minor chiefdom in the hills of what is now KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. Backed at first by his patron Dingiswayo of the Mthethwa, he reorganized his fighting men into age-based regiments (amabutho) that lived in royal barracks, drilled hard and fought at close quarters with a short stabbing spear and large cowhide shield. Within about a decade he had defeated the rival Ndwandwe and absorbed dozens of neighboring chiefdoms into a kingdom that dominated the region between the Drakensberg mountains and the Indian Ocean.¹²

The Zulu belonged to the Nguni-speaking farming and cattle-keeping peoples whose ancestors had reached southern Africa in the Iron Age. By the late 1700s competition was rising among these chiefdoms, driven by population growth, droughts, cattle wealth and new trade with the Portuguese port at Delagoa Bay (modern Maputo). Larger, more centralized states such as the Mthethwa and Ndwandwe were already forming before Shaka took power, and the regiment system itself predated him; his contribution was to push centralization and military discipline much further.²³

The conflicts of the 1810s to 1830s are often called the Mfecane ("the crushing"). Groups fleeing or breaking away from the Zulu sphere founded new states far away: Mzilikazi's Ndebele moved onto the highveld and later into modern Zimbabwe, Soshangane created the Gaza kingdom in Mozambique, and Ngoni bands crossed the Zambezi into Malawi and Tanzania. Moshoeshoe gathered refugees into the mountain kingdom that became Lesotho. Shaka was assassinated by his half-brothers Dingane and Mhlangana in 1828, but the Zulu kingdom endured until Britain defeated it in the war of 1879.¹²