Zulu History
Information provided by the Chicago Humanities Festival

The creation of the Zulu military state is surely one of the most remarkable events in the history of South Africa.... Legend says that towards the end of the Eighteenth Century a chief named Dingiswayo went into exile and wandered about for years, coming eventually to Cape Colony. There he was impressed by the sight of European soldiers drilling in uniform.

Zulu tradition recounts how one day Dingiswayo returned to his people riding upon a horse and grasping a gun, the first horse and gun seen in those parts.....

Dingiswayo. . . began to organize the tribe on a military basis. He introduced conscription and imposed discipline, forming his men into battalions on the European pattern. When he launched his well-trained warriors upon the surrounding tribes, his victories followed one another, but during one of his expeditions he was captured and put to death. He was followed by the terrible Shaka. That was about the year 1818.

Shaka was a born conqueror and despot. His nation, like Sparta, was now an armed camp. Every boy went into training and was eventually admitted into the army and no man was allowed to marry until he had washed his spear in blood. Regiments, which numbered about two thousand men, were split up into companies, and each one was distinguished by a special uniform and a name. Some wore skins of otters, some of leopards, some had crests of ostrich feathers, others wore the plumes of the blue crane and the feathers of the Kaffir finch. The cow-hide shields were either red, white, black, or spotted. Certain regiments of proved valor were royal regiments and formed a Praetorian Guard.

Zululand was now covered with military kraals, each one the station of a certain regiment. After every engagement there was a ghastly ritual, when those who were said to have shown cowardice in action were put to death upon the command of Shaka. Upon one occasion a whole battalion which had not distinguished itself suffered the death penalty, each man having the point of a spear thrust beneath his armpit until it pierced his heart.

One of Shaka's first innovations was to limit the number of assegais (slender wooden javelins) carried into battle and to force his troops to rely upon a short stabbingspear. His plan of battle was the pincer movement of modern mechanized warfare. The Zulu army advanced in the form of a half moon, and when the right and left wings had surrounded the enemy the main body advanced and delivered the attack. While the battle was in progress a large body, the reserve, remained seated with their backs to the fray.

(In) Shaka's great military kraal, . . .the king lived with a host of concubines and surrounded by thousands of mostly celibate Janissaries.

Thousands of beehive huts spaced with military precision formed a circular band round the kraal, and each group of huts were the quarters of a particular regiment. Like a queen in a hive, the Zulu monarch was the central figure, accessible to his subjects, and on occasions only too visible in transports of ungovernable rage. He exercised absolute power over the lives of his people. The organization of the Great Place was perfect. At a moments notice, the army commanders could call out whole regiments in full war-paint to dance, to display cattle, or to go off to war or to hunt. Everything the King said was formally approved by thousands of yes-men shouting in chorus. That Shaka saw through it all is perfectly obvious, but he throve on a reputation for inhumanity and based his power on fear, in which, of course, he was not alone in the ancient or the modern world.

When (trader Henry Francis) Fynn saw him first, Shaka was wearing a turban of leopard skin from which a crane's tail-feather rose two feet into the air, cubes of dried sugar-cane were let into the lobes of his ears, his shoulders and his body from waist to knee were covered with a fringe of twisted monkey skin, and at his arms, elbows, and knees were bunches of white hair from the tails of oxen. He was over six feet high, muscular, and active.

(Trader Nathaniel) Isaacs tells how every morning the king would bathe and then rub his body with balls of pounded raw meat. Sometimes he would spend most of the day reclining in his hut surrounded by the royal girls, who knelt on mats. At night he would curl up on a reed mat and place his head upon a wooden neck-rest. Anyone who asked for an audience had to comply with etiquette as rigid as that of a European court.

His cruelty took extravagant forms, such as his massacre of thousands who did not appear to him to show sufficient grief when his mother died, a slaughter that was ludicrously extended to calves' so that the cows should appear to join in the universal lamentation. Once, suspecting infidelity, he made a clean sweep of the whole harem. His judicial notions seem always to have ended in the wretched defendants being hurried away, their necks broken by a sudden sideways jerk in transit, and their bodies beaten with knobkerries.

Source: H.V. Morton, In Search of South Africa, quoted In The Pleaders Companion to South Africa, ed. Alan Ryan (New York Harcourt Brace & Company, 1999), 130-32.

In 1937 Dingane was asked for a grant of land by Pieter Retief, one of the leaders of the migration of Boers [Dutch farmers] known as the Great Trek (1835-1843). Fearful of the encroaching Boers, Dingane hedged and asked Retrief to show good faith by capturing some cattle that had been stolen by a TIokwa chief. Retief retrieved the cattle and returned thern to Dingane in February 1838. By then the Boer pioneers were already coming over the Drakensburg Mountains with their wagons and cattle, and news reached Dingane of the complete defeat of Mzilikazi, another Zulu chief, by separate Boer forces. Dingane took fright and on February 67 1838, he invited Retief and his party to a feast of celebration in his kraal (circular compound), where his warriors murdered him. His impis (regiments) then attacked the immigrant camp and some 600 Boers were killed.

The death of Retief and his followers was avenged on December 16, 1838, at the Battle of Blood River when Andries Pretorius, another Great Trek leader, killed 3000 Zulus with a force of 500 men. After this defeat, some of Dingane's followers broke away and followed his brother Mpande, who collaborated with the Boers to defeat Dingane's forces in 1839.

Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, s.v. "Dingane."

For a time the British backed Cetshwayo in a land dispute between the Zulu and neighboring Afrikaners' or white settlers of Dutch origin. The British began to withdraw their support, however, after they had annexed the Afrikaner territory of the Transvaal in 1877 and no longer had a need for Zulu allies against the Afrikaners. Beginning in the late 1860s, Getshwayo had worked to procure arms for his people. He was also determined to preserve the Zulu regimental system, which separated young men from their community at puberty and had them fight as one regiment until they reached marrying age. The regiments proved a highly effective way of controlling the fighting power in the kingdom. Local representatives of the British Empire used Cetshwayo's positions on arms and the regiment system, along with other minor incidents, to justify issuing an ultimatum on December 11, 1878, demanding that Cetshwayo disband his army.

Cetshwayo declared that he would not attack the British, but he refused to agree to the terms of the ultimatum. War between the British and the Zulu began in January 1879, with the Zulu forces achieving one significant victory at the Battle of Isandhlwana. The British defeated the Zulu in other battles, the last being the Battle of Ulundi.

Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, s.v. "Cetshwayo."

Cetshwayo went to England in 1882 to plead successfully for his restoration as king. After he returned to Zululand in 1883, a civil war began between his supporters and those of his main rival, Zibhebhu, who controlled a large part of northern Zululand. Cetshwayo died in 1884.

Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, s v. "Cetshwayo."

Portrait of Dinuzulu, c. 1888

Cetshwayo's eldest son, Dinuzulu, was sixteen or thereabouts when his father died.... Although Dinuzulu was backed by his father's more important indunas, there were others who denied his right of succession....

Not the least of (his) problems was, of course, the threat posed by the ever-hostile Zibhebhu. Until Zibhebhu was effectively removed from the scene, there was little point in Dinuzulu taking up the battered Zulu crown.... No help could be expected from the British. Only too thankful to have Getshwayo out of the way, they had no intention of encouraging his son. If Dinuzulu was to assert his claim to Zulu leadership, he would have to look elsewhere for support....

Three years earlier, in 1881, the Boers of the Transvaal had reclaimed their independence. In a short, skillfully fought campaign, they had expelled the British from their country... and declared their right to self-government.... Even before the King's death there had been talk of an alliance between the Boers and the Usutu (the Zulu royal faction); now the Boers felt free to offer their support to Dinuzulu....

Three months after his father's death, Dinuzulu knelt on a wagon before some 9,000 Zulu warriors while four Boers anointed him with castor oil, placed their hands on his head, and declared him to be the rightful Zulu King.... In return for their protection and assistance against Dinuzulu's enemies, they were to be awarded an unspecified amount of land in northwestern Zululand in which they could establish an independent New Republic....

True to their promise, the Boers lost no time in dealing with Dinuzulu's principal enemy, Zibhebhu....

When the Boers claimed their reward, the price they demanded was far in excess of anything Dinuzulu and his advisors had envisaged. Under the terms of. . . agreement, . . . some 3,000,000 acres were given over to the New Republic, while the rest of Zululand was placed under Boer supervision.

Source: Brian Roberts, The Zulu Kings (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1974), 358-59.

King Dinuzulu

Despairingly (Dinuzulu) again sought help from his former allies in the New Republic. His overtures were ignored. Unable to reconcile himself to his loss of independence, he continued to defy the rulings of the Natal authorities. The last straw came when, at the beginning of 1888, Zibhebhu was reinstated in his former territory. An inevitable clash between the Usutu and Zibhebhu's followers resulted in a warrant being issued for Dinuzulu's arrest. There were. . . clashes when the British attempted to serve this warrant and Dinuzulu was forced to seek refuge in the Transvaal. For three months he evaded capture, but finally gave himself up. He was tried and sentenced to ten years' imprisonment on the island of St. Helena....

He was allowed to return to Zululand in January 1898.

Source: Brian Roberts, The Zulu Kings (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1974), 361.

In 1897, while Dinuzulu was in exile, Britain had granted direct control of Zululand to the Natal Government.... To meet the expense of the developing territory, Natal imposed a poll tax of £ 1 on all adult males, black and white. This tax was bitterly resented by the Africans who, earning an average of £ 5 a year, objected to paying the same as the affluent Europeans. So great did this resentment become that when, in 1906, a petty chieftain named Bambatha refused to pay the tax, his defiance boomeranged and sparked off a serious rebellion. This, the last Zulu rising, resulted in the deaths of nearly 4,000 Africans and 30 whites. A further 4,000 Africans were eventually arrested and sentenced to lashings....

King Dinuzulu at the time of his trial for treason

Although Dinuzulu had taken no active part in the rebellion, he was strongly suspected of having inspired it. Personifying, as he did, all the mystique of his powerful forbears, he could not escape suspicion. He was known to have sheltered Bambatha's wife and children, many of those arrested had repeatedly implicated him. The truth of these accusations, however, was to be heatedly contested.

At the end of 1807, Dinuzulu was apprehended on twenty-three charges of high treason.... After a somewhat questionable trial, Dinuzolu was convicted on only three counts. He was fined £ 100 and sentenced to four years' imprisonment for harboring rebels.

After serving part of his sentence at Newcastle in Natal, Dinuzulu was released in 1910 on the orders of the sympathetic General Louis Botha, who had recently become the first Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa....

Grossly overweight and suffering from dropsy, Dinuzulu died, after a severe hemorrhage, (in) 1913.

Source: Brian Roberts, The Zulu Kings (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1974), 361-2.

Click on map to enlarge

The Buthelezi were the first of many related clans to be conquered by Shaka, in the early nineteenth century, and incorporated into the powerful Zulu nation. Throughout their subsequent history, the Buthelezi have always maintained an especially close relationship to the Zulu royal lineage. Ngqengelele (born c. 1790) served as a personal steward to Shaka. After Shaka's death, Klwana rose to become one of Dingane's war-captains. Thereafter, Mnyamana held the same position under Mpande, and in Cetshwayo's time became virtual prime minister of the Zulu nation. Succession in the Buthelezi chieftainship passed on through his descendents, Tschanibezwe (d. 1906), and Mathole (husband of Princess Magogo) (and her son Mangosuthu Buthelezi)

Source: David K. Rycroft, "The Zulu Bow Songs of Princess Magogo," African Music 4: 42-43.

Music, Dance and Culture from South Africa Click on the links below to learn more about Princess Magogo, Zulu music and Zulu history. South Africa Overview South Africa in Brief A South African Chronology About The Princess Synopsis of the Opera The Creators of the Opera Zulu Music The Ugubhu Musical Bow Zulu History