King Shaka

King Shaka

Zulu Chief (1816–28) born c. 1787

Founder of Southern Africa's Zulu Empire he is credited with creating a fighting force that devastated the entire region. One of the most influential monarchs of the Zulu he ordered wide-reaching reforms that re-organized the military into a formidable power. His kingship resulted in a terrible number of deaths.

Princess Nandi

Shaka was the son of Senzangakona, king of the Zulu, and Nandi, an orphaned princess of the Langeni clan. Because his parents belonged to the same clan their marriage violated Zulu custom, and the stigma of this extended to the child.

The couple separated when Shaka was six, and Nandi took her son to the Langeni where he passed a fatherless boyhood and was very badly treated among a people who despised his mother.
Spurned as an illegitimate son Shaka spent his childhood in his mother's settlements. In 1802 she was driven out and she finally found shelter with the Dletsheni, a sub-clan of the powerful Mthethwa.

War path and conquest

When he was 23 the Mthethwa chieftain called up Shaka's age group to be initiated for military service. For the next six years he served with brilliance as a warrior. When his father King Senzangakona died in 1816 Shaka was released from service and was sent to take over the Zulu which at this time probably numbered fewer than 1500. They were among the smallest of the more than 800 Eastern Nguni–Bantu clans.

Shaka ruled with an iron hand from the start countering instant death for the slightest opposition.

He fought for extermination, taking into the Zulu in the remnants of the clans he smashed. First the small clans in his vicinity were massacred, in less than a year the Zulu and their army had increased fourfold. Within two years Shaka had defeated the only clans large enough to threaten him in a series of annual campaigns, he then struck at and smashed the complex network of clans living to the south of the Zulu territories. By 1823 the region was a ruin of ashes and smoking kraals.

Shaka's devastation was further to create a wasteland around his domain to make the destruction complete, organized bands of Zulu murderers regularly patrolled the waste.

The Crushing

His kingship resulted in a massive number of deaths mostly due to massacre the Zulu wreaked in neighbouring tribes. The rise of the Zulu Empire under Shaka forced other chiefdoms and clans to flee across a wide area of southern Africa.

Although Shaka's destruction was limited to the coastal area it led indirectly to the Mfecane,  “Crushing” or “Upheaval” that laid waste the inland plateau in the early 1820s. Marauding clans, fleeing the Zulu wrath and searching for land, the clan structure of the interior left two million dead in its wake.

Shaka's army had set out on a campaign of massive expansion, killing or enslaving those who resisted in the territories he conquered. His impis were rigorously disciplined. Failure in battle meant death.

The Boer Great Trek of the 1830s passed through this area, the first European settlers arrived in Port Natal (Durban) in 1824, a post was established and settlers soon made contact with Shaka whose kraal Bulawayo lay 160km to the north. Fascinated by their ways and their artefacts but convinced that his own civilization was much superior he permitted them to stay.

Shaka's madness

In 1827 Nandi died, and with his mother's death the grief stricken Shaka became completely insane.

The monarch ordered a massive outpouring of mourning including mass executions. About 7000 Zulus were killed in the initial outburst of rage and for a year no crops were planted nor could milk be used. All women found pregnant were slain with their husbands as were thousands of milking cows so that even the calves might know what it was to lose a mother.

Shaka sent the impi south in a raid to the borders of the Cape Colony. When they returned expecting rest he immediately sent them off to raid far in the north. He had made enough enemies among his own people to lead to his death, it was too much, two of his half brothers and an induna plotted and murdered him in September 1828. Dingaan was then to be king.

The Zulu Nation

Shaka's military brilliance led to the emergence of the Zulu as the most important power in south-eastern Africa. At the time of his death, Shaka ruled over 250 000 people and could mobilise more than 50 000 warriors.

He is often thought to have destroyed everything within reach, that Shaka was a degenerate and pathological monster noting accounts of cannibalism raiding, burning of villages and mass slaughter.

Certain aspects of traditional Zulu culture still revere the dead monarch to the extreme of an almost messianic stature. Today he is honoured as a great hero of Africa, and certain aspects of traditional Zulu culture still revere the dead monarch as in typical praise songs.

In present day South Africa isiZulu is still the most spoken language.