Mfecane

The Mfecane was a decades-long period of warfare and political upheaval among the Bantu-speaking people of southern Africa in the nineteenth century. The word Mfecane comes from the Nguni language and means “the crushing.” To the Sotho people, the period was known as the Difaqane, or “the hammering.” An accurate account of the Mfecane is difficult to determine as the people of the region relied on oral traditions to pass down their history. As groups were destroyed, displaced, or forced to merge with others, much of their history was lost. The Mfecane was believed to have been triggered by a number of factors, including drought, population pressures, trade disputes, and the rise of the militaristic Zulu kingdom. Modern historians estimate that the period of conflict killed hundreds of thousands of people, displaced millions, and permanently reshaped the political and social fabric of the region.

Background

The ancestors of early humans lived in southern Africa for more than two million years, but it was not until about one hundred thousand years ago that the first modern humans migrated to the region. By about two thousand years ago, the Khoekhoe and San peoples had developed thriving sheep and cattle-raising societies in the region. About that same time, Bantu-speaking peoples from other parts of Africa migrated south and settled in the area. The Bantu were not a unified group, but consisted of different ethnic groups tied together by a common language family and similar cultures. Bantu societies were focused on both livestock-raising and crop production. Over the centuries, the peoples of southern Africa formed agricultural-based communities that developed iron-making and mining skills, copper production, and an extensive trading system.

In 1652, the Dutch established a colony at what is today Cape Town in South Africa. Within a few decades, Dutch, German, and French settlers began arriving in the region, sparking conflict with the local Khoekhoe peoples. The settlers, known as Boers, expanded their territory throughout the eighteenth century. In 1795, The British captured the Cape Colony and eleven years later, the Boers officially ceded the area to the British. To escape British influence, many Boer settlers and their families left the coastal regions and began to migrate into the southern African interior. There, they established two independent republics, further increasing tensions with the Bantu peoples of the region.

Overview

During the eighteenth century, European colonists had introduced corn to the people of southern Africa. Corn was easy to grow, provided nutrition, and could feed many people, but it needed more water than other grains. Toward the end of the century, southern Africa was hit by a drought, which caused much of the corn crop to die. The result was a famine that spread across the region and led to the starvation deaths of thousands of people.

The ongoing drought and famine forced different groups to live closer together to compete for limited resources. A number of groups also settled in what is today Maputo Bay in Mozambique to take advantage of trade with the Portuguese. The competition for water, grain, and cattle soon led to conflict between local groups. As tribes began to battle other tribes, the losing group was often absorbed into the victorious side, growing its armies in the process.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, about eighty Bantu-speaking clans were estimated to have lived in the region of southern Africa. By the 1810s, warfare had consolidated the tribes into two main kingdoms—the Ndwandwe and the Mthethwa—with smaller groups scattered throughout the area. Rather than the small-scale tribal skirmishes that had occurred in the past, these kingdoms had consolidated armies of about forty thousand warriors. By 1818, the Ndwandwe army had seemingly emerged victorious when it defeated the Mthethwa forces. However, a Zulu warrior chief named Shaka had also begun organizing his people into a powerful military state on the southern African coast. Shaka was an accomplished military strategist who defeated the Ndwandwe in 1820, forming what would become the Zulu kingdom.

These events combined to trigger a chain reaction that plunged the region into decades of warfare. While some of the Ndwandwe, Mthethwa, and other defeated tribes became part of the Zulu army, many others were displaced from their homes and forced to flee. They, in turn, attacked other groups in the region in an attempt to capture enough resources to survive. For much of the next two decades, the region devolved into chaos as entire villages were massacred, crops destroyed, and livestock and property looted. The bloodshed was significantly pronounced in KwaZulu-Natal, the coastal homeland of the Zulu kingdom; the northern regions near modern-day Malawi and Mozambique where refugees encountered the migrating Boer farmers; the refugee-packed mountainous region of modern-day Lesotho; and the Eastern Cape where conflict with European settlers had been ongoing for more than a century.

The upheaval of the Mfecane lasted until about 1840, but its effects permanently reshaped the southern part of the continent. While no accurate death toll has ever been determined, historians believe that it likely ran into the hundreds of thousands, with some estimates placing it between one to two million. Villages were destroyed and entire ethnic groups were wiped out or had their culture absorbed by other groups. Some areas were completely depopulated, giving European settlers the impression that the land was free for them to claim.

In the aftermath of the violence, the consolation of smaller groups changed the social landscape of the region as new tribal identities were formed, and the Zulu kingdom emerged as a major military power. Instead of many scattered ethnic groups with decentralized leadership, the people formed larger centralized kingdoms, with leaders who held more power. In some cases, people realized that the white settlers who were advancing into the area would make better allies than enemies and offered the newcomers a place to live.

Although the Mfecane has been historically described as a period of strife between indigenous peoples in the south of Africa, more recent scholarship has focused on the role of European nations in the calamity. Again, tensions between the colonizing British and Dutch-speaking settlers induced the Dutch, also known as Voortrekkers, to migrate into the interior. New studies suggest this population shift caused destabilization among the indigenous peoples who were forced to violently compete to hold onto their habitations. The consolidation of territory and tribes by the Shaka-led Zulu nation, and the tens of thousands of resulting deaths and population displacements, was first initiated because of the fallout among European communities. This was also instrumental in the advent of famine which soon followed.

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