Shaka

South African military leader

• Born: c. 1787
• Birthplace: Mtetwa Empire (now in South Africa)
• Died: September 22, 1828
• Place of death: Zulu Empire (now in South Africa)

Shaka revolutionized the military and political organization of the Zulu and their neighboring peoples, transforming the systems from the traditional to what might have developed into a modern nation-state, had not European imperialism intervened. His achievements enabled the Zulu to resist European conquest until the late nineteenth century and preserved Zulu national identity.

Early Life

Shaka (SHAH-kah) was the illegitimate child of a young Zulu chieftain and a woman from a clan with whom his father, Senzangakhona, could not have chosen a wife because of kinship restrictions. His parents attempted unsuccessfully a contrived marriage, but Shaka and his mother, Nandi, were soon exiled from his father’s homestead. They went to live with his mother’s clan, a branch of the Mthetwa people, but there Shaka found himself ostracized and humiliated by the boys in his age group.

Even before attaining puberty, Shaka displayed the personality that was to mold his career. He was a reclusive, brooding child, deeply attached to his mother, prone to outbursts of consuming violence. It has been reported that he once nearly killed two older boys who had taunted him. When his father’s community offered reconciliation and membership in his adolescent age group, Shaka angrily rejected the offer in public, embarrassing his father and deepening the feud between the two clans of Shaka’s parents.

There is nothing to indicate that Shaka received any more than the traditional education provided for all Zulu youths in adolescence. That would have amounted to indoctrination into tribal customs and pragmatic knowledge of the environment. Oral tradition depicts Shaka as a youth driven to reckless bravery, a superior athlete and warrior whose talents only fed the jealousy of his peers.

Life’s Work

At the age of twenty-one, Shaka joined the fighting ranks of the great Mthetwa chief, Dingiswayo. A remarkable leader in his own right, Dingiswayo had conquered some thirty tribes, including the Zulu, and had attempted to discourage the incessant feuding among his subjects, much of it caused by the food and land shortages resulting from a prolonged drought in the region during the late eighteenth century. Dingiswayo organized trading expeditions to the tiny European outpost on the coast of Southern Africa and formulated the beginnings of a centralized kingdom.

Life as a soldier offered Shaka the opportunity to display his genius for military innovation. Traditionally, combat in Southern Africa had been decided by the two opposing groups deploying themselves some fifty yards apart and hurling javelins and spears across the intervening distance until one side or the other retired. Shaka, dissatisfied with these tactics, adopted the assegai, a short stabbing sword, as his weapon, thus requiring hand-to-hand combat with enemies. There is some evidence that Shaka was familiar enough with advanced forms of iron-smelting technology to comprehend that, properly forged, these blades could be made much harder and more destructive than the less elaborate iron weapons normally used by his people.

Shaka also developed more disciplined tactics than previously used in the region. He disdained the loose array of warriors characteristic of javelin combat in favor of a close-order deployment, wherein a solid line of animal-skin shields confronted the enemy. Two “horns” of infantry extended from this central formation to outflank enemy forces. Reserves to the rear of the formation stood ready to rush into any weakness created in the enemy lines. Shaka’s regiment won victory after victory against confused opponents. His new tactics changed warfare from limited skirmishing to a modern bloodletting that often terrorized potential opponents into submission.

Shaka’s father, meanwhile, had maneuvered himself into the Zulu chieftancy. Upon his death in 1816, a grateful Dingiswayo had Shaka installed as the Zulu leader. Two years later, Zwide, the chief of a rival tribe and would-be usurper, assassinated Dingiswayo. Shaka set out to wreak vengeance. Luring Zwide’s much larger force into a valley where no provisions could be found and foregoing the final battle until his opponents were weak from hunger, Shaka’s men devastated Zwide’s forces.

Shaka now displayed an insight even more remarkable than those that punctuated his military career. He dispatched the survivors of Zwide’s army to his rear guard and, following their retraining in Zulu military tactics, incorporated them into his army. The lands vacated by Zwide’s fighters and their families were colonized by Zulu. Shaka evidently perceived that, in order to build a large army and empire, the tribal structure of Southern Africa had to be broken down. The notion of awarding land to successful and loyal soldiers, in a country where most land had been held more or less in common, carried the seeds of social and economic revolution.

Within six years after the death of Dingiswayo, Shaka’s empire embraced tens of thousands of square miles. He could muster an army of 100,000 men. From the giant village at Bulawayo, Shaka ruled over an entity without precedent in Southern Africa. European traders and diplomats made their way to Bulawayo to seek alliances and privileges.

It was a fleeting moment. Shaka’s military regimen was harsh beyond reason, a product of his own troubled mind. He demanded celibacy of his troops, granting the right to marry only to those who excelled in battle. His officers clubbed to death any recruit too fainthearted to bear the pain and deprivation of forced marches and ordeals. His new military tactics were like a plague loosed on the land, virtually depopulating the country around Bulawayo and forcing his columns to march hundreds of miles for new recruits and conquests. Shaka ruled as an absolute monarch, and a tyrannical one at that. His periodic fits of rage often led to the execution of hundreds of innocent bystanders. Soldiers who were only suspected of cowardice were killed at once. European guests at Bulawayo reported that Shaka almost daily chose soldiers or courtiers, at whim, for execution.

Throughout Shaka’s career, his penchant for violence seems to have been most pronounced in connection with the original injustice meted out to his mother. Shortly after becoming chief of the Zulu, Shaka hunted down those who had ostracized him and his mother and had them impaled on stakes. The occasion of his mother’s death—by natural causes—caused a violent outburst. In Bulawayo alone, seven thousand people were killed over the next two days. Shaka’s officers summarily butchered anyone who did not meet arbitrary standards for adequate display of grief. Shaka ordered his empire into a bizarre year of mourning for his mother. Under pain of death, married couples were to abstain from sexual relations. No cows or goats were to be milked, no crops planted. Shaka’s army embarked on a new round of conquests, in some cases hundreds of miles from Bulawayo.

Such demands pushed even the most loyal of Shaka’s followers beyond their limits. Food shortages and disease quickly began to take their toll. In 1828, when Shaka ordered his army to attack the Portuguese settlement at Delagoa Bay, his brothers, Dingane and Mhlangane, assassinated him. Dingane then killed Mhlangane, assumed the throne, recalled the exhausted army, and revoked some of Shaka’s most irrational edicts.

Significance

Given Shaka’s extraordinary behavior, especially in the last years of his life, historians have been prone to characterize him in psychological terms. Shaka has been labeled a psychotic and a manic-depressive. Because he left no male heir—he often observed that a son would try to kill him for the throne—and because he demanded nudity and celibacy among his soldiers, some historians suspect latent homosexuality. Perhaps any leader of Shaka’s dimensions might be cast in psychological types. Preferably, however, one should understand Shaka as a true innovator, perhaps a genius, let loose in a society and environment typified by violence, natural upheaval, and the beginnings of contact with the outside world.

Most historians concur that Shaka lived in a South Africa wherein the population was approaching the limits of agricultural productivity; land, therefore, was already coming to be viewed as a scarce resource and a basis of political power. The great droughts and famines that seem to have ravaged South Africa in the eighteenth century, together with the more limited but still novel sociopolitical achievements of his predecessor Dingiswayo, made Shaka’s world one of turbulence and frayed traditions. As is evident from the frequent appearance of potential usurpers and ambitious chiefs among Shaka’s opponents, there were many who might have undertaken the task of building an empire. Shaka succeeded because of his unique mentality.

Shaka’s achievement also passes a crucial historical test: It survived and flourished long after the death of its creator. Despite the level of violence that seems to have attended it, Shaka created a Zulu protostate that remained intact for the rest of the nineteenth century. Only the British, using the latest in automatic weapons, finally managed to subdue the Zulu in 1879. Consciousness of a Zulu national identity remains a strong mobilizing force in the struggle for authority and land in the modern Republic of South Africa.

Bibliography

Ballard, Charles. “Drought and Economic Distress: South Africa in the 1800’s.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 17 (1986): 359-378. Discusses how favorable conditions in the eighteenth century fostered growth of Nguni population and herds, while drought during the early nineteenth century forced rapid migration and accelerated development of the absolutist state of Shaka by forcing Zulu into military service.

Gluckman, Max. “The Rise of a Zulu Empire.” Scientific American 202 (April, 1960): 157-168. Gives an excellent summary of major events, and speculates on Shaka’s possible psychological condition.

Hamilton, Carolyn. Terrific Majesty: The Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical Invention. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998. The author analyzes why Shaka has acquired iconic status, examining how his image has changed over time.

Inskeep, R. R. The Peopling of Southern Africa. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1979. A study of the factors influencing population movements in Southern Africa and methods of reconstructing these patterns.

Kets de Vries, Manfred F. R. Lessons on Leadership by Terror: Finding Shaka Zulu in the Attic. Northampton, Mass.: Edward Elgar, 2004. The author views Shaka as a symbol of despotism, and examines his rule to better understand how and why people in positions of leadership abuse their power.

Marks, Shula. “Firearms in Southern Africa: A Survey.” Journal of African History 12 (1971): 517-530. Suggests that, although the Zulu acquired firearms early in the eighteenth century, they were little used for military purposes until it became necessary to defend against the British. Underscores the importance of Shaka’s military innovations in using indigenous weapons and tactics.

Ritter, E. A. Shaka Zulu: The Rise of a Zulu Empire. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1955. A classic account of the career of Shaka. Some passages take the style of a historical novel, but the work is essentially accurate.

Roberts, Brian. The Zulu Kings. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975. A popular but useful and innovative account of the rise of Shaka. Stresses Shaka’s concept of a territorial power base as a revolutionary development in African political thought.

Selby, John. Shaka’s Heirs. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1971. Provides an extended discussion of Shaka’s career and of those who attempted to emulate him in the Zulu environment that the warrior king had altered forever.

Taylor, Stephen. Shaka’s Children: A History of the Zulu People. London: HarperCollins, 1995. Traces the rise of Shaka and the Zulu nation, providing information about current Zulu nationalism and the tribe’s relationship with whites and other South African tribes.

Wylie, Dan. Savage Delight: White Myths of Shaka. Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: University of Natal Press, 2000. Examines how, and why, white writers from the 1830’s to the present have mythologized Shaka.