by John Keegan
Though their early European visitors noted that ubuntu — humanity — was their most important value, the Nguni did fight and they did wage war. The casus belli was usually a quarrel over grazing, the essential resource in a society where cattle may well outnumber people, and the loser ended up on new and poorer land. As is typical with primitive people living in underpopulated country, the result was not slaughter but displacement.
Battles tended to be ritualised, conducted under the gaze of old and young, begun with an exchange of insults and finished when casualties were inflicted. There were natural as well as customary limitations on the level of violence: because metals were scarce, weapons were made of fire-hardened wood, thrown rather than used hand-to-hand; and should a warrior happen to kill an opponent, he was obliged at once to leave the field and undergo purification, since the spirit of his victim would certainly otherwise bring fatal illness to him and his family.26
Suddenly in a few decades at the beginning of the nineteenth century, this typically ‘primitive’ style of warmaking was overturned. Shaka, chief of the Zulu, a small Nguni tribe, became the commander of an army of savagely disciplined regiments that waged battles of annihilation, and his Zulu kingdom became a power in southern Africa; the chiefdoms it displaced were reduced to fugitive tribes, wandering hundreds of miles in a chaos of social disorganisation to find some place of refuge.
Europeans who witnessed the rise of Shaka, like the navigators baffled by the Polynesians’ mastery of maritime skills, sought some explanation for it which denied a spontaneous cause. Shaka, it was said, had met Europeans and learnt of European military organisation and tactics. That was certainly untrue.27 But what was true was that the benevolent conditions enjoyed by the northern Nguni in their idyllic pastoral phase changed for the worse at the end of the eighteenth century. Cattle, by which the Nguni measured their wealth, had grown in numbers to exceed the supply of ‘sweet’ grazing. To the west rose the dramatic barrier of the Drakensberg, approached by ‘sour’ grazing inhospitable to a pastoral economy. The tsetse fly belt, on the Limpopo River to the north, denied expansion in that direction. The introduction of maize, brought to Africa from America in the sixteenth century, led to an increase in population among the southern Nguni, and further south the Boers of the Cape were blocking, with firearms and grim determination to find Lebensraum, any opportunity to move in that direction. To the east lay the sea.28
Some adjustment of their free-and-easy way of life had already occurred before Shaka rose to fame. A previous chief had abolished the system by which warriors, when called to serve their chief in war, went with others from their locality to muster at his kraal. Instead he formed ‘age regiments’, of men born in the same years. Their separation, during military service, from their potential brides reduced the birth rate; it also increased the power of the chief and the amount of the tribute — in cattle, produce and hunted game — due to him, since the warriors’ labour was his while they were under arms.
Shaka institutionalised these changes to an extreme degree. ‘Age regiments’ became permanent bodies, living apart from civil society in military barracks. Warriors were denied marriage not for the duration of a campaigning season or two but until their fortieth year, when they were allotted wives from the equivalent of women’s regiments that Shaka also formed.
The old restraints on battle were also cast aside. Shaka designed a new weapon, a stabbing spear, with which he trained his men to close with and kill their opponents. (It may be that, with the advance of the Boers out of the Cape, iron had become more plentifully available than thitherto; this is an aspect of the intensification of Nguni warfare which does not seem to have been explored by historians. The stabbing assegai would certainly have required more iron in its manufacture than the throwing spear previously used.)
Hand-to-hand fighting with edged weapons requires close-order tactics. These Shaka invented also. He had already obliged his men to discard sandals and learn to run long distances on hardened feet. In battle he formed his regiments into two wings with a strong centre and a reserve in the rear; when the moment for engagement came, the centre charged in dense ranks to fix the enemy, while each wing raced to encircle him from a flank. The purification ritual was abandoned until after the battle was over.29 When the killing started, a warrior disembowelled his victim, to ensure death, and then went on to the next. Disembowelling was the traditional means of releasing the spirit of the dead, which it was believed would otherwise drive the killer insane.
Shaka did not shrink from killing women and children, a practice repugnant to his Nguni forebears, but in general he was content to kill the men of a neighbouring tribe’s ruling family, together with the warriors who gave battle; survivors were incorporated into his growing kingdom. His purpose was to build a nation out of the Nguni kin who would accept his authority, and to extend the lands they occupied.
Beyond the spreading borders of Zululand this system caused catastrophe. Shaka’s methods cured overpopulation in Zululand, but among his neighbours his methods set in train a series of displacements which robbed one people after another of their traditional homelands and their settled ways of life. ‘The rise of the Zulu kingdom had repercussions from the Cape Colonial frontier to Lake Tanganyika. Every community throughout approximately a fifth of the African continent was profoundly affected, and many were utterly disrupted.’30
These awful effects of Zulu imperialism became known as the Difaqane, ‘forced migration’. ‘By 1824 most of the country between the Tukela and the Mzimkhulu [rivers], the Drakensberg and the sea, was devastated. Thousands of people had been killed; others had fled further south; and others had been absorbed into the Zulu nation. In Natal organised community life virtually ceased.’31 This is not a small area; it measures about 15,000 square miles. Its dimensions are as nothing, however, to the distances over which fugitives from the Zulus fled. One group terminated their flight on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, 2000 miles from their starting-place. In the course of their wanderings, some groups had lost their cattle altogether and been forced to subsist on weeds and roots; some had been driven to cannibalism; many had found themselves caught up in ‘hordes’, which stripped the land like locusts, marking the course of their passage by a trail of dead and dying.
Young Zulus remained true to Shaka’s military system and ethos for some time after his fall in 1828. It is a besetting fault of triumphant warrior systems that fail to fund economic and social diversification from the fruits of victory, that they become fossilised in their moment of glory. Why that should be is a theme of this book; in the case of the Zulus it was undoubtedly the result of their having to live, as was said of the Prussians, toujours en vedette — so threatened by equally potent military powers (which happened in nineteenth-century southern Africa also to be at a more advanced stage of economic development) that they continued to concentrate all their energies in an exclusively military form. As so often elsewhere, the form was that which had determined their rise. The Zulus did eventually acquire firearms but they failed to adapt their tactics to the new weapon, persisting in the mass attack with the stabbing assegai as their means to battlefield supremacy.
Shaka was a perfect Clausewitzian. He designed a military system to serve and protect a particular way of life, which it did with dramatic efficiency. Zulu culture, by making warrior values paramount, by linking those values to the preservation of a cattle-herding economy, and by locking up the energies and imagination of the most dynamic members of the community in sterile military bondage until well past maturity, denied itself the chance to evolve and adapt to the world around it. In short, the rise and fall of the Zulu nation offers an awful warning of the shortcomings of the Clausewitzian analysis.
The Mamelukes
Bondage, in a stronger or weaker form, is a common condition of military service. Among the Zulus it reached an extreme. Shaka’s warriors were not slaves, since it was custom, reinforced by terror, rather than law that bound them in servitude.
Nevertheless they were, in a functional sense, slaves to Shaka’s will. Soldiers might, however, be slaves under the law in past times, however contradictory their status seems to us today. Slavery in the modern world implies the absolute deprivation of the individual’s liberty, while possession of weapons and mastery of their use are means to the individual’s liberation. We do not perceive how a man may be armed and at the same time bereft of his freedom. In the medieval Muslim world, however, no conflict was perceived between the status of slave and soldier. Slave soldiers — Mamelukes — were a feature of many Muslim states. In the nature of things, they often became the rulers of such states, their leaders remaining in power for generations, yet far from using the power they enjoyed to make themselves legally free, they were adamant in perpetuating the Mameluke ‘institution’ and resisted all pressure to change its nature. There were understandable reasons for their resistance. They owed their dominance to their monopoly of elaborate skills of horsemanship and archery, which to abandon for the commoner practices of musketry or fighting on foot might have toppled them from their position. It was the narrowness of their military culture, like that of the Zulus, which nevertheless brought them down in the end. Though their political power derived from their military exclusivity, they preferred to persist in their outmoded warrior style rather than adapt to new ways in warfare. The Clausewitzian analysis, in their case as in that of the Zulus, was stood on its head. The holders of power made politics a continuation of warfare. Practically that was a nonsense. Culturally the Mamelukes had no alternative.
In the Islamic as in the Greek and Roman worlds, slavery took many forms, some quite benign; a slave might be a respected craftsman, a teacher, a businessman trading in part for himself, a confidential secretary. Islam, however, took the diversity of slavery further than the Greeks or Romans had done. Under the government of the caliphs — the ‘successors’ of Muhammad who exercised worldly as well as religious authority — a slave might become a high government official. It was an extension of this practice that made slaves soldiers and it was only within the Islamic world that such soldiers were to form a military élite.
That they came to do so derives from the conflict that quickly emerged within Islam between the morality of warmaking and its practice. Muhammad, unlike Christ, was a man of violence; he bore arms, was wounded in battle and preached holy war, jihad, against those who defied the will of God, as revealed to him. His successors perceived the world as divided into Dar al-Islam — the House of Submission, submission to the teachings of Muhammad, collected in the Koran — and Dar al-Harb, the House of War, which were those parts yet to be conquered.32 The early Arab conquests of the seventh century extended the frontiers of Dar al-Islam in whirlwind leaps, so that by AD 700 the whole of what is now Arabia, Syria, Iraq, Egypt and North Africa had been brought within it. Thereafter the progress of jihad became more difficult and more problematical. The original Arab conquerors were few in number, too few to sustain the pace of conquest at its initial intensity. They also proved in victory to be prone to the weaknesses of ordinary humanity, keen to enjoy victory’s fruits in peace yet ready to quarrel over the succession to their leadership.
Leadership was invested in a caliph, or ‘successor’ to Muhammad. The early caliphs found a means to satisfy the claims of their veterans, who wanted ease without war, in the diwan, a pension list for Arab warriors financed from the fruits of conquest. They were less successful in averting conflict among those who disagreed about who should be caliph. They quickly fell into a passionate dispute on the matter, in a fundamental disagreement on the nature of authority — should it be hereditary, from Muhammad, or should it derive from the consent of the community, the umma? — which persists to this day in the division between Shi’i and Sunni Muslims. What made the dispute irresolvable was a third and indisputable factor in Muslim belief, the prohibition on Muslim fighting Muslim. War, to the Muslim, could only be jihad, a holy struggle with those who would not submit to revealed truth. War between those who had submitted was a blasphemy.
Yet some Muslims persisted in carrying their disagreements over the caliphate to the point of war, while divided Islam later came to wage outright struggle for territory. In the face of both developments many pious Muslims withdrew from secular life altogether. Arabs of the heroic tradition would not serve as soldiers because the diwan made it not worth their while, while most Muslim converts would not serve either, out of piety; and yet claims to the succession by dissidents, as well as the continuing imperative of jihad, made war unavoidable. The caliphate was driven to expedients. Quite early in the conquests Islam had made use of warriors who were not Arabs, converts who had attached themselves to an Arab master (later these converts inevitably formed the majority of Muslims).
Islam had also, by the same principle, made use of slaves, since they too were attached to Arab masters, and now it became a natural alternative to enlist slaves directly. How early is a matter of dispute, but certainly by the middle of the ninth century Islam instituted what was to be a unique policy in military recruitment: the acquisition as slaves of non-Muslim youths to be raised in the faith and trained as soldiers.33
These Mamelukes were recruited, almost exclusively, on Islam’s border with the great steppe of Central Asia, between the Caspian Sea and the mountains of Afghanistan (later also from the northern shore of the Black Sea), an area populated, when the Caliph al-Mu’tasim began systematic enlistment in the ninth century, by Turks. ‘No people in the world’, he is supposed to have said, ‘are braver, more numerous or more steadfast.’ The Turks were a tough lot, as modern Turks remain, and were themselves already on the march westward, in what was to become a tide of conquest even wider than that of the Arabs. They had other qualities to commend them to the caliphs. If they were not yet Muslims, they knew of Islam, because the steppe frontier was not a fixed barrier, but a diaphragm through which Turk and non-Turk raided and traded and, in the case of Turks, frequently emigrated to better themselves. The Islam they knew, moreover, retained its heroic character. The ghazis, frontier warriors, prosecuted the holy war in easy conscience, without any of that tendency to what Daniel Pipes has called ‘inwardness’, the alienation from the secular power of Islam, which Muslims in the heartlands displayed.34 But what was most admired in the Turks was less their personalities than their practical skills: mastery of the horse and of the techniques of fighting from horseback. The riding horse originated on the steppe; the Turks rode it as if part of themselves — legend had it that Turkish women conceived and gave birth on horseback — and they used with unmatched deadliness the mounted warrior’s weapons, the lance, the composite bow and the curved sabre (on which, in a forgotten tribute to the steppe warriors’ invincibility, the British general officer’s Mameluke sword is patterned). The Turks had their drawbacks. They were insatiable plunderers, by reaction from the extreme frugality of their life on the steppe, which yielded little but milk and meat, and the chance to plunder was a strong inducement to a Turk to accept enslavement; indeed, once the ‘Mameluke institution’ was a going concern, much of the supply of military slaves was undertaken by Turkish rulers and heads of families, whose willingness to curry favour and profit with the power of Islam by the trade was matched by the readiness of those they sold to take up a secure and respected career.
Most of the great Muslim states employed military slaves. By far the most important of them was the Abbasid caliphate of Egypt, restored there after the overthrow of the Baghdad caliphate by the Mongols in 1258, whose Mamelukes ruled the country under their own sultans from the middle of the thirteenth until the beginning of the sixteenth century. The Mamelukes had chosen the right side in a dynastic struggle. They held on to it because they won a truly decisive battle at Ain Jalut in 1260, which established them as the saviours of the Muslim and, indeed, much of the rest of the civilised world, their opponents being the same Mongols, kinsmen of the recently deceased Genghis Khan, who had dethroned and murdered the Baghdad caliph two years b
efore, and whom no other military power, not even the professional Christian warriors who had the Crusader kingdom in the Holy Land, had been able to withstand. What made the Mamelukes’ victory particularly remarkable was that many of the horsemen in the Mongol army were themselves Turks, the Mongols’ steppe neighbours, who were enthusiastically exploiting the chance to plunder that Genghis Khan’s break-out from Central Asia had brought; thus at Ain Jalut they were, as the Arab historian, Abu Shama, observed, ‘defeated and destroyed by men of their own kind’.35 It would be truer to say they were defeated by men of their own race, for upbringing and training made the Mamelukes soldiers of a very special kind indeed.
Most of the Mamelukes at Ain Jalut were Kipchak Turks from the north shore of the Black Sea (Baybars, the greatest of them, was a Kipchak), who had been sold as slaves in childhood or adolescence and brought to Cairo for their training. Secluded like novices in a monastic barracks, they were first taught the Koran, the code of Islamic law and the Arabic script; at manhood, they began instruction in the furusiyya, the system of riding, horsemastership and mounted skill-at-arms which underlay Mameluke prowess on the battlefield.36 The furusiyya, in its emphasis on uniting horse and rider, inculcating dexterity and precision in the handling of weapons from the saddle and fostering tactical cohesion among mounted comrades, bore close comparison with the schooling of men-at-arms in Christian Europe; indeed, to what extent chivalry as a code both of arms and honour was common to the knight of the Cross and the faris of the Crescent is a fascinating question of medieval military history.
