The Fortunes of Africa: A 5,000 Year History of Wealth, Greed and Endeavour

by Martin Meredith

  He said he hoped that the British government would ‘allow us to govern ourselves without its interference in future’. To forestall British concerns, he disclaimed all practice of slavery, but added, ‘It is our determination to maintain such regulations as may suppress crime, and preserve proper relations between master and servant.’

  The first group of ‘emigrants’, as they were called, crossed the Orange River drifts at the end of 1835, heading northwards in their ox-drawn wagons, accompanied by their servants, cattle and sheep and carrying with them an accumulation of moveable property – agricultural implements, domestic tools, small pieces of furniture, Bibles, guns and bullet moulds, precious items of silver and porcelain, and supplies of tobacco, coffee and sugar. By 1840, some 6,000 emigrants, about one-tenth of the white population of the Cape Colony, had followed in their wake. Along the way, they met formidable opposition.

  23

  THE PEOPLE OF THE HEAVENS

  Between the Drakensberg mountains to the west and the Indian Ocean coast to the east lies a fertile region of mighty rivers, wide valleys, open grasslands and steep hills that has been the homeland of the northern Nguni for centuries. Until the end of the eighteenth century, the Nguni there lived in scattered settlements attached to small chiefdoms with leaders who tended to exercise light authority. They were mainly pastoralists with a deep reverence for cattle. Cattle were of paramount importance not only as a source of milk, meat and hides but as a medium of exchange and a measure of a tribesman’s wealth. As the price of a bride was paid in cattle, without cattle there could be no marriage. Moreover, the principal means of propitiating ancestral spirits were through the sacrifice of cattle. Significant events such as funerals were marked by their slaughter. The Nguni language contained hundreds of terms used to distinguish the visible attributes of cattle.

  One of the earliest descriptions of Nguni lifestyle came from crew members of a wrecked Dutch ship, the Stavenisse, who spent nearly three years stranded on the coast of modern Natal in the 1680s. They were subsequently interviewed by a Dutch official in Cape Town who reported details about the local inhabitants to VOC headquarters in Amsterdam. ‘In their intercourse with each other they are very civil, polite and talkative, saluting each other, whether young or old, male or female, whenever they meet; asking whence they came, and whither they are going, what is their news, and whether they have learned any new dances or songs.’

  As the population of northern Nguniland expanded, however, the character of the chiefdoms there began to change. Competition over pastures, land and hunting grounds led stronger chiefdoms to absorb weaker ones. Rival clans also sought to gain control of the lucrative trade in ivory with Portuguese traders based at Delagoa Bay. To reinforce their authority, leading chiefs used customary initiation rites as a basis for military organisation, forming age-groups of young men into armed regiments known as amabutho, rewarding them with cattle and other booty. In the early years of the nineteenth century, conflicts over cattle and land were exacerbated by the effects of a major drought.

  By the 1810s, two principal kingdoms had emerged among the northern Nguni: the Ndwandwe under Zwide to the north-west, and the Mthethwa under Dingiswayo to the south-east. What followed was a series of wars for supremacy that sent shockwaves around southern Africa. This upheaval later became known in the Nguni language as the mfecane or ‘the crushing’.

  In 1817, the Ndwandwe pushed southwards in force, defeated the Mthethwa army and killed Dingiswayo. All that stood in the way of Ndwandwe dominance over the whole region was a small Zulu chiefdom on the White Mfolozi River, which had formed part of the Mthethwa confederation.

  The Zulu leader, Shaka kaSenzangakhona, had once served as a commander in Dingiswayo’s iziCwe regiment, gaining a reputation both for courage and for innovative thinking. With Dingiswayo’s help, he had succeeded to the Zulu chieftaincy in 1816 at the age of about twenty-nine, after arranging for the murder of a half-brother who was the designated heir. Shaka’s Zulu clan numbered no more than a few thousand but he swiftly set about subduing neighbouring clans and enlarging the size of his own army. His regiments were subjected to tough discipline, equipped with short stabbing spears instead of traditional long throwing-spears, trained to fight at close quarters and taught to use speed, surprise and new battle tactics. In 1819, he succeeded in driving the Ndwandwe northwards across the Pongola River. With the collapse of first the Mthethwa kingdom and then the Ndwandwe kingdom, Shaka was able to set up his own Zulu kingdom, absorbing chiefdoms that stretched from the Pongola River in the north to the Tugela River in the south.

  His amabutho regiments became the mainstay of the Zulu kingdom. Young men were conscripted for service in a standing army, organised in age-regiments stationed at strategic points, prohibited from marriage and segregated from the rest of the Zulu population. Young women were inducted into their own regiments. Each regiment adopted its own song, war cry and means of identification to foster corporate morale. They were used to punish any sign of resistance to Shaka’s rule. Whole villages were wiped out for failing to submit to him. As well as military duties, the regiments were used as a labour force: men herded the king’s cattle and hunted for ivory; women cultivated the king’s fields. Only after years of active service did Shaka authorise regiments to disband and its members to marry and set up their own homesteads. Even then they still remained liable to be called up for military duty. Shaka was said to have at his disposal as many as 40,000 men.

  The regimental system helped to break down local identities and to develop a sense of cohesion among disparate chieftaincies. To foster loyalty to the state, Shaka also drew on customary Nguni festivals and rituals. His capital, kwaBulawayo, became the setting for spectacular military displays, for competitions, dances and executions. Often on a whim, Shaka would pronounce the death sentence of victims with the words: ‘kill the wizards’. His rule depended not just on military might but on the use of terror. Though deep-seated divisions persisted, the kingdom’s population came to regard themselves increasingly as ‘Zulu’, an Nguni term for the sky or the heavens. According to Shaka, ‘the People of the Heavens’ shared a common identity, owing him their allegiance.

  From the Zulu heartland, Shaka’s impis launched predatory raids on neighbouring territories, seizing cattle and other booty and causing widespread havoc. They plundered south of the Tugela River, precipitating waves of refugees into Mpondo territory further south. To the west, they forced the Hlubi under Mpangazitha and the Ngwane under Matiwane to retreat from the foothills of the Drakensberg and move over the escarpment into the highveld beyond.

  The turmoil spread to small Sotho chiefdoms in the eastern highveld. In 1822, the Hlubi chief Mpangazitha attacked the Tlokwa, seizing large herds of cattle. The Tlokwa, in turn, raided neighbouring Sotho clans to rebuild their herds. In the midst of a prolonged drought, rival groups competed for territory along the well-watered upper reaches of the Caledon valley. Under siege from the Tlokwa in 1824, Moshoeshoe, the senior son of a Kwena village headman, led a small band of followers sixty miles southwards down the valley. After displacing a local chief, Moshoeshoe set up headquarters on a flat-topped mountain on the southern side of the Caledon River named Thaba Bosiu. It was an impregnable base with good pastures and water supply from which he was able to ward off a series of aggressors and collect an ever increasing following.

  Other Sotho groups, dislocated from the eastern highveld, headed westwards, colliding with Tswana clans in the western highveld. Attacked by the Tlokwa in 1823, a Fokeng leader, Sebetwane, is said to have told his followers:

  My masters, you see that the world is tumbling about our ears. We and other people have been driven from our ancestral homes, our cattle seized, our brothers and sons killed, our wives and daughters ravished, our children starved. War has been forced upon us, tribe against tribe. We shall be eaten up one by one. Our fathers taught us khotso ke nala – peace is prosperity – but today there is no peace, no prosperity! What are we to do? M
y masters, this is my word: Let us march! Let us take our wives and children and cattle, and go forth to seek some land where we may dwell in tranquillity.

  Travelling westwards, Sebetwane launched an audacious attack on the Ngwaketse, a prosperous Tswana chiefdom to the east of the Marico River, killing its venerable leader Makaba II. Similar clashes occurred throughout the western highveld.

  Another upheaval emanating from the rise of the Zulu kingdom began when one of Shaka’s minor allies, Mzilikazi, chief of a branch of the Khumalo living near the Black Mfolozi River, fell out of the king’s favour and, to avoid reprisals, led the core of his fighting regiment on to the highveld. Mzilikazi was a grandson of the Ndwandwe king, Zwide, who had changed his allegiance to Shaka after the Ndwandwe’s defeat in 1818. The dispute between them was said to have occurred after Mzilikazi failed to hand over booty he had obtained after raiding a Sotho clan in 1820.

  Mzilikazi carved out a new kingdom for himself between the Vaal and Limpopo rivers, conquering several Sotho and Tswana chiefdoms, incorporating their followers into his own ranks and taking in as well a multitude of highveld refugees seeking safety. Mzilikazi called his people ‘Zulu’. But in the seSotho language, they were referred to as Matabele, or ‘strangers’, a name that the Khumalo adopted for themselves as ‘amaNdebele’. Mzilikazi’s main base in the 1820s was sited on the Apies River in the Magaliesberg hills (near modern Pretoria) from where he maintained control through a network of amabutho regiments stationed in outlying camps on the perimeter of his kingdom. Neighbouring chiefdoms were required to offer tribute or suffer punitive raids. Mzilikazi’s impis raided in all directions, northwards across the Limpopo into Shona territory, westwards against the Tswana, eastwards against the Pedi, and as far south as the Caledon River valley, acquiring vast herds of cattle.

  Several other states arose out of the mfecane. In mountainous territory north-west of kwaZulu, a Dlamini chief named Sobhuza, who had retreated from his homeland near the Pongola River, formed a new kingdom incorporating Sotho as well as Nguni groups; it later became known as Swaziland, named after his son and heir Mswati. Further north, in the Lower Limpopo region, a former Ndwandwe general, Soshangane, used his regiments to establish a kingdom in Gazaland, absorbing the Tsonga there and exacting tribute from Portuguese posts at Delagoa Bay and Sofala. Another former Ndwandwe general, Zwangendaba, took his ‘Ngoni’ regiments across the Limpopo, blazed a trail of conquest across the Zimbabwe plateau, annihilating the Rozwi dynasty there, and then crossed the Zambezi, raiding territory as far north as Lake Nyasa and Lake Tanganyika, more than a thousand miles from his homeland.

  Back in kwaZulu, Shaka was confronted by a new phenomenon. In 1824, a small group of white adventurers from the Cape landed on the coast about 120 miles south of kwaBulawayo, hoping to obtain ivory and hides. Led by a former Royal Navy officer, Francis Farewell, they built a makeshift settlement on the edge of a great natural bay with deep channels that they called Port Natal. Shaka sent spies to keep watch on their activities and eventually agreed to their request for a meeting. Escorted to kwaBulawayo, the traders were impressed by what they found. The royal kraal was spread across the slopes of a hillside, surrounded by a perfect circle of warrior huts measuring some three miles in circumference. At the centre stood a vast cattle enclosure filled with the ranks of warriors drawn up in formation. To mark their arrival, Shaka laid on a display of military might and a parade of royal herds, each bred to a single colour.

  After two weeks of deliberation, Shaka gave his approval for the traders to remain in Port Natal. He showed an interest in their guns; and he calculated that they might provide a conduit to the British authorities in the Cape that he could turn to his advantage in the intrigues and plotting that swirled around his court. He granted them use of a large tranche of land around Port Natal, treating them in similar fashion to minor chiefs in the outlying districts of his kingdom, expecting due deference and tribute in return.

  Despite Shaka’s imprimatur, the position of the traders remained precarious. Arriving in Port Natal in 1825 as a nine-year-old apprentice, Charles Maclean found no more than a rudimentary outpost. Farewell’s ‘fort’, he recalled, was a ‘very primitive, rude looking structure’ situated on the north side of the bay (in what is now the centre of the business district of modern Durban). It consisted of a quadrangular palisaded enclosure, protecting a few wattle-and-daub buildings. He described the occupants of the fort as a ‘motley group’ of whites, Khoikhoi and Bantu. The Bantu were naked; the others were dressed in a variety of tattered clothes. Of the three groups, said Maclean, the Bantu certainly had ‘the advantage of appearance’. White traders were already assimilated into local culture, taking wives and concubines from local people after making the appropriate payment of ilobolo, and acting as petty chiefs. But the volume of trade they gained fell far short of expectations. When they sought to obtain the involvement of British authorities in their venture, hoisting the Union flag and sending petitions for annexation to the Cape, they were told bluntly that they were on their own.

  Shaka’s own position was far from secure. Within the ruling house, there were several prominent figures who harboured grievances over his murderous route to power. He felt a constant need to demonstrate his power by ordering executions. He was also concerned to conceal any sign of age and to cultivate a youthful, vigorous appearance. He instructed one of the Port Natal traders to obtain jars of Rowland’s Macassar Oil which he had been told had the effect of turning grey hair black. A king, he explained, ‘must neither have wrinkles, nor grey hairs, as they are distinguishing marks of disqualification for becoming a monarch of warlike people’.

  In 1824, he was the target of an assassination attempt. During a dance, he was stabbed in the side but managed to pull out the spear himself, recovered and ordered reprisals. In 1827, the death of his mother prompted another round of frenetic killing during which Shaka sought to eliminate opponents. Hoping to bolster his standing, he sent the army southwards on a massive raid deep into Mpondoland, causing alarm as far away as the Cape. No sooner had the army returned than Shaka ordered a punitive expedition against his old Ndwandwe rival Soshangane based far to the north in Gazaland. While his loyal contingents were away, royal plotters struck. On 24 September 1828, two of his half-brothers, Dingane and Mhlangana, stabbed Shaka to death.

  The Zulu kingdom, however, held intact. After arranging for Mhlangana’s murder, Dingane gained the throne. Anxious to make peace in the region, he sent messengers out to independent rulers with presents of cattle and invitations to attend his coronation. In a message to the British authorities in the Cape Colony, he indicated his interest in developing trade and asked about the possibility of acquiring the services of a missionary.

  24

  REPUBLICS ON THE HIGHVELD

  The small bands of Boer emigrants crossing the Orange River drifts were thus entering a land in turmoil, torn apart by warring clans and awash with refugees fleeing in all directions. Even the frontier region of Transorangia, beyond the Cape border, was in disarray. It had been colonised by groups of mixed-race descendants from the Cape Colony who proudly called themselves ‘Bastaards’. They spoke the taal, possessed guns and horses and pursued a frontier lifestyle of raising cattle, hunting and trading in ivory and hides. Anxious to gain recognition as a Christian community, they had invited the London Missionary Society to set up a station at their capital at Klaarwater. At the behest of the missionaries, they had agreed to change their name to Griqua and to rename their capital Griquatown.

  The Griqua dynasties of Transorangia attracted an assortment of followers: Kora Khoikhoi, Tswana-speaking Tlaping, renegade whites, and criminals, convicts and slaves on the run from the Cape. Missionaries endeavoured to assist their political development by drawing up a constitution. But the Griquas were frequently racked by leadership disputes. One group moved to the Harts River, fifty miles away from Griquatown, adopted the name ‘Hartenaars’, began dealing in arms and powder, and raided th
e local population for cattle and ‘apprentices’. Another group, the ‘Bergenaars’, broke away to plunder the Caledon valley. Griqua and Kora commandos also mounted raids as far north as the Magaliesberg hills, prompting Mzilikazi in 1833 to move his headquarters westwards to Mosega on the Marico River.

  A Cape frontier official, Gideon Joubert, was pessimistic about the likely fate of the emigrants. ‘I imagine that an entire ruin will soon fall upon these people,’ he reported to the Cape authorities, ‘and those who are not destroyed will return to the colony or near to its boundaries or they will in time become as uncivilized as the heathens.’ The Dutch Reformed Church was critical of the emigrants, warning about the ‘departure into the desert, without a Moses or Aaron’ by people looking for a ‘Canaan’ without having been given a ‘promise or direction’; and it refused to appoint a predikant. The British authorities too opposed the exodus, fearful that it would cause yet more wars in the interior requiring their intervention. But they had no means to stop it.

  Despite the risks they faced, the emigrants found it difficult to establish common leadership. Each group consisted of a handful of families with their own leader – the Potgieter party; the Maritz party; the Cilliers party. Some decided to obtain land from the Griquas; some pressed on to the Vaal River; others aimed to find a way to reach the verdant lands on the eastern side of the Drakensberg. Divisions, schisms, squabbles and personal animosities were commonplace from the start.