The Great Trek meets Shaka

OTL they missed him by a decade. Shaka was assassinated in 1828; the Trekkers came up against his much less competent successor, Dingane.

Even against Dingane, the Trekkers lost the first couple of battles. Isolated Boer units were cut off and wiped out at the Weenen Massacre, and then the first Boer attempt to penetrate Zululand in force was blocked and turned back at Italeni. However, the Boers made up for it all at Blood River, where they occupied a fortified position, built a laager out of wagons, and mowed down wave after wave of attacking Zulus until the impis finally wavered and broke.

Blood River cost Dingane his throne and his life; Zulu power went into eclipse for a generation, and though it would rise again in the 1860s, never again would the Zulus be a serious strategic rival to the Cape Colony.

Okay, so [handwave] let's give Shaka another dozen years of life. Say his mother doesn't die, so he doesn't go into the murderous depression that OTL led to his assassination. A more long-lived Shaka may have all sorts of knock-on effects, of course -- but let's focus on just one: how would Shaka have dealt with the threat of the Trekkers?

It's hard to imagine him doing worse than Dingane. Dingane's treachery with the Retief party accomplished little but to enrage the Boers. The Weenen attacks killed a fair number of the invaders, but were not followed up, allowing the Boers time to recover and summon reinforcements. And the Blood River battle was an unmitigated disaster. It didn't help that the Zulus under Dingane were divided, with a fair number following Dingane's mild-mannered brother Mpande. Mpande stayed neutral for much of the conflict, keeping thousands of potential fighters off the field, and then eventually allied with the victorious Boers. It's impossible to imagine anything like this happening under Shaka.

If Shaka is still alive, I see two possibilities. One is that a united Zulu nation manages to see off the Trekkers. I actually think this is the more likely outcome. Yes, the Boers had muskets and horses, and the Zulus did not. But the Zulus were disciplined fighters -- at the command level, considerably more disciplined than the endlessly quarrelsome Boers -- they outnumbered the Boers almost 50 to 1, and they were fighting on their home ground. If Shaka were alive, I suspect that Zulu advantages in numbers and discipline would be pressed relentlessly until the Trekkers gave up and went away. (Which would have been entirely possible -- the other branches of the Great Trek were busy opening up and settling vast lands to the north and northwest.) In this TL, Zululand stays Zulu, at least for a while, and the tiny settlement at Durban probably gets wiped out as well. There's no short-lived Boer Republic of Natal, and the Cape Colony does not expand to the east for at least another generation.

The alternate possibility is that Shaka ends up killing off the entire Zulu nation in a fruitless attempt to stop the Trek. I think this is unlikely, because I think Shaka could have beaten the Boers -- but if he couldn't, I think he'd keep trying until every Zulu impi had been decimated. In OTL the Zulu state was badly battered, but it survived and was able to attempt a strategic comeback. TTL, I think it might get smashed out so badly as to disintegrate, losing all political identity. (And possibly ethnic identity as well -- the Zulu "nation" was still quite young in the 1830s. It had been forged out of a cluster of related tribes under Dingiswayo just a generation or two earlier. OTL the process of amalgamating everyone into a "Zulu" identity wasn't really complete until the 1850s.)

Either way, we get a South Africa that looks quite dramatically different from OTL.

Thoughts?


Doug M.
 
If Shaka diverts the great trek from Zulu territory, and the British colonize it at a later date (I think British colonization would be inevitable, given the constraints of the OP), they may treat Zululand as a very separate entity for colonial administrative purposes, and possibly end up granting it independence as its own nation like Swaziland or Lesotho or Botswana.

If Shaka destroys the Great Trek, I imagine that the Boers will develop an (even greater) fear of Black Africans and be more cooperative with the British in order to gain their military support for protection.

That said, South African history is not my forte. Anyone with more knowledge have any thoughts?
 
I think diversion is the single most likely outcome. Say Shaka kills off an advance party or two, and the other Boers decide to head north to Transvaal instead.

OTL, Natal absorbed somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000 Boers by 1843. If most of these go to Transvaal instead, they'll join 25,000 to 30,000 Boers there. So Transvaal's white population is about 15% bigger.

Meanwhile, Natal stays empty of white settlement for at least another decade. Durban may cling to life as a small trading post, but it won't evolve into a town as iOTL.

Things now get blurry, because the details depend sensitively on what happens with the Zulus. If Shaka dies soon after seeing off the Trekkers, who takes over? If you look at the sequence of Zulu monarchs OTL -- Dingiswayo, Shaka, Dingane, Mpande and Cetishwayo -- these were five very different guys with very different personalities and policies. Dingiswayo was thoughtful and statesmanlike; Dingane was lazy and treacherous; Mpande was hapless; Shaka was Shaka. So, much depends on whether the Zulus get a king who is pacifist or aggressive, competent or foolish, and willing to trade away land or not.

(In the long run, of course, the Zulus are going to get steamrollered. But the devil is in the details.)



Doug M.
 
I think once it comes to that it becomes straight fiction because unless we are to pick a random princeling or obscure secondary leader from OTL, we'd have to make up our own character. But that's okay, it would certainly be interesting. The only thing is at that point we can't really extrapolate from history, we'd be controlling the destiny of the timeline depending on our intentions.
 
unless we are to pick a random princeling or obscure secondary leader from OTL, we'd have to make up our own character.

Well. First, the bad news. Zulu kings tended to have immense harems, and so could easily have dozens of sons. In the case of (for instance) Cetishwayo, this led to years of succession war; first as crown prince and then as king, Cetishwayo methodically hunted down and killed almost all his brothers.

Now the good news: Shaka was gay (1) and fathered no heirs. So if you're looking for an immediate successor to Shaka, you're basically looking at Shaka's half brothers. Since Shaka had already killed off a bunch of them, that narrows it down to Dingane and a few others.

I'm pretty sure this is a crackable problem, but it would require someone with more detailed knowledge of Zulu history. Are there any South Africans on this board?


Doug M.


(1) or something. We don't know for sure. But he had a harem full of gorgeous young women, collected from Zululand and all the adjacent tribes, and he left them strictly alone. The official explanation was that he considered an heir to be "too much trouble". In the context of early 19th century Zululand, this was pretty damn weird, and a less powerful personality would probably have taken a PR hit. In Shaka's case, it just fed into his image of being superhumanly focused on ruling and war.
 
Now the good news: Shaka was gay (1) and fathered no heirs. So if you're looking for an immediate successor to Shaka, you're basically looking at Shaka's half brothers. Since Shaka had already killed off a bunch of them, that narrows it down to Dingane and a few others.

If you've got Shaka hanging on until the late 1830's, then it's worth remembering that Cetshwayo was born in 1826 and Zulus traditionally reach adulthood at puberty. Some scenario whereby Shaka kills or exiles Mpande and adopts Cetshwayo as his heir is by no means wildly improbable I would have thought. Cetshwayo also had an older brother, Omtonga, who seems to be chiefly remembered as an unsuccessful rival to the throne, but who might have a better chance if Cetshwayo is thought of as too young and Shaka's half brothers have been removed from the picture.
 
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