The Lion Ascendant: A Zulu TL

[Ceranthor]

This is a third redux of the Zulu TL that I started, restarted, and then abandoned once I realized that I didn't know jack about where I was going to proceed or how I would go about doing it. My lack of certainty and my inability to properly research the subject led to that project being cancelled, but I decided I love the Zulus too much to let the idea go to waste. So, owing to Bantu badassery and this site's complete lack of African TL's, I'm going for one more try. This, hopefully, will the last one.

The POD is that Shaka Zulu survives the assassination attempt that ended in his death OTL, allowing him to regain his sanity(which he previously lost) and lead the Zulu people to further greatness. This isn't a Zulu-wank, but, owing to better leadership, they will perform far better against the British, Boers, and Portuguese than they did OTL.

Finally, I'm going to begin by reposting my prologue to the TL, which I posted here a month or so earlier. It'll be immediately followed up by an actual update. Keep in mind I'm going to use a bunch of different perspectives when writing my chapters; some are going to be presented in an expository format, while others(like the subsequent prologue) will be written as prose.

So, then, here we go!

Prologue: The Lion Unconquered

The royal kraal at kwaDukuza, Zululand
22 September 1828

Oh spirits, give me release, prayed the king, his head cradled in his hands. Oh spirits, oh mother, oh God of the whites, give me freedom, show me the light, free me, free me, free me!

That last thought he roared out loud and the sound struck out at the darkness of the kraal, filling it with forty years of rage and pain and confusion, echoing from the mud walls and the beaded pillars and hitting him in the ears, making him snarl in pain. His face was beaded with sweat; his eyes were wide and bloodshot; his breathing was short, ragged, painful, and deep in his chest he felt as if his heart were about to explode. “I’m not mad,” he muttered to himself. The kraal seemed unbearably hot. “I’m not mad I’m not mad I’m not mad. Mother, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, it wasn’t my fault…”

He had been going on like this for the past few hours. His bodyguards had stood through it for a while, until the king could bear it no longer and buried his battle-ax in the nearest one’s skull. The other one he had dismissed with a howled curse, and that man had left wordlessly, showing no emotion, and saluting the king as he crawled out of the low door. Had the man failed to do any of those things the king would have killed him as well. He had felt rage before, and hatred. Those things were not unfamiliar to him. But this…this burning feeling, the way his chest wanted to overflow and burst, as if all the men and women he had ever killed were grappling at his heart, seeking to grasp it and rip it out with their hands; this was like nothing he had ever felt before, something that overwhelmed him. His rage he could control; his pain he had made into a weapon. But this…this could not be harnessed, and the only respite, temporary as it was, was in spilling blood.

The slain guardsman had not been removed from the kraal floor. He lay in a pool of blood; his head was a caved-in ruin and his brains had spilled from the remains of his skull. The man had lost control of his bowels at the moment of his death, and in his last throes he had shat his loincloth, greasing the floor with filth. His corpse stank and his blood stank and his excrement stank. Once upon a time, those things would have pleasured the king, made him smile his great white smile, made his eyes gleam as he saw the revulsion of the whites and the terror of his own people. Now they disgusted him, made him want to vomit and flee from the hut and leap into the river and cleanse himself as the current dragged him under and dashed him against the rocks. And at the same time he wanted to leap up with his axe in hand and slaughter everyone in this hovel, and stand up great and tall before his people and order his soldiers to go out and kill, until the world itself was sundered and he was the last living man on earth.

“I am mad,” the king said. The words shocked him, and he jumped to his feet, grabbing his ax and his long shield. The darkness of the kraal faced him, a wall of black that seemed to stretch a thousand miles between him and the low half-circle door, the portal that would lead him out into the cold starlit night, where there was light, where there were his soldiers and his people and his land stretching out before him until the world became the sea, which flowed unhindered until it reached the far-off land of the white men. There lay his birthright, his destiny, the kingdom he had carved from the bare earth with his ax and his spear and his own will, so close, so far, a thousand miles of burning darkness between the king and the thing he desired the most. All he had to do was cross it.

He couldn’t do it. He sank to his knees and exhaled deeply, and his eyes began to sting. The king smashed a fist into the earth, and gritted his teeth until everything poured out at once and water started to come from his eyes, slowly at first, then faster and faster until the king’s body shook with his sorrow and he began to sob like a child.

The king had never cried. He couldn’t cry. Not when the assassin had nearly killed him, and he felt the life seeping from his soul. Not even when his mother died. He had screamed then, yes, screamed and howled until he thought his lungs would burst. He had never bawled like this, not even at the moment of his birth, though he had roared and slapped his midwife across the face. This was crying, weeping, sobbing, where he lost all control and lay against the floor, heedless of the foetid air, of the stink of the dead guardsman, of even the darkness that seemed to drown him; his rage and his guilt and his madness and his hate all seemed to merge into this tide of sorrow that poured from his eyes and made him convulse, that blew away all thought and made him something new, something strange, something human. “I’m sorry,” he said, choking on his own voice. “Mother Nandi, Dingiswayo, Fynn, I’m sorry, I’m so so sorry.”

He had killed so many. His mentor, the old paramount king who had tried to teach him about mercy. His friend, the white doctor from the west, who he had driven away to die in some distant land. His own mother, who he had struck after she had hid his child from him, a bastard being, treachery given human form. He had killed his own mother. The king knew this, had come to terms with this, had told himself that she too was a traitor, that it was the whites and the spirits and his brothers who were all conspiring to bring betrayal into his family and end his life. Did that excuse this, this most horrific of crimes? Matricide, the whites would have called it. He had killed his own mother.

Was this what he had fallen to? His mother, the only woman who he had ever loved back, who had been with him forever, through poverty and hardship, when the tribes of the land would spit on them both and turn them out into the blazing veld to suffer. “Bastard,” they would call him. “Harlot,” they would call his mother. The first he could tolerate, but the second filled him with a rage that was so blinding that upon hearing it he would storm out, find the offender, and beat him until his bones were broken and he was near death. That always would bring out the wrath of the chief, and he would cast them out, telling them never to return. Even though it was always the king’s fault, his mother would never get angry at him. “You are the son of the heavens,” she would tell him. “They are jealous of you, and of me, so they hate us. Someday you will return, and you’ll make them pay for what they have done to us.”

And so he did. The king had apprenticed himself to old Dingiswayo, the lord of the south, and with that great chief’s patronage he had made himself a king in full. He had recruited men and trained them until they became unbeatable on the battlefield. Then he had gone to every tribe that spited his mother, and burned them out of existence. “See, mother,” he cried, as Makedama of the Langeni was raised into the air, screaming as a stake was ripped through his rectum. “This is what I’ve done for you. I’ve made them pay, as you said.” And when he told her of this, she had replied, “I am pleased, my son. I knew you’d make me proud.”

But he hadn’t. He betrayed her as he thought she had betrayed him, and he had killed her. She said so to him as she lay dying in the royal kraal, a hundred miles away. The king had known wounds in battle, felt the cold steel of an assegai blade passing through his flesh and seen his blood fall in ribbons on the ground. But that had hurt more than any spear thrust, and after his mother had passed into the realm of their ancestors he had emerged from the hut and screamed. And then his pain possessed him; he ordered his men to kill without reason, not just men, but women, children, cats, even cattle, mutilating she-cows so that their calves would know what it felt like to lose a mother.

What am I? he thought. What have I done? Why, why, why did I do this?

I am not a man. I am not the great Sigidi, he-who-fights-like-a-million, the conqueror of nations, the Great Bull Elephant. I am not a warrior, nor am I a king. I am Shaka, son of Nandi, and I am a murderer.

There came the sound of shuffling feet and slithering bulk. For a moment Shaka’s eyes widened a fraction; slowly, cautiously, he lifted himself from the ground, and wrapped his fingers around his ax. “Who goes?” he asked, suspicious.

“It is I, my brother,” came a voice from the darkness.

“And I, my brother.” This one was deeper.

“And I, my king,” said the last. His voice quavered, and he sounded as if he would rather be anywhere but here.

My father’s sons. And my chief minister. Shaka almost laughed. Is this how I am to die, killed by traitors? Oh, mother, I was groping in the dark, grasping the wrong people. And now here comes the moment of my death, pierced by spears that come out of the shadows.

“Dingane,” he said. “Mhlangana. Mbopa. To what do I owe this pleasure? What do my most loyal of friends want from me at this hour?”

It was Mbopa who answered him. The minister’s voice shook with fear; his fingers kept running up and down the blade of his assegai, and even through the murky darkness of the hut Shaka could see him straining to keep from pissing himself. “My king…my king. We have a petition to make.”

“The people suffer, my brother.” This was Mhlangana, tall, strong, his voice a low baritone. He edged forward, and his spear twinkled in the gloom. “They have endured much. Executions, torture, terror…it must end, my brother. We will make it end, here, now.”

“We share the same father, nkosi,” Dingane said. His fat bulk shone with sweat, and he licked his lips as he smeared filth onto the tip of his assegai blade. “But even kinslaying is preferable to enduring this. It ends here. For Sigujana, the brother you killed. For Senzangakhona, the father you poisoned.

For Nandi, the mother you murdered.”

“For Nandi,” the three said, and they lunged forward as one.

But Shaka wasn’t there. He twisted aside, and a deathly calm stole over him. He raised his axe and said to his brothers, “There will come a day when I will die, when my sins weigh down on me and I finally answer for my crimes. But it will not be today. Today, my brothers, I will kill one last time. And tomorrow, I will atone for what I have done.”

And then he loosed a battle howl that made Mbopa piss himself, and with a roar of “Namp’ amaZulu!” he attacked his assassins. Mhlangana dodged a swipe of Shaka’s axe and lunged forward with his spear; Shaka leaped into the air so that it only cut his foot, and swung his fist into his brother’s face. Mhlangana fell hard, his nose broken, and Dingane and Mbopa swiveled to face the king. They saw nothing. Black shadows surrounded them, and the heat choked their senses. They were blind and deaf and blood, piss and shit filled the air and choked their nostrils.

Mbopa screamed incoherently and charged into the darkness. He stumbled and cold steel met his throat. He screamed once more, and then there were sounds of butchery. Blood flew through the air; he reeled away and fell, and his head rolled away from the ruin of his neck.

Dingane was alone in the dark. He licked his lips and fell into a fighting crouch; sweat beaded his fat skin, and his stomach churned, making him want to vomit. His eyes scanned this way and that, watching for the slightest movement. A flicker from the right, a man stumbling forward to kill him; he shrieked and lunged with his befouled assegai, slicing through flesh, through blood, through bone. There came a burbling groan and inside Dingane crowed. He had done it! He had killed the tyrant!

But then in his ear came a whisper, “Kinslaying’s a crime, brother, or didn’t you know?” And as Dingane looked to see Mhlangana sliding off the blade of his spear, Shaka’s foot caught his ankle and pulled, bringing him crashing down to the ground. Then his brother was straddling him, sitting on his chest, wrapping his hands around his throat and squeezing with fingers of iron. Dingane sputtered; his eyes became tinged with white, and he began to suffocate. All he could see was Shaka’s face, broad, black, terrifyingly calm, and he pawed at the fingers that dug deep into his gullet, reaching, straining for just a slip of air. “I’m the king,” Dingane heard him say. “And I punish those who break the laws of the land, or did you not know, my brother?”

Dingane grew frantic; he felt himself begin to panic, thrashing, clawing, a wordless airless scream straining to escape from his throat. Shaka’s fingers clamped down and the world twisted before his eyes. His tongue became flaccid in his mouth; his lips dried, and his brain seemed to explode. Black despair at his heart and he grasped weakly at his brother’s face.
And then, as the world turned inside out, the light fled from his eyes and he died.

Shaka felt Dingane’s heartbeat cease, and he rose up quickly, staring at the body, disbelieving. “I killed my mother,” he said to himself, his voice low, distant, faraway. “I killed my father. So, then, why shouldn’t I kill you, my brothers?”

The king stood there, in the stinking, boiling hut, as his brothers rotted on the floor, their blood seeping into the earth of the kraal. Sudden revulsion grasped at him and he recoiled from Dingane’s corpse; he staggered away from the blue-faced body and made for the door of the kraal. As he fled through the darkness, names assaulted him. Dingane, Mhlangana, Mbopa, Dingiswayo, paramount king of the Mtetwas. The smell of death roiled in his nostrils as he remembered them. Zwide, king of the Ndwandwes, Ntombazi, mother of Zwide, Makedama of the Langeni, Sigujana, king of the Zulus. Senzangakhona, king of the Zulus. Nandi, mother of Shaka.

The opening lay a foot before him. With a snarl of disgust, his skin clammy with sweat, his hands washed with blood and pulped flesh, Shaka fell on his hands and knees and scrambled out of the kraal. Cool air washed over him like a kiss. The filth fell from his skin, and he felt the wind blowing out of the south, coming from the sea, touching him, caressing him, washing away the stench that clung to him like a cloak.

Tomorrow, I will atone for what I have done. He had believed those words when he said them. Were they true? Could he erase his sins? Was it even possible, for one who had murdered so many as he? Shaka had built his nations on the skulls of innocents, on the impaled corpses of his enemies, on the smoking ashes of the villages that had denied his mother sanctuary. Perhaps he could rebuild them, restore dignity to his people, make his nation one worth living in.

Shaka stood up and the hut seemed to dissolve behind him. He gazed into the sky; the eastern horizon was tinged with red and gold, and the edge of the night had begun to lighten. Above him stretched starlit darkness, a full white moon falling into the sea as the sun prepared to make its leap into the sky.

And as the new day broke, washing away the impurities of the old, Shaka stepped out into the open and smiled.

 

[Ceranthor]

Update the First: Boetha

A Bloody Beginning

“Fie! Fie upon the witches who hold us in their grip! Fie upon the sangomas, who have bound our king within the great kraal with their devilry! Fie upon the whites, who have sent their assassins to slaughter our Mighty Lion! Do they think that we are monkeys, to be prodded and played with at their whim? No! We are Zulus, the sons of the heavens, and we will teach these creatures what we do to those who betray us!”
​

-Nomxamamba, royal praise singer to the house of Zulu
​

“The attempt on Shaka’s life set off a firestorm of dissent amongst the Zulu population. Already irritated by years of forced celibacy, constant military campaigning, and random acts of state-sponsored murder, the Zulu people, who had been long held in check by the assegais of Shaka’s soldiers, decided to use the assassination attempt as an excuse to vent their suppressed energies. They did this through the outlet of slaughter; by the time the dust settled and the impis restored order throughout kwaZulu, some thirty thousand people lay dead, killed either by the spears of their neighbors or through the ravages of famine. For the period of one year, gangs, cattle thieves, and angry chieftains ran wild throughout the region, and the Zulu state almost ceased to exist.

It was the day after the assassination attempt that caused kwaZulu to founder into a frenzy of wanton slaughter. Early that morning, Shaka presented himself to his retainers and the villagers of kwaDukuza*, and bathed before them, as was his habit. He then informed them that his brothers and one of his prime ministers had almost killed him the previous night; following the ensuing consternation, he ordered that the bodies be dragged out and given decent burials. After that, he himself retreated to the kraal and stayed there for the next three days.

Rumors abounded that the king was bewitched, that the witch-doctors or the neighboring Englishmen had put some kind of spell on him, or even that they had paid his brothers to murder him. The entire kraal was thrown into confusion; no one knew what to do, or where to go, or how best to try and approach their ruler, who had locked himself inside his rondavel. His commands regarding his brothers were obeyed; Dingane and Mhlangana were given the customary shrouding and entombment, and a bewildered regimental captain performed the necessary burial rituals. Mbopa’s corpse was not given similar respect. The train of men sent to care for his body lost interest and dumped the corpse on the outlying veld; they made a half-hearted attempt at cremating him, and instead ended up cooking the dead body, which then became a meal for the vultures and hyenas.

As the day lengthened, tensions began to boil throughout the kraal, as village elders, ministers, and regimental leaders quarreled and bickered over how best to handle the situation. Before, only Shaka’s authority had kept them from outright violence; without his presence, they had free reign to fight in earnest. The only remnant of the king’s authority was the presence of his uFasimba bodyguards, who had surrounded his rondavel and barred it from outside entry.

The situation worsened when Nomxamamba, Shaka’s praise singer and confidante, attempted to enter the hut; the uFasimba only grudgingly allowed him access to their king, who did not take kindly to the intrusion. Nomxamamba was dragged out by the guardsmen and deposited outside the gates of the kraal. The praise singer, who was a fanatical follower of his king, was highly insulted; and at the peak of his rage, he began a rumor that would cause the deaths of thousands.

To an enraptured crowd he howled that the uFasimba and the resident witch-doctors were holding the king hostage, and that they were both in pay of a network of traitors who hoped to unseat Shaka and destabilize the realm. This caused a mass uproar; the entire populace of kwaDukuza took up torches and axes and burned down the lodges of the witch-doctors; and they then turned towards the royal guardsmen. Two of the uFasimba were dragged down and killed, but the other forty picked up their clubs and struck at the mob until it subsided. The rioters were angrily told to flee kwaDukuza; for when the king reappeared, he would be told of the kraal’s disobedience, and there would a frightful retribution.

The commoners took this to heart. Some four thousand people packed up their belongings and took to the hills, while another two thousand made for nearby Port Natal, which played home to kwaZulu’s European traders and explorers. The settlement already acted as a refuge for nearly three thousand of Shaka’s would-be victims, and the new arrivals transformed the place into a massive, sprawling collection of kraals that would later be remembered as kwaZulu’s first slum. The remaining nine thousand, however, decided to turn their spears against each other. Eighty were killed in the ensuing scrum, and another two hundred would die of starvation and neglect after their rondavels were burned and they were forced out onto the bare veld.

Ironically, it was Nomxamamba who restored order again. Claiming to be receiving prophetic messages from the ancestors, the praise singer told his audience that if every man and boy bearing the names of Dingane or Mhlangana were to be slain, and Mbopa’s home tribe driven from kwaZulu, then Shaka could be freed from his imprisonment by evil spirits. He also claimed that if all “traitors” were to be found and impaled, then the ancestors would fatten every cow in the kingdom, and grant the Zulus a hundred victories against the Ndebele and the Shangaan, who were their mortal enemies.

The populace of kwaDukuza fell to his decrees with terrifying zeal. The resident Dinganes and Mhlanganas (and one Mbopa, who had been circumcised as a child and thus mistrusted by everybody) were found out, beaten with knobkerries, and then impaled on long stakes. The Zulus then took to rampaging around the countryside; some would form armed gangs and launch attacks on innocent kraals for the purpose of slaughter, while others would aim to escape the ensuing chaos by raiding into the territories of neighboring tribes. Later on, another group would decide to interpret the singer’s command of “execute the traitors” as an invocation to attack Port Natal, which they would then proceed to put to the sack.

It is necessary to analyze the previous situation in kwaZulu to understand why the general population was so apt to riot and kill. Shaka himself was largely to blame for the psychological ruination of his people; while he was upheld as a god-figure by most of the Zulus; his regime was centered around constant, random murder, where not a day would go by without the king ordering an execution. Shaka cared little for the lives of his people; he would command his uFasimba to kill and impale at a whim, and he gave his witch-doctors a free license to conduct “smelling-outs”, where men and women could be seized at random and impaled on suspicion of practicing witchcraft. Many of his military commanders, who were deemed too ambitious or successful, lost their lives in this manner. Furthermore, Shaka’s history of mental instability had become terminal in recent years, causing him to go from senseless killing to committing truly abhorrent atrocities. In 1827, his lust for immortality caused him to slice open several pregnant women for the purpose of studying their unborn fetuses, which he thought held the secret to eternal life. Following the death of his mother Nandi later that year, he ordered the mass slaughter of she-cows, so that their calves would know what losing a mother felt like; he also ordered the bludgeoning of more than a thousand serving-girls to accompany Nandi into the afterlife. Shaka then proceeded to enact a policy that forbade his subjects from drinking milk or planting grain(which was tantamount to forced starvation), and made it illegal on pain of death for couples to copulate in the year following his mother’s death. While earlier Shaka had been revered as a demigod, his later tyranny destroyed any lasting loyalty his subjects might have had for him. For the past two years, his rule had been one based on terror, rather than respect. As for his subjects, the ordeal of coping with his moods and whims was taxing to the limit; and while no one dared to start a rebellion, few were prepared to stand in the way should one occur.

Shaka’s famed regiments were similarly disgruntled with their commander, who had not even deigned to lead them personally on their latest campaigns. In late 1827 twenty thousand Zulus had raided into the lands of the amaMpondo, a neighboring tribe that controlled the area near the Umzimkulu River. Their chieftain Faku appealed to the nearby British, who sent a small force to bolster the amaMpondo. Upon seeing the size of the Zulu force the Englishmen decided to retreat, after which Faku’s nation was trounced. The border of kwaZulu was then pushed back to the Umzimkulu River, and the regiments prepared to settle down and enjoy a period of blessed coupling with one of Shaka’s female guilds.

This reward was denied to them; immediately afterward, the king ordered them to trek two hundred miles to the north, where they were to engage another king, Soshangane, who had defied the Zulus on a number of occasions. To add insult to injury, Shaka ordered them to leave their uDibi squires behind, forcing them to carry all of their sleeping mats and provisions themselves. The legions were then foisted on Mdlaka, one of the king’s lieutenants, who spurred his unhappy regiments to make the three-month trek into the foreign reaches of Mozambique, where in a valley near the Marico River three thousand of Soshangane’s warriors pounced upon the footsore, homesick Zulus and smashed their flanks, routing the regiments and sending them fleeing back home in shame. Even as the people of kwaDukuza were beginning to slaughter each other, the battered army was making its torturous trek southward, where they were only saved from starvation by a horde of locusts that they chanced upon and devoured.

The result of this was that kwaZulu lacked any real homeland security in the year that the main army was out campaigning, leading to a festering of dissent and a lack of military suppression where it was needed to keep order. Furthermore, with his regiments absent, Shaka was virtually impotent. Not until Mdlaka and his soldiers returned did the king have any effective means by which to assert his authority, nor did he have any way to combat the insurgencies and armed conflicts that boiled over the entirety of his realm.

Finally, it was the repressive measures placed on the people themselves that triggered the sudden bursts of violence. Shaka’s policies of forced celibacy until the age of thirty, after which one could don the marital headring, led to a significant portion of the population living with enormous sexual repression, which they were unable to relieve in any way. Since masturbation, overconsumption of beer, and sporadic bouts of violence were all forbidden under Zulu law, an overwhelming number of tribespeople were left without an outlet for their pent-up energy. With lifetimes spent under forced abstinence and the constant threat of random murder, Nomxamamba's screaming invocations were but the spark that lit off a fire that nearly consumed Zululand, fed by an enchained, wrathful people, and a country that for years had borne the rule of an oppressive and unpredictable tyrant.

And so the people of kwaDukuza exploded out into the countryside, largely aimless, directed only by blind wrath and a need to quench their urges in blood. They coagulated into three large groups; one, called the iziNyosi (the hornets), made for Port Natal, which they intended to put to the spear. They were overwhelmingly composed of uDibi squires, restrained from combat by Shaka's vindictiveness, along with wanderers, brigands, and miscreants, who were drawn to the mob by the promise of an easy prize. The second became known as the baTlokwa, after a similar group that had arisen seven years earlier. They would go on to wreak havoc throughout all of Zululand, triggering movements that would unseat peoples farther afield and level the neighboring lands. The final group was known as the Peetes, or the lost ones. They too would scatter across the area, but they would not act as plunderers; instead they were refugees, victims of a conflict that ruined them both socially and economically. To other lands they would go, and in later years they would flame through the histories as Ndebele, Mpondo, Xhosa, and Igazi, the four tribes that outsmarted the Zulus.”

-From The Pride of the Sun(Boetha-Mkabi 18-23, 1959, TBosiu Press)

 

[Arkhangelsk]

As I have the previous two, subscribed!

I'm glad you're restarting this, Africa needs more love on this board.

 

[Cuāuhtemōc]

I expect nothing but greatness from you amigo.

 

[Ganesha]

Subscribed, as I did to the last!

I'm really looking forward to this timeline, keep up the great work!

 

[Ceranthor]

Update the Second: Morris

Thanks for the feedback, guys! It's great to see that I've retained some fans from the old TL. Hoping to make this one just as good as you guys expect it to be.

Decent update tonight; I'll try and do something like this every couple of days. Hope you guys enjoy, and if there's anything you'd like to criticize, please, please, please do so.

The Hornets​

“It is with a shaking hand that I recount the events of that fell day...never will I forget the screams, the smoke, the way that the ocean itself seemed to flow thick and red with blood and churned flesh. Never will I forget the sound of spears and the stench of death...never will I forget the orphans, the widows, and the sight of bodies blackened by fire. Never.”
-Henry Francis Fynn, The Tyranny of Chaka
​

​

"Of all the groups spawned by the Uzungu(as the ensuing chaos came to be named), the iziNyosi were likely the smallest, and existed for a minimal period of time. Yet within that period they wreaked unbelievable destruction upon the beachside settlement of Port Natal, which would never recover from that fatal assault. Had events played out differently, and the settlement's destruction averted, it is likely that the history of Zululand would have been drastically altered; Shaka would have retained his access to the European world, the ensuing conflicts with the Portuguese and Basuto would likely have never happened, and the Zulu nation, its cultural pitfalls notwithstanding, would not have gained a reputation for being a society of barbarians and cannibals.

The subsequent eradication of the European population of kwaZulu, along with the deaths of over two thousand Natal blacks, ended in Shaka's alienation amongst the diplomats of Mozambique and the Cape, and bodily destroyed any Zulu chances at acclimatizing to the colonial presence in Southern Africa. The sack of Port Natal heralded an age of perpetual war between white man and black; first between the belligerent Matabele and the hapless Trekkers, then between the Zulus and British clients, and finally culminating in open conflict between Zulu, Basuto, Boer, and Englishman.

Amongst the kraals, villages, and fortifications that dotted Zululand, Port Natal was considered something of an anomaly. Located on a southern beach, the ramshackle settlement was the brainchild of one Francis Farewell, who established it as a trading post on a largely unexplored coast. Winning grants from the Cape government, he and twenty others ventured into the heartland of kwaZulu, where he established a form of partnership with king Shaka. Viewing them as curiosities, Shaka agreed to indulge the new settlers; he gifted them with wide tracts of land and, in return for various trinkets, allowed them to hunt for ivory. Yet after the company doctor, a man named Henry Fynn, saved Shaka from death at the hands of an assassin, the Europeans became indispensable. Shaka became obsessed with them; he demanded that they teach him everything about their way of life, inquiring deeply into the social structure, medicine, government, religion, and military practices of their society. He even moved his capital from the old center at kwaBulawayo to a new one at kwaDukuza, which was nearer to the coastal beach where the whites resided. From there he derived a wealth of knowledge(though admittedly distorted by both Fynn and Farewell) about European civilization, and in return lavished his new friends with cattle, women, and truckloads of ivory.

In later months when the king's insanity became terminal, the Europeans began to distance themselves from the court at kwaDukuza, which was showing signs of becoming hostile to their presence. A root cause of this was that Port Natal was effectively autonomous from the Zulu nation, making it an ideal refuge for people fleeing Shaka's capriciousness. As such, more and more of the native tribesmen began to flock to Port Natal, where they erected their own kraals and communities on the windswept beaches. The settlement grew exponentially in both size and population; while in 1826 it could boast only a hundred souls, by 1828 its numbers had exploded to almost two thousand, which only continued to grow after the fiasco at kwaDukuza. By November of that year, Port Natal held within its sprawling confines 3,244 people, thirty-two hundred of whom were former Zulus, and forty-four of whom bore ancestry from England, Cape Town, or the Khoisan families of Table Bay.

As such, Port Natal represented a dangerous form of independence to the Zulu indunas(1); it was essentially independent, overtly massive, and largely exempt from the tribute traditionally paid to the royal court. Only Shaka's good will prevented the chiefs from urging an attack on the settlement; now that he had removed himself from the picture, it was fair game for whoever had the strength to attack it. Natal was not a difficult prize, and neither was it a poor one. It boasted stores of guns, caches of assegais and carts filled with ivory, along with valuable cloths, silks, and wools, all of which were valuable novelties amongst the Zulus. It also lacked any real form of defense. All of the Europeans knew how to use firearms, and perhaps a hundred of the resident Natal Kaffirs could fight in decent order. Beyond that meager garrison, the settlement was unprotected and largely defenseless.

And at that time, there was no group more willing to sack it than the iziNyosi. Out of all of the groups directly formed from the Uzungu, they were the best led, the best armed, and probably the most disciplined. Most of them were uDibi squires who had been left at home to guard the pastures; they were not yet the Spartan warriors that composed the majority of the Zulu army, but neither were they inexperienced youths. Most had seen battle, and all were proficient in the use of the assegai and the battle-axe. And while they were not of the caliber of Shaka's elite regiments, they were still strong, hardy, and vicious in battle, unlikely to show mercy, and even more unlikely to break and run. Worse, they were led by a man who had made it his private mission to scorch Natal off the face of the earth. A member of Shaka's Ufasimba guard, Mgobozi kaMfunda by name, he had a personal grudge against the settlement's Xhosa interpreter, Jakot, who had been suspected of raping one of his wives. The personal testimonies of three other Zulus and the Xhosa's own slovenly conduct seemed to point to him as the likely culprit; but despite this, he was valuable as an intermediary between Shaka and the Europeans, and the king dissolved the case.

Yet Mgobozi never forgot the slight. After the initial chaos at kwaDukuza subsided and Nomxamamba uttered his screaming invocations, Mgobozi picked up his weapons, walked over to the regimental barracks, and famously remarked “Shaka is gone and the law is as dead as always. We have spears, shields, and a straight path to the dogs who have oppressed us. The time is ripe for the washing of the spears; so let us go and do so now, so that never again will another criminal go free in kwaZulu.”

Stifled by their long period of inactivity and whipped up by Nomxamamba's commands, the uDibi battalions eagerly assented, and with Mgobozi at their head they set out to put Port Natal to the torch. The distance between the settlement and kwaDukuza was close to seventy miles; but Mgobozi pushed his charges at a ruthless pace, and they achieved the trip in three days. Reportedly they came upon the settlement at high noon, on a cloudy day with a light drizzle. Upon seeing the settlement, Mgobozi yelled out the battle-cry of “Aishaseeeela!” and charged down upon the beach, one thousand ravenous adolescents at his back, and proceeded to enact one of the most horrific massacres yet seen in the history of the area.

The oncoming iziNyosi apparently took the Natal natives completely by surprise; Mgobozi and his charges had moved so swiftly and suddenly that there had been no warning before the Zulus charged headlong into the beach. By two o'clock the Zulus could be seen on an adjoining ridge, and cries of alarm had already begun to spread amongst the settlement. By the time Fynn, Farewell, and their compatriots stirred themselves to see what was going on, the iziNyosi were already racing in for the kill, and there was no time to mount anything resembling a defense. Yelling “bulala! bulala!” or “kill! kill!' the enchained uDibis sliced into the hapless Natal Kaffirs like a riptide, hacking down men as they tried to defend their homes, braining children with kerries, and raping women in full view of their families. The iziNyosi carried torches with them and burned their way through much of the settlement. The thatched reeds and straw that roofed the kraals of Natal made ample kindling for hurled flames, and many were immolated alive as they tried to escape the incandescent ruins of their homes. The uDibis were so enraptured with the slaughter that they failed to press on; they killed and killed until they glutted themselves, and only a retaliating attack by the residents awoke them from their bloody stupor.

By the time the iziNyosi had finished laying waste to the fringes of the settlement, the Europeans had managed to arm themselves, brandishing guns and slapping assegais into the hands of their black charges; forty Englishmen, Boers, and Hottentots opened fire into the cavorting Zulus, while the Natal Kaffirs fell upon the invader with a vengeance. Some twenty uDibis died with bullets in their chests, while another forty were dragged down and speared by the furious Kaffirs. Yet the residents of Natal had not reckoned with the enemy leader; Mgobozi, taking one hundred of the fittest squires as his own bodyguard, had swung to the right and positioned himself behind the swirling melee. With a roar of “bulala!” he and his men drove right into the reloading Europeans, hacking them down without mercy, then went on to pin the Natal Kaffirs against their own burning kraals and rip them to pieces. The founding fathers of Port Natal met their ends in that assault. Francis Farewell was dragged away by two uDibis and thrashed to death, while two of his compatriots, the stodgy John King and the deficient Thomas Halstead were skewered and dumped into a burning kraal. Henry Fynn only narrowly escaped his death that day. Suffering an assegai cut and witnessing the murders of his friends, he quickly and understandably made the decision to flee the scene. Stumbling away from the carnage, he found a horse, turned it towards the unpeopled bush, and rode away into the night.

Mgobozi then proceeded to utterly and irrevocably burn Port Natal to the sand it was built on. What was initially intended as a vengeful raid degenerated into a full-on massacre, where innocents were beaten, raped, stabbed, and with the three often happening consecutively. The iziNyosi killed until their arms were slick with blood, and set fire to everything they could see. What other Europeans they found they killed in a rain of punches, kicks, and knobkerrie strikes; the women were gang-raped and their children killed in cold blood.

The sun eventually set upon a six-hour orgy of slaughter, culminating in the death of the man who had instilled the seeds of the horrific affair. Upon seeing Mgobozi leaping through the ruins of Natal, Jakot the rapist decided that it would be prudent to swim for his life(2). He threw himself into the surf and made an effort to swim to the nearest sandbar, but a sudden wave caught him, picked him up, and deposited him back on the beach. He found Mgobozi waiting. The day passed into twilight; the Ufasimba guardsman relieved Jakot of his genitals with the razor blade of his assegai, then held him under the frothing waters until he drowned. The body was then urinated on by twelve uDibis, and thrown into the surf to feed the sharks.

Thus did Port Natal die a painful death after four years of tenuous existence on the periphery of Zululand, killed in one savage burst by a group of men so enchained they had no other way to exert their energies. Any vestiges of London and Cape Town were cleanly and fully burned off the face of kwaZulu, and a fifty-year war for racial supremacy in Southern Africa was unofficially kicked off.

Yet while the slaughter at Port Natal was undoubtedly horrific, it did not completely destroy the legacy of the Englishmen in the land of Shaka. One thousand Natal Kaffirs survived the horrors of that day and added themselves to the lost masses of beleaguered poor wandering Zululand, and the iziNyosi left many of the gun and powder caches untouched, which would provide the Zulus with an early source of firearms later on. Finally, and most significantly, the destruction of the European community did not mean the end of all the resident Europeans. Prominent traders like Henry Ogle and John Cane, out traveling at the time, managed to survive that turbulent era, while a Hottentot family, a group of Coloureds, and a few Boer trackers did manage to escape the carnage and sneak back to the Cape Colony. Most notably, Henry Francis Fynn, along with a Hottentot nurse, two black servants, and his infant son, was able to flee out into the bush, where he hid undisturbed for almost a month. With his small band in tow, he then crossed over into Delagoa Bay and entered the Portuguese settlement of Lorenco Marques, from where he would win passage into Cape Town and then London. And with his pen, his memories, a deep-seated trauma from his experience in Zululand, he would go on to write an account that would blacken the name of Shaka for a hundred years to come.

As for Mgobozi and the iziNyosi, they themselves dissolved in the days following the slaughter. Many suddenly grew ill at the thought that they had slaughtered so many; some committed suicide, and others wandered out into the open countryside, lacking aim or motivation. The rest continued to work under Mgobozi, and became one of the many bandit groups that prowled Zululand in the ensuing months. Like all the others, they eventually were brought to heel, and the worst offenders were either bludgeoned or impaled. Their own legacy was greatest in the dead, stinking spot on the southern beach, made bloody red by their assegais, which would be unlivable as long as people still wandered the plains of Natal.

While the iziNyosi themselves either met death or societal estrangement, the fate of their leader is unclear. After 1839, Mgobozi disappears from contemporary accounts; the last sighting of him was at a skirmish between the last remnant of his party and a group of Basuto soldiers in the Drakensberg. Afterward his record is spotty, and he seemingly fades from history entirely. That said, one anecdote in the judicial records of the Spruitberg Republiek is of interest; it writes of how 'one Bantu, mean of countenance and large in build, was convicted on October the 5th 1862 of the rape of a Moslem woman of Indian descent. While the common punishment for this was usually death by firing squad, we(the jury) made provision for his advanced age and commuted his sentence to hanging. This was enacted on October the 29th, and the Bantu, Gobozee by name, was interred at the Kaffre's Ground the day afterward.'”
-From The Washing of the Spears(Morris, 103-107, Tbosiu Press 1962)

(1): A minister, chief, or court member

(2): Jakot was OTL known to the Zulus as “Hlabulamanzi”, which means “strong swimmer”. He met his historical end at the hands of Henry Ogle, a British trader, who shot him down when the Xhosa offended the Zulu king Dingane.

 

[Ganesha]

This is a terrible sign. There goes any chance for peaceful cultural interaction!

 

[Cináed]

This is absolutely smashing! I'm hoping for more

 

[Ceranthor]

Thanks, guys! I'll try and get another update up sometime this week.

 

[Cuāuhtemōc]

Thanks, guys! I'll try and get another update up sometime this week.

I am waiting with bated breath.

 

[Ganesha]

I sure hope this isn't dead. I had high hopes for it.

 

[Cuāuhtemōc]

I sure hope this isn't dead. I had high hopes for it.

Seconded. It must not die.

 

[Ceranthor]

Update the Third: Rickards-Pieter(Part One of Many)

I'm kicking myself. I thought that I put this chapter up like a week ago. I guess I hit Preview instead of Post, and forgot all about it until now . Thanks for the reminder, I probably wouldn't have figured that out for a while.

Here's the update. I finished it about two weeks ago, but I made some changes yesterday and today. This one focuses less on the Zulu state and more on the Igazis, who you guys might remember from the old TL.

Implosion​

“Ho, he! The hideous one (King Shaka) is gone
The son of Mjokwana kaNdaba has passed on
We turned deaf
We became limbless
Became mute
Where is the shelter? Where can we go?
Up we find hyenas; to the sides we face lions!
And down we find only ashes and widows

Perhaps a better question is
Was anything of value really lost?”

-Sompisi kaNdlela, king of the Igazis; from Memorias Africanco, by Fernao Rana
​

“...November of 1828 saw Zululand in ruins. Lacking a king, an army, and any real sense of order, Shaka's system of governance, tribute, and steady expansion had given way to gang warfare and cattle rustling, both of which affected all corners of the Zulu kingdom. Shaka's capital of kwaBulawayo, left unguarded in his sojourn to kwaDukuza, saw two hundred prize bulls lifted from their pens, while parties of thieves and malcontents even raided abroad, carrying off entire herds from the Basuto and the Ndebele. Warfare between gangs of thugs, exiles, and brigands became the norm in kwaZulu, and at certain times more powerful groups even made war against firearm-bearing foreigners, in confrontations that they often lost. Yet these ruffian groups came to dominate their home country, and made life a misery for their plebian targets. Travelling groups of refugees were often set upon, picked apart, and put to the assegai, while outnumbered military kraals fell easily to the torch and the spear.

Yet situated villages remained the favorite prey for wandering brigands, especially since they yielded one luxury impossible to find elsewhere; grain beer. While drinking was discouraged under Shaka's rule(he believed that, like sex, alcohol made his warriors weak), it underwent a kind of renaissance in the chaotic interval afterward. Beer became a kind of currency, used mostly to bribe gangs away from attacking lone kraals. As such, people came to almost deify it. As such, when one stodgy old kraal head poured all of the village ale on the ground in response to a brigand's threat, the ensuing raid was performed with ten times the usual savagery. To his acute misfortune, the kraal head found himself under attack by Mgobozi and his iziNyosi, who decided to reproduce the attack on Natal; assegais flashed, women screamed, the earth burned, and Mgobozi forced the headman to eat his own cooked intestines.

The results of this were twofold. The iziNyosi's brutality would become a symbol for the time that followed Shaka's near-assassination, and from then on alcohol's place in Zulu society would be reversed. The trauma of the Uzungu made liquor something to be hated, to be reviled as an agent of the chaos that wracked the country; no longer would drinking be either permissible or encouraged. Intoxication became viewed as a sign of depravity to common Zulus, and as such the selling of beer was banned outright until Langalibalele's Rebellion in 1880. While that aged revolutionary was halted before he could cause any real damage, the reigning policies in the Zulu ministry and the economic motives for his reaction led to the law being repealed. Despite this, however, consumption of alcohol became taboo in Zulu society, and has remained so until the present day. While a few liberal youths still manage to sneak weekend drinks at clubs in Lorenco Marques and Thaba Bosiu, the overwhelmingly conservative populace shuns beer, and looks at drunkenness as a sign of internal weakness. It should be noted that as late as 1971, the public caning of open drunkards was allowed( and indeed encouraged) by the governor of kwaHlubi, and that amongst the Wahabbis of Rehoboth the act of selling beer is still banned under Sharia law.

Those influences aside, however, alcohol did indirectly cause a certain migration, which would have unimaginable effects on the history of Southern Africa. It is a supreme irony that Mozambique's own standardized textbook describes it as such: “On November 22nd the Igazis, a tribe on the Tugela, faced attack by a band of armed robbers, who sought take their stores of liquor and steal their cattle. Though the Igazis did manage to repel them, they judged the area unsafe and decided to move. Led by Sompisi kaNdlela, they burned their kraals, roped up their cattle, and drove north to settle in the fertile Limpopo Valley. From there they established the nation of Nangozi, which Sompisi would rule into his late seventies.”

The famed monotony of Mozambique's historical literature notwithstanding, this passage stands out as one of the most understated iterations of an event that has inspired plays, novels, and even epic films(see Kurosawa's Trail of Blood) from across the globe. The Igazis did indeed stave off a number of groups stirred up by the Uzungu, and they did indeed embark on an epic voyage onto the banks of the Limpopo. Yet the story of this event is many times richer and deeper than Mozambique's textbook reveals; for not only should it be counted as one of the most important migrations in recent history, but it is a fascinating tale in and of itself. Praise singers have sung of it from the theatres of Kaapstad to the murky slums of Old Gazaland; and while the following description cannot hope to equal the passion and beauty of their telling, for the purposes of narrative it will have to suffice.

Before 1828, the Igazi tribe was notable for producing two people; Ndlela, an Mtetwa commander who had reverted to cannibalism during a time of severe privation, and Mbopa, Shaka's primary minister and would-be assassin. This in and of itself provided more than enough of a reason for an attack on their holdings; for while most of the gangs spawned by the Uzungu were driven by an urge to rape, steal, and kill, a sizeable number were ideologically motivated, turning fanatic once runaway rumors of Shaka's murder or Nandi's resurrection started to spread through the country. Many gangs claimed to be fighting in the name of Shaka, or his long-dead adversary Zwide, or even the deceased Mtetwa chieftain, Dingiswayo, who mentored Shaka in the ways of war. To men of such a mindset, it seemed obvious that the tribe that had turned out a maneater and a regicide was marked for evil. As such, two like-minded groups decided to join together and set on the Igazi kraal, and sack and burn until the Igazis ceased to exist.

There were other reasons for the Igazis becoming a target, chief of which was the fact that they were loathed by their neighbors. While Ndlela was undoubtedly a cannibal, he was also a competent leader, and Shaka rewarded him for his service by granting him and his tribe several head of cattle, along with barrels of beer and many teakwood assegais. This aroused the wrath and disgust of the neighboring tribes; while they cared little for the royal attention Ndlela was getting, the fact that a cannibal was being rewarded thus was repellent to them. Furthermore, the Igazis themselves were hardly interested in maintaining cordial relations with the peoples adjacent to them; cattle raids on nearby tribes became a rite of passage for adolescents, while the number of foreign women seduced by lurking Igazis numbered in the hundreds. The victims found this so intolerable that they actually appealed to Shaka. When an impi was called in to investigate, however, Ndlela's son Sompisi blamed the cattle thefts on the leopards. When the ravishing of many nubile girls was similarly looked into, he gave the impi a bribe of cattle and told them to be on their way. This reaction stirred up apopletic rage amongst some of other opposing headman, especially after it was discovered that all of the aforemented cattle had been secreted from their own pens.

Finally, the biggest dispute between the Igazis and their neighbors came chiefly from alcohol, though jealousy also played a heavy role. For years the Igazis had been renowned for the quality of their beer, which was praised as far afield as kwaBulawayo; and they made a practice out of charging exorbitant prices for it, forcing their neighbors to give them healthy cattle for pots of their beer. The Igazis owed this entirely to one Makhaya kaTana, a famously talented Mtetwa brewster who had set up his own kraal in their village some years ago. His presence, and the ridiculous prices charged for his beer, vexed the neighboring headmen beyond belief. In an act of desperation, they sent emissaries to his kraal, and offered him cattle, women, and status if he would move to their village, or indeed if he would leave the area at all. The meeting went poorly. Makhaya, thinking that the outsiders were insulting his work and implying him to be a mercenary, spat in their faces and broke an arm with his knobkerrie. The emissaries went limping home in shame, and relations between the Igazis and their neighbors deteriorated beyond repair.

With such grievances under their belt, the aggrieved groups had ample reason to try and destroy the Igazis once and for all, which they did attempt to do on the 22nd of November. Joining with two gangs who claimed ideological right to attack the Igazis, they picked up their assegais, shouted “bulala!” and charged toward the kraals of their enemy, aiming to pay them back for years of indignities.

Incredibly, the Igazis held them back. Despite being thrice outnumbered and surprised by a twilight attack, they managed to muster up, arm themselves, and lock shields against the opposing force, which attacked with an unholy fury borne out of both zealotry and a need for vengeance . The Igazis were a race of brawlers, outmatching their enemies in brute strength, and many had seen some kind of service in Shaka's army. Sompisi flung two arms of his warriors around the thronging flanks of the milling attackers, and within minutes the Igazi cries of “Ngadla!” or “I have eaten!” broke their nerve and set them to flight. Howling insults, the Igazis chased the routers down the hill and killed almost forty of them. The rest headed for the hills; one entire village actually uprooted itself, for fear of an Igazi reprisal, while the others made plans to adopt similar measures. Within the month Sompisi and his tribe were alone on the alluvial plain of the Tugela. Their erstwhile neighbors had moved twenty miles away, and by December the Igazis themselves determined to do the same thing.

This was not an act of whim or choice. The Igazis may have won the last engagement, but it had traumatized them; most had not seen actual battle in six years, and were not keen on facing it again. There also existed a strong fear that Shaka himself had ordered the mob to attack their village. Since one of his would-be assassins had hailed from an Igazi family, it was not too wild a thought that the king might order an outright attack on Mbopa's tribe as retribution, especially considering his behavior following Nandi's death. And since that attack had failed, Sompisi and his counselors postulated that Shaka might follow up with an attack by actual soldiers, who the Igazis would be hard-pressed to defeat. It was well known that Sompisi and his warriors could turn back an unorganized mass of angry villagers. Would they be forced to take the field against Shaka's Ufasimba regiment, however, or against his immortal iziCwe, then they would be slaughtered like pigs. As such, the only solution was to follow the example of their neighbors. On December 16th the Igazis packed up their belongings, roped their cattle, and began their great movement into the abject unknown.

They went north, that direction being the only one open; to the east lay the sea and to the west lay the barrier of the Drakensberg Mountains, while to the south raged the chaos of Zululand. To the Igazis, the north was open, unsettled and fertile. There they could erect kraals by the Limpopo River, grow crops aplenty, and win many battles against the weakling barbarians who lived there. Mozambique seemed a paradise to them; and so it was into Mozambique that Sompisi and his clan headed, with consequences none of them could have foreseen.

The reality of the situation was vastly different from the idyllic picture the Igazis had of the area. Mozambique may have been lush and fertile, but it was hardly the easy prize Sompisi and his people had expected to conquer. The Mozambican interior played home to a melting pot of peoples from every corner of the Indian Ocean, along with a bewildering variety of native tribes and kingdoms. Slavers from Mombasa, Muscat, and Mogadiscio prowled the rivers by raft and canoe. Mixed-race bandits made frequent war against the Tsonga groups of the inner valleys; nations formed on stolen gold and kidnapped children flourished and died with the passing of the seasons, and exiles from Ceylon, Oman, and Batavia made pirate kingdoms on the northern coasts. Even if these had been the only forces present in Mozambique at the time, the Igazis still would have been hard-pressed to make themselves its overlords.

For while the area did play host to a vast number of smaller polities, they paled in significance when compared to the powers who dominated the entire region. These were the colonial Portuguese, who from Lorenco Marques had made Mozambique their favored hunting ground, and the empire of the Gaza Nguni, who were led by the redoubtable Soshangane(1). These two giants, locked in a war of skirmish and retreat, dominated the southern area, which the Igazis would first attempt to penetrate. Their fortunes in the land were far from assured. It is evident, however, that in the early days of their migration they were completely oblivious to this fact, and that they seemingly adopted some kind of ideology akin to Manifest Destiny. In his narration to the famed Fernao Rana, Sompisi referred to this Thembandla, which, in xaiGazi(2), roughly translates to “confidence”. This attitude would carry them throughout their adventures; and it is perhaps evident that it was this “confidence” that allowed them to become the premier native power between Zanzibar and the Tugela River.”
- From The Kaffir Interlude, Book 3 of From Congo to Skyscraper: How the Bantus Won History(Rickards-Pieter, 221-225, TNchu Press)

***
(1) More on this guy in the next post; he was a pretty prominent enemy of Shaka OTL, and he'll end up playing a decent-sized role in the development of the TL.

(2) Pretty much a mix of Tsonga languages and isiZulu, with helpings of Arabic, Swahili, and gutter Portuguese.

 

[Cináed]

Smashing stuff Ceranthor

So is it a Mfecane kingdom arising from the ashes of the Zulu one that we're going to see here, slightly to the north of the old one? Interesting...

 

[Ceranthor]

Well the Zulu kingdom isn't going down completely, not by any means. The Igazi nation, however, is going to be one of many that does get formed out of the chaos of Mfecane, which will utterly rip some peoples to the ground and bring a few others to greatness. The Igazis will go in the latter category.

 

[Ganesha]

Well the Zulu kingdom isn't going down completely, not by any means. The Igazi nation, however, is going to be one of many that does get formed out of the chaos of Mfecane, which will utterly rip some peoples to the ground and bring a few others to greatness. The Igazis will go in the latter category.

Is this alive? It's really great, I would hate to see it end.

 

[Ceranthor]

Is this alive? It's really great, I would hate to see it end.

I honestly don't know. The problem with writing this TL is that I have to establish so much background that getting to the actual plot becomes almost impossible. I have a pretty good idea of where the TL is supposed to go, but making it both plausible and historically accurate requires me to explain tons of earlier stuff. As such, writing it can get really boring. If I could crank out a few more preliminary chapters, just to get all the backlog out of the way, then I would probably be able to consistently continue it, but I don't really have the time or the will to do that.

You never know, though. I started the next installment a while ago, and I could get around to finishing it sometime in the future.

 

[Ceranthor]

Update the Fourth: Boetha

Is this alive? It's really great, I would hate to see it end.

What do you know, you've inspired me

The Wild Cat

“Who is Mkabayi kaJama? A monster to some, a hero to others, a traitor, a demagogue, a murderess, a legend; to the Zulus a Nero but to liberals an Alcott; to the Wahabbis of Rehoboth a shaitan, a devil, but to the feminists of the world an Agrippa, a woman strong enough to grasp the reins of her nation and defy the despotism of her menfolk. Her own people despise her; to this day particularly disagreeable women are often slandered as “kabays”, while radical clerics in the Coloured east use her as an example of why women should be kept in perpetual pardah. Yet on the other hand, the feminist movement in our country has publicly proclaimed that Mkabayi is their strongest influence, for encouraging women to question the overbearance of the opposing sex and defy the constraints society puts on their gender. Homosexuals have taken her up as a kind of mascot—much to the disgust of the House of Zulu—and members of the third gender (1) idolize her, which the House of Zulu doubtless appreciates even less. Mkabayi is a polarizing figure, and a controversial one. Fact rarely comes up when discussing her, and this must be counted as a tragedy, for her story is one of the most fascinating to ever come out of the Uzungu of kwaZulu...

So who is Mkabayi? What is she? Where did she come from? What did she destroy? Why is she so despised in the place of her birth, and what about her inspired the sexually downtrodden for so long? These are interesting questions for an interesting woman, and they have been asked repeatedly, throughout the ages, by scholars of every color and creed…”
-From Suid Afrika, a compendium of lectures by Prof. Piet Mahomet of Stellenbosch University (TBosiu Press, commissioned and translated by the Bulawayo Lyceum)​

“The story of Mkabayi’s Rebellion is a sordid one. Borne out of the chaos of the Uzungu and the general deterioration of order in kwaZulu, this particular revolt would be the first of many insurrections that failed in unseating a Zulu king. Ironfisted rule, brutal mismanagement, and years of prior scheming only hindered Mkabayi’s attempts at securing the Zulu throne, and the only lasting legacy of her futile mutiny would be the manner of her death, which would be remembered in kwaZulu for a hundred years to come.

The origins of the rebellion’s instigator are well known. Born in 1767 to Jama kaNdaba, leader of the fledgling Zulu, Mkabayi grew up in the village of Escabeni, where she was the youngest of a large brood of female children. Her many sisters soon faded into the obscurity of marriage, but Mkabayi became notable for procuring a second wife for her father, whose first bride had consistently failed to give him a son. The woman, Mthaniya, was wed to Jama in 1780, and halfway through the consummation of their marriage Jama reputedly yelled “Nenzangakhona!” or “it has been accomplished!” In the following year Mthaniya gave birth to a baby boy, and he was accordingly named Senzangakhona. Jama retained Mkabayi as a trusted advisor, and never married her off while he lived.

Mkabayi’s activities during the reign of her brother Senzangakhona are less well known; she tried to shield him from Jama’s wrath when he fathered a bastard on Nandi of the eLangeni, and when Jama himself died of dysentery(2) she vied for royal influence with Senzangakhona’s half-brother, a man by the name of Mudli. It is not known exactly what the nature of their struggle was, but the two were mortal enemies, to the point where, upon Mudli’s much later execution, it was bandied about that Mkabayi squatted over his corpse and urinated into the carcass of his face. Both were able schemers, and Senzangakhona, the target of their machinations, was a soft and pliable man. Their political conflict often centered around the king’s treatment of his bastard, Shaka, and the angry, disagreeable woman who mothered him, Nandi of eLangeni. Mudli despised them both, but Mkabayi, after hearing about some roadside prophecy concerning the boy, took it upon herself to make sure that he was not killed out of hand.

Mkabayi's relationship with Nandi, Shaka's mother, is difficult to define. According to many Zulu historians, Mkabayi despised Nandi, and considered her little more than a whore. While she apparently saw the prepubescent Shaka as kinglier material than the king's legitimate sons, Dingane and Mhlangana, she had nothing but scorn for his mother, and legend says that the two often quarreled, which may have contributed to Senzangakhona's dislike for his erstwhile flame. Yet these accounts stand in stark contrast to the stories of Isela Sokufa, whose father lived in the pre-Shakan era. A part of his narration, which was recorded by Subhas Chandra Bose during his sojourn in Old Gazaland, speaks of how Mkabayi did Nandi a favor of some kind, which protected her from being killed by a vengeful Shaka once he hijacked the Zulu throne. With Shaka's first royal act being the wholesale massacre of all the Zulus who had previously offended his mother(including his uncle, the aforementioned Mudli), it is somewhat conspicuous that Mkabayi was not amongst those put to the assegai, making it unlikely for her to have been Nandi's antagonist in the first place.

Moreover, it is often postulated that Mkabayi's reasoning for orchestrating the subsequent attempt on Shaka's life was that she believed that he was responsible for Nandi's death. The sources on this are varied and conflicting. Rickards-Pieter believes that this was bandied about to discredit Shaka during the tumultuous Uzungu, claiming Mkabayi commissioned apologist propaganda during her short-lived reign as Zulu queen, for the purpose of legitimizing herself in the eyes of her subjects( 89 The Kaffir Interlude(3)). Morris holds that she was simply a deranged fanatic, using her later actions as supporting evidence, while Mahomet posits that Mkabayi may not have even spurred the assassination attempt at kwaDukuza, and that the failed attack on the Zulu king was the natural result of years of repression and royal capriciousness. Whatever the cause or reason, it is evident that reconstructing Mkabayi's personality and defining her morality(or lack thereof) is a confusing and torturous enterprise, and this author has neither the will nor the ability to do so within these pages.

It is obvious, however, that Mkabayi was a ruthless woman, and she proved this from the onset of the chaotic Uzungu. Shaka's disappearance was most keenly noted in the capital city of kwaBulawayo, which had been governed, and tyrannized by him for the past fourteen years. The capital immediately fragmented into three large political camps, each championed by an important member of Shaka's court or family. Foremost amongst these were the Jackals, led by Ngomane, Shaka's prime minister. Their influence, however, was checked by the Hyenas and the Vultures, the former of which was headed by Ngwadi, Shaka's half-brother, the latter dominated by Mkabayi herself.

Tensions between the three simmered until November of 1828, when, after some nighttime revel, a drunken Ngomane was almost killed by a hurled assegai that missed his throat by inches. The identity of the would-be assassin was unknown, but later that day Ngomane ascended the royal podium and declared war against the Hyena faction, ordering his followers to take up their weapons and burn the hated enemy out of existence. A howling mob was stirred up within the hour; yelling “bulala! Bulala!” they made their way to Ngwadi's expansive kraal, where they aimed to reduce this stronghold of dissidence to ash and soil.

Yet Ngwadi managed to muster his own forces before the mob could properly navigate the city, and in the crowded and cramped alleyways of kwaBulawayo his Hyenas made a stand against the Jackals who pressed them. Though Ngomane's faction had the advantage of numbers, Ngwadi's Hyenas were captained by trained soldiers, who maintained some order in the free-for-all scrum that ensued. Moreover, Shaka's brother was just as potent a warrior as Shaka was, and in that ferocious ruck Ngwadi hacked down nine Jackals before he was wounded by an axe and forced to withdraw.

The riot(for this bloodbath hardly deserves to be called a battle) lasted for some hours without any real reversals, until like the bird for which they were named Mkabayi's faction descended upon them both and reduced them to picked bones. After apprehending Ngomane and bashing his skull in, the Vultures picked up their spears, dipped them in a campfire, and then flung them at the thatched kraals that hemmed the dueling parties in. What began as a slaughter soon became a veritable abattoir. Half of the Hyenas and three-quarters of the Jackals met their ends at the inferno that consumed them, and a sizable chunk of kwaBulawayo was laid waste in a matter of hours.

Ngwadi managed to escape, as did one of his wives and two of his daughters. The rest of his household were not so lucky. His cattle were speared and left to die in the countryside, and his fields were sowed with salt, while the women who worked them were either exiled or parceled off to prominent Vultures as concubines. Ngwadi's daughters were treated with greater dignity, though with less mercy; Vulture enforcers pinned them down, grasped them by their chins, and twisted until their necks snapped. What boys they found they dragged back to their mistress, who decided to reinvent the traditional method of executing opponents. Rather than impaling them, or having them killed by knobkerrie, Ngwadi's sons would die in a way that the white trader Farewell had earlier described to a fascinated gaggle of indunas. On a cold November morning the boys were seized, tied to poles, and then set afire before a crowd of singing and dancing Zulus. In this way, burning at the stake enjoyed a brief and violent rebirth in the land of Shaka, and numerous Bantu kings, including the infamous Mzilikazi, would use it enthusiastically throughout their regimes.

A more immediate effect of this was that Mkabayi was now the absolute ruler of kwaBulawayo, a title which she took to instantly. Crowning herself ndlovukazi, or queen of kwaZulu, she ascended an unstable throne on November 12th 1828, the first(and shortest-lived)female to reign over the empire that Shaka had created. She inherited a scant and inexperienced military(the actual army was still retreating from its defeat in Mozambique), a body of subjects who were growing increasingly dissatisfied with the political turmoil that they were forced to endure, and a nation that controlled little more than the Mhlatuze Valley, which kwaBulawayo was situated in. The Zulu kingdom was at its lowest ebb in twenty years; even the miniscule tribe that Jama kaNdaba led at Escabeni had enjoyed greater stability than the wracked polity that clung to existence in 1828.

Mkabayi made few radical changes to the structure that Shaka had previously put into place. Shaka's council of elders was retained, though Mkabayi either slaughtered or dispossessed the original elders and reinstalled her cronies in their place. An Ufasimba-esque guard was drawn from the more brutal thugs of her Vulture faction, while a new contingent of praise singers was raised from willing commoners and passing travelers, who were willing to serve Mkabayi in exchange for protection from the chaos that swirled outside of kwaBulawayo.

Yet Mkabayi did not leave Shaka's sytem entirely intact. The position of chief induna, which had been recently vacated by the slaughtered Ngomane, was abolished; Mkabayi likely felt that it would detract from the total power she held over her people. She increased the size of the execution teams, and commissioned bigger and heavier clubs for her enforcers, to make them more fearsome in the eyes of the downtrodden populace. She was also presented with the obstacle of the harem; being a woman, she obviously had little use for the fourteen hundred virgins who Shaka had stashed in his royal compound. At the same time, she had little desire to treat them cruelly, and instead gave them as brides to the Vultures who had supported her from the beginning. While this obviously made them indebted to her, it did little for the remaining majority of kwaBulawayo's populace, who were still subject to a thuggish overlord and the constant threat of seizure and execution, even for minor offenses. While Mkabayi used her knobkerrie team less liberally than Shaka did, they continued to terrify the people, and their continued existence only added to the resentment that common Zulus felt for their government. If anything, Mkabayi gifting only her favored followers smacked of classism, for many of her Vultures were beginning to mistreat and denigrate the Zulus who had not supported her from the outset. Things were ripe for yet more conflict, and it would take but a spark to reignite the smoldering log that was kwaBulawayo.

Matters were not improved by the depredations many outsiders delighted in committing, many of whom scorned Mkabayi's coronation, deriding it as illegitimate and false. Bands of thugs took little issue with making punitive raids into Mhlatuze Valley, sacking kraals and kidnapping young girls, while cattle theft became a daily occurrence. In late November Mgobozi and the iziNyosi, fresh from the massacre at Natal, decided to mock-charge kwaBulawayo, much to the consternation of the people within. Three weeks later, Swazi youths stole upon a small village not a mile from the gates of kwaBulawayo, which they proceeded to put to the spear. And on Christmas Day Griqua cattle thieves snuck into the royal pens and made away with thirty prize bullocks, which they then drove all the way back to their village on the Orange River.

Not only was Mkabayi seen as oppressive, but she was increasingly proving herself weak and unsuitable for the task of defending her people, which Shaka had never demonstrated(his other faults notwithstanding). As such, when the queen tried to install a draft of all able males, the people reacted explosively. Picking up whatever implements they could find, the Zulus of kwaBulawayo went on a rampage, burning Vulture kraals with the inhabitants still inside and beating enforcers to death wherever they found them. If left unchecked, they probably would have consumed the entire city, but Mkabayi's loyalists managed to beat them into a certain district and surrounded them with naked assegais.

Another slaughter might have broken out, but endless bloodshed was beginning to pall on the Vultures, and especially on their captain. He told the commoners that if they dropped their weapons and submitted, then they would be allowed to go home without further trouble. The weary Zulus, exhausted from a full day of rioting, accepted their offer, and for a few more days there was an uneasy truce between the two parties that dominated kwaBulawayo.

When Mkabayi heard about this, she was incensed. Who did her captain think he was? His orders had been to kill the dissidents, not let them go in peace; for if they were allowed to defy her without proper punishment, who then would stop them from doing this again? Her captain was discharged, and one of her knobkerrie brutes was installed in his place. A few more virgins were doled out to ensure loyalty amongst her loyalists, but still Mkabayi felt that her people needed to be taught a lesson, and so on January 13th she stood before kwaBulawayo and decreed the following;

“If any man dares look insolently at one of my soldiers, then he will be beaten. If he speaks harshly to one of my soldiers, then he shall lose his tongue. And if he raises his fist to one of my soldiers, then he will be tied to a pole and burned. And let it be known that if there are any whispers of treachery amongst the kraals, I will know, and I will not be forgiving. For the punishment for treachery of any kind is death, and all that I must decide is how that punishment will be enacted.”

It is not known exactly what could have happened had these edicts had time to properly agitate the people, for they were not given the chance to be enforced. Perhaps there would have been another explosion, and this time more blood would have been shed, and perhaps the Zulu kingdom would have ceased to exist entirely, drained and destroyed by human wrath and governmental oppression.

But that never did come to pass, for seven days after Mkabayi made her inflammatory promise a man appeared at kwaBulawayo, and his entrance would change the history of his nation forever. For that man was Shaka Zulu, and on the twenty-first day of January his empire made its first small step towards the dignity that it lost in the bloodstained years of before.”
-From The Pride of the Sun(Boetha-Mkabi 18-23, 1959, TBosiu Press)

1) Transvestites, who like gays, lesbians, druggies, alcoholics, evangelicals, and Khoisan are absolutely and virulently despised in ATL kwaZulu

2) Completely fictional, I honestly have no clue how this guy died

3) Since Southern Africa has a much stronger literary tradition ATL than it does OTL official documents use a different form of citation, which was heavily influenced by the style used in Zulu documents(for the record, I hate MLA citations, so call this wishful revenge)

 

[Ganesha]

So Mkabayi is the last step in the Zulus long line of trouble? You've set up the return of Shaka perfectly, and I'm really excited to see that.

By the way, what will be the reaction (military especially) to the destruction of Port Natal?

 

[Ceranthor]

So Mkabayi is the last step in the Zulus long line of trouble? You've set up the return of Shaka perfectly, and I'm really excited to see that.

Thank you! Yeah, Mkabayi is essentially the last baddie from the Uzungu, and once she gets removed we're generally going to see things get a lot better for the Zulus. The end of the Uzungu, however, means the beginning of the Mfecane, where what went on Zululand will be replayed across the entirety of Southern Africa.

By the way, what will be the reaction (military especially) to the destruction of Port Natal?

There won't be an immediate one. The colonial British only really cared about defending the Cape, converting the natives and making sure the Boers didn't pull any shenanigans. The destruction of an independent trading venture set up in an unknown country isn't really going to turn many heads, at least not for the next few years. Once Henry Fynn produces his account of the massacre, that will change. The destruction of Natal is going to piss off the British, scare the Boers, and make everyone more convinced that the Zulus are evil cannibal savages, which is going to spur a lot of antagonism and a start a couple of wars.