Ceranthor
Banned
Update #7: Crushing and Crashing
Long update tonight.
In which I finally remove my head from my backside and write down what needs to be written down. This is about three posts too late, and I know, I know it's taken so damn long—I did have work, but I also was being lazy about this. But, on a more positive note, we finally, finally get to see first contact between the Ndebele and the Boers! This will be followed by chapters on the Zulu themselves, some developments father afield, and then the unfolding conflict that will grow on the northern border of Cape Colony
The First Trekkers
“We leave our soil claimed by the English Government without rancor, or threats, or ill will. We pay testimony to the good people of English heritage who have befriended us and we wish them and their nation well. We are satisfied in our hearts that we owe England no further obligations, and we are sure that the Government will allow us to depart in peace, for all we seek as is to establish in the north a nation more obedient to God's rule.”
-Sarel Cilliers, a member of Hendrik Potgeiter's Voortrekkers
How does one define the Great Trek? A movement, a migration, a success and a failure that would be just as disruptive as the Crushing that so devastated the peoples of the veld; a thrust into lands bound by the savagery of the Kaffir and a movement away from lands smothered by the heresy of the Englishman. For ten years the Boers, those sturdy, implacable men who had driven their way across the Cape would seek to enter virgin territories in the north, where they could live according to the rules of God, striding forward like the ancient Israelites in their quest for Jordan. They would fight; they would die; they would move and fight again and die again, forming nations that would not survive long under the depredations of the Kaffirs and other, worse enemies. In later years their Afrikaner descendants would proclaim their trek to be a movement for freedom, but in reality it was a lost, confusing battle across the face of south Africa, and in that vicious Canaan the Boers would suffer worse than their Israelites.
For nigh on thirty years the Boers had grown more and more discontented with the British regime at Cape Town, disgruntled by their lack of ability in developing sound policies, disgusted by their impotence in pressing the lesser races of the Cape into servitude. The Boers were avid practitioners of slavery, and considered every honest farmer considered it his god-given right to force the brown and black man into working for him for twelve hours, six days a week, without pay. Slavery was ingrained into the mentality of the Cape, but the more liberal-minded British found it distasteful, and made steps to destroy it completely. Missionaries posted in the Karoo quickly took issue with the transgressions the Boers committed against their slaves, lying with women against their will and refusing slaves education in Christ. Searing reports were sent back to London of “the infamy of the Dutch slaveholder”, with a number of missionaries naming specific Boers who had abused their slaves, and these accusations were so horrendous that there was public outrage at the atrocities seemingly committed at the Cape.
These pamphlets made their way to Cape Town, where they were met with a similar reaction. A missionary who preached emancipation was ripped from his block and horsewhipped, incoming ships were pelted with rocks and dung, and in a number of instances the redcoats themselves were assaulted in the streets. There was disgust and mutterings of rebellion, and not without good reason, for the reports penned by those fiery missionaries were sweeping exaggerations of the slavery the Boers practiced, more akin to servitude than the forced, torturous labor seen in the Americas and the Caribbean. A Coloured laboring for his Trekboer baas was allowed days of rest, rewards for hard work, and a measure of compassion from the family who owned him; rarely was he flogged without reason or mercy, and never was he forced onto a slave ship where he would be raped, abused, and subject to all manner of diseases. Compared to the ordeal faced by a slave toiling in a British colony in the Caribbean, his life was gentle, and this was pointed out by Boers who had seen the horrors of those places. “Clean up your own colonies before you come preaching to us,” they growled, but they went unheeded. By 1833 Britain did away with slavery with slavery in all its colonies, and the Cape was not spared. The missionaries, it seemed, had won out over the Boers.
Yet what was intended to be the demolition of an unfair system resulted in a terrible dislocation, where slaves across the frontier were left without aim or coin, turning them to banditry. In that terrible year of 1833, when Soshangaan was slaughtering his way to Zimbabwe and Mzilikazi was driving all he saw before him, there were scores of rapes, thefts, and murders across the face of the Cape, leading to commando attacks that in turn destroyed hundreds of the freed brigands. Yet this still was only the tip of the iceberg; the Boers were barely repaid for the labor they had lost, and what money the Crown did grudgingly spare them was impossible to attain. For a slave that had cost 600 pounds, London would scratch out a meager 180, and to collect it a Boer would have to leave his farm, trek for six months to Cape Town, collect the money, and then spend another six months trekking back home, leaving his farm in disrepair. Slowly discontent grew against the Englishmen until it was almost hatred, and even British successes in frontier wars against the Xhosa did little to assuage it. By 1834, many of the frontiersmen had made up their minds to leave the Cape and forge a new nation elsewhere.
Theirs was not a concerted movement, and Boer wagon-trains left the cape at sporadic intervals; the party of Hendrik Potgieter would leave in 1834, Retief in January of 1835, Cilliers in June of that year. Yet Boers had pushing away from the Cape since 1829, where the families of Hendrik van Valck, Paulus du Preez, and a number of others had been slowly edging north at the extreme boundary of the colony, in lands bordering the Namib desert. There were about three hundred of them, a hundred and eighty Boers and a number of Tswana slaves, living lives free of taxation and interference from the Papists(1) at Cape Town. They were considered yokels even by the hardy Trekboers who roamed the south, for not even the most daring smous(trader) came their way, and the one missionary who had had been shot at. In 1832 they established themselves at a succession of ranches they called Vrijmeer, but this too was but a temporary home. They had been lazily pressing north for three years, moving slowly through the drier lands of the Lowveld, meandering through the lovely arid place where the sand met the veld and the flowers burst into a thousand colors. Without any knowledge of the geography of that land, they expected to do this forever, tiptoeing through the hot veld and shooting gazelles and reclining on massive farms tilled by blacks who would labor for them until kingdom come.
Yet this was not to be, for in 1833 the outside world made a rude entrance into their Vrijmeer. The Nzoba people, victims of the massive upheaval to the east, had been driven so far that they stood on the periphery of the Boer farmsteads, where they clamored for sanctuary. Within months they were followed by four other tribes who had been similarly decimated, and all begged the Boers to take them for food and water and shelter. The men at Vrijmeer had never seen Kaffirs made so wretched, for they were a thin haunted bunch who had seen cannibalism and massacres and the unstoppable march of eight thousand black killers who put entire tribes to the fire and the steel. They were taken in, given subserviant roles, and allotted some land where they could build meager kraals. Yet it took a while to discover the reason why the blacks had been driven so far from their homes, for in those months all they could do was chatter of death and war and an elephant who ruptured the veld in his mad thrashings.
Finally through their Tswanas the Boers gleaned a name; “Mzilikazi!”. “Who is Mzilikazi?” they asked, but the blacks replied that Mzilikazi was not a who, a man, a human with compassion or restraint; he was a what, a force, a titan who loomed over the smaller kings and tribes and crushed them one by one until they were subsumed into his empire. They spoke of depredations that left the veld blackened and destroyed, of the impalement of chiefs and rape of women, of wholesale slaughter that left even the cattle sliced and bleeding in the ashes of the kraals. All these things they attributed to Mzilikazi, and their words made the Boers fearful of the beast that ruled in the north, for if those eight thousand soldiers attacked all at once they would be irresistible. What if he decided that the white men were too great a danger to him, and ordered his legions to destroy them once and for all? No help would come from the Cape, for these men had long abandoned that repressive place, and their cousins who wandered further afield were too far and unapproachable to be asked for aid. If the black king grew fearful, then eight thousand warriors would stamp their feet and sharpen their assegais and fly at Vrijmeer, and there would be no stopping them, for there were forty black men for every white and from the testimonies of the refugees they were vicious in battle.
At first some believed that Mzilikazi was just another chief, that he was no threat, that the ramblings of the emaciated Kaffirs were stories and embellishments of cattle theft and some bloodshed. But the Boer patriarchs, van Valck and du Preez knew different; they had fought the Xhosa and Coloured bandits years ago, and knew well of what Kaffir leaders could do to if stung. There was only one thing to do; they would have to assemble a commando, and make some sort of an agreement with Mzilikazi before he could do more damage. And if he acted treacherously then the commando would have to attack him until his regiments and his people were so wounded that they would lie forever prostrated.
An Elephant at Rest
“He is Mzilikazi the unbreakable
Roarer-on-the-plains, son of Matshobane
He is the lion that scatters the hyenas
The bird that crushes stones in its beak
The foot of the elephant who straddles the earth...”
-Early Ndebele praise song(1827)
By late 1833 the Ndebele had settled down. No longer did they barrel over the veld and scatter tribes before them, killing without mercy; by August of 1833 Mzilikazi had secured a relatively safe area directly to the north of Cape Colony, forming a kingdom far removed from the Zulu monolith to the east and safely apart from the chaos that wracked the veld in all directions. Mzilikazi erected a capital that he called Bulawayo(2), a kind of mocking replication of Shaka's royal kraal, and from it reigned over an area perhaps three-fourths the size of Soshangaan's Paramountcy in the far north. It was a stable, cohesive nation that combined the industry of the Zulu with the flexibility and resilience of the Ndebele, peaceful, productive, neither overpopulated or underpopulated and possessed with massive herds of cattle that gave Mzilikazi an endless pool of capital to feed his nation and pay his regiments.
Yet this nation had been forged out of a wild massacre that saw the veld ruined and two hundred tribes destroyed or subjugated. In that prologue to the horror unleashed by the Mfecane, Mzilikazi had implemented a policy that would nearly depopulate the region; any tribe he and his amaNdebele encountered were given the choice of subjugation or utter destruction. Many peoples wisely dropped their spears and assimilated into Mzilikazi's nation, but those who chose defiance found themselves facing the full force of eight thousand soldiers who raped, stole, and killed without compunction. From 1829, when Mzilikazi burned his kraals in the northlands of Zululand , to 1833, when the Ndebele finally settled themselves, ninety such tribes were either completely massacred or decimated to the point of being irreparably weakened. The Ndebele did not even spare the lands those tribes had inhabited; they put pastures and forests to the torch, and slaughtered whatever game they could find. Some groups starved to death or reverted to cannibalism. Others, knowing that the land was unsustainable, fled to other territories, setting off the reactions that would begin the Mfecane. Some fifteen thousand people died from the depredations of the Ndebele alone, while uncounted others lost their lives to the destruction that followed.
When Mzilikazi finally find a place worth settling, it was less of a calculated choice and more of a general weariness of travel. That land was on the periphery of the Karoo, an arid area populated mostly by vagrant peoples and Bushman hunters, and few tribes of Bantu extraction ever settled it; arid and dry, it sported none of the rich pastures that had fattened the Ndebele cattle back east. Yet Mzilikazi had nowhere else to go; the lands behind him were smoking ruins, and in all other directions he was hemmed in by powerful enemies who would not take kindly to an entire nation intruding upon their doorsteps. So he and his Ndebele found passable land in a region blasted by heat and destroyed by their own depradations, and from it raised a kingdom that would dominate the drylands. The land was already occupied by a sizable group of five thousand, who held rich herds of cattle and a modest kraal situated between three hills . Their emissaries went to the Great Bull Elephant and pleaded for clemency, but this the king refused to give; he could not harbor any more refugees, and he needed their cattle . The tribe(whose name has been lost to history) was set upon and destroyed, and in the place of their village Mzilikazi built Bulawayo, which meant “The Place of the Slaughter”, for in one day his regiments had put three thousand men, women, and children to the spear. Mzilikazi also took the daughter of their chief to wife and from her sired a son named Lobengula(3). Then, from a trail of blood and a land lacking in bare necessities, he built a strong, stable nation that would last all of five years before it was leveled completely, its domain transformed into a battleground between Englishman, Voortrekker, Xhosa, and Zulu.
The Ndebele kingdom was militaristic in nature, little different from any of the other nations birthed by the great men who dominated that era. Like Soshangaan's Paramountcy it was provincially policed by commanders and regiments who could be trusted to maintain order, and like Shaka's Zululand it was administered directly by the king, who owned everything. And while Mzilikazi may have been a mass murderer, he was one of the most stolid rulers ever seen in that part of Africa; his regiments and their indunas were completely loyal to him, and he was able to command even subjugated peoples without use of intimidation or cronyism. In the space of months, he built up an orderly, productive society centered at a kraal that was beginning to approach its Zulu namesake in grandeur and strength, if not population. Mzilikazi continued Shaka's policy of advancing soldiers and commanders by value of their talent, not birth, and improved on it by discouraging his sangomas from targeting any of his warriors or commanders. Unless that military man committed some serious offense or was so disliked that his removal was necessary, soldiers, captains, or indunas were never picked out for impalement. Subsequently, more and more men found themselves joining the army to dodge the ill will of the witch-doctors, giving Mzilikazi a vast host of loyal men to serve him in times of war, and from them he built a caste of warriors who knew no other occupation but battle. By December of 1833, ten thousand soldiers marched under the banner of the Great Bull Elephant, and of them two thousand formed a professional class of men who lived and breathed war, knowing nothing of the plow or the cattle-kraal. Mzilikazi's nation was mighty indeed, and had the Zulu themselves come against him he would have emerged victorious; but an enemy worse than Shaka waited over the horizon, and against them he and his amaNdebele would suffer a terrible defeat.
The first of those enemies would enter the Ndebele kingdom in February of 1834, in the form of thirty men riding out of the south, tired and haunted by their journey across the blasted veld. The men of Vrijmeer had been riding for four months across a landscape akin to hell, passing kraals that still smoked with the touch of the flame and bodies piled so high that the Boers had mistaken them for small hills. And of the raving peoples who survived that slaughter the Boers could not divine directions to Mzilikazi's realm; whenever they encountered the depopulated borders of the Ndebele kingdom the food was so lacking and the terrain so forbidding that the Boers went turned away, often moving in the opposite direction completely. By January they had nearly circumnavigated the area before they came upon a kraal that seemed untouched, and through their Tswanas they managed to convince the villagers to lead them to their king.
This group of thirty would go down in Afrikaner history as the Erstcommando, the first commando, for though they were by no means the first party of armed Boers seen in Cape Colony, they were the first to encounter Mzilikazi, who would be remembered as Die Vyund; the enemy. Captained by van Valck and du Preez, they made their way to Bulawayo, and there they were astonished by the scale of the place; Bulawayo itself harbored some twenty thousand people, comprising more than half of the nation's population, and it sported thousands of rondavels and herds of cattle so massive that the Boers imagined that this Mzilikazi must be some Xhosa renegade, making off with livestock stolen from the Cape frontier. Yet of all the things Boers saw in the lands of the Ndebele, it was the army of Mzilikazi that was most memorable, for in the wide flat area used for training they saw nine thousand men marching with unmatched discipline, running barefoot over a landscapes of thorns and rocks and dancing in such order that they would have been the envy of any battalion at Cape Town, Lorenco Marques, or beyond.
Upon their entry at Bulawayo the Boers were treated with some amount of wariness, for they carried the weapons feared by the Great Bull Elephant, and rode the horses that had carried the vanquished Griquas into battle. But there were only twenty-five of them, and through their servants they managed to convey that they meant no harm. What could they do, surrounded by warriors who would break them at a word? The Boers were allowed to camp outside the gates of Bulawayo, and in three days they would be granted an audience with the Great Bull Elephant, who was preoccupied with other matters. Yet those three days would be fateful ones for the Boers, the Ndebele, and indeed all of southern Africa, for in those days two things happened which would turn the blacks against the whites, causing a souring that would become belligerence, hatred, and eventually open conflict.
The first of these things was reckoned by the men of Vrijmeer to be a middling offense, but to the Ndebele it was a grievous attack on the king, his prosperity, and the wellbeing of his nation. On the second day, Koos, the fine Cape hound who was supposed to be presented as a gift to Mzilikazi killed five of the royal dogs in a brawl over scraps. At the sight of the five carcasses lying dead before the royal kraal, the already suspicious sangomas were driven to a frenzy; they capered around the city and screamed inundations against the Boers, calling them wizards who wanted to destroy the nation. Accusing another of being a wizard was a serious accusation, for, if found guilty by both the king and the sangomas, the accused would be subject to impalement. Mzilikazi was unavailable to arbitrate the dispute, and the Boers were spared, but the incident soured the Ndebele against their visitors. What happened to the hound is unclear, for it was not seen again..
The second offense was not at all the fault of the Boers, but in the minds of the Ndebele it was further proof that they were to be distrusted, destroyed if need be; within three days of their entrance at Bulawayo Mzilikazi's young wife and his infant son, Lobengula both fell very ill. The teenaged queen, Nonsizi was stricken with dysentery, while Lobengula raged with a fever that somehow did not kill him. The Ndebele panicked; Bulawayo was closed, and rumors spread that both mother and son had died. The sangomas pounced upon this. How could both the mother, honored of Mzilikazi, and her son both be afflicted by illness at the same time, on the same day, almost at the very hour when the white men had first ridden through the gates of Bulawayo? Was it coincidence? Was it sorcery? Why would the white men seek to disable them like this? Perhaps they were Zulus in disguise!
Of course, none of these things were true, and it is more than likely that the sangomas knew this very well. But in the space of days they managed to transform wary curiosity of the whites into distrust, fear, and near-hatred. Cattle were slaughtered and their gallbladders poured over the earth of the kraal to propitiate the bad spirits, and contrary to Mzilikazi's explicit orders a “smelling-out” was conducted, where the witch-hunters pranced through the crowds of people and marked out those who would be impaled, so that the evil could be drained out of Lobengula and his mother. The Boers noticed what was going happening, and asked again if they could meet with Mzilikazi. The knotted gates of Bulawayo were still closed to them.
Ill feelings grew. On the fifth morning the Boers awoke to find one of their Tswanas missing; he had been snatched from his sleeping place by a team of slayers, who dragged him to the kraal and had him impaled. The next day, after the Boers had spent another day waiting for the Great Bull Elephant to return from his sojourn, two Basuto ponies were led into Bulawayo and had their throats cut in a ditch attempt to save the royal mother and the heir to the throne. Then from the huts of the doctors came the horrible news; the queen, Nonsizi, had died. By some miracle, her infant son continued to cling to life.
And it was seven days after the Boers' arrival that Mzilikazi returned to Bulawayo after leading his regiments against a band of Xhosa thieves, finding his wife dead, his heir critically ill, and his capital seething with discontent. It is said that Mzilikazi was always calm and always peaceful, even when he ordered his soldiers against an enemy; but upon returning to Bulawayo he fell into a rage, and none escaped it. First he heard of the smelling-outordered by the sangomas, and upon seeing the impaled corpses above the gates of his kraal(some of whom were his own soldiers) he ordered his knobkerrie team to seize the chief witch-doctors and club them to death. Then Mzilikazi summoned the doctors, priests, warriors and ladies-in-waiting who had attended Nonsizi in her last moments, and condemned every one of them to be speared by assegais ; they would attend his wife in the her grave, as they had on her deathbed. Finally the king turned his attention to the Boers who still waited outside his gates, and upon hearing of their misdeeds he flew into a terrible fury. He had always hated guns and horses and the men who wielded them, and to have them tolerated in his lands was unacceptable, especially since it was they who had sickened his son and killed his wife.
Mzilikazi found the villagers who had led the Boers to Bulawayo, razed their kraals to the ground, and killed all their cattle. Then with one growling command of “Ubathakathi ukubulala”--kill the wizards-- he issued six thousand men to fall upon the twenty-nine who remained outside the gates of the kraal. They were ordered to bring the white men back alive, for the Great Bull Elephant desired to give the Boers the death that Shaka had given Dingane on the night of the Uzungu; while wizards were punished with a stake, the men who had murdered his wife, infected his son, and plunged his nation into disorder would receive four heated bamboo skewers. The king of the Ndebele was roused to a fury, and he would not rest until the white wizards had been appropriately punished.
The six thousand streamed out of Bulawayo and dashed for the Boer encampment, only to find it smoking and deserted. Warned by their Tswanas, the men of Vrijmeer had fled hours before, riding like wind out of the Ndebele territory; they had seen what Mzilikazi was capable of, and they were now the targets of his anger. It was imperative for them to warn their families at Vrijmeer, the trekkers who were beginning to set out from the colony, even the heathens who ruled at Cape Town; now was a time for white men across the Cape to unite and beat back the Kaffir emperor who had turned against them, who would see them as enemies and attack with everything he possessed. Not all escaped, however. Paulus du Preez and four others were separated from their comrades, and the Ndebele pinned them against a river and came against them without mercy. But the Boers were at least spared from the horrendous deaths they would have suffered at Bulawayo; du Preez and his friends fought to the last with knives and rocks, slashing and smashing against the shielded blacks until the regiments pressed in their steel and stabbed the Boers to death.
For his part, Mzilikazi did not stay idle. He had tangled with the Griquas before, and destroyed them utterly; and that was what he resolved to do with the Boers who had now endangered him. If any white man set foot in the lands of the Ndebele, he was to be killed on sight, and his ashes scattered to whatever direction he had come from, so that he did not pollute the good land occupied by the Ndebele.
And so began a war; not a conflict, or a series of a skirmishes, but a full, total war where thousands would die and millions would be displaced. Here would come the twilight of the Ndebele, and the great killing of the Boers; here would come the mauling of the Xhosa, and the rape of the fertile lands of southern Africa. Yet from the ashes there would rise others, and out of the seas of blood they would come and dominate the land. Falling was the star of the Trekboer and the Ndebele; approaching was the dawn of the Englishman and his powerful rival to the east. The fall of Mzilikazi would see the rise of the Zulu, in a land that belonged to them since their apotheosis.
Notes
On Slavery
Was I politically incorrect? I think I was. But I think I was being honest. Slavery at the Cape in the early 19th century was hard, yes, and there were atrocities, but for the most part it was a fairer and cleaner system than the real horrors being practiced in Dominica and America. For the most part, Boers did not rape, flog, or otherwise abuse their slaves in any really substantial way. In trekker families, slaves were accepted as part of the family, treated like the children. Yes, the Boers could be cruel, and they could father bastard children who were also inducted into slavery. But what was practiced at the Cape was a lot less vile than what went on in the Caribbean and the American South.
On the Ndebele
The thing with writing alternate history is its often impossible to tell exactly how the butterflies are going to work by way of people and how they think and view things. I'm not talking about population consciousness, or any of that sort of thing; I'm talking about how events affect individuals, like Mzilikazi being influenced by his travels and travails and the constant bloodshed that surrounds him and his people. The society he builds is mostly based on his own reflections of the civilization built up by Shaka, with a helping of his own ideas mixed in, and these ideas have been affected by what he and his people have gone through over 1829-1833. In OTL Matabeleland(When Mzilikazi went north and founded an empire there), society was caste-based and stratified. At the top were the original Ndebele/Zulu clansmen who had been with Mzilikazi from the beginning; in the middle were Sothos who had joined them; and at the bottom were Shona tribesmen who had been conquered and pressed into servitude. None of that here. ITTL Mzilikazi has had too little time to create a society like the one he made OTL; in the Ndebele kingdom, everyone is equal, and you rise or fall according to the power of your brain and the fortitude of your testicles.
On Afrikaans and Afrikaners
More will be revealed about this later. But its safe to say that Afrikaner culture will be a lot different than what it is OTL. A lot more insular, a lot more stolid and protective, and a lot more distrustful of the “other” (British, blacks). At the same time, however, their prolonged contact with black tribes and the Zulus are going to have a greater influence on their language, to the extent that it will be a lot harder for a Dutch-speaker to communicate with someone speaking Afrikaans.
Footnotes
1)The men of Vrijmeer are the rednecks of Afrikaner society(at the time), and as such Anglicans(and possibly even Lutherans) might as well be oppressive baby-eating Catholic Papists.
2)Bulawayo was OTL Mzilikazi's capital, though it was located a couple thousand miles north of where it is ITTL. It still stands today as one of Zimbabwe's most prominent cities. It's notable for having the most people who speak out against Robert Mugabe, though in this TL they likely won't need to. Or alternatively, they'll have someone worse.
3)Lobengula was, OTL, Mzilikazi's son and heir, who led Matabeleland for twenty years. He was almost as great a ruler as his father, protecting his realm from the British for a long time using diplomacy and clever statesmanship. ITTL he won't be so successful.
Long update tonight.
In which I finally remove my head from my backside and write down what needs to be written down. This is about three posts too late, and I know, I know it's taken so damn long—I did have work, but I also was being lazy about this. But, on a more positive note, we finally, finally get to see first contact between the Ndebele and the Boers! This will be followed by chapters on the Zulu themselves, some developments father afield, and then the unfolding conflict that will grow on the northern border of Cape Colony
The First Trekkers
“We leave our soil claimed by the English Government without rancor, or threats, or ill will. We pay testimony to the good people of English heritage who have befriended us and we wish them and their nation well. We are satisfied in our hearts that we owe England no further obligations, and we are sure that the Government will allow us to depart in peace, for all we seek as is to establish in the north a nation more obedient to God's rule.”
-Sarel Cilliers, a member of Hendrik Potgeiter's Voortrekkers
How does one define the Great Trek? A movement, a migration, a success and a failure that would be just as disruptive as the Crushing that so devastated the peoples of the veld; a thrust into lands bound by the savagery of the Kaffir and a movement away from lands smothered by the heresy of the Englishman. For ten years the Boers, those sturdy, implacable men who had driven their way across the Cape would seek to enter virgin territories in the north, where they could live according to the rules of God, striding forward like the ancient Israelites in their quest for Jordan. They would fight; they would die; they would move and fight again and die again, forming nations that would not survive long under the depredations of the Kaffirs and other, worse enemies. In later years their Afrikaner descendants would proclaim their trek to be a movement for freedom, but in reality it was a lost, confusing battle across the face of south Africa, and in that vicious Canaan the Boers would suffer worse than their Israelites.
For nigh on thirty years the Boers had grown more and more discontented with the British regime at Cape Town, disgruntled by their lack of ability in developing sound policies, disgusted by their impotence in pressing the lesser races of the Cape into servitude. The Boers were avid practitioners of slavery, and considered every honest farmer considered it his god-given right to force the brown and black man into working for him for twelve hours, six days a week, without pay. Slavery was ingrained into the mentality of the Cape, but the more liberal-minded British found it distasteful, and made steps to destroy it completely. Missionaries posted in the Karoo quickly took issue with the transgressions the Boers committed against their slaves, lying with women against their will and refusing slaves education in Christ. Searing reports were sent back to London of “the infamy of the Dutch slaveholder”, with a number of missionaries naming specific Boers who had abused their slaves, and these accusations were so horrendous that there was public outrage at the atrocities seemingly committed at the Cape.
These pamphlets made their way to Cape Town, where they were met with a similar reaction. A missionary who preached emancipation was ripped from his block and horsewhipped, incoming ships were pelted with rocks and dung, and in a number of instances the redcoats themselves were assaulted in the streets. There was disgust and mutterings of rebellion, and not without good reason, for the reports penned by those fiery missionaries were sweeping exaggerations of the slavery the Boers practiced, more akin to servitude than the forced, torturous labor seen in the Americas and the Caribbean. A Coloured laboring for his Trekboer baas was allowed days of rest, rewards for hard work, and a measure of compassion from the family who owned him; rarely was he flogged without reason or mercy, and never was he forced onto a slave ship where he would be raped, abused, and subject to all manner of diseases. Compared to the ordeal faced by a slave toiling in a British colony in the Caribbean, his life was gentle, and this was pointed out by Boers who had seen the horrors of those places. “Clean up your own colonies before you come preaching to us,” they growled, but they went unheeded. By 1833 Britain did away with slavery with slavery in all its colonies, and the Cape was not spared. The missionaries, it seemed, had won out over the Boers.
Yet what was intended to be the demolition of an unfair system resulted in a terrible dislocation, where slaves across the frontier were left without aim or coin, turning them to banditry. In that terrible year of 1833, when Soshangaan was slaughtering his way to Zimbabwe and Mzilikazi was driving all he saw before him, there were scores of rapes, thefts, and murders across the face of the Cape, leading to commando attacks that in turn destroyed hundreds of the freed brigands. Yet this still was only the tip of the iceberg; the Boers were barely repaid for the labor they had lost, and what money the Crown did grudgingly spare them was impossible to attain. For a slave that had cost 600 pounds, London would scratch out a meager 180, and to collect it a Boer would have to leave his farm, trek for six months to Cape Town, collect the money, and then spend another six months trekking back home, leaving his farm in disrepair. Slowly discontent grew against the Englishmen until it was almost hatred, and even British successes in frontier wars against the Xhosa did little to assuage it. By 1834, many of the frontiersmen had made up their minds to leave the Cape and forge a new nation elsewhere.
Theirs was not a concerted movement, and Boer wagon-trains left the cape at sporadic intervals; the party of Hendrik Potgieter would leave in 1834, Retief in January of 1835, Cilliers in June of that year. Yet Boers had pushing away from the Cape since 1829, where the families of Hendrik van Valck, Paulus du Preez, and a number of others had been slowly edging north at the extreme boundary of the colony, in lands bordering the Namib desert. There were about three hundred of them, a hundred and eighty Boers and a number of Tswana slaves, living lives free of taxation and interference from the Papists(1) at Cape Town. They were considered yokels even by the hardy Trekboers who roamed the south, for not even the most daring smous(trader) came their way, and the one missionary who had had been shot at. In 1832 they established themselves at a succession of ranches they called Vrijmeer, but this too was but a temporary home. They had been lazily pressing north for three years, moving slowly through the drier lands of the Lowveld, meandering through the lovely arid place where the sand met the veld and the flowers burst into a thousand colors. Without any knowledge of the geography of that land, they expected to do this forever, tiptoeing through the hot veld and shooting gazelles and reclining on massive farms tilled by blacks who would labor for them until kingdom come.
Yet this was not to be, for in 1833 the outside world made a rude entrance into their Vrijmeer. The Nzoba people, victims of the massive upheaval to the east, had been driven so far that they stood on the periphery of the Boer farmsteads, where they clamored for sanctuary. Within months they were followed by four other tribes who had been similarly decimated, and all begged the Boers to take them for food and water and shelter. The men at Vrijmeer had never seen Kaffirs made so wretched, for they were a thin haunted bunch who had seen cannibalism and massacres and the unstoppable march of eight thousand black killers who put entire tribes to the fire and the steel. They were taken in, given subserviant roles, and allotted some land where they could build meager kraals. Yet it took a while to discover the reason why the blacks had been driven so far from their homes, for in those months all they could do was chatter of death and war and an elephant who ruptured the veld in his mad thrashings.
Finally through their Tswanas the Boers gleaned a name; “Mzilikazi!”. “Who is Mzilikazi?” they asked, but the blacks replied that Mzilikazi was not a who, a man, a human with compassion or restraint; he was a what, a force, a titan who loomed over the smaller kings and tribes and crushed them one by one until they were subsumed into his empire. They spoke of depredations that left the veld blackened and destroyed, of the impalement of chiefs and rape of women, of wholesale slaughter that left even the cattle sliced and bleeding in the ashes of the kraals. All these things they attributed to Mzilikazi, and their words made the Boers fearful of the beast that ruled in the north, for if those eight thousand soldiers attacked all at once they would be irresistible. What if he decided that the white men were too great a danger to him, and ordered his legions to destroy them once and for all? No help would come from the Cape, for these men had long abandoned that repressive place, and their cousins who wandered further afield were too far and unapproachable to be asked for aid. If the black king grew fearful, then eight thousand warriors would stamp their feet and sharpen their assegais and fly at Vrijmeer, and there would be no stopping them, for there were forty black men for every white and from the testimonies of the refugees they were vicious in battle.
At first some believed that Mzilikazi was just another chief, that he was no threat, that the ramblings of the emaciated Kaffirs were stories and embellishments of cattle theft and some bloodshed. But the Boer patriarchs, van Valck and du Preez knew different; they had fought the Xhosa and Coloured bandits years ago, and knew well of what Kaffir leaders could do to if stung. There was only one thing to do; they would have to assemble a commando, and make some sort of an agreement with Mzilikazi before he could do more damage. And if he acted treacherously then the commando would have to attack him until his regiments and his people were so wounded that they would lie forever prostrated.
An Elephant at Rest
“He is Mzilikazi the unbreakable
Roarer-on-the-plains, son of Matshobane
He is the lion that scatters the hyenas
The bird that crushes stones in its beak
The foot of the elephant who straddles the earth...”
-Early Ndebele praise song(1827)
By late 1833 the Ndebele had settled down. No longer did they barrel over the veld and scatter tribes before them, killing without mercy; by August of 1833 Mzilikazi had secured a relatively safe area directly to the north of Cape Colony, forming a kingdom far removed from the Zulu monolith to the east and safely apart from the chaos that wracked the veld in all directions. Mzilikazi erected a capital that he called Bulawayo(2), a kind of mocking replication of Shaka's royal kraal, and from it reigned over an area perhaps three-fourths the size of Soshangaan's Paramountcy in the far north. It was a stable, cohesive nation that combined the industry of the Zulu with the flexibility and resilience of the Ndebele, peaceful, productive, neither overpopulated or underpopulated and possessed with massive herds of cattle that gave Mzilikazi an endless pool of capital to feed his nation and pay his regiments.
Yet this nation had been forged out of a wild massacre that saw the veld ruined and two hundred tribes destroyed or subjugated. In that prologue to the horror unleashed by the Mfecane, Mzilikazi had implemented a policy that would nearly depopulate the region; any tribe he and his amaNdebele encountered were given the choice of subjugation or utter destruction. Many peoples wisely dropped their spears and assimilated into Mzilikazi's nation, but those who chose defiance found themselves facing the full force of eight thousand soldiers who raped, stole, and killed without compunction. From 1829, when Mzilikazi burned his kraals in the northlands of Zululand , to 1833, when the Ndebele finally settled themselves, ninety such tribes were either completely massacred or decimated to the point of being irreparably weakened. The Ndebele did not even spare the lands those tribes had inhabited; they put pastures and forests to the torch, and slaughtered whatever game they could find. Some groups starved to death or reverted to cannibalism. Others, knowing that the land was unsustainable, fled to other territories, setting off the reactions that would begin the Mfecane. Some fifteen thousand people died from the depredations of the Ndebele alone, while uncounted others lost their lives to the destruction that followed.
When Mzilikazi finally find a place worth settling, it was less of a calculated choice and more of a general weariness of travel. That land was on the periphery of the Karoo, an arid area populated mostly by vagrant peoples and Bushman hunters, and few tribes of Bantu extraction ever settled it; arid and dry, it sported none of the rich pastures that had fattened the Ndebele cattle back east. Yet Mzilikazi had nowhere else to go; the lands behind him were smoking ruins, and in all other directions he was hemmed in by powerful enemies who would not take kindly to an entire nation intruding upon their doorsteps. So he and his Ndebele found passable land in a region blasted by heat and destroyed by their own depradations, and from it raised a kingdom that would dominate the drylands. The land was already occupied by a sizable group of five thousand, who held rich herds of cattle and a modest kraal situated between three hills . Their emissaries went to the Great Bull Elephant and pleaded for clemency, but this the king refused to give; he could not harbor any more refugees, and he needed their cattle . The tribe(whose name has been lost to history) was set upon and destroyed, and in the place of their village Mzilikazi built Bulawayo, which meant “The Place of the Slaughter”, for in one day his regiments had put three thousand men, women, and children to the spear. Mzilikazi also took the daughter of their chief to wife and from her sired a son named Lobengula(3). Then, from a trail of blood and a land lacking in bare necessities, he built a strong, stable nation that would last all of five years before it was leveled completely, its domain transformed into a battleground between Englishman, Voortrekker, Xhosa, and Zulu.
The Ndebele kingdom was militaristic in nature, little different from any of the other nations birthed by the great men who dominated that era. Like Soshangaan's Paramountcy it was provincially policed by commanders and regiments who could be trusted to maintain order, and like Shaka's Zululand it was administered directly by the king, who owned everything. And while Mzilikazi may have been a mass murderer, he was one of the most stolid rulers ever seen in that part of Africa; his regiments and their indunas were completely loyal to him, and he was able to command even subjugated peoples without use of intimidation or cronyism. In the space of months, he built up an orderly, productive society centered at a kraal that was beginning to approach its Zulu namesake in grandeur and strength, if not population. Mzilikazi continued Shaka's policy of advancing soldiers and commanders by value of their talent, not birth, and improved on it by discouraging his sangomas from targeting any of his warriors or commanders. Unless that military man committed some serious offense or was so disliked that his removal was necessary, soldiers, captains, or indunas were never picked out for impalement. Subsequently, more and more men found themselves joining the army to dodge the ill will of the witch-doctors, giving Mzilikazi a vast host of loyal men to serve him in times of war, and from them he built a caste of warriors who knew no other occupation but battle. By December of 1833, ten thousand soldiers marched under the banner of the Great Bull Elephant, and of them two thousand formed a professional class of men who lived and breathed war, knowing nothing of the plow or the cattle-kraal. Mzilikazi's nation was mighty indeed, and had the Zulu themselves come against him he would have emerged victorious; but an enemy worse than Shaka waited over the horizon, and against them he and his amaNdebele would suffer a terrible defeat.
The first of those enemies would enter the Ndebele kingdom in February of 1834, in the form of thirty men riding out of the south, tired and haunted by their journey across the blasted veld. The men of Vrijmeer had been riding for four months across a landscape akin to hell, passing kraals that still smoked with the touch of the flame and bodies piled so high that the Boers had mistaken them for small hills. And of the raving peoples who survived that slaughter the Boers could not divine directions to Mzilikazi's realm; whenever they encountered the depopulated borders of the Ndebele kingdom the food was so lacking and the terrain so forbidding that the Boers went turned away, often moving in the opposite direction completely. By January they had nearly circumnavigated the area before they came upon a kraal that seemed untouched, and through their Tswanas they managed to convince the villagers to lead them to their king.
This group of thirty would go down in Afrikaner history as the Erstcommando, the first commando, for though they were by no means the first party of armed Boers seen in Cape Colony, they were the first to encounter Mzilikazi, who would be remembered as Die Vyund; the enemy. Captained by van Valck and du Preez, they made their way to Bulawayo, and there they were astonished by the scale of the place; Bulawayo itself harbored some twenty thousand people, comprising more than half of the nation's population, and it sported thousands of rondavels and herds of cattle so massive that the Boers imagined that this Mzilikazi must be some Xhosa renegade, making off with livestock stolen from the Cape frontier. Yet of all the things Boers saw in the lands of the Ndebele, it was the army of Mzilikazi that was most memorable, for in the wide flat area used for training they saw nine thousand men marching with unmatched discipline, running barefoot over a landscapes of thorns and rocks and dancing in such order that they would have been the envy of any battalion at Cape Town, Lorenco Marques, or beyond.
Upon their entry at Bulawayo the Boers were treated with some amount of wariness, for they carried the weapons feared by the Great Bull Elephant, and rode the horses that had carried the vanquished Griquas into battle. But there were only twenty-five of them, and through their servants they managed to convey that they meant no harm. What could they do, surrounded by warriors who would break them at a word? The Boers were allowed to camp outside the gates of Bulawayo, and in three days they would be granted an audience with the Great Bull Elephant, who was preoccupied with other matters. Yet those three days would be fateful ones for the Boers, the Ndebele, and indeed all of southern Africa, for in those days two things happened which would turn the blacks against the whites, causing a souring that would become belligerence, hatred, and eventually open conflict.
The first of these things was reckoned by the men of Vrijmeer to be a middling offense, but to the Ndebele it was a grievous attack on the king, his prosperity, and the wellbeing of his nation. On the second day, Koos, the fine Cape hound who was supposed to be presented as a gift to Mzilikazi killed five of the royal dogs in a brawl over scraps. At the sight of the five carcasses lying dead before the royal kraal, the already suspicious sangomas were driven to a frenzy; they capered around the city and screamed inundations against the Boers, calling them wizards who wanted to destroy the nation. Accusing another of being a wizard was a serious accusation, for, if found guilty by both the king and the sangomas, the accused would be subject to impalement. Mzilikazi was unavailable to arbitrate the dispute, and the Boers were spared, but the incident soured the Ndebele against their visitors. What happened to the hound is unclear, for it was not seen again..
The second offense was not at all the fault of the Boers, but in the minds of the Ndebele it was further proof that they were to be distrusted, destroyed if need be; within three days of their entrance at Bulawayo Mzilikazi's young wife and his infant son, Lobengula both fell very ill. The teenaged queen, Nonsizi was stricken with dysentery, while Lobengula raged with a fever that somehow did not kill him. The Ndebele panicked; Bulawayo was closed, and rumors spread that both mother and son had died. The sangomas pounced upon this. How could both the mother, honored of Mzilikazi, and her son both be afflicted by illness at the same time, on the same day, almost at the very hour when the white men had first ridden through the gates of Bulawayo? Was it coincidence? Was it sorcery? Why would the white men seek to disable them like this? Perhaps they were Zulus in disguise!
Of course, none of these things were true, and it is more than likely that the sangomas knew this very well. But in the space of days they managed to transform wary curiosity of the whites into distrust, fear, and near-hatred. Cattle were slaughtered and their gallbladders poured over the earth of the kraal to propitiate the bad spirits, and contrary to Mzilikazi's explicit orders a “smelling-out” was conducted, where the witch-hunters pranced through the crowds of people and marked out those who would be impaled, so that the evil could be drained out of Lobengula and his mother. The Boers noticed what was going happening, and asked again if they could meet with Mzilikazi. The knotted gates of Bulawayo were still closed to them.
Ill feelings grew. On the fifth morning the Boers awoke to find one of their Tswanas missing; he had been snatched from his sleeping place by a team of slayers, who dragged him to the kraal and had him impaled. The next day, after the Boers had spent another day waiting for the Great Bull Elephant to return from his sojourn, two Basuto ponies were led into Bulawayo and had their throats cut in a ditch attempt to save the royal mother and the heir to the throne. Then from the huts of the doctors came the horrible news; the queen, Nonsizi, had died. By some miracle, her infant son continued to cling to life.
And it was seven days after the Boers' arrival that Mzilikazi returned to Bulawayo after leading his regiments against a band of Xhosa thieves, finding his wife dead, his heir critically ill, and his capital seething with discontent. It is said that Mzilikazi was always calm and always peaceful, even when he ordered his soldiers against an enemy; but upon returning to Bulawayo he fell into a rage, and none escaped it. First he heard of the smelling-outordered by the sangomas, and upon seeing the impaled corpses above the gates of his kraal(some of whom were his own soldiers) he ordered his knobkerrie team to seize the chief witch-doctors and club them to death. Then Mzilikazi summoned the doctors, priests, warriors and ladies-in-waiting who had attended Nonsizi in her last moments, and condemned every one of them to be speared by assegais ; they would attend his wife in the her grave, as they had on her deathbed. Finally the king turned his attention to the Boers who still waited outside his gates, and upon hearing of their misdeeds he flew into a terrible fury. He had always hated guns and horses and the men who wielded them, and to have them tolerated in his lands was unacceptable, especially since it was they who had sickened his son and killed his wife.
Mzilikazi found the villagers who had led the Boers to Bulawayo, razed their kraals to the ground, and killed all their cattle. Then with one growling command of “Ubathakathi ukubulala”--kill the wizards-- he issued six thousand men to fall upon the twenty-nine who remained outside the gates of the kraal. They were ordered to bring the white men back alive, for the Great Bull Elephant desired to give the Boers the death that Shaka had given Dingane on the night of the Uzungu; while wizards were punished with a stake, the men who had murdered his wife, infected his son, and plunged his nation into disorder would receive four heated bamboo skewers. The king of the Ndebele was roused to a fury, and he would not rest until the white wizards had been appropriately punished.
The six thousand streamed out of Bulawayo and dashed for the Boer encampment, only to find it smoking and deserted. Warned by their Tswanas, the men of Vrijmeer had fled hours before, riding like wind out of the Ndebele territory; they had seen what Mzilikazi was capable of, and they were now the targets of his anger. It was imperative for them to warn their families at Vrijmeer, the trekkers who were beginning to set out from the colony, even the heathens who ruled at Cape Town; now was a time for white men across the Cape to unite and beat back the Kaffir emperor who had turned against them, who would see them as enemies and attack with everything he possessed. Not all escaped, however. Paulus du Preez and four others were separated from their comrades, and the Ndebele pinned them against a river and came against them without mercy. But the Boers were at least spared from the horrendous deaths they would have suffered at Bulawayo; du Preez and his friends fought to the last with knives and rocks, slashing and smashing against the shielded blacks until the regiments pressed in their steel and stabbed the Boers to death.
For his part, Mzilikazi did not stay idle. He had tangled with the Griquas before, and destroyed them utterly; and that was what he resolved to do with the Boers who had now endangered him. If any white man set foot in the lands of the Ndebele, he was to be killed on sight, and his ashes scattered to whatever direction he had come from, so that he did not pollute the good land occupied by the Ndebele.
And so began a war; not a conflict, or a series of a skirmishes, but a full, total war where thousands would die and millions would be displaced. Here would come the twilight of the Ndebele, and the great killing of the Boers; here would come the mauling of the Xhosa, and the rape of the fertile lands of southern Africa. Yet from the ashes there would rise others, and out of the seas of blood they would come and dominate the land. Falling was the star of the Trekboer and the Ndebele; approaching was the dawn of the Englishman and his powerful rival to the east. The fall of Mzilikazi would see the rise of the Zulu, in a land that belonged to them since their apotheosis.
Notes
On Slavery
Was I politically incorrect? I think I was. But I think I was being honest. Slavery at the Cape in the early 19th century was hard, yes, and there were atrocities, but for the most part it was a fairer and cleaner system than the real horrors being practiced in Dominica and America. For the most part, Boers did not rape, flog, or otherwise abuse their slaves in any really substantial way. In trekker families, slaves were accepted as part of the family, treated like the children. Yes, the Boers could be cruel, and they could father bastard children who were also inducted into slavery. But what was practiced at the Cape was a lot less vile than what went on in the Caribbean and the American South.
On the Ndebele
The thing with writing alternate history is its often impossible to tell exactly how the butterflies are going to work by way of people and how they think and view things. I'm not talking about population consciousness, or any of that sort of thing; I'm talking about how events affect individuals, like Mzilikazi being influenced by his travels and travails and the constant bloodshed that surrounds him and his people. The society he builds is mostly based on his own reflections of the civilization built up by Shaka, with a helping of his own ideas mixed in, and these ideas have been affected by what he and his people have gone through over 1829-1833. In OTL Matabeleland(When Mzilikazi went north and founded an empire there), society was caste-based and stratified. At the top were the original Ndebele/Zulu clansmen who had been with Mzilikazi from the beginning; in the middle were Sothos who had joined them; and at the bottom were Shona tribesmen who had been conquered and pressed into servitude. None of that here. ITTL Mzilikazi has had too little time to create a society like the one he made OTL; in the Ndebele kingdom, everyone is equal, and you rise or fall according to the power of your brain and the fortitude of your testicles.
On Afrikaans and Afrikaners
More will be revealed about this later. But its safe to say that Afrikaner culture will be a lot different than what it is OTL. A lot more insular, a lot more stolid and protective, and a lot more distrustful of the “other” (British, blacks). At the same time, however, their prolonged contact with black tribes and the Zulus are going to have a greater influence on their language, to the extent that it will be a lot harder for a Dutch-speaker to communicate with someone speaking Afrikaans.
Footnotes
1)The men of Vrijmeer are the rednecks of Afrikaner society(at the time), and as such Anglicans(and possibly even Lutherans) might as well be oppressive baby-eating Catholic Papists.
2)Bulawayo was OTL Mzilikazi's capital, though it was located a couple thousand miles north of where it is ITTL. It still stands today as one of Zimbabwe's most prominent cities. It's notable for having the most people who speak out against Robert Mugabe, though in this TL they likely won't need to. Or alternatively, they'll have someone worse.
3)Lobengula was, OTL, Mzilikazi's son and heir, who led Matabeleland for twenty years. He was almost as great a ruler as his father, protecting his realm from the British for a long time using diplomacy and clever statesmanship. ITTL he won't be so successful.