The World полностью

As Shaka’s conquests intensified the Mfecane, he was just one player in a multi-ethnic tournament for power and resources. To the north-east, the Portuguese forged a unique model of European empire. Portuguese kings granted titles and estates to Luso-African warlords, the prazo senhors, who ruled alongside African magnates.^* These Luso-African lords – the prazeiros, commanding private armies of African colonos and chicundas (slave-soldiers) – hunted deeper into Africa for cattle, slaves and ivory to sell in Lourenço Marques (Mozambique); further north, Omani and Swahili slave traders hacked their way into central Africa, selling their captives around the Indian Ocean as Mehmed Ali raided into Sudan. To the south, the mixed-race Griqua raided into the northern Cape; Xhosa kings conquered the east Cape; and behind them came the Dutch and the British.

The Dutch traders of the VOC had founded Cape Town, where they settled thousands of poor Boers – farmers, devout Calvinists – who soon encountered the hunter-gatherer Khoikhoi (Bushmen or Hottentots to the Europeans), descended from the original inhabitants of the continent, pushed southwards by the Bantu who migrated from west Africa. The Dutch imported slaves from Dahomey, Angola and Mozambique to work their plantations while breaking the Khoikhoi, who, crushed between Bantu and Dutch, decimated by smallpox and reduced to indentured labour close to slavery, almost ceased to exist. The settlers, who called themselves Afrikaners, expanded northwards and eastwards, thus encountering the Nguni, herders of long-horned cattle, who were moving south conquering their own kingdoms.

The Afrikaners developed into skilled frontiersmen, who raided the herds and hunted elephants for ivory, but they also settled with African women with whom they had children, sometimes living more like Nguni royalty than Europeans. They became expert fighters in mounted units called commandos, and trained their mixed-race sons to serve as auxiliary fighters. When the British seized the Cape, it was a colony of 75,000 people – 15,000 semi-hostile Afrikaners, 13,000 black slaves, 1,200 freedmen and the rest mixed-race Khoikhoi-Dutch Griqua, known as the ‘Bastards’. As new British settlers arrived in the Cape, moving north and eastwards, they encountered resistance from the amaXhosa kingdom led by Tshawe warrior kings Ngqika, Hintsa and Mgolombane Sandile. The Xhosa were formidable fighters whose acumen is often neglected by historians: they halted the British empire for seventy years.

Now in 1818 as the British were fighting the amaXhosa under Hintsa, a group of frontiersmen founded Port Natal on the east coast and travelled to Shaka’s capital kwaBulawayo. The king mocked their strange fair hair – comparing it to cattle tails – but granted them rights to the port and recruited them as military advisers. Yet Shaka’s conquests were reaching their limit.

In 1824, while the British hunters were still in his kraal, Shaka was dancing when a would-be assassin speared him in the side. Shaka hunted down the hitmen, who were beaten to a pulp by the people, then he massacred the Qwabe tribe whom he decided to blame – though he rightly distrusted his own family. In 1827, his mother Nandi died mysteriously. She had disapproved of his purges, and may have protected a male baby born of his concubines: he either killed her in a rage or had her killed, like Nero. She was buried as Zulu royalty, sitting up supported by the bodies of sacrificed henchmen, servants and concubines, strangled or buried alive. Killing anyone suspected of disloyalty, Shaka supposedly killed 7,000 people. After Nandi’s death he appointed his aunt Mnkabayi as Great She-Elephant.

As the British and Afrikaners probed Zulu lands, and Shaka launched his terror, southern Africa was in ferment. In 1828, needing another victory, Shaka ordered an expedition against Soshangane, formerly one of Zwide’s generals, who led the tribe founded by his grandfather Gaza eastwards to find their own realm. Emulating many of Shaka’s military tactics, Soshangane routed the Zulus, weakening Shaka. ‘I’m like a wolf on the plain, at a loss for a place to hide his head in,’ Shaka said, encouraging the diviners to smell out witches among his half-brothers, Dingane and Mhlangana. Great She-Elephant Mnkabayi began to suggest that he was mad and had killed his mother. But while he was protected by his devoted inceku (warrior/bodyguard) Mbopha, no one could touch him.