Chaka (1787 - 1828), or Shaka, was the founder of the Zulu Empire.
Childhood
Chaka is said to be the result of an illegitimate union between Nandi, Princess Langeni, and Senza Ngakona, chief of the Zulu clan (a fraction of the Nguni people, from the Bantus who populated South Africa from the 13th to the 18th century). According to legend, he would have been considered a bastard, rejected and humiliated by his father, regularly mistreated by his comrades [1]. These experiences will harden him and mark his personality with a thirst for revenge. Mazisi Kunene, who was inspired by Zulu traditions, explains that Chaka's mother, Nandi, was an authoritarian princess. She got angry with her husband and with his co-wives, for which she was divorced. Cause of war between the Abasema Langeni, her people, and the Zulu tribe, she had to flee to the Qwabe, of which she would have married one of the princes. Thus, Mazisi Kunene does not refute the difficult childhood of Chaka, but the nuance.
Chaka does not get along with the members of the Qwabe royal family (against whom he will have to fight later). He goes to the Bathwetwa and becomes a member of the army of Dingiswayo, the ruler of the Bathwetwa. He quickly becomes the most outstanding warrior in Dingiswayo's army. Endowed with prodigious physical strength and endurance, he excels in combat. He is charismatic and turns out to be a fine strategist. His reputation is spreading. He soon becomes Dingiswayo's spokesperson and right-hand man.
The ascent
On the death of his father, Sigujana, one of Chaka's half-brothers, takes over in accordance with their father's will, and becomes the chief of the Zulu clan. Dingiswayo supports Chaka so that he takes power. In the battle, Sigujana finds death.
Chaka reigns over his people and begins to apply his revolutionary ideas to them to create a powerful army. He continues to fight for Dingiswayo, who has some trouble with a powerful neighbor with imperialist aims, Zwide, chief of the Ngwane tribe. In a few years, he achieves his goals:he succeeds in taking prisoner and assassinating Dingiswayo, thanks to the support of his spies. Following this event, the Bathwetwa regiments elected Chaka as their sovereign chief.
The Zulu Kingdom
After Dingiswayo's death, Chaka defeats Zwide in two memorable battles where he uses his keen sense of strategy. Then begins the time of conquests. He becomes the leader of a large part of the Nguni tribes of Natal. He assimilates them to his tribe, and makes them bear his name, that of Zulu. To do this, he remodels his people into a professional army constituting the pivot of society, which upsets its traditional structures. He compels all his subjects to military service, creates a body of Amazons, imposes the Zulu language on his neighbors. He reorganized the Zulu army, which became permanent. He abolishes the initiation of young men but retains the division into age groups to form regiments. He stimulates them by contests of tests:to the winners are offered the most beautiful nubile girls, initiated into wrestling and combat. He multiplies the physical exercises and increases the share of meat food of his troops.
He then revolutionizes the military strategy of his army (task initiated with his own tribe):he opts for the "buffalo head" attack strategy:the troops are divided into four corps, two wings form the buffalo horns and two central bodies placed one behind the other form the "skull". Operating in spinning motion, one wing attacks, while the other hides and only intervenes when combat is engaged. It waged total war and used scorched earth tactics with special regiments, the impi ebumbu (red regiments).
Chaka's army at its peak will number over 100,000 men, to which must be added about 500,000 men from neighboring tribes. Chaka directs the expansion of the Zulus in two main directions:towards the west and towards the south against the Tembou, Pondo and Xhosa. They sow terror among the Nguni, the Swazi, the Sotho and the Xhosa. In ten years, Chaka carved out an empire in Natal.
He had a systematic eugenics practiced:the old men of the conquered peoples were eliminated, the women and the young incorporated. Young people survive on condition that they enlist in the impi, give up their name and language, and become true Zulus.
By 1820, four years into his first campaign, Chaka had conquered a territory larger than France.
From 1822, Chaka deployed his armies east of the Drakensberg. Faced with him, many communities choose to flee, attacking their neighbors in passing, which adds to the confusion. The ethnic map of the region is upset (this process is called Mfecane, “turbulent movement of populations”). Tradition tends to make Chaka guilty of Mfecane. In truth, this migration movement had already begun before he took power, with, among other things, the fighting between Zwide and Matiwane.
Three of Chaka's generals left him to conquer southern Africa by applying his brutal methods:Moselekatse (or Mzilikazi), after his break with Chaka in 1821, headed south-west with the Ndebele, dispersed the Sotho on the of the Vaal and settled between the Vaal and the Orange until 1836; Manoukosi (or Sochangane) submits Tonga to current Mozambique (1830); Zouangendaba migrates three thousand kilometers to the north.
The fall
Chaka's decline will begin with his increasingly assertive tendency towards tyranny, which earned him the opposition of his own people. When his mother Nandi died in 1827, Chaka had over 7,000 people executed. For a year, married people were forbidden to live together and everyone was forbidden to drink milk. Note, however, that this rite of extreme mourning was exceptionally part of the Zulu tradition.
The circumstances of his death, which occurred in 1828, are unclear:Chaka is said to have been stabbed to death by his half-brothers Dingane and Mhlangane, the victim of a plot orchestrated by his brothers and his aunt Mkabayi, with the help of one of his men. of confidence, Mbopa.
Chaka was a charismatic leader, a genius strategist and organizer, founder of a nation. And like Napoleon, to whom he is sometimes compared, he was a conqueror and a despot. His action influenced the life and destiny of entire regions of southern Africa.
Chaka has been an important symbol in the ideological struggle between blacks and whites in South Africa. White people have demonized him a lot, presenting him as a barbaric tyrant. For the Zulus, he is a complex, semi-legendary character, a fabulous warrior to whom the pride of the nation can be traced.