were kept apart. Members of a regiment were of much the same age, and the young warriors were forbidden to marry until they had distinguished themselves in battle.
Chaka had but two ways of dealing with the tribes with whom he came in contact, either they received permission to be incorporated in the Zulu nation or they were practically exterminated. In the latter case the only persons spared were young girls and growing lads who could serve as carriers for the army. No tribe against which he waged war was able successfully to oppose the Zulu arms. At first Chaka turned his attention northward. Those who could fled before him, the first of importance so to do being a chief named Swangendaba (Sungandaba), whose tribe, of the same stock as the Zulu, was known as Angoni. He was followed by another tribe, which under Manikusa for many years ravaged the district around and north of Delagoa Bay (see Gazaland). Chaka next attacked the tribes on his southern border, and by 1820 had made himself master of Natal, which he swept almost clear of inhabitants. It was about 1820 that Mosilikatze (properly Umsilikazi), a general in the Zulu army, having incurred Chaka’s wrath by keeping back part of the booty taken in an expedition, fled with a large following across the Drakensberg and began to lay waste a great part of the country between the Vaal and Limpopo rivers. Mosilikatze was not of the Zulu tribe proper, and he and his followers styled themselves Abaka Zulu. Chaka’s own dominions, despite his conquests, were not very extensive. He ruled from the Pongolo river on the north to the Umkomanzi river on the south, and inland his power extended to the foot of the Drakensberg, thus his territory coincided almost exactly with the limits of Zululand and Natal as constituted in 1903. His influence, however, extended from the Limpopo to the borders of Cape Colony, and through the ravages of Swangendaba and Mosilikatze the terror of the Zulu arms was carried far and wide into the interior of the continent.
Chaka seems to have first come into contact with Europeans in 1824. In that year (see Natal) he was visited by F. G. Farewell and a few companions, and to them he made a grant of the district of Port Natal. Farewell found the king at Umgungindhlovu, the royal kraal on the Arrival of the British.White Umfolosi, “surrounded by a large number of chiefs and about 8000 or 9000 armed men, observing a state and ceremony in our introduction little expected.” At this time an attempt was made to murder Chaka, but the wound he received was cured by one of Farewell’s companions, a circumstance which made the king very friendly to Europeans. Anxious to open a political connexion with the Cape and British governments, Chaka entrusted early in 1828 one of his principal chiefs, Sotobi, and a companion to the care of J. S. King, one of the Natal settlers, to be conducted on an embassage to Cape Town, Sotobi being commissioned to proceed to the king of England. But they were not allowed to proceed beyond Port Elizabeth, and three months later were sent back to Zululand. In July of the same year Chaka sent an army westward which laid waste the Pondo country. The Zulu force did not come into contact with the British troops guardrng the Cape frontier, but much alarm was caused by the invasion. In November envoys from Chaka reached Cape Town, and it was determined to send a British officer to Zululand to confer with him. Before this embassy started, news came that Chaka had been murdered (23rd of September 1828) at a military kraal on the Umvote about fifty miles from Port Natal. Chaka was a victim to a conspiracy by his half brothers Dingaan and Umthlangana, while a short time afterwards Dingaan murdered Umthlangana, overcame the opposition of a third brother, and made himself king of the Zulu.
Bloodstained as had been Chaka’s rule, that of Dingaan appears to have exceeded it in wanton cruelty, as is attested by several trustworthy European travellers and merchants who now with some frequency visited Zululand. The British settlers at Port Natal were alternately Dingaan.terrorized and conciliated. In 1835 Dingaan gave permission to the British settlers at Port Natal to establish missionary stations in the country, in return for a promise made by the settlers not to harbour fugitives from his dominions. In 1836 American missionaries were also allowed to open stations, in 1837 he permitted the Rev F. Owen, of the Church Missionary Society, to reside at his great kraal, and Owen was with the king when in November 1837, he received Pieter Retief, the leader of the first party of Boer immigrants to enter Natal.
Coming over the Drakensberg in considerable numbers during 1837, the Boers found the land stretching south from the mountains almost deserted, and Retief went to Dingaan to obtain a formal cession of the country west of the Tugela, which river the Zulu recognized Arrival of the Boers.as the boundary of Zululand proper. After agreeing to Retief’s request Dingaan caused the Boer leader and his companions to be murdered (6th of February 1838), following up his treachery by slaying as many as possible of the other Boers who had entered Natal. After two unsuccessful attempts to avenge their slain, in which the Boers were aided by the British settlers at Port Natal, Dingaan’s army was totally defeated on the 16th of December 1838, by a Boer force under Andries Pretorius. Operating in open country, mounted on horseback, and with rifles in their hands, the Boer farmers were able to inflict fearful losses on their enemy, while their own casualties were few. On “Dingaan’s day” the Boer force received the attack of the Zulu while in laager, the enemy charged in dense masses, being met both by cannon shot and rifle fire, and were presently attacked in the rear by mounted Boers. After the defeat Dingaan set fire to the royal kraal (Umgungindhlovu) and for a time took refuge in the bush, on the Boers recrossing the Tugela he established himself at Ulundi at a little distance from his former capital. His power was greatly weakened and a year later was overthrown, the Boers in Natal (January 1840) supporting his brother Mpande (usually called Panda) in rebellion against him. The movement was completely successful, several of Dingaan’s regiments going over to Panda. Dingaan passed into Swaziland in advance of his retreating forces, and was there murdered, while Panda was crowned king of Zululand by the Boers.
When in 1843 the British succeeded the Boers as masters of Natal they entered into a treaty with Panda, who gave up to the British the country between the upper Tugela and the Buffalo rivers, and also the district of St Lucia Bay. (The bay was not then occupied by the British, Panda.whose object in obtaining the cession was to prevent its acquisition by the Boers. Long afterwards the treaty with Panda was successfully invoked to prevent a German occupation of the bay.) No sooner had the British become possessed of Natal than there was a large immigration into it of Zulu fleeing from the misgovernment of Panda. That chief was not, however, as warlike as his brothers Chaka and Dingaan, and he remained throughout his reign at peace with the government of Natal.[1] With the Boers who had settled in the Transvaal, however, he was involved in various frontier disputes. He had wars with the Swazis, who in 1855 ceded to the Boers of Lydenburg a tract of land on the north side of the Pongolo in order to place Europeans between themselves and the Zulu. In 1856 a civil war broke out between two of Panda’s sons, Cetywayo and Umbulazi, who were rival claimants for the succession. A battle was fought between them on the banks of the Tugela in December 1856, in which Umbulazi and many of his followers were slain. The Zulu country continued, however, excited and disturbed until the government of Natal in 1861 obtained the formal nomination of a successor to Panda, and Cetywayo was appointed. The agent chosen to preside at the nomination ceremony was Mr (afterwards Sir) Theophilus Shepstone, who was in charge of native affairs in Natal and had won in a
- ↑ Bishop Schreuder, a Norwegian missionary long resident in Zululand, gave Sir Bartle Frere the following estimate of the three brothers who successively reigned over the Zulu—“Chaka was a really great man, cruel and unscrupulous, but with many great qualities. Dingaan was simply a beast on two legs. Panda was a weaker and less able man, but kindly and really grateful, a very rare quality among Zulus. He used to kill sometimes, but never wantonly or continuously.”
