Early Accounts of Natal, History of the Rulers, and the Reign of Chaka
From Zulu-Land: or Life among the Zulu-Kafirs of Natal and Zulu-Land, South Africa by Lewis Grout, 1864.
Location: KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
From Zulu-Land: or Life among the Zulu-Kafirs of Natal and Zulu-Land, South Africa by Lewis Grout, 1864.
Between the years 1684 and 1690, several vessels came to Port Natal, doubtless in search of slaves. The accounts which these voyagers have given to the world, show that the people of this district were numerous at that time, and their character and customs much the same as we now find them.
At about the same period, nearly two hundred years ago, the Cape government (the Dutch East India Company,) collected some facts respecting this country and people, from shipwrecked seamen who reached Cape Town,—some coming across the country, others by sea; also from agents who came here in behalf of that company, for trade, exploration, and other purposes.
These men, they tell us,
"found the country of Natal very fruitful and populous, and the natives friendly, obliging, strong, and ingenious; armed with only one assegai; obedient and submissive to their king, or chief; living in communities, in huts made of branches wrought through with rushes and long grass, and roofed like haystacks in Holland. In manners, dress, and behaviour, they are much more orderly than the Cape Hottentots. The women attend to cultivation; the men herd and milk the cows. They do not eat poultry, because these feed on filth; still less do they eat eggs.
From their corn they make very well-tasted and nourishing bread, and brew beer, both small and strong, which is not unpleasant to the taste, and which they keep in earthen vessels. They have tobacco and smoke it. The country is populous and fertile, abounding in oxen, cows, and goats, as also in elephants, buffaloes, hartebeests, and other tame and wild beasts. The inhabitants are obliging; and for a copper bracelet they will not refuse to carry a weight of fifty or a hundred pounds, a distance of three or four days' journey over hill and dale."
Coming down to a later date,—a period of more definite history, within the memory of the present inhabitants,—we find that Natal was visited by several white people about a third of a century since. They came here, some for exploration, some for commerce, and some for other reasons,—such as the miscarrying of fortune, of character, or of some ship upon the Indian sea.
When Captain King, Lieutenant Farewell, and others arrived in 1823, to explore the coast and harbor and engage also in trade, it was said that, at that time, no vessel or white man had been here within the memory of the oldest inhabitants. These men, with a few others, some of whom had been wrecked upon this coast, took up their abode among the natives, soon after the above date. Being joined from time to time, by one and another, in 1835, their number had increased to eighteen or twenty.
On their arrival, they found the whole country from Umzimvubu to Delagoa Bay, and inland to the Kwalilamba range, the boundary of Basutuland, in possession of the Zulu chieftain Chaka, and his people, who had conquered the tribes that dwelt here in former days, incorporating them with his own nation, and adding the district to his own ancestral domain.
The authority and dominion of this chief, Chaka, and then of his successor, Dingan, over all this vast region, were fully acknowledged by the white men during the period above named, as well as by the native tribes. It was by the consent or sufferance of these chiefs, first Chaka, then Dingan, that the foreigners remained in safety for many years,—some till their death, and others till the arrival of the Dutch emigrants in 1838, and the disturbances consequent upon that influx. When Captain Gardiner arrived here from England, and several missionaries from America, to labor among the heathen, they all looked to the great Zulu chieftain as the arbiter of the land.
In respect to the infancy and rise of the Amazulu as a nation, if we go back only so far as the memory of the oldest inhabitants of the land extends, we find the Zulus at that time a comparatively small tribe, living on the Imfolosi and Umhlatusi rivers, mostly between 28° and 29° South Latitude, and between the sea and 31° East Longitude. They are reported to have come down at some former period from a more inland region on the north-west.
The line of Zulu chiefs, (as remarked in the Introduction" to my ''Zulu Grammar,") so far as we can now ascertain, is the present incumbent Umpande, who succeeded his brother Dingan, who succeeded his brother Chaka, who succeeded his father Usenzangacona, who was the son of Jama, who was the son of Umakeba, who was the son of Upunga. Some, however, give Umbuzi, in place of Umakeba, as father of Jama.
Chaka was born about the year 1787. His father, Usenzangacona, was rich in wives and children; having twenty-five or thirty of the former, and no one knows how many of the latter. Between him and one of his wives, Umnandi (the sweet one,) the mother of Chaka, there arose some cause of bitterness, which is common, actually inevitable, in a social state of which polygamy is the basis.
In consequence of this difficulty between husband and wife, which increased with the father's jealousy of the precocious and aspiring youth, the mother took the boy Chaka, and fled, first to the Amaqwabe, and then to the Amatetwa or Umtetwa, whose chief at that time was Udingiswayo. The Amatetwa, reported to have come down the coast from the north-east, at a former period, were now a powerful tribe, and neighbors to the Amazulu; probably the same with those who are spoken of in some books of an ancient date under the name of Vatwa or Batwa.
Udingiswayo gave Chaka and his mother to the care of Ungomana, an induna, or chief counselor of his tribe. Here the young prince passed most of his youth, and received all the training which he had for royalty. On the death of his father, he was sent back by Udingiswayo, at the age of about thirty, to take possession of the kingdom. Arriving at home, he found his father's place already filled by another son, Usigujana, said by some to have been the rightful successor. Chaka, however, soon succeeded in deposing and destroying his brother, and in taking the power into his own hands. No sooner had he ascended the throne of his father, and fairly asserted his authority over the Amazulu, than a large portion of the Amatetwa joined him, and asked his aid against another tribe with whom they were at war.
At the head of a tribe whose very name (from izulu, heaven) is equivalent to the celestials, now increased in numbers, in strength, in courage, by the voluntary alliance of another powerful tribe; himself an ambitious man, of royal blood, in the prime of life, already adored as of more than human origin, panting for forays, victory, and plunder, Chaka sallied forth in person at the head of his warriors, soon conquered the tribe against which his aid was sought, took many of them captives, and added them to his own nation.
Cruel and bloody as this mighty African conqueror is reputed to have been, or as he really became in the progress of his triumphs, his policy, especially at first, was not so much the utter destruction of the neighboring tribes, as to subdue, and incorporate them with his own. Pursuing this policy, he conquered one tribe after another, located them here and there among his own people, taking care so to distribute, guard, and govern them, as to hold them in the most complete awe and subordination to himself. In this way he seems to have gone on, five or six years, without much interruption, increasing the number of his subjects and tributaries, the strength of his army, and the extent of his dominions; so that, in 1822, his conquering power was felt from the Umzimvubu, or St. John's, on the south-west, to Inhambane on the north-east, and from the sea coast inland across at least half the continent of Africa.
It is said that Chaka kept twelve or fifteen thousand warriors, in constant readiness for any expedition or emergency, in which he might deem their services requisite. The first great law of his military code was, conquer or die. Unsuccessful troops had little to hope from him. If they would not die rather than fly, they must die for flying.
"Elephant hides," "panther catchers," "the travelers," "the victors," "the bees," are a sample of the names by which his regiments were designated. The numerous force which he was accustomed to keep in readiness for service at a moment's warning, and the still greater number of fighting men which he ever had in reserve, all go to show that he must have had an immense population at his command. Remembering that the Zulu tribe proper was small when he came to the throne, we judge that, careless of life as he was, his leading policy in war was not so much to annihilate the neighboring tribes, as to subjugate and incorporate them with his own.
Among his royal towns,—of which he had as many as he had regiments of soldiers,—Isiklepe, Nobamba, Bulawayo, Umbelebele, and Utukusa, may be named as some of the more important. Utukusa was built on the Umvoti after he had subdued this district. Here he passed much of his time during the latter part of his life, praised and worshiped, by his soldiers and all the people, as "the tiger, the lion, the elephant, the great mountain, the mighty black prince, king of kings, the immortal only one."
One of the songs which his soldiers used to sing to his praise, turned into English, runs thus:
Thou didst finish, finish the nations; Where will you go to battle now?
Hey! where will you go to battle now Thou didst conquer the kings,
Where do you go to battle now? Thou didst finish, finish the nations,
Where do you go to battle now? Hurrah! hurrah! hurrah!
Where do you go to battle now?
But during the last few years of his life, while the country was enjoying a season of comparative peace, his own mind seems not to have been at rest. Some of the last expeditions which he planned and prosecuted give plausibility to the report which was circulated concerning him, that he was entertaining the mighty project of sweeping the coast from Natal to the Cape of Good Hope with the besom of destruction; nor would he leave an unsubdued nation to the north or north-east of his own domain.
In 1828, alleging that a brother had robbed him of some of his cattle, and fled with them to the West, and that he must go in pursuit of the offender and of the stolen property, he not only marshalled his own forces, but also called the European residents at Natal, with their muskets and men, and pushed on to the West, at the head of a grand army. He led his forces in person till they reached the Umzimkulu. Here his majesty remained, reserving one regiment for his own protection, while he sent the remainder, including those who were armed with muskets, on a plundering expedition into distant regions beyond.
It would seem that the Amampondo people had not recovered sufficiently from former fleecings to make it an object with Chaka to plunder them again at present; or, at any rate, as he had now both force and time enough to go farther, he would not suffer his army to touch them or their cattle until it should return from a foray farther on. Hence, leaving Faku and his people unmolested in the forests to which they had resorted as a refuge from the storm, the Zulus passed on beyond the Umzimvubu to the Umtata region; coming within two days' march of Hinza's people on the west of the Bashee, or St. John's River.
The terror of the bloody chief spread through all the tribes, down to the very borders of the Cape Colony; so that a company of English troops, together with a volunteer corps of the Colonists, deemed it necessary to go out to meet and turn them back. These Colonial forces did great execution; but their bullets and blows were directed against the wrong party,—some of the unoffending people of Kafirland, instead of the ravaging Zulus; these having turned back long before the white man had begun to approach them. Having fallen upon three or four tribes and taken ten thousand head of cattle, these swift-footed foes from the North-East were far away on their homeward march, exulting in their success, ere the Colonial forces came down upon the poor, unfortunate tribe of Amangwana under Umatiwane, on the Umtata, some of whom they shot, and from whom, with the help of an auxiliary force of five thousand Kafirs, they are said to have taken twenty thousand head of cattle, which they delivered over to a neighboring tribe, the Tembus, and then returned home in great triumph.
Returning from this expedition to the South-West, the Zulu monarch sent off his men at once to the North-East, to make a plundering attack upon Usosliengane, who was now living somewhere beyond Delagoa Bay, whither he had retired with the hope of escaping the hands of the mighty marauder, from whom he had suffered not a little on former occasions.
It was during the absence of his army on this northern expedition that Chaka, who remained at home at his great Kraal Utukusa on the Umvoti, was slain. The deed was committed in open day, on or about the 23d of September, 1828. Chief among the conspirators were two of the king's brothers, Dingan and Umhlangane; also Umbopa, one of his servants, by whose hand, as many allege, the fatal stab which laid the king in the dust, was given. It would be wrong, however, to suppose that the two or three who planned and executed this deed were the only parties who were interested in it or approved of it. No doubt they felt assured that many would rejoice to see the tyrannical reign of this ruler at an end.
Some of Chaka's great men, chief counselors, who might be feared as adherents to the cause of the king, were slain the same day; and, on the next, the two brothers fought hand to hand for the vacant throne, the soil beneath their feet still wet with the blood which but yesterday they were united in spilling. Dingan prevailed, slew Umhlangane, assumed the government, and sent messengers to inform the army of what had been done, and to say that all was done for the good of the nation,—for the peace and safety of soldier and citizen. After two months the army returned from one of the most fruitless forays in which it was ever engaged, having been not only decimated in battle, but also greatly reduced by hunger, fatigue, and exposure, of the severest kind; so that most of them were twice glad to find an end put to the power of one from whom they had naught but death to expect in case of defeat or ill-success.
Nor would you wonder that the stout-hearted Zulu warrior stood in such dread of this mighty, marvelous man, could I find space to give anything like an adequate view of the devastations he wrought in the land. Of the two or three scores of tribes which he broke up and scattered, or the remnants of which he incorporated with his own nation, during the early and more sanguinary days of his reign, about forty have been able to recover more or less of a tribal name and standing in the land since his death.
Others, however, shared a worse fate, being able to show only here and there a feeble fragment. Some of those who fled to Kafirland were held and treated as a class of dependents, virtually as slaves, subject to the will of the Kafirs among whom they had taken refuge. Eventually, however, most of them either returned to Natal, or else found their way down to the Old Colony, where, under the name of Fingoes, they remain to this day, some of them laboring for the white people at Port Elizabeth.
Sanguinary and sad, yet not altogether devoid of instruction, or at least matter for reflection, are the facts of which so brief an outline is here given. Whilst showing what the Zulus and their neighbors have done and suffered in times of ignorance; they also suggest of what these people may be capable under the influence of better motives or better rule, should they ever be brought under the power of Christianity. If “it is a loss to universal humanity to have the imprint of any phase of human life and experience entirely blotted out," it may be well to preserve some record of such men and things as were seen, known, and felt among the Zulu-Kafirs under the reign of that prodigy of a prince, that African Bonaparte, whose name recurs so often in the preceding pages, whose name, too, will not be forgotten so long as there shall be a Zulu-Kafir to talk of Chaka's greatness or to swear by the terrors of his memory.
Grout, Lewis. Zulu-Land: or Life among the Zulu-Kafirs of Natal and Zulu-Land, South Africa. Presbyterian Publication Committee, 1864.
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