Southern Africa: Mutapa and the Zulu Kingdom

1The source: a wall without mortar

The first source for this lesson is a stone wall. Look closely at it before reading on: there is no cement or mortar between the blocks. The granite was split into roughly equal blocks and laid in courses, each holding the next by weight and skill alone.

Construction at Great Zimbabwe began in the 11th century and continued for over 300 years; the Great Enclosure was built in the 13th and 14th centuries and probably served as the royal residence. At its peak the city may have had about 18,000 people. It is the largest stone structure in pre-colonial southern Africa.

The source also has a colonial history. In 1871 the German explorer Karl Mauch saw the ruins and at once ruled out construction by Africans, linking them instead to the Queen of Sheba and to Phoenicians. White settlers repeated the legend, and in the 20th century the white government of Rhodesia pressured archaeologists to deny that Black Africans had built it. Archaeology has refuted these "fantastical and dehumanising theories": Great Zimbabwe was built by the Shona. You will meet the same pattern in Rwanda's history: colonial writers who refused to believe Africans could build states invented foreign origins for them (Unit 8).

2Where they were

3Mutapa: a Shona empire, 15th to 19th centuries

• Rise. Shona tradition says that people from Great Zimbabwe moved north as it declined. An elephant hunter named Mutota became powerful, took an interest in the trade along the Zambezi, found salt in Dande, conquered it and built a stone enclosure as his capital, sharing land and offices with his allies. His successor Matope campaigned widely. Historians date this state-building to the 14th and 15th centuries. They also warn that the traditions are "telescoped": they remember only about half the known rulers, and Mutota may be partly a symbolic founder.
• Organisation and economy. The Mwenemutapa ruled through allies and governors, among them the governor of Guruuswa, the southern province. Wealth came from gold and ivory, traded with Swahili merchants from the coast who had opened a route up the Zambezi in the early 15th century.
• The Portuguese. The Portuguese took Sofala in 1506 and replaced the Swahili traders along the Zambezi with their own settlements at Quelimane, Sena and Tete. In 1561 the Jesuit Gonçalo da Silveira baptised the Mwenemutapa and hundreds of officials, but was then killed at the court. Portugal sent an army to conquer Mutapa and seize its gold, and in 1629 Portuguese forces defeated Mwenemutapa Kapararidze at Masapa; Mutapa became a Portuguese vassal.
• Decline. Internal revolts (a governor, Changamire, briefly seized the throne around 1490), succession conflicts, Portuguese interference, and the rise of the Rozvi Empire under Changamire Dombo, which attacked the Portuguese trading fairs from 1693 and later imposed its own officials on Mutapa, all weakened the state.

4The Zulu kingdom, 1816 to 1879

• Rise. Shaka (c. 1787 to 1828), a warrior trained under Dingiswayo of the Mthethwa, became Zulu king and, after Dingiswayo's death around 1816, took over the whole Mthethwa alliance. He conscripted young men into amabutho, a standing army kept apart from the rest of society, and his name is linked to the iklwa, a short stabbing spear, although he probably did not invent it. He defeated Zwide of the Ndwandwe at the Mhlatuze River in 1820, and by 1822 ruled about 210,000 square kilometres. His own clan grew from a few thousand to about 45,000 people by absorbing neighbours.
• Organisation. A king with great personal power, military towns for the regiments, and conquered peoples absorbed into the Zulu nation and its army.
• Challenges. Shaka was assassinated in 1828 by his half-brothers, including Dingane. Under Dingane the Zulu fought the Voortrekkers (Boer settlers) at Blood River on 16 December 1838, losing over 3,000 men. A civil war between Cetshwayo and his brother Mbuyazi followed in 1856.
• Fall. In December 1878 the British official Sir Bartle Frere sent King Cetshwayo a provocative ultimatum, and in 1879 British forces invaded. On 22 January 1879 at Isandlwana about 20,000 Zulu warriors overwhelmed part of the British column armed with breech-loading rifles, killing over 1,300 troops and defeating the first British invasion of Zululand. But at Ulundi on 4 July 1879 a British force with artillery and Gatling guns defeated the Zulu and ended the war. Britain made Zululand a protectorate and annexed it in 1887.

5A historians' debate: what was the Mfecane?

Older histories described the Mfecane as a storm of destruction set off by Shaka's wars, with traditional estimates of 1 to 2 million deaths. In 1988 the historian Julian Cobbing argued that this picture was a self-serving product of apartheid-era historians, who blamed Africans for "Black-on-Black destruction"; he pointed instead to the labour demands of Portuguese slave traders at Delagoa Bay and of European settlers in the Cape Colony. Other scholars now lower the death toll and stress complex political, economic and environmental causes. The debate shows how the politics of the present can shape the writing of the past.