You know, usually when we talk about empire builders,
we're looking at figures like Julius Caesar or
Genghis Khan. Right. People who operate on these
massive, sprawling timelines. You know, we look
at centuries of evolution to get to the peak
of an empire. Yeah, the Roman Republic to the
empire, that takes hundreds of years. Exactly.
But today I want to look at something that happened.
Well, in the blink of an eye, really. It really
is a speed run of history. Yeah. It it sort of
defies the usual laws of political gravity. It
really does. We are talking about a time frame
of just 12 years. Twelve. In that tiny window,
one man takes a relatively small, insignificant
pastoral tribe in southern Africa. People who
were, I mean, largely mining their own business.
Raising cattle, growing sorghum. Exactly. And
he forges them into a military machine that completely,
and I mean completely, rewrote the map of the
region. We're talking, of course, about Shaka
Zulu. The Black Napoleon, as he is often called.
And look, the mission for this deep dive is...
It's a bit tricky. It's very tricky. Because
on one hand, we have the military genius, the
tactics, the weaponry, the sheer organizational
brilliance. That stuff is, well, it's undeniable.
You can't argue with the results. No. But on
the other hand, we have the monster, the tyrant
who supposedly killed a million people and depopulated
a subcontinent. And that is where the detective
work begins. Because as we dug into these sources,
and we're talking oral traditions, the diaries
of British traders, and crucially, modern revisionist
history from scholars like Dan Wiley and Julian
Cobbing, a massive question mark started to appear
over that whole monster narrative. Right. Like
a huge one. Are we looking at a historical fact
or are we looking at a 200 -year -old smear campaign?
That's really the mystery we're trying to solve
today. It is. But before we get to the controversy,
to the big debate, we have to understand the
man. And his story, it doesn't start in a palace.
Not even close. Var from it. If you are picturing
a prince, you know, waiting for his turn on the
throne, you have to wipe that image away completely.
Shaka's story is a story of exile. And it starts
from birth, basically. From the moment of conception,
really. He was born around 1787 in the lunar
month of Untulikazi, which corresponds to July
for us. And July in that part of the world is
winter. It's dry. It's dusty. Not exactly a bountiful
time. No, it's a harsh time to be born. A time
of scarcity. And his name, Shaka, tells you everything
you need to know about his social standing. It's
not a royal name. It was not a noble name given
with fanfare, no. It roughly translates to intestinal
beetle. An intestinal beetle, that is. That's
specific. And not exactly flattering, is it?
It was a dismissal. His father was the Zulu king,
Senzangakona, but Shaka was considered illegitimate.
The elders basically, you know, they dismissed
his mother's pregnancy as just a stomachache.
Caused by this beetle. Caused by a Shaka beetle.
It was a way of saying, this child is a mistake.
He doesn't count. So he carries this label, this
deep insult, right from day one. From day one.
And it defined his entire childhood. He and his
mother, Nandi, were outcasts. They were sent
away to live with her tribe, the Elanjani. But
even there, Shaka was... bullied relentlessly
oh for everything for being fatherless for his
appearance for being the poor relation who had
to be fed the oral histories are full of stories
of him being tormented by other boys i think
this is such a crucial psychological key for
you the listener shaka spends his entire formative
years on the outside looking in He isn't part
of the system. He's a victim of it. He's a victim
of it. And that has to breed a certain kind of
resentment or at the very least a powerful drive
to prove everyone wrong. Or a drive to burn the
entire system down and build a new one in its
place. And that is what happened. Eventually
the situation became untenable and they had to
move again, finally finding refuge with the Efethwa
clan. Okay, so the Mephethwa. This is where things
start to change for him. This is the turning
point. Because with the Efethwa, he gets drafted.
He's old enough to join an Ibutho. Let's define
that term because it comes up a lot in the sources.
Ibutho. It's not just an army unit, is it? No,
it's more than that. Essentially, it's a regiment,
yes. But in Zulu society, it is also an age set.
You grow up with these guys, you work with them,
you go through initiation with them, you fight
with them. It's your social cohort for life.
A band of brothers, literally. A band of brothers.
And this is where Shaka finds his calling. He's
no longer the bullied outcast. Here, his aggression,
his intensity, his physical strength, they're
assets. And he falls under the wing of the Mithithwa
chief, a man named Dingiswayo. Dingiswayo is
the mentor figure here. He's a huge part of the
story. The Obi -Wan to Shaka's Anakin, maybe.
In a way, that's a good analogy. Yeah. Dingiswayo
was a visionary leader in his own right. He saw
something in this angry, intense young exile.
He realized Shaka had royal blood. He was the
son of the Zulu king, after all. Even if that
king didn't claim him. Right. But more importantly,
he saw that Shaka was a naturally gifted soldier,
a brilliant tactician. So Dingiswayo puts him
in charge of a regiment. And this is the incubator.
This is where Shaka stops being the victim and
starts becoming the commander. He hones his skills
here. And the timeline moves incredibly fast
from here. In 1816, Shaka's father, the king
of Azulu, sends Angakona. He dies. He does. Shaka
is nearly 30 at this point. He is trained. He's
a respected commander. He's backed by Dinguswayo,
and he decides it is time to go home. But he's
not going home for a family reunion. No. He's
going for the crown. His half -brother, Sigurjana,
had taken over, but Shaka marches in with his
Mithual regiment. And it wasn't a war. It was
a coup. Swift and brutal. Sigurjana is assassinated,
and Shaka takes the throne of the Zulu. So 1816,
year zero for what would become the Zulu Empire.
Paint the picture for us. What exactly did he
take over? Because when we say Zulu kingdom today,
we think of this massive, powerful territory.
At that moment, it was tiny, insignificant, really.
The Zulus were just one small clan among many,
maybe a few thousand people. They were pastoralists.
Their life revolved around cattle, drinking milk,
eating sordom. They were not a regional superpower.
Not even close. They were a blip on the map.
Chukka looks at this small tribe, his inheritance,
and decides he is not content with just herding
cows. He wants to build a state, an empire. And
to do that, he initiates what historians call
the military revolution. And this is the part
of the research I found absolutely fascinating.
It is like he looked at the software and the
hardware of warfare in southern Africa and decided
to upgrade absolutely everything. It really was
a systemic overhaul, a total reboot. And it started
with the most basic thing, the weapon. The spear.
The spear. Traditionally, warfare in this region
was almost... Ritualized. Yeah. Men carried the
long throwing assegai. A javelin, basically.
Right. And you'd have two opposing lines of men
standing maybe 40, 50 yards apart. They would
shout insults at each other, posture a bit, and
then they'd throw these spears. And maybe someone
gets hit, maybe not. Exactly. It was low casualty,
distance fighting. And once you've thrown your
spear, you're unarmed. You might run away or
pick up a rock. Shaka thought this was ridiculous.
Absolutely insane. He famously said. A warrior
who throws his spear is a warrior who has lost
his weapon. That's a great line. So what's his
solution? His solution is the ikwa. The ikwa.
It's a heavy, broad -bladed stabbing spear. The
handle is short, maybe two feet long. You can't
throw it. It is useless at range. Its only purpose
is for close quarters killing. The name itself
is onomatopoic, isn't it? I read that somewhere.
It is. The oral tradition says it's meant to
mimic the sucking sound the blade makes when
you pull it out of a human body. Wow. That is
visceral. But think about the psychological shift
that requires. You are telling these men, you
don't stand back anymore. You don't throw things.
You have to run right up to the guy who wants
to kill you, look him in the eye, and stab him.
It changed warfare from a skirmish into a slaughter.
And he paired this new weapon with a new shield.
He made the cowhide shields much larger and heavier.
So better defense. Better defense, yes. But he
also weaponized it. And here's the technical
brilliance. He taught a specific move. A drill.
You use the left side of your shield to hook
the enemy's shield. Okay, so I am a warrior.
I'm facing my enemy. I hook the guy's shield
and pull it across his body. Exactly. You hook
his shield and pull it hard to your right. What
does that do? It exposes his entire left side.
His ribs, his heart, under his arm. And that's
the opening. That is where you thrust with the
Ikwa. It was a mechanized, drilled method of
killing. Hook, pull, stab, over and over. He
drilled his regiments until it was muscle memory.
But having a better sword doesn't win a war if
you don't have a strategy. And this is where
we get the bullhorns. I feel like this is the
trademark Shaka move that everyone references.
It is. The Isumpando Zancoma. The horns of the
beast. And it's just a brilliant formation that
maximizes encirclement. Can you break it down
for us? Of course. So imagine the shape of a
bull's head looking down at a map. You have three
main parts. First, the chest. The chest. These
are your battle -hardened veterans, your strongest,
most experienced warriors. Their job is to charge
the enemy center, hit them hard, and pin them
down. They are the anvil. They absorb the main
shock of the battle. So the enemy is totally
focused on fighting the chest. They can't move.
They can't maneuver. Right. They're locked in
place. Then while that's happening, you unleash
the horns. The horns. These are the junior regiments.
Young, fast, full of adrenaline. While the chest
is engaging, the horns sprint out wide to the
left and right. They flank the enemy and close
in behind them, cutting off any escape. Complete
of the circle. It's a classic double envelopment.
A perfect double envelopment. But Shaka added
a third element that often gets overlooked, and
this shows his genius for command and control.
The loins. The loins. This is the reserve force.
Yes, and this is where the discipline comes in.
The loins were positioned behind the chest, and
they were ordered to sit down with their backs
to the battle. Wait, their backs to the fighting?
Why would you do that? To keep them calm. In
the heat of battle, with the noise and the dust
and the blood, it is easy to get sucked in, to
panic. Shaka wanted them fresh and cool -headed.
They couldn't see the chaos. So you're just waiting
for the call? Just waiting. They sat there until
the commander saw a gap in the line, or a point
where the enemy was about to break, or if one
of the horns was in trouble. and then boom, they
were sent in as a fresh wave to finish the job
or plug a gap. It is comparable to the Roman
usage of the triari. It is that level of professional
command and tactical depth. You keep mentioning
discipline, and there is a famous story, and
I want to know if you think this is fact or myth,
that Shaka made his warriors discard their sandals.
Ah, the sandal myth. He supposedly made them
march barefoot over thorns to toughen their feet.
Is that real? It is one of the most debated points
in the historiography. The story goes that Shaka
believed sandals made warriors slow and clumsy.
They couldn't feel the ground. So he banned them.
And if you complained or if you kept your sandals.
You were executed. You were executed. It fits
the ruthless genius narrative perfectly, doesn't
it? It does. Toughen up or die. Right. But we
have to be really careful here. Some of the more
critical historians, like John LeBand, are very
skeptical about the exaggerated claims surrounding
this. You will hear these incredible stories
that the Zulu army marched 50 miles a day, fought
a battle, and marched 50 miles back. LeBand calls
that ridiculous. Yeah, 50 miles is basically
two marathons. With weapons and a shield, that's
superhuman. It is. A more realistic estimate
is maybe 12 to 15 miles a day, maybe 20 on a
forced march, which, by the way, is still incredibly
fast for an army moving on foot in rough terrain.
So very impressive. Immensely impressive. And
whether they were barefoot or not, they were
undeniably more mobile than their enemies. And
a big part of that speed came from the logistics.
He created the Udibi. The logistics core. Yeah.
The support stack. Yes. Exactly. Shaka realized
that if a warrior is carrying his own sleeping
mat, his cooking pot, and three days of beef
jerky, he is going to be slow and tired. So he
drafted boys, sometimes as young as six or seven,
to be carriers. The Udibi. So the warriors carried
nothing but their weapons. Nothing but their
weapons and shield. They traveled light. The
Udibi carried all the baggage in the rear. It
meant the Zulu army could strike before the enemy
even knew they were in the region. Total surprise.
So he has the weapon, the formation, the speed,
and the logistics. He has built a Ferrari in
a world of horse carts. Now he needs a track
to race on. And this brings us to the expansion.
It does. And every great story needs a great
villain. For Shaka, that villain was a man named
Zwide. Zwide, king of the Nwanwe. He was the
heavy hitter in the region when Shaka took over
the Zulu. He was the established power, and he
made a fatal error. What did he do? He killed
Dinguswayo. Shaka's mentor. The man who saved
him from exile and gave him his first command.
The very same. He captured and executed him.
And for Shaka, this wasn't just politics anymore.
It was a blood feud. It was personal. And the
way Shaka handled this war shows both his tactical
brilliance and his capacity for extreme cruelty.
Let's talk about the cruelty part first because
it's extreme. I'm looking at the notes on what
he did to Zweid's mother, a woman named Lampambazi.
She was a sangoma, a spiritual healer, and apparently
quite powerful. Yes. The sources, and again,
we have to remember these are oral traditions
written down much later by Europeans, say he
captured her. He didn't just execute her. He
locked her in a house filled with starving jackals
or hyenas. Alive. Alive. to be devoured. And
then after they were done, he had the entire
house burned to the ground. It was a message.
What was the message? I am not just defeating
you. I am erasing you. I am destroying you, body
and soul. Chilling. But on the battlefield, he
was just as decisive. The Battle of Gwakli Hill
seems to be the masterclass. It is. It's his
defensive masterpiece. Shaka was massively outnumbered
by Zwide's army. But he chose the terrain. He
positioned his smaller force on the top of a
hill, which limited how many Inwandri could attack
him at once. He created a bottleneck. He created
a bottleneck. And he used the bullhorns defensively
to absorb the Inwandri attacks, wear them down,
and inflict huge casualties. He bled them dry
on that hill. And that wasn't even the final
battle. No, the final blow was the Battle of
the Miletus River. He caught the Andwandwe army
in a terrible position, split in half as they
were crossing the river. He just annihilated
them. Zweid himself escaped, but his capital
was sacked and his power was completely broken.
Now, usually this is where the history books
just say, and then Shaka conquered everyone.
But there's a real nuance here about how he built
the nation. He didn't just kill everyone he conquered,
right? That wouldn't be sustainable. No, and
that is the genius of a statecraft. He practiced
assimilation on a massive scale. When he conquered
a neighboring tribe, like the Kwabe, he brought
them into the Zulu fold. The men were incorporated
into the Zulu -Abutho. The women were married
to Zulu men. But he did something really clever
with the culture. He reinvented their genealogies.
He rewrote their family trees. How do you do
that? Essentially, yes. The history was oral.
Right. So he manipulated the oral traditions.
He had his praise singers and storytellers craft
new histories that made it seem like the Zulu
and a Quab were actually long lost brothers descended
from a common ancestor generations ago. So it
wasn't a conquest. It was a reunification. Yeah.
He convinced them that they weren't being conquered.
They were being reunited with their true family.
It was brilliant propaganda to build national
unity out of all these disparate conquered groups.
That is fascinating. We have always been one
people. You just forgot a very powerful message.
Extremely. But now, now we have to pivot. We
have built the empire. Now we have to look at
the destruction. And this brings us to the most
controversial, most debated topic in all of Southern
African history. The emphacane. The emphacane,
or you hear it called the defacane as well. Translate
that for us first. It means the crushing or the
scattering. And the standard story, the one that
was taught in South African schools for decades,
the one in all the old textbooks, is that Shaka's
expansion was so violent, so genocidal, that
it set off a cataclysmic domino effect. Okay,
so what does that domino effect look like? The
narrative is that entire tribes fled from Shaka
in terror. As they fled, they bumped into other
tribes, fought them for their land and cattle,
which caused them to flee, and so on. This wave
of chaos and violence supposedly depopulated
the entire interior of South Africa. And the
numbers usually cited are just massive. We see
claims of one to two million dead. A million
dead. Two million dead. A continent -shifting
event. Leaders like Mzilikazi of the Ndebele
and Soshangani of the Gaza people fled from Shaka
and carved out their own violent path all the
way up in modern -day Zimbabwe and Mozambique.
The narrative is Shaka was the pebble that started
the avalanche. Okay. So that is the story, Shaka
the monster, the man who killed a million people.
But earlier you mentioned a detective story.
You said that we might be looking at a lie. Yes.
This is where we need to introduce two very important
men, Nathaniel Isaacs and Henry Francis Finn.
And who were they? They were British traders,
adventurers maybe. They operated in the region
during Shaka's reign. And they are our primary
written sources for this period. Almost everything
we know about Shaka's day -to -day brutality
comes from their diaries and memoirs. Okay, so
they're the eyewitnesses. Are they reliable witnesses?
Well, let's look at the evidence. We found a
letter, a literal smoking gun, written by Nathaniel
Isaacs to Henry Francis Finn while Finn was writing
his memoirs. He gives Finn some friendly advice
on how to write about Shaka. He says, and I'm
quoting here, Make Shaka out to be as bloodthirsty
as you can. It helps rel out the work and make
it interesting. Wait, wait, he put that in writing.
Make him a monster because it sells books. It
sells books, yes. Absolutely. Sensationalism
sells. But there was a much darker, much more
significant motive than just book sales. Which
was? Land. Follow the money, of course. Finn
wanted a massive land grant for the British colonial
government in the Cape. A huge tract of what
is now KwaZulu -Natal. But the British weren't
just going to let him seize land that belonged
to the Zulu people. There were laws, optics.
However, if the land was empty. If Finn could
prove that the land was empty. that it had been
depopulated by a savage tyrant before the British
got there, then the land was terra nullius, no
man's land, and it was up for grabs. Oh, my God.
So the narrative of the Imphican, the idea that
Shaka killed everyone and left the land empty,
was a convenient legal fiction for a land grab.
That is the core argument. of revisionist historians
like Julian Cobbing. He calls it the alibi. If
Shaka is a monster who emptied the land, then
white settlers aren't conquerors. They're heroes
bringing civilization to a wasteland. It justifies
colonization. It justifies everything that came
later. That is, that's mind -blowing. It completely
inverts the entire history we've been taught.
It does. And Cobbing and others like Dan Wiley,
they go further. They argue that the violence
and scattering did happen, but it wasn't primarily
caused by Shaka. They point to other factors.
Like the Portuguese slave trade operating out
of Delagoa Bay in modern -day Mozambique. They
argue that slave raiding by Portuguese proxies
was destabilizing the entire region, causing
tribes to flee and fight long before Xhaka consolidated
power. They also point to droughts and competition
for resources. So in this version, Xhaka wasn't
the cause of the chaos. He was a reaction to
it. He was building a militarized state as a
defense against slave raiders and environmental
pressures. That is the theory. Instead of the
black Napoleon destroying his neighbors for sport,
maybe he was the shield, building a strong, centralized
state to hold back the colonial tide and the
slave trade. Wow. Now, to be clear, this is a
very heated debate. Most historians today would
say the truth is somewhere in the middle. Shaka
was undeniably a violent, ruthless warlord. But
was he a genocidal maniac who single -handedly
killed a million people? That figure is almost
certainly a fabrication, a thumbsuck, as Dan
Wiley calls it. invented by men with a clear
motive to lie. It really forces you, as the listener,
to question every historical text you have ever
read about this era. But okay, even if we strip
away the coronial propaganda, Shaka's end was
still tragic. And it was violent. Let's talk
about the downfall. The beginning of the end
was deeply personal. In October of 1827, Shaka's
mother, Nandi, died. The woman who raised him
in exile, his only true ally. From everything
we've read. Yes, the one constant in his life.
And when she died, Shaka didn't just grieve.
He unraveled. The sources describe a grief that
became a national terror. He demanded that the
entire Zulu nation suffer as he suffered. What
did that look like in practice? He issued a series
of edicts that were functionally suicidal for
the state. He ordered that no crops could be
planted for a year. He ordered that no milk could
be consumed. And you have to remember. Milk was
their staple protein. He was basically starving
his own people to make a point. Exactly. And
it got darker. He ordered that any woman found
pregnant during the year of mourning should be
executed, along with her husband. Because how
could you dare to bring new life into the world
when Nandi, the mother of the nation, was dead?
That is absolute madness. A state can't survive
that. No. And there is one detail from the oral
history that is just haunting. He ordered thousands
of cows to be slaughtered, but their calves were
to be left alive, penned up next to their dead
mothers. Why? What was the purpose of that? so
that the calves would know what it felt like
to lose a mother. He wanted their cries of hunger
and grief to echo his own. Wow. That is Shakespearean.
It's poetic, but it's utterly horrific. It terrified
the nation. The sources say people were being
executed simply for not looking sad enough. We
are talking about maybe 7 ,000 executions in
this period of forced mourning. The structure
of the state was collapsing under the weight
of his personal grief. Did anyone try to stop
him? Did anyone stand up to him? One man did.
A guy named Gala. And honestly, Gala deserves
his own movie. In the middle of this madness,
he stood up to the Shaka, shouted at him essentially,
and told him to stop. He said something like,
Nandi is not the first person to die in Zululand.
You are destroying your father's house. That
is a good way to get an Ikwa in the chest. I
mean, the courage that would take. You would
think so. But Shaka listened. The outburst actually
seemed to snap him out of it. He called off the
edicts, and he rewarded Gala with a gift of cattle
for his bravery. That's incredible. It shows
that Shaka wasn't just a mindless beast. He was
a human being in deep, deep pain. But politically,
the damage was done. He had shown weakness. He
had terrorized his own people. The sharks were
circling. Sharks being his own family, of course.
Of course. His half -brothers, Dingani and Wonigana.
They saw that Shaka had lost the support of the
people and many of the key chiefs. So in September
of 1828, they made their move. And Shaka made
it easy for them, didn't he? He did. He sent
the main army, the bulk of his loyal regiments,
away on a long campaign to the north. A campaign
Shaka didn't even go on himself. It left him
exposed at the Royal Craw. The classic palace
coup. The classic palace coup. Along with an
Induna, a headman named Mbopa, they cornered
Shaka while he was meeting some petitioners.
They stabbed him. Repeatedly. And just like that,
after 12 years of remaking the world, the empire
builder is gone. Gone. His body was dumped into
an empty grain pit. They filled it with stones
and mud. No royal burial, no tomb, no marker.
To this day, the exact location is unknown. Just
a hole in the ground. It is such a stark, brutal
end, but... Clearly, they couldn't bury the legacy
because here we are almost exactly 200 years
later and Shaka is still a global icon. He is.
He's this larger than life figure. And it's complicated.
Physically, the sources say he was tall, dark,
muscular, your classic warrior king image. But
there's a surprising detail. He might have had
a speech impediment. Really? Shaka Zulu? Yeah.
Some of the European accounts say his tongue
was too big for his mouth, creating a lisp or
a stutter. And that he joked about being ugly.
Because he had a protruding forehead. It humanizes
him, right? The great terrifying warrior who
was maybe a little self -conscious about his
looks and how he spoke. It really does. But culturally,
he's just monumental. Oh, absolutely. The Zulu
praise songs, the Izabongo, they're incredible.
They refer to him as the thunderer while sitting,
meaning his power was immense even at rest. And
my favorite. The bird that preys on other birds.
The bird that preys on other birds. That is such
a power move of a nickname. Isn't it? And today
you land at King Shaka International Airport
in Durban. You can play as him in the Civilization
video games. There are constantly new TV series
about him. like Shaka Elembe. He's become the
enduring symbol of African martial power and
nation building. But the ambiguity remains. You
go to KwaZulu -Natal today and some people revere
him as the father of the nation. Others revile
him as a tyrant who killed his own people. Both
narratives are alive and well. I think that tension
is what makes him so endlessly fascinating. You
can't put him in a neat box. He's not just a
hero or just a villain. No, you can't. But I
think the biggest takeaway from this whole deep
dive, for me at least, isn't just about Shaka's
tactics or his statecraft. It's a warning about
history itself. How so? What do you mean? Because
for 200 years, the dominant global narrative
of this man was written by people who openly
admitted to lying. It was written by men who
wanted to steal Zululand. We accepted the monster
myth because it was convenient for the colonial
project. So we have to constantly ask, are we
seeing the real Shaka? Or are we seeing the Shaka
that Henry Francis Finn constructed so he could
get a real estate deal? Precisely. It forces
us to look to the silences in the archives, to
always, always question the motive of the storyteller.
Who is writing this history and why? That is
a heavy thought to end on, but a crucial one.
Here is a final provocation for you listening.
We focus so much on the violence of Shaka, on
the crushing. But if we strip away the colonial
lies, do we see a monster or do we see a desperate
survival strategist? In a world where Portuguese
slave ships were anchoring off the coast and
British colonial armies were marching up from
the Cape, with Xhaka's brutal militarization
the only reason the Zulu people survived the
19th century is a coherent nation at all. Maybe
the monster was actually the shield. Something
to think about. Thanks for listening to this
deep dive. We will see you next time.