The Nation: The Zulus: People of the Heavens

Where the Zulus came from no one really knows. Their ancestors are believed to have entered Africa from the Mesopotamian valley more than 10,000 years ago, following their cattle into new grazing lands up the Nile valley and finally to the southern part of the continent and what is now Rhodesia and the South African provinces of Natal and the Transvaal.

The Zulu tribe as it is known today dates from the early 17th century. Initially, they numbered no more than a hundred, but the clan grew, proudly calling themselves, after one of their chieftains, amaZulu—”People of the heavens.” At that time, African tribal warfare was mostly a matter of threats and feints, and the major weapon was an unwieldy 6-ft. spear, thrown wildly through the air. The 19th century Zulu King Shaka adapted this long spear into a broad sword, the stabbing assegai.

Shaka also developed a battle tactic based on the shape of a buffalo’s head. Stamping their feet, beating on their shields with their assegais and roaring the war cry usutu!, the warrior impis, arrayed like the right and left horns of the buffalo, would begin encircling the foe. Then the main unit—the head—would sweep forward so that the Zulus could use their assegais in close combat. During the twelve years before he was assassinated by his brother in 1828, Shaka built a Zulu empire that extended over hundreds of thousands of square miles and contained some 2 million inhabitants.

But Shaka’s successors could not hang onto it. First the Boers, then the British, gained control of Zulu territories. In 1879, after numerous disputes, the British army invaded Zululand. The Zulus fought back ferociously, and at the Battle of Isandhlwana some 10,000 Zulus wiped out 1,300 British and native soldiers in hand-to-hand fighting. The British, however, had the Gatling gun. They sacked the Zulu capital of Ulundi and divided the fallen empire into 13 quarreling kingdoms.

Today the 5 million Zulus are still the largest tribe in South Africa. Half live and farm in the fertile hills and valleys of KwaZulu, the designated “homeland” that forms a patchwork quilt of territory from the Mozambique border in the north to southern Natal and the Transkei in the south. There they live much in the tribal style of old, in beehive-shaped mud and thatch huts, sharing the kraal with their cattle. The other half work in the “white man’s” South Africa, living in bedroom ghettos like Soweto. They are frequently favored for positions of trust in public service and industry.

Their poetry often flares with a sense of lost grandeur, as in Oswald Mtshali’s lines about King Shaka: “Lo. You can kill me/ But you will never rule this land.” That proud defiance is perhaps best epitomized today by Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, chief minister of the KwaZulu territorial government. Buthelezi, 49, is relentless in his condemnation of white supremacy. He has insisted that his government will not take an oath of allegiance to the South African government. In that resistance, he believes, the tribe is fighting the last Zulu war.