Episode 62 – Dingiswayo and Shaka of the amaMthethwa, Ndlambe and Ngqika of the amaRharhabe

We’re hustling towards the year 1807. If you remember last episode, we heard that the young Shaka had grown up in amaZulu chief Senzangakona’s house – the Zulu chief – but by 1802 he’d fled. By the early 1800s only about 2000 people were part of the AmaZulu and they lived between the upper Umhlatuzi and white Umfolozi Rivers.
Remember that Shaka who was Senzangakona’s illegitimate son, was showing signs of being a troublemaker, at least that’s the view of oral historians, and by now the future amaZulu king was in his late teens. Senzangakona planned to kill him, but he got wind of the plan and fled to Jobe kaKayi who was a well known nkosi of the Mthethwa.
While he languished at Jobe’s kraal, Shaka knew that the accepted route to power for all men was honour in battle, this increased his attractiveness to women, his standing in society, and as a child who’d lived a constant life of what was seen as his mother’s dishonour, he was motivated to set the record straight.
He’d been living with his mother Nandi in the Mhlathuze Valley where the Langeni people resided – close to where I lived as a child by the way.
Here, growing up fatherless, traditional story tellers recount how Shaka was the victim of humiliation and cruel treatment by the Langeni children,
The rivalry between the amaMthethwa and the amaNdwandwe under Zwide was notorious. Then to make matters worse, the countryside was riven by the Great Famine in 1802 known as the Madlantule.
We’re still hovering around the first decade of the 19th Century, and a great deal was going on back along the Cape frontiers. So let’s head back to the Zuurveld.
In 1809 Ngqika took the egregious misstep that changed the balance of power among the Xhosa chiefdoms of the frontier.