The Lie of 1652. Patric Tariq Mellet
are a worldwide phenomenon, but in southern Africa it descends from the Lala people of Congo and from West African cultures. These divine leaders were called maMbos or Mambos. During the reign of one of the Mambos of the Mutapa, the Mambo Chikuyo (1494–1530), the disagreement mentioned earlier about the Portuguese slave raiders and gold-seekers being given too much power turned into a civil war. Changamire led a group southwards and declared independence in the south.
In about 1670 the new divine leader was a man by the name of Dombo who, by about 1680, had built a powerful army known as the Rozvi (‘the destroyers’). The Rozvi destroyed the Butua kingdom in western Zimbawe and overthrew the Torwa dynasty. The power of Dombo extended over some of the southern Pedi and Tswana groups that had migrated from south of the Limpopo to the Shashe River area of Zimbabwe.
Parsons147 mentions that the military ideas of the horning battle tactics and the short stabbing spear in close combat fighting, which are often associated with the Zulu king Shaka, had been used much earlier by the Rozvi during Dombo’s time. Refugees from Dombo’s reign are likely to have settled in what are now Gauteng, Limpopo, Mpumalanga, Swaziland and KwaZulu-Natal. Shaka’s later Mfecane (‘the crushing’) involved warfare across a huge area of South Africa in which he forcibly almalgamated societies and communities by submission. The great similarity between the names Rozvi (‘the destroyers’) and Mfecane (‘the crushing’) cannot be overlooked as incidental. This challenges the uniqueness of Shaka’s rise. The Rozvi and Mfecane phenomenona are both directly related to strategies to challenge colonial incursions – of the Portuguese and the Boers respectively.
The imperial sweep subjected all the defeated to paying tribute to Shaka as the supreme leader and accepting his social and military framework. This martial and governance defence mechanism ready and able to challenge colonialism would later prove itself in the Zulu victory against a strong British force at the Battle of Isandlwana in 1879 in the time of King Cetshwayo.
Shaka’s ideas, methods and tactics were a repeat of a remarkably similar set of historical events of more than 150 years earlier. They can be seen as an extension of the Rozvi revolution, which was a large-scale reorganisation of societies to face modern threats. The Rozvi empire was only finally destroyed by Queen Nyamazana in 1836 during the flight of the Nongoni from the south to the north in the post-Mfecane period.
What is interesting is that several of the groups we refer to as being Nguni have an affinity for what they call an abaMbo or eMbo ancestral root – the initially small Zulu clan among them. These Mbo roots are spoken about in oral traditions ranging from the Ndwandwe, Hlubi, Ngwane, Mzantsi and Zulu,to the Mpondo, Mpondomise and Mfengu. There is also a clan called abaMbo or AbaseMbo. The Swati, too, have a lineage that goes back in time to the Rozvi MaMbos and the Mutapa kingdom. It makes more sense that this root goes back to the maMbo culture of the Rozvi confederacy rather than to the minor West African Mbo tribe, who are incorrectly believed by some to have marched on into South Africa in a mass aggressive invasion.
The Mambo or divine leader tradition had flowed from the Congo peoples down through to the Kalanga of the Mutapa kingdom to the Rozvi empire and entered the South African arena into Swaziland, Mpumalanga and KwaZulu-Natal between 1100 and 1450 CE. It is the root of the Nkosi, Morena (Lord) or royal tradition in South Africa. The European word and concept of hereditary ‘kings’ was overlaid on this tradition.
Parsons148 also tells us that during the 17th and 18th centuries the Langeni of the Pongola marshlands were part of the Tembe kingdom of the Ronga and may also earlier have been part of the Nyaka kingdom. These are all peoples with a mixed heritage going back to the southwestern San-Khoe-Kalanga societies of the first millennium as well as to the Urewe roots of northeast Africa and the Great Lakes. The Langeni split up into new clan formations that moved southwards to join up in the societies that were emerging in present-day KwaZulu-Natal and came to be called Nguni. These clans included the Ngwaneni, Dlamini, Ndwandwe and Langa. Other formations with this root are the Hlubi, Ngwane and Swati. The Hlubi could be the oldest of the peoples in the region, with roots that can be tracked back to the Rozvi Mambo state and the Mutapa state with their old southern African ancestral Kalanga pastoral heritage, as well as to the East African ancestral Shubi heritage.
According to Parsons,149 there was much movement to and fro over the Limpopo in the east, and to and fro between Zimbabwe and Mozambique. In this arena there were many trade routes to the coast and much opportunistic trading activity in gold, ivory and slaves. Tsonga from the south and the north were involved, as were Tswana, Sotho and Chopi-Tonga. Chopi and Tonga (who were related to the Tswana/Sotho) were originally part of the Rozvi confederacy. The southern Tsonga who did not move northwards formed three Ronga states: the Nyaka, Tembe and Maputo. These ended up in conflict with one another as well as with the societies to the south referred to as Bokoni/Nguni in KwaZulu-Natal, Swaziland and Mpumalanga.
It is this conflict arena that saw European pirates based in Madagascar become involved to exploit the tensions. Prisoners of war in southern Mozambique and today’s Mpumalanga and northern KwaZulu-Natal were then traded to the pirates as slaves. All this occurred long before the age of Shaka, during which, and after which, there is no evidence of prisoners of war being sold as slaves, according to Eldredge and Morton.150 Shaka ruled from 1816 to 1828.
With the decline of Ronga power in today’s northern KwaZulu-Natal, the Ndwandwe chieftaincy arose, consolidated its power over the region and incorporated many of its former enemies. The other powerful chieftaincy that arose in about 1600 was that of Nyambose with his Mthethwa, who also trace back to the Tsonga. These were the two most powerful regional formations up until the late 18th century. These Nguni societies traded extensively across the Drakensberg with Tswana-Sotho. There was much migration back and forth across the mountains and much adoption of each other’s cultures.
At the same time as the emergence of the Ndwandwe and Mthethwa, there were the Zantsi clans spread along the coastal area of central KwaZulu-Natal from Babanango mountain west of Ulundi. One of these clans split into the Qwabe clan and the Zulu clan, and the latter settled on the Mhlatuze River.151
The groups referred to as southern Nguni mainly emerged from the Zwedi clan north of the Mzimkhulu River and the Hlubi.152 These societies were the Mpondo, Bhaca, Hlubi, Xesibe, Zizi, Bhele, Tolo, Cele, Ntlangwini and Mpondomise. The Bomvana later migrated to the Mpondo to seek refuge during conflict in the north.
The Xhosa took in peoples from the north who sought refuge. The confederacy of Khoe and Xhosa (|Kosa) was only welded into a kingdom at the time of Tshawe with the help of his allies among the Mpondomise. It is from this and the earlier mentioned migrations that the modern Xhosa confederation of peoples were born, with a strong hegemony in their society of those to their immediate north but nonetheless also with a very strong Khoe backbone as well as an older San legacy. The history of the Thembu, like that of the Xhosa, involves earlier migrations from the west at the time of the early Khoe and Xhosa, as well as migrations from the northeast.
The rise of new states in the western regions of South Africa
There were more than 30 large organised formations elsewhere across South Africa besides the great Rozvi empire.153 From early micro-societies that consolidated over time with the development of trade and stratification, there were processes of what Giliomee and Mbenga154 call segmentation and differentiation, resulting in new kingdoms. They cite 35 ethnic groups.
Examples of these are the early Pedi state, the Bokoni phenomenon, the Hurutshe state, the Rolong state, the Tlhaping state, the Tebele state, and the Nwaketsi state. There was the emergence of the social formations of the Fokeng, Tlokoa, Koena, Kubung, Taung and Zizi along the road to the Sotho state, which also involved incorporation of San, Khoe and Zizho-Kalanga foundation people.
Segmentation can be explained as the separation or breaking away by groups from existing societies related by descent from a common ancestor or origin to create new social groups. Differentiation refers to the exertion of political, social and economic control over others that leads to stratification and a hierarchy of a common class and a client class.
After the decline of the Mapangubwe state in 1290 CE, the first emergence of ‘differentiation’ was the Kalanga (Karanga) or ‘The Houses of Stone’ people, who branched off northwards from the