How Did the Zulus Go From Tribe to Empire? | Rise of the Zulus (1790-1828)

several empires have played an important role in South Africa's history of course in 1652 with the arrival of yahwah rebake we get but in 1795 when the Dutch Republic was invaded by revolutionary French forces a new power arrived in South Africa [Music] that's enough putting anthems at the start of this video because for the rest of this video I'm not going to talk about either of these empires but rather a native Empire and this Empire of South Africa was the Zulu Empire now a quick note about this term is that it's also sometimes referred to as the Zulu Kingdom all the territory that they controlled as Zululand of course a difference between a kingdom and an empire is the name of the monarch that rules it and Zulu monarchs at the time we called them cause II so perhaps we should call it the Zulu and gauzy land or something along those lines but basically a kingdom Empire it's referring to the same thing because obviously they're not seen in the same way as the monarch of the strict definition of King and emperor in Europe at the time the name for the Zulus themselves what they called themselves is the alma Zulu and this essentially means the the Zulu people and in this video I want to talk about how did the Zulu forge an empire in southeastern Africa during the start of the 19th century well to begin with there were other peoples living in South Africa the earliest people that we know of living in South Africa were hunter-gatherer groups some moved into pastoralism as well who will sometimes together called the Kois son and these are a different group of people to the the Zulus who came in who come in later because the Zulus are an ethnic and linguistic Bantu people so the Bantu languages found across Africa and they actually migrated at some point in the first millennium it's very sketchy the dating on this we're not exactly sure but they came from sort of the the Congo Delta region they expanded southwards this group did and into southern Africa at some point now one of the names that's given to you these Bantu people's that moved into the area that's now South Africa is that in goony and at various times they migrated onto the plains of southeastern Africa now we don't really know much about the zulu at all because they had no written language until they interacted with europeans so there are oral traditions that do survive but that period of history in south africa is incredibly murky and we're not entirely sure it's very hard to place any significant dates on things but one thing that we can date fairly certainly actually is the exact origin of the Zulu as a separate group because these in goony people's they spoke related languages and they had similar cultures as well material cultures that can be defined against other groups for example at the Sotho all the closer that you find in South Africa the Khoikhoi they were clearly different groups to these peoples but there were probably lots of different tribes and chiefdoms that originated as bands they then came together and sometimes came together as Confederacy's but actually we find an individual called Zulu camel and Ella and this appears to be the the person who really breaks off from another group to form the Zulu and now that the name Zulu actually comes from the Zulu word is Zulu and this word actually means something like heaven or whether so something to do with the sky and this of course was the personal name of this leader and we know that he died in 1709 so at some point around there just in the last decade maybe of the 17th century we have the the formation of the Zulu as a separate entity as a separate group from another northern goony group at the time now we do find around this time so around the start of the 19th century you have the northern goony and the southern and goony again both of them bantu-speaking and the zulu are just one small rather insignificant group of northern goony that sometimes form together into different Confederacy's and tribes now these groups that lived on the plain just like the Native Americans in North America the Plains natives there that they followed the Buffalo around and the Buffalo was very important in both a physical way so they made lots of things happen the Buffalo they followed them they used it as food and in a spiritual way well for the peoples in this region of Africa it was the cow that was incredibly important now cow cows were used as a state a symbol so of how wealthy you were depending on how many cows you had if you were getting married you would give cows as a bride price it's similar to what you see for example I've talks about cows in the early Middle Ages in in England or Scandinavia or the Germanic speaking world cows were incredibly important and it's very similar for the for the ancestors of the Zulu and for the northern and goony peoples now they live together in small tribal collection often there would be a tribal chief sometimes they would be called Kings depending on the exact status and the role that they had there but again as I said the the local Zulu word isn't gauzy that they use for these rulers and this was the state of affairs for many centuries on the plains there would be intermittent warfare but nothing particularly bad it's small-scale small-scale tribal groupings and nothing really major that represented strong kingdoms or empires as such now one of these groups was called them that way and then that way they were technically speaking I believe that they're called the paramountcy they're not really seen as a kingdom at the time and they formed their alliance at the start of the 19th century with another group to the north of them called that Sangha now the Tonga and were important to them because they were in the north and they were actually in touch with the Portuguese who at this point were in the area of Mozambique where they had trading colonies and so they traded with various African tribes who brought them goods from the interior so for example elephant ivory was incredibly sought after in in Europe and that's one of the reasons the Portuguese were there what this serves to do however was to put them to air in conflict with another tribal group in the north that before this has had a monopoly on the trade and this tribal group was the in dwande Way and the Andromeda Sea in the north and very deadly enemies to have for a smaller tribe which is probably why the groups like them Tate way we're looking around for alliances with people like Tonga now the ruler of the intent way at the 20 at the time was called dingus while and dick is wire is a very interesting character now he tried to overthrow his father with one of his brothers but the coup went wrong his brother was killed and he had to flee into exile however he was able to later come back and did manage to become the leader of his people now his time in exile seems to have been very formative and very important for the future of the region and indeed for the Zulus as well which we'll get onto in just a second now he actually encountered on his travels a regiment of Khoikhoi so these are people from further south in Africa who were working for the British at that time so a real regiment they had been drilled these were professional soldiers and he saw them and he saw how well organized and ordered they were and he learned from this and decided to do something similar with his own military forces and so instead of having everyone together in regiments as they did he actually split the groups of men into their age and had different regiments with different tasks based on their age in different training and so he reformed the army of the immediate way into these regiments and had commanders for each of the sections just as this this regimen of the the Khoikhoi that he had seen working for the British so he got a much more modern understanding of military technique in with this he used it to expand his power but you might be wondering I'm talking a lot about the impaired way and dingus wire and not about the Zulu so where do the Zulu fit in well one of these new commanders that he raised was a man called SATA and Shaka actually you probably will have heard of he's very famous was a Zulu now the reason that he was there and was one of the commanders of dingus y/o he proved to be a really great warrior he was a renovator and a not a renovator a reformer himself in terms of military tactics a great tactician and the reason he was there was actually he was the son of a the salute King the Zulu King sends a corner and since I got corner he had had a minor wife called Nandi and she had been outcast with her son so Shaka was an illegitimate son of the Zulu ruler at the time now what this meant was that he had to flee away and to join with the intera now the Zulus were a much smaller try about the time compared to the immediate way and they were probably tributary to to this larger group but in 1816 Singh as a corner he died and so Chaka was able to return to the capsule of the Zulus to the royal crown and to kill his half-brother who had become ruler and became king of the Zulu himself however in the meantime sweida who was the king of the land way in the north he continued the conflict with dingus y ou ending is why I attempted to outsmart Swede a and to capture him but in the ensuing battle actually the opposite happened in his wire and the metoya to a they were overpowered by the in dwande way and he was captured and be now the UM Ted way at this point they were without their leader and so they had been defeated in this huge fight and so essentially they broke away but instead they joined with the Zulu and basically they traded their leader who had been helping his y ou with Shaka and so they became Zulu so now the boot essentially was on the other foot and the Zulus were the prime power in this Confederacy this little alliance that they had made with other groups like the Tonga for example now it's around this time around 1817 when the Zulus and their allies moved southwards from their traditional homelands into lands that formerly had been ruled by the khwab a people now it's possible that this was a military expedition that they were conquering the kua Bay and thought actually these lands are quite nice will have them potentially also they were moving away from the area group that was most exposed to the dwande way because they of course were living in the north and that's another factor we have to consider but it's interesting that Shaka moves the whole Zulu group from their traditional homeland this of course was important to these people because this is where generations of their ancestors were buried and so you leave the burial places when you completely relocate all the relocation of these Bantu groups in South East Africa wasn't something that crazy it happened a lot during this period and that's something I'll make another video on as well as Jacques military reforms and the Zulu tactics at the time because that's also a very interesting subject now he moves south and he actually found the new Zulu capital in this old quoi bear territory and what they call this new capital is quar Bulawayo and there is another Bulawayo which is in zimbabwe but that's a different place so don't get it mixed up now what the capital was it's called a trowel this is a word that comes into English from Afrikaans it's also found in Dutch and it was actually borrowed from a Portuguese word originally but that's something else and essentially what we need to remember is that the Zulu they expand out and they absorb all these other tribes for example like them that way like the qua Bay and you have other groups like DSO Thile and and lots more but what we need to remember is that often this period is assumed to have been incredibly violent and it certainly was Zulu warriors and the new battle tactics employed by Shaka again some of them taken from dias earlier innovations were incredibly important but this wasn't the only factor it wasn't just bloodshed a lot of this was political maneuvering we might think of marriages and customs and tribes coming together to work together against powerful enemies for example like the IND wand way as well as coercion of course there is a middle ground between the two of political threat and violence and then the people go actually yes we will join this Confederacy of groups so that's something to keep in mind when looking at this period now in 1817 the two sides come together and dwande ways they attack the Zulus and Shaka and this comes to a head at the Battle of GU Coakley hill now at this battle although he is very much outnumbered by the enemies Jacques knew military innovations actually win him the day and he's able to substantially defeat the enemy force and Kings we de fleas now that is until 1819 when sweida gives it another try and this time it's at the Battle of La Toya's a river now during this battle actually sweetie has learned from the new Zulu tactics and he also employs these tactics and yet Shaka still gets the upper hand this is it by using newer tactics that he's innovating thinking on the spot which really shows that or what I wanted to say before I was frightened half to death was that it showcases Jacques ability to think on the spot and his great militaristic mind that he was able to think even when an enemy came at him with his own tactics he was still able to outsmart him now this next move that he does also shows him in this vein of this burning in general and this is that he marched then straightaway before actually news of the defeat could reach the sweida in his capital he marches there very quickly the Zulus were very famous to be able to march great distances in a very short amount of time with very little rest so he marched all the way to his capital some 70 miles away and then by singing and dwande where victory songs they pretended to be in blond We're warriors also the oral tradition goes snuck into the capital and were able to so seize the capital now some say that he was able to then captures we they other traditions say that's really escaped but was then actually killed by another try but what's important is that his made enemies we date in the north had been completely and utterly destroyed in defeated in the power of the dwande way was was obviously never the same again they were subjugated by the Zulu at this point now this actually is an image of Shaka in the years after his successful campaign against the against the in Guam where this was painted in 1824 and it's potentially a very good likeness of him so this may be what Shaka would have looked like in some form and we can find obviously around this time in in 1825 the area of Zulu land it has really been expanded greatly obviously when Chaco was born the Zulus were a very insignificant group that really wasn't very well known by Europeans at all at the time but by the time of his death the full extent of his empire it stretched over some 11,500 square miles and it had some 250,000 people and he was able to call upon about 50,000 warriors at a moment's notice so this is an incredible achievement especially considering that you know these were peoples that they had ironworking but apart from that they were essentially living in the Iron Age the kind of technology that they had but they were still able to do amazing feats like this conquering such an empire in such a short amount of time with innovative battle tactics that would actually fool the British as well now in the end he was actually murdered by his half-brother Dingaan and Dagon he went on to become the next Zulu King for 12 years he has some interesting interactions with the boards the four trekkers sometimes wonder how Shaka would have dealt his interaction with the coming of the Boers after the Great Trek but of course it was actually his successor Dingaan that went on to do that but don't worry I will be making more videos about the Zulus or maybe you are worried you didn't find this interesting at all either way let me know in the comments below but I find this topic really interesting I'm definitely planning to make a video on the Zulu war machine and how shaka revolutionized that because I was going to incorporate that into this video but actually I thought this video would be incredibly long if I tried to do that and I thought and make a dedicated video on methods of Zulu fighting on their battle tactics of course we've got the famous horns of the buffalo and I haven't I have not changed the the little pictures there from the the Japanese flag video which isn't which may be out at this point I'm not even sure but essentially I'll be making a video on Zulu War tactics which I find very interesting and how shaka how he advanced them and how he changed them and actually whether it was shaka or whether it was actually eating Swire which which is another alternative hypothesis which is being put forward but anyway thank you very much for watching I will I will end this by just playing the audio from when when my dad interrupted me because he had something funny to say in Dutch and if you if you're not Dutch you one you won't understand it maybe if he's big Afrikaans you can get moving but here it is anyway stay safe see you soon this is the history put the nation on big take for you [Music]

Channel: History With Hilbert

Views: 65,748

Keywords: Zulu, History, Zulu 1964, Is Zulu Racist, Zulu FIlm Racist, Anglo-Zulu War, Rorke's Drift, Isandlwana, Boer War, South African History, Afrikaner, Zulu Full Movie, Thinkery, Michael Caine Zulu, British Imperialism, South Africa, isiZulu, History of South Africa, Dutch History, British History, Anglo-Boer War, Boers, Afrikaners, Voortrekkers, Great Trek, African History, Zulu People, Xhosa, Shaka Zulu, History Documentary, Khoisan, Battle of Blood River, Battle of Rorke's Drift

Id: Ig4Sb53rNpw

Length: 17min 17sec (1037 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 28 2020