Mfecane

The Mfecane is the name historians give to a period of intense warfare, migration and state-building in southern Africa, usually dated to the 1810s–1840s, though some extend it from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Out of it came new kingdoms, among them the Zulu, Swazi, Gaza, Ndebele and Sotho states, and new ethnic identities. Both its causes and its scale remain debated, and the way it has been told has itself become an important historical question.

Political centralisation was already under way in south-eastern Africa by the late 1700s. The growing ivory trade through Delagoa Bay, in present-day Mozambique, let chiefs accumulate wealth and use it to build stronger states, which in turn extracted more wealth through tribute and war. In the early nineteenth century severe drought, made worse by the climatic effects of volcanic eruptions in 1809 and 1815, struck a society in which land and grain were unequally held. Facing famine and shrinking revenues, leaders turned increasingly to raiding and conquest, which gave their followers access to cattle, grain and land. A second wave of disruption in the 1820s and 1830s was driven partly by slave and cattle raids by Griqua, Korana and other mounted groups armed through trade with the Cape Colony, and by the slave trade at Delagoa Bay.

Between the Phongolo and Thukela rivers, two large paramountcies, the Ndwandwe under Zwide and the Mthethwa under Dingiswayo, competed for dominance. In the late 1810s the Ndwandwe killed Dingiswayo and the Mthethwa broke up. One of its former subordinates, the Zulu under Shaka, then fought Zwide, defeating the Ndwandwe at the Mhlatuze river in 1818. Groups that broke away from the Ndwandwe moved north: Soshangane founded the Gaza kingdom in what is now Mozambique, and Zwangendaba led the people later called the Ngoni beyond the Zambezi, eventually settling between lakes Malawi and Tanganyika. The Zulu Kingdom expanded into the space left behind. Shaka was assassinated by his brothers Dingane and Mhlangana in 1828, and Dingane succeeded him.

On the highveld, conflict had been spreading since the 1780s as Korana and Griqua raiders, displaced by colonial expansion and armed with guns and horses, attacked Tswana chiefdoms. From the early 1820s groups uprooted from the east crossed the Drakensberg, setting off further fighting in the Caledon valley. Moshoeshoe gathered refugees and local Sotho communities around defensible mountain strongholds, forming the kingdom that became Lesotho. Mzilikazi, a former commander under Shaka who broke away around 1821, built the Ndebele kingdom, which dominated much of the interior until Boer settlers drove it north of the Limpopo in 1837–1838; it resettled in what is now southern Zimbabwe. Sebetwane led the Kololo across present-day Botswana to the upper Zambezi, where they conquered the Lozi.

Older estimates put the death toll at one to two million, but these figures are disputed, and many recent scholars consider them far too high. The term itself appeared in the 1830s, in accounts that blamed the upheaval on Shaka, portraying him as waging near-genocidal wars that set off a chain reaction across the region. In 1988 the historian Julian Cobbing argued that this picture was a self-serving construction that had served colonial and apartheid-era narratives, and that the main drivers were demand for labour from Portuguese slave traders at Delagoa Bay and from Cape settlers. The "Cobbing controversy" that followed was fierce. Critics such as Elizabeth Eldredge found little evidence of a large slave trade at Delagoa Bay before 1823 and stressed the ivory trade and African state-building, while agreeing that the Zulu-centred account was unreliable. By the early 2000s a broad consensus saw the Mfecane as the product of many factors, not simply the rise of the Zulu state.

Our 1815 map shows southern Africa as the turmoil began, and our 1878 map shows the region after it, including the Zulu Kingdom and the Cape Colony.