Shaka the Great Read Free Page A

Africa as a balustrade. Geographers of the time reckoned this could be done without impaling one’s ship on an iceberg, therefore João II duly sent Bartolomeu Dias along to give it a shot.
    Things went reasonably well until he reached the Namibian coast, and saw lush greenery give way to a moonscape desert as dry as old bones, yet caressed by waters as icy as a pope’s heart.
    Dias didn’t know it at the time, but he’d now entered the realm of Adamastor, tyrant of the seas, ruler of the wind, with his clay-clogged, steel-wool hair, his scowling hollow eyes and his yellow fangs. And Adamastor
bided his time, letting a sense of unease grow among the members of the expedition, as they eyed that inhospitable coast and mulled over what they faced should they find themselves shipwrecked. For if they didn’t first freeze to death in the waters of the Benguela current, they’d burn up on those sands.
    Then, after Dias had gingerly planted a
padrão
on the promontory of Luderitz Bay, Adamastor finally struck. Herding the mariner and his caravels out into a storm, he tossed them southward into the middle of nowhere.
    Thirteen days passed before Dias could set about finding Africa again. First he turned east, groping for the north-south coastline that had been their companion these many months. Then, growing ever more frantic, he sailed due north—and finally made land at Mossel Bay, on a coast that now stretched directly from east to west. He continued on to the Great Fish River, to make sure this wasn’t just another bump in the continent, then he turned back.
    And it was only now, on their voyage home, that he rounded Cape Agulhas, Africa’s southernmost tip, and discovered the Cape of Good Hope. (He, with no little feeling, called it Cabo das Tormentas—the Cape of Storms—but the king later reckoned Cabo da Boa Esperança would inspire more confidence among investors.)
    That was in 1488, and Dias had shown it could be done, but almost ten years would elapse before a Portuguese expedition finally reached India by this same route.
    That one was led by Vasco da Gama, and in December 1497 he sailed into the uncharted waters that lay beyond the Great Fish River. As Christmas was near, he christened the lush green coast he was passing “Natal,” to commemorate the Nativity.
    A few days later, a headland running parallel to the coast caught his eye. He named it Ponta de Pescaria and sailed on, blithely missing the bay hiding behind this imposing bluff. It was only in 1554 that Manoel de Mesquita Perestrello, coming back from India, found Rio Natal for Portugal. Even so, the sheltered harbor was soon forgotten.
    In 1652 the Dutch chose Table Bay, at the Cape of Good Hope, as the site of a settlement tasked with supplying provisions for the ships of the Dutch East India Company. As the years passed a mud fort evolved into
a star-shaped stone castle, Company employees became settlers, vineyards were planted, and slaves imported. By 1793 the colony had a population of fourteen thousand burghers, of whom only four thousand lived in or near Cape Town. Hunters, traders and nomadic cattlemen called Trekboers had meanwhile pushed the borders of the settlement eight hundred kilometers eastward.
    In 1806 the British occupied the Cape. As the century entered its late teens, they began to hear talk of great upheavals further along the coast, but they had other more immediate matters to deal with. Like pacifying the Xhosas, who stubbornly insisted on hampering the colony’s expansion beyond the Great Fish River, on the basis that they had got there first.
    As a result, the nearest European settlement to the Zulus remained Delagoa Bay, where Lourenço Marques had established a trading post back in the 1540s.
    But these Portugiza were different from the other savages who washed up on the beaches from time to time. Familiarity had long ago bred contempt; and they had been there, dying of