fever, for so many generations that they were seen more as a mongrel offshoot of the Maputo tribe they customarily dealt with than as representatives of a mighty foreign nation.
Ascending to the Zulu throne in 1816, Shaka was more interested in the other tribes who came from across the water. Or ratherâand this is where he differed from most of the other rulers in the regionâhe knew there was more to learn here than appearances might suggest.
That was thanks to his great mentor, Dingiswayo. For while in exile, fleeing his fatherâs wrath, the Mthetwa prince had befriended a White Man who may have been the last survivor of an expedition dispatched from the Cape in 1807 and tasked with seeking an overland route to Portuguese East Africa. Dingiswayo agreed to guide the man to the coast but, after a few months, the barbarian contracted a fever and died. Dingiswayo inherited the manâs horse and his gun, then decided it was time to go and claim his own birthright. Although the gun was useless, lacking powder and shot, and the horse would soon die (this long being insalubrious territory for these naked zebra), they were nonetheless impressive talismans that played no small part in helping the Wanderer regain the throne.
And Dingiswayo never forgot all the things the White Man had told
him, as they sat around the fire of an evening. Coming from the Cape, the White Man could speak Xhosa, a Nguni language Dingiswayo himself understood, and though the young prince could grasp most of the concepts he raisedâtrade, empires, wars of conquestâit was their sheer scale that awed him.
And got him thinking.
So it was Dingiswayo, not Shaka, who first set about uniting the tribes and clans along the south-east coast of Africa, organizing something approaching a standing army and fighting wars not only to gain territory and cattle, but to secure trade routes with the Portuguese. The Zulu king merely completed what his mentor had started.
And Shaka wanted to know more, wanted to hear for himself. What else could these creatures from the sea tell him? Problem was, whatever trembling specimens his warriors found amid the seaweed could do little more than weep and grovel.
Possibly, in the end, they werenât that different from all the others. Possibly, their claimed provenance aside, they were simply wild beasts like all the rest. For thatâs how the Zulus saw things: they themselves were Abantu, human beings, while everyone else was izilwane, wild beasts, savages. But even as Shaka was taming the other beasts around himâthose indigenous to the regionâthese newly found barbarians were poking at the map and wondering about the possibilities of this coast.
By the 1820s the British Admiralty was desperately seeking employment for the naval officers left idle and on half pay after the Napoleonic Wars. One of the projects embarked upon was a long delayed and much needed scientific survey of the coastline extending from the Cape of Good Hope up to Cape Guardafui north of Portuguese East Africa. Captain William Owen was the one put in charge of the expedition, which included the
Leven
and the
Barracouta.
The HMS
Barracouta
left the Cape first, around the middle of 1822. Also tasked with making contact with the tribes beyond Algoa Bay, the furthermost outpost of British civilization on that coast, the shipâs officers discovered something interesting.
The natives they encountered were a pathetic lotâcunning, treacherous and prone to âdrunkenness and gluttony.â However, the
Barracouta
âs officers
soon learned that they were
not
the âaboriginal inhabitantsâ of the coastal strip, but were refugees who had fled âthe merciless and destructive conquests of a tyrannical monster named Chaka.â These reports, which caused a stir back at the Cape, mark one of the first official mentions of the Zulu king whose name would one day be known around the globe.
The dispatches