Shaka kaSenzangakhona

Shaka was born around 1787, the illegitimate son of Senzangakhona, chief of the small Zulu clan that occupied a strip of grassland in what is now KwaZulu-Natal. He returned to the Zulu in 1816, took the chieftainship by force on his father's death, and over the next twelve years remade Southern African political geography.

His military reforms were comprehensive. He replaced the throwing-spear traditional to Bantu warfare with the iklwa — a heavy short stabbing-spear — and trained his soldiers to close to hand-to-hand range, where conventional Bantu tactics had no answer. He standardized the amabutho regimental system, organized by age-grade rather than clan; reformed shield design and battlefield drill; and developed the encirclement maneuver, the impondo zankomo (horns of the buffalo), that became the signature Zulu tactical formation.

The state he built grew from a thousand subjects at his accession to perhaps a quarter-million at his peak. The military reforms set in motion the mfecane — the chain of population displacements and state-formations across Southern Africa that produced, in subsequent decades, the kingdoms of Mzilikazi's Matabele, Moshoeshoe's Basotho, and Sobhuza I's Swazi, among others. Almost every Southern African polity that the Boer trekkers and the British encountered in the mid-nineteenth century was a direct or indirect product of his reforms.

He was assassinated by his half-brothers Dingane and Mhlangana on the twenty-fourth of September 1828. The Zulu Kingdom under Dingane and later Cetshwayo would fight the most consequential anti-colonial wars in nineteenth-century Southern Africa — the form of those wars set by Shaka's military reforms half a century earlier.

He is honored here as the founder of the Zulu Kingdom, whose military reforms reshaped Southern Africa.