Mzilikazi

Mzilikazi kaMashobane was born around 1790 in what is now KwaZulu-Natal, the son of Mashobane, the chief of the small Khumalo clan of the northern Nguni. He inherited the Khumalo chieftainship around 1818 and brought the clan under the suzerainty of Shaka kaSenzangakhona (also placed in this archive) — the founder of the Zulu Kingdom — that same year.

Mzilikazi rose to the rank of induna (general) under Shaka. In 1823 he refused to surrender the cattle his clan had captured in a Shaka-ordered raid against the Sotho. Shaka dispatched two regiments to enforce the order. Mzilikazi and the entire Khumalo clan — approximately three hundred warriors with their families — fled north across the Drakensberg. The migration that followed across the next eighteen years took the Matabele (as the Khumalo came to be called) across approximately fifteen hundred miles of southern African veld and produced — through warfare, absorption, and political consolidation — the largest single state created by the mfecane.

Mzilikazi conquered or absorbed the Pedi, the Tswana, the BaSotho-ba-Borwa, and dozens of smaller groups across what is now eastern Botswana, the Limpopo Province of South Africa, and southwestern Zimbabwe. By 1838 he had established the Matabele capital at Mosega in the western Transvaal. Boer Voortrekker pressure from the south pushed the Matabele further north across the Limpopo River in 1838-1840. He established his final capital at Bulawayo (in what is now southwestern Zimbabwe) in approximately 1843.

He ruled the Matabele kingdom for the next twenty-five years from Bulawayo. He died there on the ninth of September 1868, age approximately seventy-eight. His son Lobengula (also placed in this archive) succeeded him.

He is honored here as the founder of the Matabele Kingdom and the principal state-builder of the southern African mfecane.