The Assassination of Shaka Zulu: The Palace Coup That Changed Africa

[00:00:00]The body was found on September 22nd, [music] 1828.

[00:00:04]The investigation that followed would expose something far bigger than Shaka's death.

[00:00:10]Shaka kaSenzangakhona [music] had remade a kingdom.

[00:00:14]By 1818, he had turned [music] disparate Nguni clans into the Zulu military state.

[00:00:20]His reforms, iklwa spears, bullhorn formations, dominated [music] the Tugela and Thukela valleys of present-day KwaZulu-Natal.

[00:00:28]European settlers and tourists recorded him.

[00:00:32]Nathaniel Isaacs and Henry Fynn wrote journals.

[00:00:35]The region was [music] in the grip of the Mfecane.

[00:00:39]People fled.

[00:00:41]Kingdoms [music] collapsed.

[00:00:43]Lives were erased.

[00:00:45]After his mother [music] Nandi's death in 1827, Shaka changed.

[00:00:50]Warning [music] turned into edicts.

[00:00:53]Planting stopped. Travel stopped.

[00:00:57]Contemporary [music] accounts claimed he ordered mass executions of attendants and mourners, numbers some later sources put in the thousands, an almost unbelievable claim that historians still debate.

[00:01:08]Tension boiled.

[00:01:10]On September 22nd, 1828, Shaka was struck down at his royal kraal at kwaDukuza by his half-brothers Dingane and Langana and an Nduna named Mbopa, according to Isaacs and Fynn.

[00:01:21]>> [music] >> But what investigators found next would change everything.

[00:01:26]Missionary journals, Voortrekker [music] reports, and oral testimony revealed a palace coup, not a lone murder.

[00:01:34]Dingane consolidated power.

[00:01:36]Langane [music] reportedly disappeared soon after.

[00:01:40]Witnesses were silenced or scattered by the waves of migration Shaka's reign had worsened.

[00:01:46]The assassination [music] rewired alliances.

[00:01:50]It set the stage for Dingane's later massacre of Piet Retief and his party in 1838 and the deeper colonization that followed.

[00:01:58]Accounts differ.

[00:02:00]Documents conflict. [music] Yet one fact endures. One dead king opened a chain reaction that remade Southern Africa. [music] Who then decides which faces are buried and which versions of the truth are left standing?

[00:02:14]If you want more, click on the following [music] button.