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In the early part of the 19th century there was a set of conflicts, conquests,
mass migration and dislocation across southern and central Africa that was collectively known as the
Mfecane or “the smothering”. And there were a lot of causes of the Mfecane, a population explosion,
a drought, contacts with european culture but central to it all was the rise of a powerful,
expansionist, militaristic kingdom under the leadership of a charismatic king who was one
of the most gifted military strategists in the history of the earth. And if you want
to understand the rise of Shaka Zulu and the Zulu Kingdom the place to start is the 1818
battle of Gqokli Hill. The Zulu Civil War started before the Battle of Gqokli Hill, but the battle
represented a turning point in the very nature of the conflict and well demonstrated the skill of
the personality that drove the rise of the Zulu, the key dynamic in the Mfecane. In 1818 the Zulu,
under their 29 year old King Shaka, were a minor tribe, vassals of a larger kingdom that was in
the process of decline in the face of a rival, the powerful Ndwandwe Kingdom. At Gqokli Hill
Shaka used a number of strategies that would be recognizable on the battlefield today, deception,
guerrilla warfare, decoy, but to understand the nature of the battle first we have to understand
the nature of the way that Shaka transformed the very way that the Zulu fought Wars.
Traditional warfare among the Zulus had been done with relatively light throwing spears,
the two armies would stand at a respectful distance, they would shout insults back and
forth and they would throw their spears until one side or the other decided that they had
lost. It was almost more ceremony than warfare and the casualties were relatively light. But
Shaka decided that this was pointless, that it made more sense to fight in close combat
where you knew you had killed your enemy and so he changed the weapon from a long light spear,
to a short long bladed stabbing spear that worked more like a sword. It was called an iklwa and to
give you an idea how brutal this kind of combat was, that name, iklwa represented the sound it
made when you withdrew it from a person after stabbing them. Shaka also changed the size of the
traditional lozenge shaped cowhide shield that a Zulu warrior carried making it much larger,
that gave more protection against the throwing spears but it made it heavy enough to use as
a battering weapon. As opposed to standing at a distance and throwing spears at each other,
the way that Shaka saw a fight was that you would charge your enemy with your heavy shield,
hit them hard to knock them off balance, hook their shield with yours to pull it back and create
an opportunity to stab them with your ikwla, it was a brutal and effective change to the way that
the Zulus engaged in warfare. Moreover, Shaka expected his warriors to have a greater level of
training and discipline than ever before expected of the Zulu, with hours of training turning the
men to peak physical specimens, and then he formed them into distinct military units called impis,
that were much closer to the lines of European armies. It was in the context of this change
in warfare, that the king of the Ndwandwe sent his oldest son Nomahlanjana with 12,000 warriors
to attack Shaka and his mere five thousand warriors in April of 1818. The Ndwandwe were
expecting to annex the Zulu lands and they expected that it would be an easy fight.
The first tactic that Shaka used was to use guerrilla tactics, he would use small forces
to contest river crossings and thus slow the advance of the Ndwandwe. This is a tactic that
would be well understood on a twentieth century battlefield. Shaka used that time to move his
people out of harm's way to the fringe of Zulu land, and then to strip all the land that the
Ndwandwe had to cross of all useful supplies, so that they had exhausted their supply before
they even got to the battle. When it came time to fight, Shaka chose his ground carefully, he placed
his army on top of a hill, Gqokli Hill, but the hill had a large depression on top and that way
Shaka could hide his numbers, and his preparation, from the enemy. Then Shaka employed a diversion,
he sent a small bit of his army leading a bunch of cattle off in the distance where the Ndwandwe
army could see them. Nomahlanjana took the bait, he thought that, that was Shaka moving all of his
cattle, which represents wealth in Zulu culture, and he realized he had a chance to catch them.
He sent nearly four thousand men of his force chasing after Shaka's diversion. Shaka had a
great defensive position on the hill but he had to goat Nomahlanjana into attacking him on the
hill. And so he hid most of his troops in the depression to make it look like he was smaller
and weaker than it really was. Nomahlanjana took the bait, he thought that this would be simple,
he said to one of his generals this will be like slaughtering cattle. But as the Ndwandwe moved up
the hill they realized that it was difficult to bring their numbers to bear, because as
they climbed the hill, the units started crushing together and then when they were pressed together
so that they couldn't maneuver, Shaka sprung a trap. His warriors used the impetus of the
hill to charge down and use their brutal close combat tactics, the Ndwandwe army was thrown back.
Nomahlanjana wasn't stupid, he knew what was going on but he just didn't have an answer,
he tried several different modes of attack but all of them were thrown back because the Zulus had
the advantage of the hill and the powerful close combat tactics. Moreover, the Ndwandwe army was
tiring, they were climbing up and down the hill and they'd run out of the water that they carried
with them and they were starting to strangle back towards the closest river which was nearly
two miles away. Unknown to Nomahlanjana, Shaka had prepared for this, up in the depression on
the hill he had water and food for his troops so that his troops were refreshed while the Ndwandwe
army was exhausting. What Shaka lacked was time, he knew eventually the 4,000 warriors had gone
chasing after the cattle would return. He had to goat Nomahlanjana into one more attack so that he
could defeat the main army before the other force came back. And so what he did was rearranged his
warriors so that it looked like the units were more depleted than they were. Nomahlanjana at
the bottom of the hill saw these depleted units and assumed that they were as exhausted as the
Ndwandwe were that they've been fighting on a hill all day with no water and he took the bait.
He assumed that one last mass attack would overrun the Zulus for good, and so he personally led 1,200
warriors up the hill one last time. But Shaka had a last trick up his sleeve. All day he had
been hiding a significant reserve of warriors that Nomahlanjana didn't even know about. As his troops
moved up the hill Shaka threw in his reserves, they charged around and flanked Nomahlanjana's
army capturing that entire force, encircling them and killing them all. Nomahlanjana and four of his
brothers died in the fight. Then it was an easy mop-up to chase down the rest of the army which
broke and ran. In the end the Ndwandwe army lost 7,500 of its warriors and five of the king's sons.
The battle of Gqokli Hill wasn't the beginning of the Zulu Civil War or the Mfecane and it wasn't
the end of the Ndwandwe. They were still a much larger force than the Zulus. And the Zulus had
taken significant losses, Shaka lost nearly 2,000 of his entire 5,000 person force and many cattle.
But the failure to defeat Shaka in 1818 when he was at his weakest would have long-term
ramifications, when the two armies met again a year later Shaka had absorbed many smaller
kingdoms and was far more powerful than had been before and one more time he used
brilliant tactics to defeat a much larger force and eventually defeat the Ndwandwe. The Battle
of Gqokli Hill is what set Shaka Zulu down the path of creating the great Zulu Kingdom.
The ripple effects of the Zulu conquest were massive, displace people like the Ndwandwe
now had Zulu weapons and tactics and they would move along conquering and subjugating
other people as ripple effects went all the way through southern and central Africa. In
the end the effects of the great migrations of the Mfecane would cost the native population
of South Africa as many as 2 million lives. That depopulation would then facilitate the expansion
of European settlements in South Africa, though would also create the great native nations that
became the greatest obstacles to those European settlements and would set up a series of colonial
conflicts that would continue throughout the 19th century and still impact borders,
politics and conflicts today. Rarely has one personality so greatly affected an entire
region really half a continent. Shaka Zulu is as important to the history of Africa as Napoleon
was to the history of Europe. And that rise all started with the Battle of Gqokli Hill.
I’m the History Guy. I hope you enjoyed this edition of my channel, 5 minutes of history,
short snippets of forgotten history between five and ten minutes long. If
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