Reddit Reddit reviews Zulu

We found 2 Reddit comments about Zulu. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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2 Reddit comments about Zulu:

u/faceintheblue · 176 pointsr/AskHistorians

Let's start with the high-end. Almost every Zulu adult male served in a regiment based on his age: You joined a regiment in your late teens with all the other teenagers, and that was your regiment until the day you died; you literally did not have access to adulthood in the Zulu Kingdom without joining a regiment, serving the king for a number of years, and then being permitted to sew on the headring, marry, and become head of a household excused active service outside times of war. The only exceptions to the age regiment (amabutho) system were the abaQulusi who guarded the northwestern border, and the Cube clan who were not required to serve militarily if they worked as smiths. From a total population of several hundred thousand, that gives us more than 50,000 armed and trained warriors.

That number is far too high for a number of reasons. First, regiments were never disbanded, so some of the oldest ones --men who served under King Shaka and Dingane-- were made up of grandfathers and great-grandfathers too elderly to contribute to the war effort. Quite a number of those men did answer Cetshwayo's command to muster at oNdini, but he called them his reserve --one can only imagine to spare their feelings-- and they played little to no role in the actual fighting. A much larger number of warriors from all age ranges did little or no fighting because they were more loyal to their local chieftains --especially northern barons like Hamu and Zibhebhu-- and they stayed home.

A realistic ballpark puts the Great Impi that fought at Isandhlwana at 20-25,000 (4,000 of whom did no fighting but went on to Rorke's Drift afterwards). Another 5-8,000 opposed the eastern column at Nyezane, resulting in the siege of Eshowe, and the final battle at Gingindhlovu. The abaQulusi's strength in the west is much fuzzier --between 1-3,000-- depending on how many of them ever actually followed Mbilini waMswati at any one time. That puts the range between 26,000 and 36,000 fighting men at the start of the war.

In answer to your question about rivals, the Zulu were excellent at absorbing their rivals among their Bantu neighbours. They never successfully conquered the Swazi, but King Mpande did go to war with them for the purposes of blooding regiments too young to have participated in the wars of Shaka and Dingane. The Boers were a constant source of anxiety before the British put the whole matter to rest. Probably the single greatest threat to the Zulu in the years leading up to the Anglo-Zulu War was civil war: Mpande refused to choose an heir, and princes Cetshwayo and Mbuyazi fought a major engagement at eNdodakusuka that saw as many as ten thousand fatalities. Cetshwayo came out the victor, but by the time of his ascension to the throne --the only peaceful succession in Zulu history-- he had divested so much power to the Great Men of the Nation that he had to invite the British to his coronation to use them as a threat against the sprawling nobility.

/ZuluHistoryNerdMoment

EDIT: Thanks, everyone! I'm pretty sure this is my most popular submission in this subreddit, so I hope you don't mind my adding a shameless plug: I actually wrote a work of historical fiction about the Zulu in the later half of the 19th Century. It's my second novel. My first was about the decline and fall of the Inca Empire.

u/remembertosmilebot · 2 pointsr/selfpublish

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Here are your smile-ified links:

give the first book away for free

Inca

Zulu

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