Shaka Zulu was mocked as a boy, named after a beetle, and grew up to build a kingdom. But much of what the world "knows" about him was written by men with books to sell.
In this episode we pull the man apart from the legend. Shaka rose through Dingiswayo's army, took over the small Zulu clan around 1816, defeated the powerful Ndwandwe and built one of southern Africa's strongest kingdoms. He is credited with the short stabbing spear and the "horns of the buffalo", though historians now think he refined ideas that already existed. His wars caused real suffering, but the claim that he alone emptied the region in the Mfecane is still debated. And in 1832 the trader Nathaniel Isaacs urged Henry Fynn to make the Zulu kings look as bloodthirsty as possible to make his book more interesting.
After his mother Nandi died, Shaka's rule grew darker, and in 1828 he was killed by his own half-brothers. Hero or tyrant? Maybe a little of both.
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When you first heard about Shaka Zulu, what did you believe about him, and has that changed?
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