The Mfecane
From Australia, we move to Africa, and a slightly different take on genocide.
The last major act of defiance of a native race in southern Africa against European domination was the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879. In this campaign, the mighty Zulu nation made one last, desperate effort to throw off the colonial yoke. But the Zulu race itself was not innocent of genocide. The Zulu are a military people, forged in a crucible of violence and predatory warfare, and in the early decades of the 19th century, they emerged as a martial society on an almost Spartan scale.
The story begins with a popular African tale. The dissolute prince of a minor tribe, playing fast and loose, raped and impregnated the daughter of a neighboring tribal chieftain. The young woman, whose name was Nandi, was, with ageless injustice, cast out to give birth to her illegitimate child in exile. That child, a boy, was given the name Shaka, a pejorative reference to an intestinal parasite.
The mother and child wandered in exile until taken in by a local paramount chief by the name of Dingiswayo. Dingiswayo very quickly noticed that the young Shaka possessed a particular talent for war, and took him into his army. There Shaka revealed something much more than a simple talent for war, something, in fact, akin to genius. But he also displayed a dangerous pathology, perhaps born of his reduced birth, and the suffering that his mother endured on his behalf, but also, perhaps, because of hidden homosexuality.
Upon the death of his illegitimate father, the king of the minor Zulu clan, Shaka seized the ascension, killing all rivals, after which he began to build a society forged by war and bloodshed. He introduced concepts of warfare and weaponry revolutionary in his age, and upon the death of Dingiswayo, he assumed the paramountcy of what is today known as Zululand.
The Zulu style of warfare was based on finely tuned tactics, relentless discipline and brutal, close-quarters combat. His Impis, or regiments, were relentless and unstoppable. A minor tribe or clan was attacked and utterly obliterated, with only those able to fight or breed spared, to then be assimilated into the Zulu race. The result of this was an extraordinarily cohesive and violent nation, glorifying in bloodshed, and celebrating with utter fanaticism the personality cult of their leader.
The wider effect, however, was a cascading implosion of refugees, who displaced only to attack yet weaker groups, who in turn were displaced to do the same. In this way, a chain reaction of violence and predation began that lasted from about 1815 to 1840. The result was the decimation of the interior population of South Africa, and the ruination of the social and productive landscape. The phenomenon was known as the Mfecane, or Difaqane, or the ‘Scattering’. There are no reliable figures, but the combined death toll of the Mfecane is estimated to be upwards of 2 million.