The Zulu-Xosas.
Former and Present Domain.
Beyond Sofala we enter the domain of the Ama-Zulu, the Ama-Xosa, and others whom I have collectively called Zulu-Xosas[253], and who are in some respects the most remarkable ethnical group in all Bantuland. Indeed they are by common consent regarded as Bantus in a preeminent sense, and this conventional term Bantu itself is taken from their typical Bantu language[254]. There is clear evidence that they are comparatively recent arrivals, necessarily from the north, in their present territory, which was still occupied by Bushman and Hottentot tribes probably within the last thousand years or so. Before the Kafir wars with the English (1811-77) this territory extended much farther round the coast than at present, and for many years the Great Kei River has formed the frontier between the white settlements and the Xosas.
But what they have lost in this direction the Zulu-Xosas, or at least the Zulus, have recovered a hundredfold by their expansion northwards during the nineteenth century. After the establishment of the Zulu military power under Dingiswayo and his successor Chaka (1793-1828), half the continent was overrun by organised Zulu hordes, who ranged as far north as Victoria Nyanza, and in many places founded more or less unstable kingdoms or chieftaincies on the model of the terrible despotism set up in Zululand. Such were, beyond the Limpopo, the states of Gazaland and Matabililand, the latter established about 1838 by Umsilikatzi, father of Lobengula, who perished in a hopeless struggle with the English in 1894. Gungunhana, last of the Swazi (Zulu) chiefs in Gazaland, where the A-Ngoni had overrun the Ba-Thonga (Ba-Ronga)[255], was similarly dispossessed by the Portuguese in 1896.
North of Zambesi the Zulu bands—Ma-Situ, Ma-Viti, Ma-Ngoni (A-Ngoni), and others—nowhere developed large political states except for a short time under the ubiquitous Mirambo in Unyamweziland. But some, especially the A-Ngoni[256], were long troublesome in the Nyasa district, and others about the Lower Zambesi, where they are known to the Portuguese as "Landins." The A-Ngoni power was finally broken by the English early in 1898, and the reflux movement has now entirely subsided, and cannot be revived, the disturbing elements having been extinguished at the fountain-head by the absorption of Zululand itself in the British Colony of Natal (1895).
Zulu-Xosa Genealogies.
Nowhere have patriarchal institutions been more highly developed than among the Zulu-Xosas, all of whom, except perhaps the Ama-Fingus and some other broken groups, claim direct descent from some eponymous hero or mythical founder of the tribe. Thus in the national traditions Chaka was seventh in descent from a legendary chief Zulu, from whom they take the name of Abantu ba-Kwa-Zulu, that is "People of Zulu's Land," although the true mother-tribe appear to have been the now extinct Ama-Ntombela. Once the supremacy and prestige of Chaka's tribe were established, all the others, as they were successively reduced, claimed also to be true Zulus, and as the same process went on in the far north, the term Zulu has now in many cases come to imply political rather than blood relationship. Here we have an object lesson, by which the ethnical value of such names as "Aryan," "Kelt," "Briton," "Slav," etc. may be gauged in other regions.
So also most of the southern section claim as their founder and ancestor a certain Xosa, sprung from Zuide, who may have flourished about 1500, and whom the Ama-Tembus and Ama-Mpondos also regard as their progenitor. Thus the whole section is connected, but not in the direct line, with the Xosas, who trace their lineage from Galeka and Khakhabe, sons of Palo, who is said to have died about 1780, and was himself tenth in direct descent from Xosa. We thus get a genealogical table as under, which gives his proper place in the Family Tree to nearly every historical "Kafir" chief in Cape Colony, where ignorance of these relations caused much bloodshed during the early Kafir wars:
Physical Type.