mountains
and deserts, and fearlessly venturing into the strongholds of the
fiercest native tribes, undoubtedly hastened and secured the
acquirement of the marvellous diamond and gold fields of South Africa.
The march of the caravans and the winning of the land was a drama full
of barbaric color and movement.
At the time when the Cape first fell into the hands of Great Britain, there was an insignificant tribe, the Amazulu, living in
kraals
on the banks of the river Unvolosi, which flows into the Indian Ocean
at St. Lucia Bay. In their name there was an arrogance of high
descent, for its meaning is " the people of the sky "; but the Amazulu
had then nothing else to brag of, and while their head chief,
Senzanzakona, lived, there was no terror in the Zulu name. But there
was a son born to Senzanzakona in or near the year 17835 who
made the Amazulus masters of a region far exceeding any bounds of the
Kalangu Monomotapa, and stamped his name across it in indelible blood.2
The
boy was called Tshaka or Chaka, which, in the Sechuana tongue, is "
battle axe." There is another tracing of his name to Cheka, a wasting
disease afflicting his mother. In either translation the name was
ominous. But this chief's son had no deformity that an eye could see.
When he came to manhood, a sculptor would have picked him as a model of
his tall, athletic
1 "South Africa," Theal. "Annals of Natal." 2 Ibid.
