MagnetMan
Sep 8th, 2007, 9:24 AM
The endless clan vendettas of the Bronze Age could only be brought to an end and an Iron Age of national unity initiated via the concept of total war. The totemic beliefs that kept clans religiously and superstitiously separate from each other had to be ruthlessly smashed and their beliefs laid bare by profound fear of a force more physically immediate than the spiritual protection of dead ancestors. For this to happen a particular type of ruthless character had to emerge. A Warlord who was not indoctrinated into totemic superstition, and who had the power and will to force mass change.
The diaries of three English colonists in South Africa, who visted Zululand in the early year of th 1800's give us a graphuic record of the rise of such a man, and thereby put pen the blank pages of events thast took place in pre-literate Euope and Asia when the Iron Age was intiated over there.
Shaka Zulu was a monstrous genocidal messiah of the Iron Age, a pitiless tyrant who put much of what is now South Africa to fire, sword and stark terror. He was a prime exponent of the concept of “shock and awe” long before the wordsmiths in Washington DC thought of the term.
Shaka’s self-imposed mission was to put an end to the endless petty vendettas waged by the clans and tribes of what later became known as kwa-Zulu, or Zululand, and create a single nation led by the Zulu clan. By the time his own people assassinated him out of fear for their own lives, he had succeeded, although at terrible cost. He had exterminated literally scores of the surrounding tribes, emptied huge tracts of land of their inhabitants and condemned an estimated two million people to death by starvation and exposure.
Generally speaking, petty chiefs’ sons like Shaka, driven into exile at a young age by rivals for the chiefdom, were the only individuals in Bronze Age societies ever to escape totemic indoctrination. These individuals then grew to maturity without a programmed sense of clan identity. Consumed by hatred and revenge, they brooded over a larger sense of their destiny, awaiting the opportunity to return and claim their rightful heritage.
This could only be accomplished with the help of outside enemies of the home clan, or by way of alliances with families within the clan which were seeking a regime change. Forced to defend himself and his dynasty against the exiled son’s challenge, the clan chief in turn, had to make new alliances. Thus petty clan vendettas and border clashes would escalate into actual warfare.
If the personality of the youthful warlord leading the invasion was strong enough, and if the war was devastating enough, he could consolidate his victory to make his power absolute and lasting; he would then seize total power by turning his victorious army loose on the whole country and crushing the remaining clans.
If, at the same time, Bronze Age agricultural economies were already under strain because of over-crowding, with an evolutionary need for national industrialization able to provide a livelihood for the increased numbers, such war-born nations could be sustained long enough, through dynasties of tyrannical rule, for a binding Scripture to emerge that would serve to consolidate the federation into a national focus of religious industry. Thus when dynasties ended, as they inevitably must, the nation would remain and not revert to petty clanism.
The life of Shaka and his successors follows this general pre-literate route. His story reveals the precise circumstances of how wrathful messiahs employed as indispensable tools by universal forces of change, were able to further the evolutionary imperative and initiate a mass change of human consciousness by the ruthless imposition of force.
This mass change of the social and spiritual order of Bronze Age cultures served not only to unify clans into powerful nations but also to break regional marriage taboos and assist the cross-fertilization of the species. New generations had to migrate off the land and congregate in cities. There, they were forced to initiate a New Iron Age of occupational contracts, which were based on a broader national mind-set of industrial craftsmanship and improved technological development.
This mass change of consciousness had to be cemented by the introduction of national scriptures which served to break down individual totemic claims of divine descent and unite citizens under a single Godhead, and a learned priest-caste had to evolve within each culture to interpret these sacred writings. Dogmatic scriptures held Iron Age nations together, through religions composed of mystical ritual threats of excommunication and promises of eternal spiritual suffering to all non-conformers.
The personal story of Shaka and the goal of his mission are, in this sense, the story of every despot who ever fathered a nation. Relating his story and explaining why the particular circumstances of his moment in time allowed him to act the way he did, and succeed in his mission, allows us a greater understanding of the motivating factors that initiated our third great Age change, thereby forcing our ancestors into more complex systems of social unity.
Shaka ’s story begins in 1780. He was born as the bastard son of a minor chieftain. His father, Sensangakhona (The Rightful Doer), was the chief of the amaZulu clan, one of the smaller of the 80 clans of Nguni-speaking pastoralists and millet farmers, which had migrated out of Central Africa some 500 years earlier, to settle the fertile coastal regions of today Kwa-Zulu-Natal Province.
Born out of wedlock, Shaka festered with the shame of his birth, and from the age of six he and his mother were forced continually to flee from paid assassins hired by the relatives of Sensangakhona’s other wives, who feared his eventual succession to the chieftainship. The flight of the boy and his mother, Nandi, did not end until they eventually found a permanent haven under a chief named Dingiswayo, head of the large and powerful Mtetwe clan. Here Shaka grew to maturity, and he was to prove that Sensangakhona’s other wives had been right to fear him. His long flight from clan to clan had broken the hold of totemic indoctrination and freed his young mind to focus on dark thoughts of revenge. This deprogramming of an individual’s psyche is a crucial factor that initiates the messianic mission of a ruthless warlord - especially that of a chief’s son who dreams of a vengeful return and who has the potential, by right of royal birth, to attract others to his cause.
So Shaka ended up loyal to no one but himself, dreaming a terrible dream of total revenge, a dream that was eventually to propel him to paramount power. He distinguished himself as a fearless warrior, ending up as commander-in-chief of the Mtetwe regiments. When Dingiswayo was assassinated by a rival clan chieftain, Shaka avenged him and then led his victorious regiments further afi eld. He went on to seize total power over the entire region, killed his father, and mounted the Zulu throne atop a pile of the smashed skulls and broken bodies belonging to members of his clan, who previously, had insulted him and his mother and driven them into exile.
He ruled for 14 years, from the ages of 27 to 41, during which time he smashed the totems of 80 clans and forced them all to become part of the amaZulu. His regime was characterized by absolute personal power and mass fear based on unremitting psychological warfare. The slightest opposition to his will spelled instant death. Not even those closest to him knew who would be executed next. Life and death depended on his whim. A mere wave of his finger was all it took for the amapisi, the executioners, to raise their clubs and splinter a comrade’s skull or break the bones in his body; a moment’s hesitation on the part of an executioner spelled his own death.
It is hardly to be wondered at that Shaka was permanently paranoid about assassination plots. His spies were everywhere. No one knew if his or her neighbor was a secret informant, and arrest on suspicion meant torture as a matter of course. During mass assemblies he cunningly employed witchdoctors to “smell out” any group that might be contemplating his assassination; even the slightest suspicion was enough for a man to be impaled alive on a stake outside one of the royal kraals, after which his family would be clubbed to death and the corpses thrown to the vultures and hyenas. A hands-on despot, Shaka himself was not averse to personally smashing infants to death against the ground.
Shaka waxed rich from his bloody rule, because everything that had belonged to the slain men – personal wealth, concubines, and cattle – were confiscated and went into the royal treasury. At one time his seraglios housed 5,000 concubines and the royal herds numbered in the tens of thousands.
At the height of his reign Shaka could fi eld an army, of 50,000 warriors. Ten regiments were barracked at his various royal kraals, each of which was strategically placed throughout his kingdom, to guard both the king’s person and his huge herds. Each of his dead father’s wives were stationed with the regiments as colonels in charge. His mother Nandi, was Colonel-in-Chief - Indlovukazi – “Great She Elephant “. The army was ruled by savage discipline, with death the punishment for most offenses. Any warrior who showed the slightest sign of fear on the battlefield was instantly killed; on Shaka’s command, a warrior was expected to instantly execute himself by impaling himself on his own spear.
The midlands of what was later South Africa shuddered under the weight of Shaka’s remorseless heel. Whole tribes fl ed before his impis, or regiments, forcing yet other tribes to flee as well. People were displaced from their lands and herds, by the hundreds of thousands, leading to famine. Landless tribes collided with one another and fell like dominoes, while behind them the Zulu impis rampaged, raping, looting, burning and killing. The malign ripple effect convulsed tribes into movement hundreds of miles away.
It was a new Dark Age that became known as the “Mfecane” – meaning “the crushing of people” - and by the time it was over an estimated one million people had died from genocide and mass starvation.
There were no lengths to which Shaka would not go to maintain his steely grip on his subjects. When Nandi died he forced the entire population into a year of mourning and fasting, during which tens of thousands of his subjects died of hunger. Those who could not force tears out of their eyes to mourn his mother had their skulls splintered. It was an ultimate act of tyranny, which was to lead to his assassination less than a year later.
In just 14 terrible years Shaka single-handedly destroyed five hundred generations of entrenched oral-based tribal customs, totemic indoctrination and superstitious taboos. The 80 Nguni clans – once fiercely independent clans, each intensely proud of its heritage and certain that it was
of Divine descent - lost all sense of their former identity and trembled in fear of Shaka ’s wrath, so terrified of him that they feared even to utter his name aloud.
And so a monstrous black messiah who preached not of eternal life but instant death ushered in a New Age of national consciousness and fathered the Zulu nation we know today.
The story of Shaka is indicative of a universal unification impulse that characterizes the nature, not only of man, but also of all organic colonies. The brutal ambition that drove Shaka was the same one that drove other individuals like Atilla, Alexander, Ghengis Khan, Napoleon and Hitler to amass armies and set out to crush smaller unions and make them their own. Totemic indoctrination was transcended by sheer intimidation. Military invasion, mass genocide and torture served to unify the Bronze Age clans of Europe and Asia and lay the pre-literate foundations of the nations that we know today.
Brutal dynastic power can only hold sway for so long, and disunity might once again have prevailed, if where not for the timely introduction of a powerful metaphysical inspiration – the invention of scripture. Nation hood was cemented by the gradual introduction of national scriptures that united all the clans behind a single powerful Godhead, and a learned priestcaste had to evolve within each culture to interpret the sacred writings of the new God. The oral-based traditions of former Bronze Age clans, each with conflicting totemic claims as to the exclusive divinity that once held them tightly bound together, were over-powered by religious rituals and the mass recitation of dogmatic creeds - with dire threats of eternal excommunication if the creeds were broken. Thus it was that the profound influence of written Word with its doctrinal mystique, claimed an artificial hold on the budding intellect of the specie. It was an Iron Age hold that would be challenged some two hundred generations later, by the next New Age of scientific argument and religious protest.
Shaka was in the process of initiating the same age-changing process in Southern Africa when European colonials arrived to witness it less than two centuries ago. Colonialism helped to accelerate the Age change in Africa just as the Romans did in Britain, 2,000 years earlier. They brought in the Christian scriptures and used their armies to force the Zulu nation into subjugation.
The next chapter explains in greater detail why no Age change can be sustained unless the social contract of the new paradigm includes a corresponding evolution of spiritual disciplines.
The diaries of three English colonists in South Africa, who visted Zululand in the early year of th 1800's give us a graphuic record of the rise of such a man, and thereby put pen the blank pages of events thast took place in pre-literate Euope and Asia when the Iron Age was intiated over there.
Shaka Zulu was a monstrous genocidal messiah of the Iron Age, a pitiless tyrant who put much of what is now South Africa to fire, sword and stark terror. He was a prime exponent of the concept of “shock and awe” long before the wordsmiths in Washington DC thought of the term.
Shaka’s self-imposed mission was to put an end to the endless petty vendettas waged by the clans and tribes of what later became known as kwa-Zulu, or Zululand, and create a single nation led by the Zulu clan. By the time his own people assassinated him out of fear for their own lives, he had succeeded, although at terrible cost. He had exterminated literally scores of the surrounding tribes, emptied huge tracts of land of their inhabitants and condemned an estimated two million people to death by starvation and exposure.
Generally speaking, petty chiefs’ sons like Shaka, driven into exile at a young age by rivals for the chiefdom, were the only individuals in Bronze Age societies ever to escape totemic indoctrination. These individuals then grew to maturity without a programmed sense of clan identity. Consumed by hatred and revenge, they brooded over a larger sense of their destiny, awaiting the opportunity to return and claim their rightful heritage.
This could only be accomplished with the help of outside enemies of the home clan, or by way of alliances with families within the clan which were seeking a regime change. Forced to defend himself and his dynasty against the exiled son’s challenge, the clan chief in turn, had to make new alliances. Thus petty clan vendettas and border clashes would escalate into actual warfare.
If the personality of the youthful warlord leading the invasion was strong enough, and if the war was devastating enough, he could consolidate his victory to make his power absolute and lasting; he would then seize total power by turning his victorious army loose on the whole country and crushing the remaining clans.
If, at the same time, Bronze Age agricultural economies were already under strain because of over-crowding, with an evolutionary need for national industrialization able to provide a livelihood for the increased numbers, such war-born nations could be sustained long enough, through dynasties of tyrannical rule, for a binding Scripture to emerge that would serve to consolidate the federation into a national focus of religious industry. Thus when dynasties ended, as they inevitably must, the nation would remain and not revert to petty clanism.
The life of Shaka and his successors follows this general pre-literate route. His story reveals the precise circumstances of how wrathful messiahs employed as indispensable tools by universal forces of change, were able to further the evolutionary imperative and initiate a mass change of human consciousness by the ruthless imposition of force.
This mass change of the social and spiritual order of Bronze Age cultures served not only to unify clans into powerful nations but also to break regional marriage taboos and assist the cross-fertilization of the species. New generations had to migrate off the land and congregate in cities. There, they were forced to initiate a New Iron Age of occupational contracts, which were based on a broader national mind-set of industrial craftsmanship and improved technological development.
This mass change of consciousness had to be cemented by the introduction of national scriptures which served to break down individual totemic claims of divine descent and unite citizens under a single Godhead, and a learned priest-caste had to evolve within each culture to interpret these sacred writings. Dogmatic scriptures held Iron Age nations together, through religions composed of mystical ritual threats of excommunication and promises of eternal spiritual suffering to all non-conformers.
The personal story of Shaka and the goal of his mission are, in this sense, the story of every despot who ever fathered a nation. Relating his story and explaining why the particular circumstances of his moment in time allowed him to act the way he did, and succeed in his mission, allows us a greater understanding of the motivating factors that initiated our third great Age change, thereby forcing our ancestors into more complex systems of social unity.
Shaka ’s story begins in 1780. He was born as the bastard son of a minor chieftain. His father, Sensangakhona (The Rightful Doer), was the chief of the amaZulu clan, one of the smaller of the 80 clans of Nguni-speaking pastoralists and millet farmers, which had migrated out of Central Africa some 500 years earlier, to settle the fertile coastal regions of today Kwa-Zulu-Natal Province.
Born out of wedlock, Shaka festered with the shame of his birth, and from the age of six he and his mother were forced continually to flee from paid assassins hired by the relatives of Sensangakhona’s other wives, who feared his eventual succession to the chieftainship. The flight of the boy and his mother, Nandi, did not end until they eventually found a permanent haven under a chief named Dingiswayo, head of the large and powerful Mtetwe clan. Here Shaka grew to maturity, and he was to prove that Sensangakhona’s other wives had been right to fear him. His long flight from clan to clan had broken the hold of totemic indoctrination and freed his young mind to focus on dark thoughts of revenge. This deprogramming of an individual’s psyche is a crucial factor that initiates the messianic mission of a ruthless warlord - especially that of a chief’s son who dreams of a vengeful return and who has the potential, by right of royal birth, to attract others to his cause.
So Shaka ended up loyal to no one but himself, dreaming a terrible dream of total revenge, a dream that was eventually to propel him to paramount power. He distinguished himself as a fearless warrior, ending up as commander-in-chief of the Mtetwe regiments. When Dingiswayo was assassinated by a rival clan chieftain, Shaka avenged him and then led his victorious regiments further afi eld. He went on to seize total power over the entire region, killed his father, and mounted the Zulu throne atop a pile of the smashed skulls and broken bodies belonging to members of his clan, who previously, had insulted him and his mother and driven them into exile.
He ruled for 14 years, from the ages of 27 to 41, during which time he smashed the totems of 80 clans and forced them all to become part of the amaZulu. His regime was characterized by absolute personal power and mass fear based on unremitting psychological warfare. The slightest opposition to his will spelled instant death. Not even those closest to him knew who would be executed next. Life and death depended on his whim. A mere wave of his finger was all it took for the amapisi, the executioners, to raise their clubs and splinter a comrade’s skull or break the bones in his body; a moment’s hesitation on the part of an executioner spelled his own death.
It is hardly to be wondered at that Shaka was permanently paranoid about assassination plots. His spies were everywhere. No one knew if his or her neighbor was a secret informant, and arrest on suspicion meant torture as a matter of course. During mass assemblies he cunningly employed witchdoctors to “smell out” any group that might be contemplating his assassination; even the slightest suspicion was enough for a man to be impaled alive on a stake outside one of the royal kraals, after which his family would be clubbed to death and the corpses thrown to the vultures and hyenas. A hands-on despot, Shaka himself was not averse to personally smashing infants to death against the ground.
Shaka waxed rich from his bloody rule, because everything that had belonged to the slain men – personal wealth, concubines, and cattle – were confiscated and went into the royal treasury. At one time his seraglios housed 5,000 concubines and the royal herds numbered in the tens of thousands.
At the height of his reign Shaka could fi eld an army, of 50,000 warriors. Ten regiments were barracked at his various royal kraals, each of which was strategically placed throughout his kingdom, to guard both the king’s person and his huge herds. Each of his dead father’s wives were stationed with the regiments as colonels in charge. His mother Nandi, was Colonel-in-Chief - Indlovukazi – “Great She Elephant “. The army was ruled by savage discipline, with death the punishment for most offenses. Any warrior who showed the slightest sign of fear on the battlefield was instantly killed; on Shaka’s command, a warrior was expected to instantly execute himself by impaling himself on his own spear.
The midlands of what was later South Africa shuddered under the weight of Shaka’s remorseless heel. Whole tribes fl ed before his impis, or regiments, forcing yet other tribes to flee as well. People were displaced from their lands and herds, by the hundreds of thousands, leading to famine. Landless tribes collided with one another and fell like dominoes, while behind them the Zulu impis rampaged, raping, looting, burning and killing. The malign ripple effect convulsed tribes into movement hundreds of miles away.
It was a new Dark Age that became known as the “Mfecane” – meaning “the crushing of people” - and by the time it was over an estimated one million people had died from genocide and mass starvation.
There were no lengths to which Shaka would not go to maintain his steely grip on his subjects. When Nandi died he forced the entire population into a year of mourning and fasting, during which tens of thousands of his subjects died of hunger. Those who could not force tears out of their eyes to mourn his mother had their skulls splintered. It was an ultimate act of tyranny, which was to lead to his assassination less than a year later.
In just 14 terrible years Shaka single-handedly destroyed five hundred generations of entrenched oral-based tribal customs, totemic indoctrination and superstitious taboos. The 80 Nguni clans – once fiercely independent clans, each intensely proud of its heritage and certain that it was
of Divine descent - lost all sense of their former identity and trembled in fear of Shaka ’s wrath, so terrified of him that they feared even to utter his name aloud.
And so a monstrous black messiah who preached not of eternal life but instant death ushered in a New Age of national consciousness and fathered the Zulu nation we know today.
The story of Shaka is indicative of a universal unification impulse that characterizes the nature, not only of man, but also of all organic colonies. The brutal ambition that drove Shaka was the same one that drove other individuals like Atilla, Alexander, Ghengis Khan, Napoleon and Hitler to amass armies and set out to crush smaller unions and make them their own. Totemic indoctrination was transcended by sheer intimidation. Military invasion, mass genocide and torture served to unify the Bronze Age clans of Europe and Asia and lay the pre-literate foundations of the nations that we know today.
Brutal dynastic power can only hold sway for so long, and disunity might once again have prevailed, if where not for the timely introduction of a powerful metaphysical inspiration – the invention of scripture. Nation hood was cemented by the gradual introduction of national scriptures that united all the clans behind a single powerful Godhead, and a learned priestcaste had to evolve within each culture to interpret the sacred writings of the new God. The oral-based traditions of former Bronze Age clans, each with conflicting totemic claims as to the exclusive divinity that once held them tightly bound together, were over-powered by religious rituals and the mass recitation of dogmatic creeds - with dire threats of eternal excommunication if the creeds were broken. Thus it was that the profound influence of written Word with its doctrinal mystique, claimed an artificial hold on the budding intellect of the specie. It was an Iron Age hold that would be challenged some two hundred generations later, by the next New Age of scientific argument and religious protest.
Shaka was in the process of initiating the same age-changing process in Southern Africa when European colonials arrived to witness it less than two centuries ago. Colonialism helped to accelerate the Age change in Africa just as the Romans did in Britain, 2,000 years earlier. They brought in the Christian scriptures and used their armies to force the Zulu nation into subjugation.
The next chapter explains in greater detail why no Age change can be sustained unless the social contract of the new paradigm includes a corresponding evolution of spiritual disciplines.