Agrippina

Great, that is exactly what I wanted. The world believes that Africa was this dark black uncivilized continent full of killing fields, starving children and barbarians, when history shows that this is not true.

You are right, no excuse for not doing that, however, the space is limited so I left what I was doing to watch my team become the world champions, then planned to return this morning. Having your comments helps me to focus.

Perhaps my picture is naive - I didn't intend to paint the picture of the 'noble savage'. There were, as in any society the best people and the worst.

Shaka was born circa 1787, son of a minor Zulu chief, but his mother was an unranked woman, and Shaka was a humiliated and discredited child. Taking refuge with his mother in the court of the Zulu leader of the day, he grew up to become a great military leader. When the Zulu leader was murdered by a rival clan, Shaka assumed the throne.

Tragedy on a vast scale struck Southern Africa in the early 1800's. This event was named the "Mfecane" ('the crushing of people') by the Nguni, and the "Difaqane" ('the scattering of tribes') by the Sotho and Tswana. The Afrikaners and the British called the catastrophe "the Wars of Calamity". By 1825, two and half million starving, homeless people wandered about southern Africa looking for respite.

The causes of the Mfecane were many. Introduced from the Americas, corn (maize) flourished in the mild seasons of southern Africa. Not carefully managed, corn depleted the soil of nutrients. As the local population increased, they competed for more land to cultivate corn and to graze livestock. Starting in 1800, a long drought then made southern Africa inhospitable. Peoples moved in search of food, and fought for meager supplies. The Mfengu called the drought, "madlatule" ('eat what you can and say nothing').

During this period Shaka reorganized the Zulu into a military clan, and he soon made them into a force unchallenged in Southern African kingdoms. He introduced the shorter 'stabbing' spear that replaced the traditional long and awkward 'throwing' spear. On the battlefield, he developed the now-famous "horns of the bull" formation (a two-pronged attack). Conquering tribe after tribe, he assimilated all his conquests into the Zulu nation, making it swell with numbers and power, but also causing the displacement of thousands. His actions were partly responsible for spreading the Southern African tribes as far away as Mozambique.

Although he maintained a good relationship with the Europeans in Africa, including the Colonial authorities, he was disliked by other Africans, including his own people, who suffered under his long, cruel and debilitating rule of constant war.

After 10 years of unrelenting warfare that placed incredible strains on the Zulu nation, Shaka, always psychologically unstable and obsessively worried about being replaced by an heir, finally snapped into derangement after the death of his mother in 1828. He imposed a year of celibacy on his people and executed anyone who did not show enough grief at the death of his mother. He was murdered within the year by his half-brother, Dingane, who succeeded him as ruler.

Even though he created brutal conditions for his subjects, it was his legacy that created the powerful Zulu Kingdom and consolidated a nation and its pride.

Refer to the above.

Yes, they were called Khakis but the English did come here in uniforms with read coats, we have the red coats in Johannesburg's war museum. I'm not too up to date on the history of the two Anglo Boer Wars mine was merely a summary, perhaps you can fill that in the with the causes and results and explain why the Boers accused the English of using ground glass to kill them when they were using Epsom salts to fix the dysentery problem?

Yes Mandela was the leader of Umkhonto wesizwe you are right. He also advocated civil unrest but he did not encourage the acts that were perpetrated by some of the people we have around today, who's names shall not be mentioned. I have read his book and I quote:

Nelson Mandela's autobiography is a book worth reading for anyone who would understand South Africa's dark times of Apartheid and I recommend too for anyone who wants to learn about true faith and hope for a better tomorrow. He never lost the belief that he would be free on day that the land he loved would become healed.

The rest of AH's post can be read above; I don't want to follow up on that. I want to say that although I have painted a bleak picture of white behavior towards Africa, it is not untrue. Europeans came to Africa in the belief that it was a dark, empty continent with a few uncivilized tribes, Herodotus called them pygmies, the Romans believed that the gorillas they discovered were another 'race' of people.

But when the Europeans arrived, they were surprised to find villages and groups of people living together with tribal leaders, kings, great cities and trade with outsiders already ongoing. But their arrogance and religion led them to believe that these were 'lesser' people who needed to be saved and converted into the European ideal, when they would not be assimilated into given up their traditions, they were dismissed as the 'sons of Ham' and transformed into lowly paid slaves. People like Mandela (and there were lots of them) rose above their disadvantages and poor education, made the effort to become better educated and took advantage of every learning opportunity that was presented to them. Million upon millions of others, however, in their despair, allowed it to flow over them and engulf them. They would not in their collective despair give in, but they would also not fight until the fight started on a small scale and led to mass exterminations of everything that begin European stood for. This is why we have Rwanda, Darfur and the Liberia and Nigeria. If the Cape had remained a trading post or if the settlers had negotiated instead of overrun, who knows how different the history might have been.