Zulu

Zulu, Bantu-speaking (or, Sintu-speaking) people of southern Africa. Numbering more than 8 million, the Zulu live mainly in the provinces of KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng, South Africa. Their language, Zulu, is a member of the Nguni sub-group of the Niger-Congo languages. It is closely related to Swati (or Swazi) and Xhosa.

Archaeological research conducted since the 1960s suggests that the remote ancestors of the Bantu-speaking peoples, including the Zulu, who today live in southern Africa, were farmers from further north in the continent. From about the 1st or 2nd centuries ad they settled in small communities along the coast of KwaZulu-Natal. Later they spread up the river valleys of the region, and later still into the higher-lying grasslands. Linguistic and genetic evidence indicates that they interacted closely with the existing occupants of the region, who lived by hunting and gathering and who fairly certainly spoke Khoisan languages.

The earliest ancestors of the Zulu seem to have lived in relatively large, self-sufficient villages. After about 1000 ad, they dispersed into smaller homesteads, which traded with one another for necessities. The people cultivated sorghum and millet, and bred cattle, goats, and long-tailed sheep. Specialists among them smelted, forged, and traded iron. Some time after 1500 they adopted maize, a South American crop that may have been brought to Africa by European navigators.

Until the later 18th century the inhabitants of the KwaZulu-Natal region seem to have been organized into small chiefdoms, typically of a few thousand people occupying a few hundred square kilometres. After 1750, larger states began to develop, possibly in response to the expansion in the region of an international trade in ivory, cattle, and, later, slaves. Processes of state-formation culminated with the founding of the Zulu kingdom under Shaka in the 1820s. Images of Shaka as a tyrannical ruler and of the Zulu as a nation of warriors became widespread in Africa and other parts of the world during the colonial era. Long-established ideas of this kind are currently being challenged by a new generation of revisionist historians in South Africa. (See also Zulu Wars.)

It was only at this time that the name “Zulu” became more widely known, and it was not until the early 20th century that the Bantu-speaking people of KwaZulu-Natal specifically became generally known, both to themselves and to others, as Zulu.

The Zulu kingdom was destroyed by colonial conquest and civil wars in the 1880s. From this time on, increasing numbers of Zulu people—first younger men, then older men, then women—left the rural areas to look for waged work in the towns and cities of South Africa, where an industrial revolution was beginning. Large numbers became migrant labourers, moving between their homes in the rural areas of KwaZulu-Natal and their places of work in the towns. Today more than half the Zulu population lives permanently in urban areas.

In the 20th century, increasing numbers of Zulu people, particularly in the towns and cities, came to identify with Africa and with the working class, as well as with the Zulu “nation”. The suppression of black trade unions and black liberation movements by apartheid governments in the 1950s and 1960s, together with these governments’ active promotion of the Bantustan system, which promoted separation, opened the way for the growth of Zulu ethnic nationalism in the 1970s and 1980s.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, a period of far-reaching political change in South Africa, there was a great deal of violence between those Zulu who gave their allegiance to the Inkatha Freedom Party (a political organization committed to Zulu nationalism and therefore supported by the apartheid state) and those who were aligned with the African National Congress (ANC). Following the coming to power of an ANC-led government in South Africa’s first democratic general election in 1994, the level of political violence in the country dropped significantly. However, the Zulu people, inside and outside KwaZulu-Natal, remain bitterly divided in their political loyalties. South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission report published in 1998 detailed the past political violence, and held the leader of the Inkatha Freedom Party, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, responsible for his party's role, saying it had killed about 3,800 people in KwaZulu-Natal and colluded with state security forces during the apartheid era.