1850s–1880s: (The Ngoni Invasion of Tanzania — Refugees from the Zulu Revolution Far to the South Bringing Destruction and a Transformation of Warfare, Absor…

1850s–1880s: (The Ngoni Invasion of Tanzania — Refugees from the Zulu Revolution Far to the South Bringing Destruction and a Transformation of Warfare, Absorbing and Being Imitated by Local Communities, and the Ruga Ruga as Cannabis-Smoking Wandering Gangs Who Were Perhaps the Single Most Important Social Phenomenon of the Second Half of the Century): By the 1850s, groups of Ngoni, refugees from the Zulu revolution far to the south, were penetrating into modern Tanzania, bringing destruction and a transformation in patterns of warfare and statehood. They attacked and pillaged across a wide area, living by plunder, though after a few years some settled down to more sedentary existence. By the 1850s and 1860s these groups were amalgamations of various absorbed and conquered peoples, imbued with the Ngoni military ethos — some communities scattered on their approach, others were absorbed, and still others copied the Ngoni model to survive. Rising levels of violence and endemic insecurity both gave rise to and were exacerbated by wandering gangs of desperate, cannabis-smoking young men, heavily armed, driven by the search for plunder and adventure — perhaps the single most important social phenomenon of the second half of the nineteenth century. These young men were the cause and effect of social, political, and economic change, the symptom of both the destruction of old orders and the reconstruction of new ones. They came to be known generically as ruga ruga — they might be petty criminals living off plunder in the bush, or they might attach themselves to commercial caravans or the entourages of coastal merchants as mercenaries. Crucially, they formed the backbone of the emerging military states that dominated swathes of the interior during the 1870s and 1880s.