19th Century: (Interpreting the Mfecane — Competition for Land, Commerce in Ivory and Slaves, Drought, the Role of Exceptionally Talented Individuals Like Sh…

19th Century: (Interpreting the Mfecane — Competition for Land, Commerce in Ivory and Slaves, Drought, the Role of Exceptionally Talented Individuals Like Shaka, and the Controversy Over Whether Europeans Exaggerated the Violence to Justify Colonialism and Later Apartheid): The mfecane and the rise of the Zulu state have been interpreted in various ways. It has been suggested that the series of wars engulfing the interior and their effects were deliberately exaggerated by Europeans to justify colonialism and later the apartheid state. Nevertheless, the historical consensus accepts that the mfecane originated among the Ngoni kingdoms and involved virtually permanent war over limited resources, absorption of smaller chiefdoms, and increasingly centralized and militarized kingship. Some observers suggested the warfare patterns could be attributed to European influence, a racist assumption demonstrating fundamental incredulity that Africans could be responsible for such an expansion of political scale — this was wholly groundless. More compelling interpretations explain the escalation of warfare through competition for land and commerce: population growth and land shortage led to competition for pastureland, exacerbated by drought, while the growing role of commerce in ivory and slaves toward the end of the eighteenth century meant that where there was growing global trade, there were attempts to monopolize it. The role of exceptionally talented individuals, most famously Shaka, must also be acknowledged. Shaka’s successors Dingane (1828–1840) and Mpande (1840–1872) contended with a greatly altered political environment — particularly the advance of white settlement from the Cape, which by the end of the 1830s had become a serious challenge to the Zulu as the voortrekkers moved onto the interior plateau.