Dingane
Dingane killed his brother for the Zulu throne, killed his fellow conspirator to keep it, and lost it to a wagon laager on a river. He was a son of Senzangakhona and a half-brother of Shaka, and took part in the assassination of September 1828 with Mhlangana and the servant Mbopa, in a kingdom exhausted by continuous campaigning and by the executions that followed Nandi's death. He then had Mhlangana killed and ruled alone. His policy was the reverse of his brother's: fewer campaigns, the regiments allowed home, and an attempt to hold the kingdom together rather than expand it. The Voortrekkers arrived in 1837. Piet Retief negotiated a land cession and, at a ceremony at his capital in February 1838, he had Retief and some seventy of his party clubbed to death on the hill above it, and sent impis to attack the encamped families - several hundred were killed, and one of the sites is still called Weenen, weeping. What he judged, on the evidence of the Ndwandwe and the Boers' own quarrels, was that a scattered column could be destroyed piecemeal. On 16 December 1838 some 470 men under Andries Pretorius drew their wagons into a laager on the Ncome with the river and a donga at their backs and firearms inside. Three thousand Zulu dead and three Boers wounded gave the river its Afrikaans name and gave Afrikaner nationalism a covenant it commemorated for a century and a half. His brother Mpande went over to the Boers with much of the army, and he was driven out and killed in exile in 1840.
- Lived: 1795 CE – 1840 CE
- Nationality: Zulu
- Roles: head_of_state, military
