Mhlangana
Mhlangana helped kill Shaka and was killed by his co-conspirator within months. He was a son of Senzangakhona and so a half-brother of Shaka, one of several who had grown up in a kingdom where royal brothers were a standing danger to whoever held it. He served in the campaigns and is described as the more capable soldier of the two brothers who acted together, which is part of why he did not survive the aftermath. The killing came out of exhaustion rather than ambition alone. Shaka's mourning for his mother Nandi in 1827 had involved months of executions and a ban on planting, and his regiments were being kept in the field continuously and forbidden to marry. In September 1828 he sent the army north against Soshangane while he remained at Dukuza with a small guard, which gave the opening. He and Dingane stabbed Shaka with the help of the servant Mbopa, and the body was left overnight and buried in a grain pit. Dingane then had him killed, on a charge of plotting, and took the kingship alone - which is the ordinary end of a two-man conspiracy. Dingane ruled for twelve years, was beaten by the Boers at Blood River in 1838 and killed in exile in 1840. Almost everything recorded about the assassination comes from Zulu testimony collected decades afterwards by white officials and traders, and the accounts differ on who struck first, on where it happened and on what was said. His own part is therefore uncertain in a way the histories rarely admit: he is a name in the sentence that ends Shaka's reign, and the man who profited from it wrote the version that survived.
- Nationality: Zulu
- Roles: military, royalty
