Nandi

Nandi was Shaka's mother, and her death was the occasion for a killing that lasted months. She was a daughter of a Langeni chief, and her pregnancy by Senzangakhona of the Zulu was outside a recognised marriage - the Zulu explanation offered at the time was that she was suffering from an intestinal beetle, iShaka, which is where the boy's name comes from. The marriage that followed did not hold. She was sent back to her own people with the child, and they were treated as a burden there too, moving between households through a famine. That upbringing is the standard explanation for both her son's attachment to her and his treatment of nearly everyone else. When he took the Zulu chieftaincy she became a figure of real authority, with her own household, a voice in his decisions, and the title of queen mother in a kingdom that had not had one. She sheltered children he had ordered killed, by several accounts. She died in October 1827, and what followed is the part every source reports. He ordered a mourning in which no crops were planted and no milk drunk, cows were killed so their calves would know what it was to lose a mother, and those judged insufficiently grieved were executed - the figures given run to thousands and cannot be checked. The regiments were kept from their homes. His half-brothers killed him within two years, and the excesses after her death are usually given as the reason the kingdom let them.

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