KwaZulu-Natal (Zulu)

The subtropical east coast and the interior behind it, and the region whose nineteenth century reshaped southern Africa. Shaka consolidated the Zulu kingdom in the 1810s and 1820s out of a landscape of chiefdoms under pressure, using age-regiment military organisation and close-quarters tactics to build a state that could field tens of thousands of men. The upheaval that accompanied and followed it, the Mfecane, dispersed peoples as far as Tanzania and Zambia and created or destroyed polities across the whole subcontinent, though historians now argue about how much of it Shaka caused and how much was driven by drought and the slave trade at Delagoa Bay. The kingdom's end came quickly: Britain manufactured a war in 1879, lost a full battalion at Isandlwana in one of the worst defeats a European army suffered in Africa, and destroyed Zulu power at Ulundi six months later. The coastal strip developed separately as Natal, where British settlers grew sugar and, unable to recruit Zulu labour, imported indentured workers from India from 1860 - producing the largest Indian population outside Asia, into which Gandhi arrived as a young lawyer in 1893. Apartheid made the interior into the KwaZulu homeland under Mangosuthu Buthelezi, and the conflict between Inkatha and the ANC killed thousands in the province between 1985 and 1994. Durban is Africa's busiest port. isiZulu is the most widely spoken home language in South Africa. The Drakensberg forms the region's western wall and holds the largest concentration of San rock art in the world. Pietermaritzburg is the provincial capital. Sugar remains the coastal crop. The kingdom's monarchy still exists, without governing power.

• Existed: 1816 CE – present
• Type: Entity