| Summary: | This study illustrates the events in Southern Bantu history at the turn of the eighteenth century. Events that gave contents to the Difaqane (Difaqane is derived from the Southern Sotho word "faqane" which means "calamity") can be divided into phases. The first started in Natal as a phase of expansionism where Dingiswayo and Zwide started their wars of conquest. Nguni clans were forced to subject themselves or to flee. The struggle for the supremacy of Natal, started thereafter when the then king of the Zulu, Tsjaka, captured the kingship of the Mthetwa. He set himself the veracious task of suppressing the Natal Nguni under one rule - his! The following phase which started with the fleeing Nguni crossing the escarpment into the interior, is called the struggle for the supremacy of the Caledon. These refugees carried the Difaqane to the peoples of Sotho-origin as well as to the people in the East African regions. Smaller tribes were then scattered over the South African interior by the main forces, and they lived as nomadic marauding gangs. These actions resulted in the spreading of havoc, famine, cannibalism, the ruining of social-economic structures, the dislocation of tribal structures and the total cessation of economic activities. The last phase, the dismantling of the power of the great leaders, started when the Voortrekkers were attacked by the Matabeles and the Zulus. In return the Voortrekkers hit back and with this act brought an end to the powers that fickled and destabilized the interior of South Africa. The contact with the Voortrekkers started . the process of acculturation between the Zulu culture and the Western culture which is
still ongoing to this day. === Thesis (MA)--PU vir CHO, 1989
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