Chaka, Cetywayo's great uncle, was the first Zulu king, and doubtless
one of the most remarkable men that has ever filled a throne since the
days of the Pharaohs. When he came to his chieftainship, about 1813, the
Zulu people consisted of a single small tribe; when his throne became
vacant in 1828, their name had become a living terror, and they were
the greatest Black power in South Africa. The invincible armies of this
African Attila had swept north and south, east and west, had slaughtered
more than a million human beings, and added vast tracts of country to
his dominions. Wherever his warriors went, the blood of men, women, and
children was poured out without stay or stint; indeed he reigned like a
visible Death, the presiding genius of a saturnalia of slaughter.

His methods of government and warfare were peculiar and somewhat
drastic, but most effective. As he conquered a tribe, he enrolled its
remnants in his army, so that they might in their turn help to conquer
others. He armed his regiments with the short stabbing assegai, instead
of the throwing assegai which they had been accustomed to use, and kept
them subject to an iron discipline. If a man was observed to show the
slightest hesitation about coming to close quarters with the enemy,
he was executed as soon as the fight was over. If a regiment had the
misfortune to be defeated, whether by its own fault or not, it would on
its return to headquarters find that a goodly proportion of the wives
and children belonging to it had been beaten to death by Chaka's orders,
and that he was waiting their arrival to complete his vengeance by
dashing out their brains. The result was, that though Chaka's armies
were occasionally annihilated, they were rarely defeated, and they never
ran away. I will not enter in the history of his numerous cruelties, and
indeed they are not edifying. Amongst other things, like Nero, he killed
his own mother, and then caused several persons to be executed because