The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (56 page)

Fighting alone or beside Dingiswayo, Shaka used these innovations to defeat all comers. In 1816 he crushed the E-Langeni; in 1817 he conquered the Butelezi. By now his sphere of influence was 400 square miles.

In 1817 Dingiswayo assembled an estimated 4,500 warriors for an assault on the Ngwane; he was joined by Shaka and 1,000 of his men. Dingiswayo was victorious this time, but in 1818 he was captured and killed by his old nemesis, Chief Zwide of the Ndwandwe, whose life he had spared in the past.

Shaka replaced Dingiswayo as leader of the combined Mthethwa-Zulu forces. Zwide, emboldened by his defeat of Dingiswayo, now made plans to eliminate Shaka as well. An estimated 8,000 Ndwandwe warriors forded the White Umfolozi River. Before them stood Gqokli Hill, which Shaka and his 4,000 warriors had turned into a fortress.

Outnumbered two to one, Shaka won this crucial battle by superior military strategy. In a completely independent move, according to Selby, Shaka hit upon “the famous British square tactics used by Wellington at Waterloo.” Drawing his veteran forces into a tight circle, Shaka instructed his reserves to hide in the brush. He then sent off a decoy force of 700 men who pretended to flee with a cattle herd, kept at the fortress for food. The Ndwandwe were taken in by the ruse, sending a third of their force to chase the herders. The remaining two-thirds charged the hill, unaware that there were twice as many defenders there as they could see.

The Ndwandwe threw their javelins; Shaka’s troops avoided most of them and charged and killed 1,000 enemies at close range. Shaka’s highly disciplined warriors held firm through repeated attacks, and at the appropriate moment his reserves came out of hiding and joined the fray. The Ndwandwe were defeated.

Through this and other victories, Shaka turned 30 chiefly societies into the provinces of a unified kingdom covering 7,000 square miles. In only 12 years (a period so short as to be virtually invisible to an archaeologist) he had gone from the illegitimate son of a minor chief to the king of the Zulu.

Shaka established his capital in 1820 at a place called New Bulawayo. There he built a royal kraal a mile in diameter, defended by a stockade and containing some 1,500 residences. He stationed a portion of his 50,000 warriors at New Bulawayo, which had 130 acres set aside for cattle.

Shaka’s revisionist ideology portrayed the Zulu as ruling by right of genealogical seniority rather than conquest. To his inner circle of advisers, however, he confided his belief that “you can only rule the Zulus by killing them … only the fear of death will hold them together.”

Shaka, whose genealogical credentials were shaky, worried constantly about being usurped. He often said that a king “should not eat with his brothers, lest they poison him.” Shaka kept many concubines but was so afraid of being overthrown by a son that he executed any lover who became pregnant. He would leave no heir.

In 1827 Shaka’s beloved mother, Nandi, with whom he had endured so much abuse in childhood, passed away. In order to mourn her properly, Shaka ruled that for one year no crops would be planted, no cows would be milked, and no married couples would engage in sex. He executed 7,000 of his own subjects who did not appear to be grieving sufficiently.

This “year of hell” caused such grumbling in Natal that two of Shaka’s half brothers, Dingane and Mhlangane, were persuaded to assassinate him. At a meeting with them in 1828, an unsuspecting Shaka was fatally run through with a spear. Dingane was then named king of the Zulu.

By then, of course, European colonization of Natal had become an irreversible process. In 1838 the Boers drove the Zulu north of the Tugela River. In 1880, after a very bloody war, the British conquered the Zulu; thirty years later, in 1910, Zululand was ceded to the Union of South Africa.

In 1994 the province of KwaZulu-Natal was created as a homeland for the Zulu. Its parliament is based in Pietermaritzburg, and the Zulu king receives a government stipend. Each year the king is allowed to take an additional wife, but he usually declines. Instead, the current Zulu king uses the annual ceremony to promote abstinence and the prevention of HIV/AIDS.

Shaka’s Kingdom

From time to time we hear one of our colleagues say, “Wasn’t so-and-so the worst president in the history of this country?” After listening politely, we add, “but at least he didn’t execute 7,000 of his own citizens because they refused to mourn the death of his mother.”

Let us look briefly at some differences between Shaka’s kingdom and Kamehameha’s. While some of Kamehameha’s predecessors may have created political hierarchies of four administrative levels, the society in which Shaka was raised had only two levels above the headmen of each kraal. Leadership in Natal relied heavily on military force; not only did it lack the sacred aspects of Polynesian leadership, it also lacked a continuum of rank based on the differential possession of sacred life force.

The citizens of the Zulu kingdom did, however, display four descending levels of prestige, based largely on the length of time each group had been loyal to Shaka. On the most prestigious level were the king, the Zulu ruling lineage, and the ruling lineages of allied groups who (like the Mthethwa) had embraced Shaka from the beginning. The second level consisted of the more important chiefs and notables of the societies subjugated during the middle stages of Shaka’s career. As a result of aligning themselves with the Zulu king, they were left in charge of their old territories.

The third level of Zulu citizenry consisted of the lower-ranking members of Shaka’s most favored subjugated societies. Although these people had once belonged to different ethnic groups, they were now encouraged to think of themselves as sharing a common origin. Those who distinguished themselves would be appointed to bureaucratic posts.

The fourth, or lowest, level was composed of people who had either sought refuge with the Zulu or were subjugated late in Shaka’s career. According to Wright and Hamilton, such people were often referred to as “destitute,” “menials,” “people with strange hairstyles,” or the like. They never became full Zulu citizens and were regarded as ethnically inferior even if they had once been led by hereditary chiefs.

THE UNIFICATION OF THE HUNZA

Let us now turn to the roof of the world. The Hunza River, an upper tributary of the Indus, rises in the Karakoram Mountains of the Pakistani-controlled region called the Northern Areas. From some of the snowcapped 25,000-foot peaks, one might be able to see Afghanistan and the Hindu Kush in the distance. To the south lies Kashmir and to the east lies China’s Xinjiang province.

Three hundred years ago, according to anthropologist Homayun Sidky, the territory of the Hunza consisted of three fortified villages. Each of these villages—Baltit, Altit, and Ganesh—had its own small irrigation system and grew barley, wheat, buckwheat, millet, apricots, and vegetables. Their fields lay at 8,000 feet above sea level, and the Hunza pastured goats, sheep, and cattle at still higher elevations. They used manure from both humans and animals as fertilizer on their crops and grew alfalfa for their herds.

Prior to
A.D.
1790, Hunza society had male lineage heads, clan elders, and a village headman called a
trangfa.
All three villages were nominally under a chief called a
thum,
though he shared power with the elders and headmen. The thum, like the chiefs in Tikopia society, derived his authority from sacred life force. He was alleged to have a special relationship with the
pari,
or supernatural mountain spirits. This relationship gave a thum the power to melt glaciers and bring rain, both essential to agriculture.

The thum’s supernatural powers were validated by religious practitioners called
bitan.
The bitan were not formal priests and maintained no temples. They served more as oracles, soothsayers, and earthly spokesmen for the mountain spirits. Travelers to Hunza territory report that the bitan entered ecstatic trances, drinking goats’ blood and inhaling the smoke of burning juniper.

While the thum tended to come from one elite lineage, there were no firm rules of succession. When a chief died, his sons and brothers often began a struggle that ended only when one of them had murdered his rivals or forced them into exile. Even the winners in this power struggle could not relax. A thum who proved unable to bring rain or melt glaciers might be assassinated or overthrown.

Periodic attempts to consolidate power among the Hunza began in the 1500s and took the form of eliminating rival factions. During the late 1600s, a Hunza chief named Mayori massacred the Diramheray faction with the aid of the Hamachating and Osenkutz factions; the three allied factions divided up the victims’ land and animals. Mayori’s son, Ayasho II, then massacred his father’s former allies the Hamachating with the aid of the Osenkutz; again, the victors divided up the victims’ land and animals. The cycle of bloodshed was extended when Ayasho II went on to massacre his former allies the Osenkutz, seizing all their land and livestock for himself.

At this point the Hunza had been unified under one faction but were still no more than a rank society. Whatever plans the thum may have had for further aggrandizement were put on hold in the mid-eighteenth century. In 1759 the Chinese emperor Kien-lung brought the Karakoram Range and neighboring Turkestan under his control. From 1760 onward the Hunza were forced to send gold to China as tribute. In return the Chinese gave Hunza leaders tea, silk, and horses.

Around 1790 a man named Silim Khan usurped the position of thum from his brother Ghuti Mirza. Unfortunately for Ghuti Mirza, his term as chief had been plagued by drought, and his subjects had ceased to believe that he could control the mountain spirits. According to oral history, his brother Silim Khan then caused snow to fall “to the depth of an arrow shaft” in mid-summer. This feat was enough to swing public support to Silim Khan.

Silim Khan took on the title of
mir,
the Pamir or Persian equivalent of thum. With most rival factions already eliminated by Mayori and Ayasho II, he moved quickly to bring Baltit, Altit, and Ganesh under his control. Applying a “top-down” strategy, he named a series of loyal subordinates to be the headmen of each village. He then installed a
wazir,
or vizier, to oversee for him all three villages.

Mir Silim Khan fully intended to expand against his neighbors. He knew that to do so he would need a series of advantages not shared by his predecessors. He built hilltop forts, watchtowers, and fortified granaries. He then set out to create the greatest system of irrigation canals ever seen in the Karakoram Mountains. Some of these canals would bring water from glaciers on the region’s high mountains, delivering it to previously uncultivated stretches of the Hunza River valley.

The first canal took seven years to complete. Silim Khan demanded that each household commit one male member to his labor force, using apricot-wood shovels and crude picks made from the horns of mountain goats. The mir worked his diggers from dawn to dusk and required highly ranked families to provide them with food. When finished, the canal brought water from a stream above Baltit and irrigated a former wasteland down valley from Ganesh. There Silim Khan founded a new village, called Haidarabad.

The second and longest canal, called the Samarqand waterway, brought water from Ultar glacier, high above the river. This canal was designed to irrigate a wasteland even farther downstream. Here Silim Khan founded the new village of Aliabad. The mir allowed the people of Ganesh to divert some of the Samarqand water to arid lands closer to their homes. Soon a new village, called Hasanabad, had split off from Ganesh.

Finally, Mir Silim Khan directed work on a third canal, bringing water from another mountain glacier. This canal was used to irrigate a wasteland upstream, near Altit. The increased water allowed the people of Altit to found a new village, called Ahmadabad.

These canals ushered in a period of unprecedented prosperity, but they also altered traditional Hunza society. Because the irrigation system was the creation of Mir Silim Khan, it became the property of an embryonic Hunza monarchy. None of the new villages, established on formerly useless land, had a previous history. They were occupied by new followers of Silim Khan, ethnically and genealogically heterogeneous, united by place of residence rather than common ancestry. These new people were the clients of an emerging Hunza kingdom, and their loyalties were only to the mir.

Aware of his growing political importance, Silim Khan turned his back on the soothsayers who had formerly validated his sacred vital force. In a move reminiscent of the Kachin chiefs who adopted Buddhism, the mir converted to Islam. From now on, water would be provided by hydraulic expertise instead of supernatural power. Silim Khan’s monarchy would promote Islam, and the ecstatic trances of the soothsayers would be reduced to folk religion.

The irrigation system brought about enormous immigration to Silim Khan’s realm. Soon he expanded east to the neighboring Shimshal Valley and north to the Pamir Range. Most of all, he longed to expand southeast into the territory of the Nagar. Years before the building of his canal system, the mir had been “dissed” by a Nagar chief who asserted that his virile member was larger than Silim Khan’s entire chiefdom.

By expanding into the Pamirs, Silim Khan compelled the Kirghiz nomads to pay tribute to him rather than to China. Expanding still farther to the north, he attacked the small kingdom of Sarikol and turned many of its villagers into slaves.

Now Silim Khan had a vantage point from which to raid caravans along the Silk Route. Instead of paying tribute to China as his predecessors had, he was soon receiving protection money from the Chinese. The luxury goods stolen from caravans further enriched Hunza society. The loot produced by raiding created another route to prominence, analogous to that of Colombia’s “nobles by wealth.”

In 1824 Silim Khan was succeeded by Mir Ghazanfar Khan. The latter enlarged the Hunza canal system and extended the kingdom’s territorial control, finally subduing the Nagar society so hated by his predecessor.