Cetywayo and his White Neighbours | Page 5

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 they did not show sufficient sorrow at her death.
At length, in 1828, he too suffered the fate he had meted out to so many,
and was killed by his brothers, Dingaan and Umhlangan, by the hands
of one Umbopa. He was murdered in his hut, and as his life passed out
of him he is reported to have addressed these words to his brothers,
who were watching his end: "What! do you stab me, my brothers, dogs
of mine own house, whom I have fed? You hope to be kings; but
though you do kill me, think not that your line shall reign for long. I tell
you that I hear the sound of the feet of the great white people, and that
this land shall be trodden by them." He then expired, but his last words
have always been looked upon as a prophecy by the Zulus, and indeed
they have been partly fulfilled.
Having in his turn killed Umhlangan, his brother by blood and in crime,
Dingaan took possession of the throne. He was less pronounced than
Chaka in his foreign policy, though he seems to have kept up the family
reputation as regards domestic affairs. It was he who, influenced,
perhaps, by Chaka's dying prophecy about white men, massacred Retief,
the Boer leader, and his fifty followers, in the most treacherous manner,
and then falling on the emigrant Boers in Natal, murdered men, women,
and children to the number of nearly six hundred. There seems,

however, to have been but little love lost between any of the sons of
Usengangacona (the father of Chaka, Dingaan, Umhlangan, and Panda),
for in due course Panda, his brother, conspired with the Boers against
Dingaan, and overthrew him with their assistance. Dingaan fled, and
was shortly afterwards murdered in Swaziland, and Panda ascended the
throne in 1840.
Panda was a man of different character to the remainder of his race, and
seems to have been well content to reign in peace, only killing enough
people to keep up his authority. Two of his sons, Umbelazi and
Cetywayo, of whom Umbelazi was the elder and Panda's favourite,
began, as their father grew old, to quarrel about the succession to the
crown. On the question being referred to Panda, he is reported to have
remarked that when two young cocks quarrelled the best thing they
could do was to fight it out. Acting on this hint, each prince collected
his forces, Panda sending down one of his favourite regiments to help
Umbelazi. The fight took place in 1856 on the banks of the Tugela. A
friend of the writer, happening to be on the Natal side of the river the
day before the battle, and knowing it was going to take place, swam his
horse across in the darkness, taking his chance of the alligators, and hid
in some bush on a hillock commanding the battlefield. It was a
hazardous proceeding, but the sight repaid the risk, though he describes
it as very awful, more especially when the regiment of veterans sent by
Panda joined in the fray. It came up at the charge, between two and
three thousand strong, and was met near his hiding-place by one of
Cetywayo's young regiments. The noise of the clash of their shields
was like the roar of the sea, but the old regiment, after a struggle in
which men fell thick and fast, annihilated the other, and passed on with
thinned ranks. Another of Cetywayo's regiments took the place of the
one that had been destroyed, and this time the combat was fierce and
long, till victory again declared for the veterans' spears. But they