ABSTRACT
Voortrekkers defeated the two most powerful African kingdoms—the Ndebele and the Zulu—and carved out settlements for themselves in the central part of the coastal sector and the central high veld. The white-inspiration theory of the origins of the Zulu kingdom is in the same genre. One of the many small chiefdoms which acknowledged Dingiswayo as paramount was that of the Zulu, who numbered perhaps two thousand people and who lived between the upper Mhlatuzi and the White Mfolozi, west of the Mthethwa nuclear area. The first person to devote serious attention to collecting the oral traditions of the northern Nguni was A. T. Bryant, a Catholic missionary, who spent many years in Natal from 1883 onwards. Cooperation, as well as conflict, marked human relations in south-eastern Africa as in the Cape Colony and the Transkei. The rise of the Zulu kingdom had repercussions from the Cape Colonial frontier to Lake Tanganyika.
