ELIZABETH A. ELDREDGE

and the loss of cattle. But many military campaigns sent to enforce the submission of smaller
chiefs as tributaries to Shaka's rule did not result in any fighting at all when allegiance was
promptly forthcoming. Even when these early battles were fought, most resulted in dozens
rather than hundreds or thousands killed, and even some major campaigns such as the sec-
ond campaign against the AmaMpondo did not result in any fighting. From the evidence
there appear to have been only a handful of battles in which hundreds of warriors died,
and mortality figures in the range of several thousand killed in battles fought by AmaZulu
troops during Shaka's reign are only reported for two battles, the first (amabece) campaign
against the AmaMpondo in 1824 in which the majority of casualties appear to have been
AmaZulu warriors, and the 1826 battle in which the AmaNdwandwe then under Zwide's
son Sikhunyana were finally defeated north of the Phongolo River. About eight thousand
warriors, mostly AmaZulu, were also said to have died in the Balule campaign, although it is
impossible to distinguish therein between losses in battle and losses from disease. Mortality
counted in the hundreds in a single battle were still considered staggering, as occurred in
three battles fought by the AmaNgwane west of the Drakensberg against the AmaHlubi, the
AmaZulu, and the BaSotho; losses counted in the thousands in a single battle were unex-
pected and unacceptable even during Shaka's rule. The violence inflicted by Shaka's warriors
and by other predatory chiefs, including Makedama, Zihlandlo, and Sambela were targeted
towards chiefs and sometimes their immediate families, rather than entire populations.
In sum the number of people including Shaka's warriors who were killed in battles in-
volving impis sent by Shaka, or commanded by these subordinate chiefs, certainly amounted
to ten thousand dead, and the true figure was probably twice that number. These figures do
not take into account mortality arising from other battles and fights across the wider region
involving other chiefs and chiefdoms, nor the associated death from famines known to have
occurred west of the Drakensberg during the droughts of the 1820s.'36 As terrible and dra-
matic as these figures are, they are far lower than the one to two million deaths attributed to
Shaka's rule that were estimated in the early historiography.
The widespread use of force and the threat of force to reconfigure the political and
social organization of southern Africa in the era of Shaka's reign underscores the false and
artificial presumptions of modern claims of "ethnicity" associated with supposed "primor-
dial" cultural identities. This history decisively undermines the legitimacy of any contem-
porary political, social, or economic claims on the basis of putative but false "primordial"
socio-cultural origins. Processes of cultural assimilation followed upon the turmoil and
sociopolitical reconfiguration of the 1820s and 1830s, disguising the cultural, political, and
social (and biological) heterogeneity of modern political identities that only emerged later
in the nineteenth century. Cultural "identities" or modern "ethnicities" currently masquer-
ade, in the words of the Comaroffs, as "the manifest product of biology, genetics, human
essence," with damaging political and economic consequences. Hence the historical decon-

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