SHAKA'S MILITARY EXPEDITIONS: SURVIVAL AND MORTALITY FROM SHAKA'S IMPIS
struction of the processes of sociopolitical incorporation and amalgamation are more salient
than ever to modern politics and economic dispensations.137
The supposed "primordial" origins of modern ethnic identities such as the modern
Zulu "identity" are contrived from false claims that threaten renewed conflicts. Associated
economic and financial claims to benefits are based on a false representation of past political
and cultural history. The wages of war in battle and beyond as experienced by the people of
southern Africa in the 1820s and 1830s were high, and by the time Protestant missionaries
became active in the region in the 1820s and 1830s, populations across the region knew
they were recovering from a long period of chronic violence that had sometimes uprooted
entire chiefdoms and brought death from violence and famine. Wherever they found them-
selves settled, communities regrouped and replanted and rebuilt, and through their oral
traditions they remembered their relatives and their ancestors who had not lived to see the
reconfigured chiefdoms and kingdoms of the 1820s and 1830s that created a new legacy for
subsequent generations.
Notes
1.  This article is part of a larger project on the pre-colonial history of southeastern Africa encompassing
modern KwaZulu-Natal, Lesotho, Swaziland, and southern Mozambique with reference to adjacent
areas and developments from 1400 to 1830. Research for this project was supported by grants from
a Senior Scholar Fulbright Research Fellowship and the Social Science Research Council, and a
Michigan State University All-University Research Grant. I am grateful for the (non-financial)
support and encouragement I received for this work from the Departments of History at the
University of Durban-Westville, the National University of Lesotho, the University of Swaziland,
and the Universidade Eduardo Mondlane during the tenure of my research grants, December
1993-November 1994. I am especially grateful to the staff at the Killie Campbell Library where
most of the research for this article was conducted.
2.  In English historical renditions, the term impi has been used to refer to regiments, units, or to the
military campaigns on which they were sent.
3.  Christopher Saunders, "Pre-Cobbing Mfecane Historiography," in Carolyn Hamilton, ed.,
The Mfecane Aftermath: Reconstructive Debates in Southern African History (Johannesburg:
Witerwatersrand University Press and University of Natal Press, 1995), 25. Saunders quotes
historian G. M. Theal's original estimate of people killed at "nearer two millions than one;"
historian E.A. Walker did not question this estimate, noting that Theal had provided no evidence
to support this estimate, until the third edition of his History of South Africa.
4.  Saunders, "Pre-Cobbing Mfecane Historiography."
5.  Elizabeth A. Eldredge, "Sources of Conflict in Southern Africa c.1800-1830: The 'Mfecane'
Reconsidered," Journal of African History, 33 (1992), 1-35, reprinted in Hamilton, ed., The
Mfecane Aftermath, 122-61; Elizabeth A. Eldredge, "Delagoa Bay and the Hinterland in the Early
Nineteenth Century: Politics, Trade, Slaves, and Slave Raiding," in Elizabeth A. Eldredge and Fred
Morton, eds., Slavery in South Africa: Captive Labor on the Dutch Frontier (Boulder: Westview
Press and Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1994), 127-65.
6. Eldredge, "Sources of Conflict"; Elizabeth A. Eldredge, "Slave Raiding Across the Cape Frontier,"
in Eldredge and Morton, eds., Slavery in South Africa, 93-126.
7.  Eldredge, "Sources of Conflict," 25-34; Elizabeth A. Eldredge, "Drought, Famine, and Disease
in Nineteenth-Century Lesotho," African Economic History 16 (1987), 61-93.

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