Territorial governance and political centralisation in the nineteenth-century Zulu Kingdom

This study examines how the Zulu Kingdom, under various monarchs, constructed territorial power and a geographical order within southeast Africa in the nineteenth century. It moves beyond typical military and historical interpretations of the Zulu by investigating territorial politics and territorial organisation’s effects on the monarch’s ability to integrate a previously autonomous range of chiefdoms into a network of macro- and micro-scale territorial rule. The use of oral history, archival materials and existing literature on the matter allows the author to analyse aspects, such as the impact of the amabutho institution (military and labour groups), the formation of royal homesteads called izigodlo (administrative centres and fortresses) and the transformation of powers of amakhosi (hereditary chiefs). It becomes clear from the analysis that although King Shaka developed an effective system of centralised governance, mostly over land, labour and movement, Zululand was a highly complicated territory characterised by territorialisation within the context of a segmental lineage society together with peripheral incorporation. It demonstrates how precolonial institutions produced distinctive forms of territorial governance, networked sovereignty and spatially differentiated authority.