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We kick off this episode with Henry Francis Fynn, the trader who\u2019d made his home in Port Natal and was part of a group of Englishmen who\u2019d fought with Shaka against Sikhunyane of the Ndwande.
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\nBy 1826 Fynn had been living basically as a Zulu at Mpendwini, near the Mbokodwe stream which is close to Isipingo south of Durban.
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\nLast week I explained how Shaka had donated three herds of cattle to Fynn so he could set up his important Umuzi. One of the herds was payment for helping defeat the Ndwandwe. Fynn by now was given a Zulu name, Mbuyazi \u2013 which means long-tailed finch, a bird, of the bay. One of his praise songs was all about the Finch, a fiscal shrike, which is particularly vicious in how it hunts \u2013 by impaling insects on thorns.
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\nFynn was Shaka\u2019s favourite mercenary, a killer, and one of the few that Shaka allowed to kill people without his direct permission. Later Fynn\u2019s descendents would become known as iziNkumbi, the locusts.
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\nBy 1826 Fynn had four, possibly five, Zulu wives. We don\u2019t know their names because these were never passed down in the usual Zulu oral tradition, not even his great wife. But we know quite about about his children.
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\nA son called Mpahlwa was born while Fynn was off fighting the NDwandwe, so he was conceived around December 1825. That was a few months after Fynn\u2019s umuzi had been setup.
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\nHe adopted the Zulu custom of living, and would send for one of his wives every night, who would come to his hut at nightfall. Only poor men would creep around at dusk to visit their wives. Fynn had thrown off all pretenses of living like a European \u2013 unlike some of the other traders such as Maclean the youngster, or Farewell.
\nSo by 1826, Shaka was watching these traders with their guns and ships carefully. In the same year, the Zulu king decided to move his entire main umuzi closer to Port Natal \u2013 building his new residency on the site of an Umuzi long abandoned by the Cele chieftan Dibhandlela.
\nWe\u2019ll come back to what happened there next episode, right now lets swing to the north west deeper\u2013 because our old friend \u2013 who was actually still quite young by the name of, Mzilikazi of the Khumalo had been a very very busy young man.
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\nThe remnants of Sikhuyane\u2019s Ndwandwe, shattered by Shaka, joined up with him in the area around the upper reaches of the Vaal River by the end of 1826. The erosion of power of the Buhurutshe people was taking place, the Mzilikazi was also incorporating refugees from the Tswana and Sotho chiefdoms as the area to the south and West of the Vaal became more unstable.
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\nThe Pedi had also been defeated earlier by Zwide\u2019s Ndwandwe and now Mzilikazi was busy taking advantage of their defeat to raid their old stomping ground. The Khumalo people had become an agglomeration of their original clan from Zululand and the Tswana called them the Matabele \u2013 Nguni speakers called them the amaNdebele.
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\namaNdebele means the Marauders. They were indeed, amaNdebele.