Word: shaka
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...their standard of living surpasses that of their cousins in Egypt, Syria or Lebanon. Yet even West Bankers who remember that they were also second-class citizens under Jordanian rule between 1948 and 1967 remain bitterly opposed to their Israeli overlords. Says the Arab mayor of Nablus, Bassam Shaka'a: "If I could communicate with the world, I would shout 'We want our freedom! We want to feel like human beings! We want to live like other people...
...clan grew, proudly calling themselves, after one of their chieftains, amaZulu-"People of the heavens." At that time, African tribal warfare was mostly a matter of threats and feints, and the major weapon was an unwieldy 6-ft. spear, thrown wildly through the air. The 19th century Zulu King Shaka adapted this long spear into a broad sword, the stabbing assegai...
...Shaka also developed a battle tactic based on the shape of a buffalo's head. Stamping their feet, beating on their shields with their assegais and roaring the war cry usutu!, the warrior impis, arrayed like the right and left horns of the buffalo, would begin encircling the foe. Then the main unit-the head-would sweep forward so that the Zulus could use their assegais in close combat. During the twelve years before he was assassinated by his brother in 1828, Shaka built a Zulu empire that extended over hundreds of thousands of square miles and contained some...
...Shaka's successors could not hang onto it. First the Boers, then the British, gained control of Zulu territories. In 1879, after numerous disputes, the British army invaded Zululand. The Zulus fought back ferociously, and at the Battle of Isandhlwana some 10,000 Zulus wiped out 1,300 British and native soldiers in hand-to-hand fighting. The British, however, had the Gatling gun. They sacked the Zulu capital of Ulundi and divided the fallen empire into 13 quarreling kingdoms...
Their poetry often flares with a sense of lost grandeur, as in Oswald Mtshali's lines about King Shaka: "Lo. You can kill me/ But you will never rule this land." That proud defiance is perhaps best epitomized today by Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, chief minister of the KwaZulu territorial government. Buthelezi, 49, is relentless in his condemnation of white supremacy. He has insisted that his government will not take an oath of allegiance to the South African government. In that resistance, he believes, the tribe is fighting the last Zulu...