The Zulu, although initially successful at repelling the Europeans, were, like the Ndebele, eventually overpowered by them in clashes such as the Battle of Blood (Ncome) River in 1838. Boer attacks on the Zulu between 1838 and 1839 precipitated a Zulu civil war between Dingane and Mpande. The latter allied himself with the Boer invaders and so split the kingdom. Between 1839 and 1840 the Boers seized large parts of the Zulu kingdom, including the area between the Tugela and the Swart-Mfolozi. When the British in turn evicted the Boers and annexed Natal in 1843, the southern region to the Tugela was restored to the Zulu. Mpande (reigned 1840–72), a formidable ruler, controlled territory between the Tugela in the south and, roughly, the Pongolo in the north, boundaries that were not seriously disturbed until 1879.

In 1856 the primary conflict in the Zulu civil war (the Battle of Ndondakasuka on the lower Tugela River, close to the sea) elevated Mpande’s younger son, Cetshwayo, over Mpande’s older son, Mbuyazi. Although Cetshwayo formally became ruler of Zululand only upon his father’s death in 1872, he had in fact effectively ruled the kingdom since the early 1860s.

By the late 1870s, colonial officials had identified the Zulu kingdom as a major obstacle to confederation, and in January 1879 British and colonial troops invaded Zululand (see Anglo-Zulu War). During his rule Mpande had expanded Zulu military capacity, and Cetshwayo used this effectively against the British invaders at Isandhlwana in 1879. The annihilation of a large British force at Isandhlwana slowed the invasion, but imperial firepower ultimately prevailed (see Battles of Isandhlwana and Rorke’s Drift). For the Zulu, political dismemberment followed military defeat. British divide-and-rule policies precipitated another civil war in 1883, and Zululand was annexed in 1887.

The decline of the African states

As the 1860s came to an end, the great African states began to weaken. Not only did many important African leaders die during this period (Soshangane in 1858, Sekwati of the Pedi in 1861, Mswati in 1865, Mzilikazi in 1868, Moshoeshoe in 1870, and Mpande in 1872), but, increasingly, Europeans were determined to exploit Africans as a source of labor and to acquire the last large fertile areas controlled by them.

Colonial troops tipped the balance decisively against societies that had previously withstood attempts to bring them under the settlers’ control. A century of military conflict on the Cape frontier ended with the Cape-Xhosa war of 1877–78 (see Cape Frontier Wars). Between 1878 and 1881 the Cape Colony defeated rebellions in Griqualand West, the Transkei, and Basutoland. Sir Bartle Frere, governor of the Cape and high commissioner for southern Africa from March 1877, rapidly decided that independent African kingdoms had to be tamed in order to facilitate political and economic integration of the region.

Governor George Grey had already proposed a federated South Africa in 1858, and in the late 1860s the discovery of gold and diamonds reactivated this idea. The annexation of Basutoland in 1868 began a series of movements toward consolidation that included the British seizure of the diamond fields from the competing Griqua, Tlhaping, and Boers in 1871 (the Keate Award), Colonial Secretary Lord Carnarvon’s more determined federation plan of 1875, Shepstone’s invasion of the Transvaal in 1877, and the British invasions of Zululand and Pediland in 1879. British troops also took part in an 1879 campaign that crushed Pedi military power in the northern Transvaal. With the collapse of Zulu resistance in the 1880s, the invasions of the Gaza and Ndebele kingdoms in 1893–96, and the crushing of Venda resistance in 1898, by 1900 no autonomous African societies remained in the region.