Shaka Zulu

Shaka Zulu will appear in an upcoming episode of Epic Rap Battles of History. It is highly speculated that he will face off against Roman military leader and dictator, Julius Caesar.

Information on the rapper
Shaka kaSenzangakhona (c. 1787 – c. 24 September 1828), also known as Shaka Zulu, was one of the most influential monarchs of the Zulu Kingdom.

Shaka was the son of Senzangakona, chieftain of the Zulu, and Nandi, an orphaned princess of the neighbouring Langeni clan. Because his parents belonged to the same clan, their marriage violated Zulu custom, and the stigma of this extended to the child. The couple separated when Shaka was six, and Nandi took her son back to the Langeni, where he passed a fatherless boyhood among a people who despised his mother. In 1802, the Langeni drove Nandi out, and she finally found shelter with the Dletsheni, a subclan of the powerful Mthethwa. When Shaka was 23, Dingiswayo, the Mthethwa paramount chieftain, called up Shaka’s Dletsheni age group for military service. For the next six years, he served with brilliance as a warrior of the Mthethwa Empire.

Senzangakona died in 1816, and Dingiswayo released Shaka from service and sent him to take over the Zulu. His first act was to reorganize the army. Like all the clans, the Zulu were armed with oxhide shields and spindly throwing spears. He developed standard tactics, which the Zulu used in every battle.

Shaka fought for extermination, incorporating the remnants of the clans he smashed into the Zulu. He first decimated the small clans in his vicinity, starting with the Langeni; he sought out the men who had made his boyhood a misery and impaled them on the sharpened stakes of their own kraal fences. In less than a year, the Zulu and their army had quadrupled in numbers. In 1817,  Shaka's overlord, Dingiswayo, was murdered, and the last restraint on Zulu expansion was removed.

In 1827, Nandi died, and with his mother’s death, Shaka became openly psychotic. About 7,000 Zulus were killed in the initial paroxysm of his grief, and for a year no crops were planted, nor could milk, the basis of the Zulu diet staple, be used. All women found pregnant were slain with their husbands, as were thousands of milch cows, so that even the calves might know what it was like to lose a mother. Dingane and Mhlangana, together with an induna named Mbopa, murdered him in September of 1828.

Trivia

 * He is the third character to be leaked for Season 4.5, after Bill S. Preston and Ted Logan.