Zulu Kingdom

The Zulu Kingdom, sometimes called the Zulu Empire, was a monarchy in Southern Africa. In the 1810s Shaka built a standing army that consolidated rival clans and gathered a large following, ruling a wide area along the Indian Ocean coast from the Tugela River in the south to the Pongola River in the north, centred on present KwaZulu-Natal. A civil war in the mid-19th century reached its climax in the 1856 Battle of Ndondakusuka between the brothers Cetshwayo and Mbuyazi. In 1879 a British force invaded Zululand and began the Anglo-Zulu War, winning at Ulundi in July, and the kingdom passed to Natal in 1897.