Mfecane: The Scattering That Built NationsSouthern Africa · 1818–1828“Ask ten peoples of the south where they came from, and seven will begin this story in the same decade.”The elders count the causes on one hand: a famine remembered as the time of eating what was forbidden, new trade and new guns moving inland from Delagoa Bay, and young kingdoms learning to fight in massed regiments. In the middle of it stood the Zulu state of Shaka, rising fast, pressing its neighbours outward into one another.The lesson the elders kept: A catastrophe is also a forge. The same upheaval that scattered peoples built Lesotho and Eswatini, and the myth of empty land it left behind served the next conquest.