King Mzilikazi kaMashobane

The story of King Mzilikazi kaMashobane is a narrative that has been almost forgotten after it was first written and told almost exclusively by white missionaries, travellers, traders and slavers and was thus greatly slanted. Fortunately, on the other hand the story has been kept current and residual in the minds and lives of people through izibongo, oral history and izithakazelo. As such the book juxtaposes the two sides through desktop research where various authors’ inputs are blended with first hand research inputs from traditional houses and descendants of various protagonists.
One element about the book which distinguishes it from other books of history on big men, is that it does not only assume the standard plot of following the hero from cradle to grave. The book takes a birds’ eye view of how various pressures in different parts of the world ended up impacting developments on the home front. This leading up to the arrival of various European groupings that led to formation of defensive states firstly by Khoi kings and then later that of Moshoeshoe, Manthatisi, Zwide, Shaka etc. and later the roving kingdom of King Mzilikazi kaMashobane. The story is also very different to many other contemporaries of Mzilikazi in that the movements of the king traverses’ various parts of Southern Africa, from Mozambique, Eswatini, Lesotho, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia and finally Zimbabwe (anecdotes across these areas attest to all this).