The Zulu Kingdom was the southern African state that rose in the early nineteenth century and became, for several decades, the most formidable military power in the region. Beginning as one small Nguni-speaking chiefdom, it was forged into a centralized, regiment-based war state, organized around age-grade regiments (amabutho) that gave the king something close to a standing military apparatus. It suffered a major defeat by Afrikaner trekkers at Blood River in 1838 but remained the dominant regional power. It inflicted a stunning defeat on a British army at Isandlwana in 1879, before Britain regrouped and conquered it, breaking up and absorbing Zululand by the century's end.
On a January morning in 1879, a British column of more than a thousand men was camped beneath a sphinx-shaped crag called Isandlwana, confident in the firepower and discipline of a modern imperial army. By the afternoon most of them were dead. A Zulu army had crossed open ground in a great curving formation, overwhelmed the camp, and destroyed one of the most powerful empires on earth's columns in a single day. It was one of the worst defeats a British force ever suffered at the hands of a people armed mainly with spears and shields. The empire would come back, in force, and within months the Zulu Kingdom would be conquered. But Isandlwana announced something that the century would spend decades trying to explain: a state built for war, assembled in barely two generations, strong enough to shatter the army of the world's leading industrial power.