"Here you are about to publish. Do make Shaka out to be as bloodthirsty as you can; it helps swell out the work and make it interesting." — Nathaniel Isaacs, in a letter to the adventurer Henry Francis Fynn
"A leader utilizing customary practices — including death sentences — to achieve a consolidation of power and control, rather than a tyrant pathologically addicted to cruelty for its own sake." — Dan Wylie's assessment
For most people outside South Africa, Shaka (c. 1787-1828) is first encountered as the hyper-aggressive warmonger of the Civilization games ("Aggressive/Expansive" are his Civ4 traits), the African tyrant who killed a million people and executed subjects for sneezing. To a partial degree, this figure is a fabrication. The two foundational European sources, the traders Nathaniel Isaacs and Henry Francis Fynn, were adventurers with land claims and book sales at stake. Isaacs wrote to Fynn, urging him to make Shaka "as bloodthirsty as you can" because it would make the book interesting, and advance the British annexation that would mean "a fortune for you as well as myself." Fynn complied — his claim to a vast land grant rested on the premise that Shaka's savagery had depopulated it, so he conjured the figure of "a million people" killed. Even the Zulu own oral tradition is partially contaminated, since Shaka's assassin and successor Dingane ran a propaganda campaign attributing his own misdeeds to his predecessor. Dan Wylie, the historiography's most rigorous skeptic, concludes that a long trustworthy biography of Shaka simply cannot be written, and that perhaps two anecdotes in three cannot be verified at all. The famous stories — the executions for insufficient grief, the details of every royal caprice, even the outcast bullied childhood that was invented to psychologize the monster — are not necessarily true, even though I would be vary of proclaiming them false, either — history tells us that plenty of rulers do quite weird things, after all.
Donald Morris's classic survey, weighing every source against the others, still credits Shaka with the substance of the legend's core: he rose through his patron Dingiswayo's army on personal battlefield prowess, a warrior of demonstrated individual supremacy in combat before he ever held power. Made chief of the small Zulu clan, he then made several reforms, introducing, most signifigantly of all, amabutho — the age-regiment system that took the young men of every absorbed chiefdom out of their kin structures and rebuilt them into standing formations bound to the king, down to central regulation of when each regiment might marry. Over a hundred chiefdoms were hammered into a single kingdom, with the conquered not exterminated but incorporated, their youth drafted into the machine, until "Zulu" — the name of one fairly low-prestige clan — had been manufactured into a nation. And the structure held: the kingdom survived Shaka's assassination and later military defeat by the British Empire.
The SLE diagnosis is fairly clean. The base is the direct domination of the concrete field of force — his career begins in personal combat supremacy and never leaves the register of physical power: speed, shock, the conquest of everything within reach. The creative function is visible in what made him more than a banal raider: the organization of force into a machine. Short spears, formations, regiments – each one transforms brute strength into order. Shaka's machine was impersonal in a Ti manner: it absorbed the conquered wholesale, and ran on discipline and hierarchy.
Even the violence, read soberly, confirms the type rather than the legend. Wylie's revision does not deny that Shaka was a cruel man who killed — death sentences at the royal court were real and customary — but finds a ruler using recognized instruments "to achieve a consolidation of power and control." Fynn himself on surprising occasion recorded a man "intelligent and often amiable," capable of real generosity. Still, you can't say that Shaka's violent end was uncharacteristic of the type that notably combines high aggression with a low self-preservation instinct. No matter how "explainable" Shaka's conduct was, he had made enough enemies among his own people to hasten his demise.
Shaka carefully avoided any collision with the Cape Colony, while observing European technology and concluding, with a conqueror's self-assurance, that the Zulu way remained superior. According to Wikipedia, he was somewhat impressed with rifles as ranged weapons, yet claimed that riflemen won't have enough time to shoot effectively until spearmen catch up with them, and he thought that writing is not that useful, because his messengers receive the death penalty for not reporting messages accurately, anyway. Such somewhat interested, but ultimately dismissive reaction to innovations fits "role" Ne.
Strip away every story Isaacs sold, and remaining materials still describe a ruthless warrior who organized force into a system and used it to dominate everything he could reach. The colonial sources demonized him, the nationalist tradition idolized him, and the games made him a morality tale about aggression. In any case, one can hardly object to the traditional Zulu epithet for him, "the axe that surpasses other axes in sharpness."
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