Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
In contradistinction, when Africans became pastoralists, this is when open conflict started
arising. Hunting became less important as the game population was eliminated and provided
insufficient amounts of meat for the growing population. As the population became more static,
living off dairy products and growing carbohydrate crops for energy rather than gathering also
became more important, and there was a grazing and planting territory that also had to be
protected. Fights started occurring over who the lobola cattle should be given to and cattle
raiding became a popular pastime as any reading of Zulu history will show (my favorite topic
on the period is “The Washing of the Spears” by Donald R. Morris, who was a reporter for the
Houston Post but never visited South Africa for the topic). As this became a larger problem,
the clans had to be consolidated in larger tribes, governed by fierce warrior chiefs, both to
protect territories and to obtain more cattle, and this required greater numbers of warriors.
This is what Shaka Zulu faced in the 1820s and he responded by consolidating power. It also
required the developing of laws of behavior, although for the Shaka he was the absolute law
over life and death. For Shaka, all the territory was his and he then doled out parcels for his
trusted indunas (chiefs) to have control over. This meant they would give permission to their
local sub-chiefs and peasants to control a piece of land to setup a kraal, an “isibaya”, some
land to farm millet, and later maize corn (probably brought over by the Portuguese from
America, via Mozambique, and then down to Zululand by ivory traders). If the peasants did not
have cattle they could get permission to look after cattle from the royal herd and in turn milk
the cows. The point is the Shaka owned and controlled the land together with his council of
indunas. If iron ore was mined for metal tools, spears, knives, and implements (particularly
hoes and axes), the mine was controlled by permission from Shaka. After serving faithfully in
the army (impi), young men were allowed to marry and settle down under their chiefs who had
often been their commanders. Thus, Shaka's decrees and rules determined behavior and land
use in the population as it transitioned from a hunter-gatherer society to a nomadic pastoral
society, and ultimately to a territorial pastoral and more agrarian society. If his orders were
not followed and obeyed, death was most gruesome, typically by being hoisted into the air
with a spiked pole through the rectum, as an example to others.
As a digression, for Moses when he arrived at the Jordan river after conquering the local
tribes, establishing the new laws meant conveying the ten commandments to what had changed
from a hunter-gatherer society (Abel, Esau, Nimrod, “a mighty hunter before God” of the
animals his grandfather Noah saved but also “who was the first to be a warrior on earth” and
ruler over the city of Babel / Babylon, 50 miles south of Baghdad, with the foundations of both
Nebuchadnezzar's palace and Tower of Babel and also the cuneiform Babylonian Chronicles,
the Cyrus Cylinder, and British Museum tablets confirming Pentateuch and Torah manuscripts.
The Septuagint, translated in Alexandria by seventy Jewish translators into Greek is among the
oldest, dating to the second century BC; Mosul in Iraq was his city of Nineveh enclosed by 9
miles of walls where the Epic of Gilgamesh was found also relating the story of the Flood) to
then largely a pastoralist society. The laws included both proscription on taking without
permission neighboring dwellings, oxen, and donkeys but also prescription of protection of
neighboring property and animals. Later with more agrarian practice, there were the laws of
letting the land lie fallow, not cutting the edges of fields, leaving fallen grain on the fields, and
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