Gungunhana
Based on Wikipedia: Gungunhana
The Lion Who Wouldn't Kneel
On December 28, 1895, Portuguese soldiers surrounded a fortified village called Chaimite in the heart of what is now Mozambique. Inside was a man they called the Lion of Gaza—a king who had unified dozens of peoples under his rule, who had watched European powers carve up his continent from conference rooms thousands of miles away, and who now faced the end of an empire his grandfather had walked twenty years to build.
His name was Ngungunyane. The Portuguese called him Gungunhana. And unlike most African rulers who resisted European colonization in the nineteenth century, he would not be executed. He was simply too famous to shoot.
Born into the Great Scattering
To understand Ngungunyane, you have to understand what the Zulu call the Mfecane—a term that translates roughly as "The Great Scattering" or "The Crushing." Beginning around 1815, a series of violent upheavals radiated outward from Zululand in what is now South Africa, sending waves of displaced peoples and conquering armies across the southern half of the continent. It was one of the most significant forced migrations in African history.
One of those armies was led by a man named Soshangane.
Soshangane was a leader of the Nguni people—a linguistic and cultural group related to the Zulu and Swazi. When the great disruption began, he gathered his followers and marched north. Not for a year or two. For nearly twenty years.
Along the way, through the 1820s and 1830s, Soshangane did what successful conquerors do. He persuaded the chiefs of roughly two hundred tribes to become his vassals. Those who wouldn't submit were displaced, absorbed, or killed. By the time his army reached the land between the Maputo and Zambezi rivers—in the territory that would eventually become Mozambique—Soshangane had built something that didn't exist when he started his journey: an empire.
He named it Gaza, after his grandfather.
The empire covered about 56,000 square kilometers at its founding—roughly the size of Croatia. More importantly, it sat squarely in territory that Portugal had claimed as its own for centuries, based on a scattering of coastal trading posts established during the age of exploration.
The Portuguese had been the first Europeans to establish a permanent presence on the East African coast. They had been there since the early 1500s. But "presence" is a generous word for what amounted to a few fortified trading stations clinging to the shoreline. The interior remained someone else's country.
Now that someone was Soshangane.
A Childhood in an Empire at War
Ngungunyane was born around 1850 into this world that his grandfather had created through force of arms and relentless forward movement. His birth name was Mdungazwe, which in Zulu means something like "one who confuses the people"—an oddly prophetic name for a man who would spend his life navigating between African rivals and European colonizers.
His father was Mzila, one of Soshangane's sons. His mother was named Yosio, though after her death she would be remembered by the honorific Umpibekezana. The boy grew up somewhere in the Gaza heartland, probably along the banks of the Limpopo River, where the main Nguni settlements stood.
It was not a peaceful childhood.
When Soshangane died in 1858, the succession did not go smoothly. Two of his sons—Mzila and Mawewe—fought for the throne. Mawewe won the initial struggle and immediately set about trying to eliminate his brothers and their families. This was standard practice in many African kingdoms: when you took power, you removed anyone with a competing claim. The easiest way to prevent a civil war later was to ensure there was no one left to start one.
Young Mdungazwe was about eight years old.
His father Mzila escaped to the Transvaal—the Boer republic that lay to the south—and began organizing a counterrevolution. Mdungazwe almost certainly went with him. The alternative was death.
The Enemy of My Enemy
What happened next illustrates a pattern that would repeat itself throughout the European colonization of Africa: local conflicts created opportunities for outside powers to extend their influence.
The Portuguese colonial administration had dealt with Soshangane and knew what to expect from his successor. Mawewe proved to be just as aggressive as his father. But Mawewe made a crucial miscalculation. He demanded that the Portuguese colony at Lourenço Marques—the city now called Maputo—pay tribute to him. The tribute would take the form of footwear, with a special provision: pregnant Portuguese women would pay double.
This was accompanied by a threat. If the Portuguese didn't comply, Mawewe would pursue a scorched-earth policy against their interests.
The governor of Lourenço Marques responded by sending Mawewe a rifle cartridge. This, he said, would be the form of his tribute.
War was now inevitable. And Mzila—the exiled brother who wanted his throne back—suddenly found himself with powerful friends.
The Portuguese, the Boers, and numerous local chiefs who preferred distant colonial overlords to nearby Nguni domination formed an alliance to support Mzila's claim. On November 2, 1861, Mzila arrived in Lourenço Marques to formalize the arrangement. Portugal would supply him with weapons and ammunition. He would pledge allegiance to the Portuguese crown.
The decisive battle came later that month, stretching along a front of nearly twenty kilometers from the beaches of Matola to the inland territory of Moamba. Despite having fewer men, Mzila won. On November 30, he presented himself at the colonial prison in Lourenço Marques—not as a captive, but as an ally come to receive congratulations from the governor.
A treaty was signed on December 1, 1861. In it, Mzila acknowledged himself as a Portuguese subject.
The irony is hard to miss. Mzila's father Soshangane had refused any treaty with Portugal. Now the son was signing away his sovereignty to secure the weapons he needed to win a family feud. Portugal supplied two thousand rifles, fifty thousand rounds of ammunition, and twelve hundred flints. In exchange, they acquired—at least on paper—a vast empire in the African interior that they could never have conquered on their own.
Learning to Rule
The civil war continued until 1864, but Mzila's position grew steadily stronger. He moved the capital from the Limpopo valley to Mossurize, north of the Save River in what is now Manica province. The old capital of Chaimite became a sacred site—a place of pilgrimage and ancestor worship, where the spirits of past rulers dwelt.
Young Mdungazwe, no longer a refugee, was now a prince with a claim to the throne.
He was educated as a warrior. From an early age, he participated in the long marches that his father and grandfather had used to maintain control over their far-flung domains. These weren't military campaigns—or not primarily. They were tours of inspection, reminders to distant vassals that the king's eye could reach anywhere in his territory.
Mzila ruled with what one might politely call firmness. He kept up the old Nguni traditions, maintained a powerful army, and refused to let his nominal status as a Portuguese subject interfere with his actual independence. His warriors raided the Portuguese colonies at Sofala and Inhambane multiple times, creating what diplomats call "a climate of tension."
Meanwhile, the world was changing around Gaza.
The Conference Where Africa Was Divided
By the early 1880s, Mzila was in the final years of his reign, though he didn't know it. European interest in Africa had intensified dramatically. Expeditions of exploration pushed deeper into the continent's interior. Missionaries and traders appeared in Gaza with increasing frequency. And in the capitals of Europe, statesmen were becoming obsessed with the idea of colonial empires.
Portugal had developed what became known as the "Pink Map"—a proposal to connect its colonies of Mozambique on the Indian Ocean and Angola on the Atlantic with a continuous band of Portuguese territory across southern Africa. On European maps of the era, Portuguese possessions were traditionally colored pink, hence the name.
But Portugal was a small country with limited resources. Other European powers—Britain, France, Germany, Belgium—had their own ambitions. The competition was becoming chaotic, with rival expeditions racing to plant flags and sign treaties with local rulers who often had little understanding of what they were agreeing to.
In late 1884, the major European powers gathered in Berlin to sort out the mess. The Berlin Conference—sometimes called the Congo Conference—would establish the ground rules for the "Scramble for Africa." One key principle emerged: a European power could only claim territory if it could demonstrate "effective occupation." Simply drawing lines on a map wasn't enough. You had to actually control the land.
King Mzila died in late August 1884, just as the conference was getting underway. He never knew that men in frock coats, thousands of kilometers away, were deciding the fate of his empire.
A Prince Seizes Power
Mzila had four sons: Mafemani, Hanyani, Mdungazwe, and Mafabazi. According to Nguni custom, the heir should have been Mafemani, whose mother was the principal wife. Mdungazwe's mother was of lower status.
But Mdungazwe had not spent his childhood fleeing civil war and his youth learning the arts of kingship only to step aside for a technicality of royal marriage rankings.
He went to war against his half-brother. He won. Mafemani died.
The other two brothers—Hanyani and Mafabazi—understood the situation clearly. They fled into exile, following a tradition that was apparently well-established among the Nguni: when you lose a succession struggle, you run.
In 1884, Mdungazwe was sworn in as the new ruler of Gaza. He took a new name: Ngungunyane, son of Mzila, of the house of Nxumalo.
He gave himself a title too. The Lion of Gaza.
A Kingdom Under Pressure
The empire that Ngungunyane inherited was impressive but increasingly precarious. He controlled a vast territory and commanded the loyalty of numerous tributary peoples. He was, by any measure, one of the most powerful rulers in southeastern Africa.
But the world had changed since his grandfather's day.
The Berlin Conference had set the European powers in motion. Britain had humiliated Portugal by rejecting the Pink Map and demanding that Lisbon demonstrate effective occupation of its claimed territories. This meant that the informal arrangement—where Portugal had treaties on paper while African kings actually ruled—was no longer acceptable to anyone.
The Portuguese needed to actually conquer their empire. And that meant conquering Ngungunyane.
The process was gradual. Military expeditions pushed inland. Administrators arrived with treaties and demands. The kingdom that had once raided Portuguese settlements with impunity found itself being encircled.
Ngungunyane tried to play the European powers against each other. He sought alliances with Britain, hoping to find a counterweight to Portuguese pressure. But the British weren't interested in acquiring another African territory—they already had plenty—and they certainly weren't going to clash with a fellow European power over the internal affairs of Portugal's nominal colony.
The Fall of Chaimite
On December 28, 1895, a Portuguese cavalry officer named Joaquim Mouzinho de Albuquerque led a force to the fortified village of Chaimite—the same village that Ngungunyane's grandfather had founded as his capital more than half a century earlier. The village had taken on sacred significance as the dwelling place of ancestral spirits. It was the heart of Gaza.
Ngungunyane was captured.
Under normal circumstances, the Portuguese would have executed him. This was the standard procedure for African rulers who resisted colonial authority. A firing squad, a quick death, and a powerful message to anyone else who might consider resistance.
But Ngungunyane was different. He was famous.
The European press had been following events in Gaza for years. The Lion of Gaza had become something of an international figure—not a celebrity in the modern sense, but a known quantity, a name that readers recognized. Executing him would have created an outcry that the Portuguese colonial administration didn't want to deal with.
So they chose exile instead.
The Long Journey to Nowhere
Ngungunyane was transported to Lisbon, accompanied by his son Godide and various other dignitaries from his court. After a brief stay at the Fort of Monsanto, he was transferred to the island of Terceira in the Azores—a Portuguese archipelago in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, about as far from Gaza as the Portuguese could reasonably send him while keeping him on Portuguese territory.
He would never see Africa again.
For eleven years, the Lion of Gaza lived on a small island in the Atlantic. We don't know much about those years. The sources are sparse. He was a king without a kingdom, a ruler without subjects, a warrior without a war to fight.
He died on December 23, 1906. He was approximately fifty-six years old.
The Kingdom That Wouldn't Die
But the story doesn't end with Ngungunyane's death in exile.
When the Portuguese captured the king at Chaimite, they didn't capture all of his family. One of his half-brothers—Mpisane, son of the Mafemani that Ngungunyane had killed to seize power—escaped to the Transvaal with several of Ngungunyane's children. Among them was a boy named Thulamahashe Msinganyela Nxumalo, one of the king's surviving sons.
They settled in a place that would eventually be called Bushbuckridge, in what is now the Mpumalanga province of South Africa. They established a community. They maintained their identity as the royal house of Gaza.
And they kept the succession going.
Through the early twentieth century, through South African apartheid, and into the democratic era, descendants of the Nxumalo royal house continued to maintain their claims. The place where they settled—Thulamahashe—is named after that boy who escaped the Portuguese with his uncle. It serves today as the seat of what calls itself the Amashangana Tribal Authority.
Not everyone accepts these claims. The Nhlapo Commission, which investigated traditional leadership claims in South Africa, rejected Eric Nxumalo's application for official recognition in 2012. Leaders of the Tsonga people have disputed assertions that the Gaza kingdom ever had authority over their ancestors, arguing that the Tsonga established themselves in the Transvaal precisely to escape Nguni domination and never had any relationship with the Gaza Empire.
These disputes continue. King Eric Nxumalo—who claimed descent from Mafemani through Mpisane—died in March 2021 after forty years as the head of his royal house. As of the most recent reports, the royal family was still deliberating on his successor.
What the Lion Means Now
Ngungunyane occupies a complicated place in the history of southern Africa. To Mozambican nationalists, he became a symbol of resistance to Portuguese colonialism—the last great African ruler to stand against European conquest. His capture at Chaimite was reimagined as a moment of national tragedy, the beginning of six decades of colonial rule that would only end with independence in 1975.
But the history is messier than the mythology.
The Gaza Empire was itself a product of conquest. Soshangane and his Nguni warriors had displaced, subjugated, or slaughtered the peoples who lived in the territory before they arrived. The Tsonga, the Chopi, the Tonga, and numerous other groups had been vassals of Gaza—and not always willing ones. For them, the fall of Ngungunyane meant liberation from one form of domination, even as it inaugurated another.
The Portuguese celebrated Mouzinho de Albuquerque as a hero. He became one of the iconic figures of Portuguese imperial history, the cavalry officer who had captured the terrible Lion of Gaza. Streets and squares were named after him. His remains were eventually repatriated to Portugal with great ceremony.
After Mozambique's independence, the story was rewritten again. Mouzinho became a villain, Ngungunyane a hero. The remains of both men were subjects of controversy. In 1985, Ngungunyane's bones were repatriated from the Azores to Mozambique, where they were reburied with honors as those of a national hero.
History is written by the winners. But sometimes the losers get a second act.
The Lesson of the Pink Map
There's a broader lesson in the story of Ngungunyane and the Gaza Empire. It's a lesson about how European colonialism actually worked—and how it didn't.
Portugal claimed Mozambique as a colony for centuries before the Scramble for Africa. Those claims meant almost nothing on the ground. The Portuguese controlled their coastal trading posts and very little else. The interior belonged to African rulers who treated Portuguese pretensions with the contempt they deserved.
Even the treaties that the Portuguese signed with Mzila and others were largely fictional. Mzila's warriors raided Portuguese settlements despite his nominal status as a Portuguese subject. The treaties were pieces of paper that allowed both sides to pretend a relationship existed that served their immediate purposes—weapons for Mzila, claims to territory for Portugal.
What changed everything was the Berlin Conference and the doctrine of effective occupation. Suddenly, paper claims weren't enough. You had to actually control the territory. This meant sending armies, building infrastructure, installing administrators, and—when necessary—capturing or killing the rulers who stood in the way.
Ngungunyane was one of those rulers. He had the misfortune to be in power precisely when the rules changed.
A generation earlier, he might have spent his reign playing the same games his father did—signing treaties he never intended to honor, accepting Portuguese flags while raiding Portuguese settlements, maintaining an independence that his nominal colonial overlords were too weak to challenge.
A generation later, he would never have had a kingdom at all. The Gaza Empire would have been dismembered before it could be born, its potential founders confined to reserves and labor pools.
Instead, Ngungunyane was the man standing when the music stopped. The last Lion of Gaza, exiled to a small island in the middle of the ocean, where he could roar at the waves until he died.