‘I Shall Need to Use Her to Rule’: The Power of ‘Royal’ Zulu Women in Pre-Colonial Zululand

Abstract

There is a dearth of historical work relating specifically to the role that ‘royal’ women played in the Zulu state.1 This article argues that rather than being peripheral and subordinate in politics, certain amakhosikazi and amakhosazana or ‘royal’ women were key political figures in the Zulu state. Clearly, the women held specific powers and Zulu rule did not centre solely on the male consolidators and administrators, or on a single despotic king and his indunas. It does seem that power was collective. It would be quite narrow to dismiss the significance of these women by arguing that their roles were not related to the structures of power, or that they took on male roles. The Zulu kings needed to incorporate the independent power ‘traditionally’ possessed by amakhosikazi and amakhosazana to be able to rule the new state. On the one hand it aided integration and legitimacy, but on the other hand, Shaka attempted to bypass their power and consolidate his own. At the same time however, they tried to subvert some of the women's power, or perhaps to tap into what may have been considered a characteristic of female authority (symbolic celibacy), by attempting to incorporate and combine in their own person aspects of both male and female power: ‘Dingiswayo and, after him, Shaka each pretended to be afflicted with certain evacuations in the way that women are, though not at regular periods. On these occasions numerous cattle were slaughtered and many people killed.’2