The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (49 page)

MEXICAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE

Death toll:
400,000
¹

Rank:
81

Type:
colonial rebellion

Broad dividing line:
Spain vs. New Spain

Time frame:
1810–21

Location:
New Spain (Mexico)

Who usually gets the most blame:
Spain

The Cry of Delores

Proper hierarchies were important to the Spanish colonials. Their society was rigidly arranged such that the
peninsulares
(born in Spain) were on top, lording it over the
criollos
(Creoles, born in Mexico but of pure Spanish ancestry), followed by the
mestizos
(mixed Indian-Spanish ancestry), with the pure Indians on the bottom. After Napoleon conquered Spain in 1808 and imprisoned its Bourbon king, the colonials of Spanish America had no idea who to take orders from—the new king of Spain (Napoleon’s brother) or the renegade national legislature that the Spanish rebels established. With so much confusion over who was in charge, Creole power brokers began to wonder if this was the moment to declare independence from the arrogant
peninsulares
.

In September 1810, authorities in Mexico began to crack down on a list of scheming revolutionaries, so Father Miguel Hidalgo, a Catholic parish priest in the city of Dolores and the next person on their list, took matters into his own hands. Afraid that the anticlerical attitude of the French Revolution might take hold in Mexico, Father Hidalgo inflamed the poor into a frenzied mob that demanded racial equality, land reform, and severing ties between Mexico and decadent Europe. In the name of Our Lady of Guadeloupe, the mob began a march toward Mexico City and soon grew to an army of 25,000 men and women, mostly poor Indians armed with clubs, bows, lances, and machetes. Fewer than 1,000 were equipped as real soldiers.

Both sides fought dirty. The royalist commander in charge of crushing the revolt, General Felix Calleja, burned villages, shot hostages, and executed any prisoners he took. On the other side, when Hidalgo’s rebels took the wealthy city of Guanajuato, they massacred all of the leading citizens, which caused the Creole middle class to rethink its support for the independence movement.

Even so, the rebel army soon swelled to 80,000, and Hidalgo punched through the enemy line at Monte de las Cruces; however, 2,000 rebels died in that fight, and the royalists retreated in good order. As the offensive dragged on, the rebel force eroded. Forty thousand rebels deserted before the next confrontation, a battle that reduced Hidalgo’s force to 7,000 men with only six hundred muskets. Finally, in January 1811, the royalists solidly defeated the rebels in a battle near Guadalajara. As Hidalgo fled toward the United States, he was caught and hauled back to face the Catholic Church (which excommunicated him) and the government (which stood him up and shot him). His severed head was stuck on a pole in Guanajuato until Mexico achieved its independence a decade later.

Iturbide

Phase two of the war was more scattered and confusing. Rebel leadership passed to another parish priest, José María Morelos y Pavón. Reality had dashed the hope that a spontaneous uprising would drive the oppressors from power, so Morelos avoided confrontation. Royalist forces, mostly Mexican creoles, numbered 80,000, and their strategy focused on reducing the pockets of resistance one by one. In January 1812, General Calleja destroyed the town of Zitacuaro at the center of a particularly troublesome rebel area and laid waste to the Indian villages around it.

The Creole general Agustin de Iturbide captured Morelos in No
vember 1815, and the rebel leader was excommunicated and executed before the end of the year. With the main rebel force broken and its leaders dead, the war devolved into five years of guerrilla warfare that gradually diminished.

Back in Spain, the Bonapartes were gone and the Bourbons returned, but parliament had forced King Ferdinand IV to accept a liberal constitution. This alienated and worried the conservatives who ran Mexico, and one by one the generals in charge of crushing the rebellion began to switch sides. The royalist General Rafael de Riego declared for the republic in January 1820.

In February 1821, General Iturbide announced that he would no longer follow the orders of the Spanish viceroy. After negotiating with leaders of the revolution, Iturbide joined their side and marched against the viceroy’s army, which he beat in a series of battles. The new independent government that Iturbide set up left much of the status quo intact, except that it declared the criollos and peninsulares to be legally equal.

The republican ideals of the early revolution didn’t last very long.
Within a couple of years, Iturbide declared himself emperor. That didn’t last long either, and he was deposed in 1823. The political history of Mexico bounced around erratically after this.
²

SHAKA

Death toll:
1.5 million died because of his rule

Rank:
40

Type:
conqueror

Broad dividing line:
Zulus vs. everyone else

Time frame:
ruled 1816–28

Location:
South Africa

Who usually gets the most blame:
Shaka

Total Bastard

When Chief Senzangakhona of the Zulus heard that he had gotten a girl named Nandi pregnant, he tried to shrug the pregnancy off as nothing more than an intestinal beetle throwing her menses out of whack. When the pregnancy kept developing and produced an illegitimate baby boy around 1787, the chief’s new son was sarcastically named Beetle, or Shaka. Because Nandi was too closely related to the chief to become a full wife, she was shamefully tucked away in the back of his harem as a lesser wife. Eventually, Nandi was sent back to her family’s village, where Shaka spent the rest of his childhood in fatherless exile, scorned, bullied, and teased by other children.
¹

In later years, when Shaka rose to power, his army surprised his old village with a stealthy night march. After assembling the villagers, Shaka killed all of the bullies from his childhood by impaling them up the rectum on the sharpened stakes of the walls of their kraals (cattle stockades) and then setting fires beneath them. The villagers who had merely stood by while the others had teased Shaka were shown mercy: their skulls were cracked open with a club for a quick death. Only one man who could prove an earlier act of kindness to Nandi was spared.
²

Impis and Assegais

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the various clans of the Nguni people were consolidating into two large confederations: the Ndwandwe (led by Zwide) and the Mthethwa (led by Dingiswayo). Don’t get too attached to either of these since they will be gone by the end of this chapter.

The Zulus began as one subordinate clan of the Nguni under Dingiswayo. When Shaka reached adolescence and his age group was called up for military service, Dingiswayo noticed the young boy’s courage and audacity and groomed him for leadership. Stories were told of how Shaka stood calmly and killed a charging leopard, and how he slew a giant warrior face to face. When Shaka’s father died in 1816, Dingiswayo arranged that Shaka, rather than his more legitimate half brothers, would take control of the Zulus.

Tribal battles in those days were ritual contests of bravado fought with light javelins (assegais) at a distance. There was a lot of jeering and posturing from the men in the battle and from the women on the sidelines, but few deaths. These were loud, festive occasions with dancing, singing, and shouting.

Shaka, however, took war-making more seriously. He trained his warriors in grim, unemotional killing at close quarters. Shaka increased the size of his men’s oval ox-hide shields and armed them with heavy iron stabbing spears of his own design, called an
ixlwa
, supposedly from the sound it made when being thrust into and pulled out from an enemy’s gut.

Zulus learned to run and fight at the very limits of human speed and endurance. Shaka’s soldiers gave up their loose, floppy sandals and fought barefoot instead. Their soles were toughened by long runs across thorns and rocky ground, and any who hesitated during these training exercises would be killed on the spot.
³

Shaka deployed his impis (regiments) as a dense phalanx rather than a long skirmish line. Each impi was instilled with great pride, and Shaka encouraged them to maintain a fierce rivalry with each other. They often had to be maneuvered into battle separately because they would fight each other if they got too close. Men who had “washed their spears”—drawn blood in battle—were allowed to wear a distinctive and prestigious head ring.

His regiments attacked in the “buffalo” deployment: a solid head that smashed directly into the enemy front line, a body reinforcing the first wave, and two curving horns of swift runners that swept around the flanks and behind the enemy to prevent escape. It was designed to annihilate anyone who stood in the way.
⁴
In the first battle using this formation, the Zulu horns enveloped both the enemy warriors and their cheerleading women, all of whom were butchered without mercy.

No one could stand up to the Zulus once they unleashed these new tactics on their neighbors. Shaka fought to annihilate and took few prisoners. Only an instant, utter, and abject surrender could spare a target tribe from merciless destruction. Enemy tribes were usually exterminated to the last living soul, except that young boys were often taken into the Zulu military and young girls into their harems.
⁵
During his career, Shaka conquered more than three hundred chiefdoms, the full list of which is both impressive and boring.
⁶
Because the Zulu usually absorbed the defeated clans, you are unlikely to hear their names anywhere outside of a biography of Shaka. Even the clans that keep a separate identity today are still hidden in the shadow of the Zulus.

Around 1817, Dingiswayo was killed in a battle with Zwide of the Ndwandwe Confederation. Shaka eventually avenged the death of his mentor and crushed the Ndwandwe army at the Battle of Mhlatuze River in 1820. Zwide escaped the battle with a handful of his men, but Shaka found the confederacy’s women and children and slaughtered them. As a special revenge, he locked Zwide’s mother, a powerful witch, in a hut full of hungry hyenas.

On the Genitalia of Tyrants

Believe me, I don’t want to discuss Shaka’s penis any more than you want to read about it, but the subject comes up unavoidably in his biographies—especially in those written by scholars of a Freudian outlook. During his childhood, the other children in the village teased Shaka mercilessly for his tiny penis (“like an earthworm”), but in later years he often walked around casually naked to show everyone that his penis had grown quite normally now, thank you very much. However, his childhood torment probably scarred his psyche. A common pattern throughout Shaka’s tyranny is a fanatic attention to the sex life of his subjects.
⁷

Shaka organized Zulu girls into non-fighting regiments parallel to the regiments of men. He forbade his soldiers to marry until they were forty, but when it was time, he would assign them wives from the corresponding women’s regiment.

Sex outside marriage was now absolutely forbidden. Any unmarried woman who became pregnant by one of his warriors was put to death, as was her lover. In fact, Shaka killed his own wives if they became pregnant, but no one knows why. Among the possibilities that have been suggested are (a) he feared the birth of a son who would become a rival (Shaka’s own excuse), or (b) Shaka was impotent so his wives could become pregnant only through infidelity, or (c) same thing but he was gay, not impotent. However, Zulu sexual practices were alien enough from Western practices to make words like
gay
and
impotent
meaningless. Shaka probably indulged exclusively in
uku-hlobonga
(there’s no easy translation) with his wives, which meant none would get pregnant without cheating.
⁸

When his mother, Nandi, died, Shaka imposed strict laws of mourning while he wallowed in grief. No crops could be planted, no cows could be milked, and obviously no one was allowed to have sex. If a woman got pregnant during the period of mourning, both she and the baby’s father were killed, even if they were properly married.
⁹
Eventually 9,000 Zulus were killed for showing insufficient sadness.

With every new episode of bloodthirsty madness, Shaka lost support, until finally his half brothers assassinated him while he was in his kraal. As he was being cut down, every courtier, servant, neighbor, and villager fled the town in terror, figuring that they would get blamed for it. Shaka’s body lay abandoned in the empty town throughout the night; the only protection from prowling hyenas was one favorite wife from his adolescence who stayed behind. The next morning, he was hurriedly buried with minimal ceremony. His bones are probably somewhere under a street in the South African town of Stanger.

Mfecane

Shaka sparked a massive upheaval called the Mfecane, the “Crushing.” As the weaker peoples of southern Africa fled to escape Shaka’s fury, they created ripples of instability that disturbed the status quo halfway up the continent. The first ripples were often Zulu freebooters setting out to build their own kingdoms by defeating people unaccustomed to the new Zulu tactics. Then those defeated tribes ran into the next circle of neighbors, until eventually everyone was on the move. Nations jostled one another for the next generation, and communities descended from South African fugitives are today found as widely scattered as Kenya, Malawi, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
¹⁰

Among the notable movements:

•
The Swazi were driven into the rugged mountains that are now Swaziland, a small independent kingdom surrounded on all sides by South Africa.

•
One of Shaka’s generals, Mzilikazi, had a quarrel with his boss and fled with his clan, the Khumalo, on a five-hundred-mile journey and established themselves as the Ndebele (Matabele) state in Zimbabwe.

•
Soshangane, one of the fugitive leaders of the defeated Ndwandwe Confederation, formed the Gaza state in Mozambique and overran several Portuguese settlements. The Portuguese had to flee to their ships while they watched their towns burn.

•
Another refugee Ndwandwe band under Zwangendaba migrated a thousand miles over the next twenty years before it came to rest in Tanzania.

Cobbing

Shaka passed his entire career beyond the horizon of the literate world, so we have only secondhand accounts of his life. European visitors to Shaka’s court returned with blood-curdling stories of a mad savage king sowing death and destruction wherever he went. Local tribes passed along legends, rumors, and oral histories that were written down only long after the fact. This leaves a lot of room to rewrite history any way you want.

White Afrikaners have long claimed that the Mfecane left the South African interior emptied of natives, littered with bones, conveniently free for the taking when their Boer ancestors arrived a couple of decades later. Black Africans swear the Mfecane was nowhere near as destructive as that, and it was the encroachment by white slave traders that set it off anyway. The theory that the horrors of the Mfecane are mostly white propaganda (called the Cobbing hypothesis after the scholar who published it in 1988) has gained ground, but it is still the minority view. The debate is far from settled, driven by political winds more often than by solid proof.
¹¹