Dinuzulu kaCetshwayo

Who is Dinuzulu kaCetshwayo?

Dinuzulu kaCetshwayo was king of the Zulu people during a turbulent period of British colonial expansion in southern Africa. Son of King Cetshwayo, he assumed leadership amid the political fragmentation that followed the Anglo-Zulu War and the subsequent partition of Zululand. After becoming embroiled in the Zulu civil wars of the 1880s and briefly allying with Boer settlers who then claimed large tracts of Zulu land as payment, Dinuzulu came into repeated conflict with British colonial authorities. Following the 1906 Bambatha Rebellion against poll taxes in Natal, in which he was accused (largely on disputed evidence) of complicity, he was tried for treason and, in 1907, exiled by the British colonial government to Saint Helena, the same remote island once used to exile Napoleon. He remained on Saint Helena for several years before being permitted to return to South Africa in 1910, where he settled in the Transvaal under restricted circumstances until his death in 1913. His exile is remembered as part of the broader history of British suppression of Zulu political authority in the colonial era.

Sources: Jeff Guy, The Destruction of the Zulu Kingdom (1979) · C.T. Binns, Dinuzulu: The Death of the House of Shaka (1968)