Partially thanks to all of my history courses that I am taking this semester at Grand Valley, one of my favorite pass times is to play a video game called Civilization Revolution. It is a game where you, as the player, can choose which empire you wish to control. You have the opportunity to start at around 3,000 BCE and build an empire. There are multiple ways that you can win the game, but one of the neatest things about this particular game is that it actually uses concepts from the actual nations as they existed in history. One of those nations is the Zulu of Africa, which I knew very little about. After playing the game, and learning about sub-sahara Africa in class, I became interested in trying to understand just a little bit more about the culture.

Once I started to search around, I learned that "Zulu" is a fairly recent tribe by historical means, in the fact that they weren't considered Zulu (at least, as the warrior tribe that we know them as today) until around the 16th or 17th centuries. While this does not directly pertain to history before 1500, their origins are considered well before that time. According to this website,

The Zulus believe that they are descendents of a Congo chief whom during the 16th century migrated to the South.

After discovering this fact, I wanted to do some research to find more relevance to the earliest history of the Zulu people. As I did some searching around, I learned that the Zulu nation is formed because of several different Nguni nations that were forced together by the Shaka Zulu ruler. This website describes the fact that the Nguni peoples, like many other cultures of sub-sahara Africa, passed down their history orally. There is very little written record of ancient African history. What we can tell, however, is the fact that the Nguni people, around some 3,000 years ago, were one of the pastoral tribes that migrated from Egypt down into Africa herding a specific breed of cattle.

It is particularly interesting how this pastoral tribe became part of a larger society that, in years to come, would dominate the majority of the African culture and become known world wide as an infamous warrior tribe. It is interesting how the events in history can shape and change the way that the world works, as we are slowly coming to understand even in today's multicultural society of America.