Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Nguni people
Summary
The Nguni people are a cultural group in southern Africa made up of Bantu ethnic groups from South Africa, with offshoots in neighboring countries in Southern Africa. Swazi (or Swati) people live in both South Africa and Eswatini, while Northern Ndebele people live in both South Africa and Zimbabwe.
A group of the Nguni living in present-day Malawi and Zambia originated from South Africa and are known as AbaNgoni or Ngoni.
The Xhosa, who were the first Bantu group to arrive during the Bantu expansion settled in the southern part of southern Africa and established federations (AbaThembu, AmaMpondo, AmaXhosa, and AmaMpondomise) in the region during the 10th century AD. One of the dynasties of the Xhosa polities traces its lineage to a mythical leader named 'Mnguni'. Mnguni begot Xhosa, who founded the Xhosa State and whose great-grandson Tshawe expanded the state after a civil war broke out with his brother. The traditional homeland of the Xhosa people stretches from the Gamtoos River up to Umzimkhulu near Natal.
Both the Ndebele of Zimbabwe and the Ngoni migrated northward out of South Africa in the early 19th century, during a politically tumultuous era that included the Mfecane and Great Trek.
In South Africa, the historic Nguni kingdoms of the Ndebele, Swazi, Xhosa, and Zulu are in the present-day provinces of the Southern and Eastern Cape, Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal, Limpopo and Mpumalanga. The most notable of these kingdoms are the Zulu Kingdom, which was ruled by Shaka, a warrior king whose conquest took place in the early nineteenth century, and the Xhosa Kingdom, a country that was well established prior to the 17th century and had existed for 11 generations before the start of the Frontier Wars in 1779.
Overall, the Nguni cultural group is made up of the Xhosa, Zulu, Ngoni, Swati and Ndebele ethnic groups.
In Zimbabwe, the Ndebele people live primarily in the province of Matabeleland.
Most of what is believed about ancient Nguni history comes from oral history and legends.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.