Nguni

The Nguni are the largest ethnolinguistic community of southern Africa, Bantu-speaking peoples named after a common ancestor, Mnguni, and including the Zulu, Xhosa, Swati and Ndebele. Linguistic evidence suggests their forebears began moving south from west of Africa's geographic centre around 5000 BCE.

By the first century CE, Nguni speakers lived in what became KwaZulu-Natal and the Transvaal. They absorbed San clans and Khoisan click consonants; their related languages form a dialect continuum divided into Zunda and Tekela branches.

For centuries they lived in competing chiefdoms; in the early 1800s the Zulu ruler Shaka welded clans into a military kingdom using age-regiment barracks. The accompanying mfecane began when Zwide's Ndwandwe attacked the Hlubi, scattering peoples and sending Nguni offshoots such as the Ngoni and Matabele north into the Zimbabwe plateau.