Oh look another pop science channel turned “history” channel that does such a bad job of explaining things that even reading the wikipedia page would leave someone more informed and less racist.
what if we could make a new universe? humans are greedy, expansionist apes with smartphones, we will need more room eventually. we asked a team of scientists from the deutchphisik institute if they could improve the design of the kaplan thruster from one of our earlier videos and they came back with an even better idea that could solve all our problems including aging, meat scarcity and immigration
But also, if you do anything other than try to vote away problems, you’re the real problem, and if you think western democracy isn’t the pinnacle of human civilisation you’re wrong because we’re smart sounding and have fancy graphics, which means we are always correct and you must never challenge the status quo.
Almost entirely unrelated to the video, because that’s probably just racist, but Shaka sits at an interesting intersection for me. Because he is one of the few figures of the colonised who gets to be the troubled military genius. Sure he also gets hit by the racist caricature beam a lot, but unlike a lot of other figures he gets respect for his military innovations whole also delving into the person in a way you don’t typically see.
I-m not saying he fully gets the respect of an Alexander the Great, but he isn’t usually portrayed as just some warlord or ignorant barbarian or (noble) savage crushed underfoot.
The only thing I can think of is that he was a credible threat at the end of imperial expansion and a time where the noble savage was a heavy literary theme, but it is fully groundless speculation.
It’s a shame there are so few records of Shaka and the life he lead, his tactics mirror similar developments in the ancient world like the Roman Maniple or Greek Phalanx systems, which makes me wonder if he was relatively well-read (or had spoken with people who were) and was able to learn about and reorganise historical tactics to suit his needs and revolutionise his army.
It’s also kind of interesting that all British records of the Zulu wars are basically like “We slaughtered 500,000 of them at the battle of Whitey’s bluff and won a decisive victory with only 10 casualties, then we decided to sign a ceasefire agreement with them for a time because uh…we felt sorry for them but were totally winning the entire time.” Makes me wonder if the battles were a little less one sided than the history we are taught about it makes them seem.
Given that the British got wiped at Isandlwana, it’s obvious that Zulus actually fought significantly better than typical African people. It was unusual at the time to suffer such defeats in colonial wars and paper over the embarrassments with more reinforcements.
And I think that Shaka’s reforms were original, they were very different from Roman reforms, even if they also established well-organized mass army.
Oh yeah, I didn’t mean to imply that he just copied other military reforms, but he clearly had an understanding of how to create effective reforms that actively improved his army and took into account the conditions and issues they faced. Anyone doing reforms like that probably had a good grasp of military history and tactics, which makes me wonder if he was quite well read on military history.
if my reading of wikipedia is trustworthy, they used oral tradition instead of writing so he would probably send for accounts of sub saharan africa to be repeated to him
