Dingane

I and my people believe there is only one God – I am that God. ... I am the Great Chief – the God of the living; Umatiwane is the Great Chief of the wicked.

Dingane ka Senzangakhona Zulu (c. 1795 – 29 January 1840), commonly referred to as Dingane or Dingaan, was the second king of the Zulu Kingdom, which was founded by his half-brother Shaka.

Quotes

• If that is your belief you are of no use to me or to my people; we knew all that before you came to preach to us. I and my people believe there is only one God – I am that God. We believe there is one place to which all good people go; that is Zululand. We believe that there is one place where all bad people go. There (pointing to a rocky hill to the north, the hill of execution). There is hell where all my wicked people go. The chief who lives there is Umatiwane, the head of the Amangwane. I put him to death, and made him the devil chief of all wicked people who die. You see that there are but two chiefs in this country – Matiwane and myself; I am the Great Chief – the God of the living; Umatiwane is the Great Chief of the wicked. I have now told you my belief; I do not want you to trouble me again with the fiction of you English people. You can remain in my country as long as you conduct yourself properly.
  • Dingane to Francis Owen, on an appointed Sunday when the missionary was allowed the occasion to expound his Christian beliefs before an assembly of nearly a thousand Zulu men inside the uMgungundlovu enclosure, as quoted by their interpreter, R. B. Hulley, and published in Zululand under Dingaan by Rev. Mr. Kirkby, The Cape Monthly Magazine, Vol. III, July to December 1880, pp. 324–326.

• I see that every white man is an enemy to the black, and every black man an enemy to the white, they do not love each other and never will.
  • Dingane to Richard B. Hulley in February 1838, as quoted in Hulley's “An Account of Rev. Mr Owen’s Visit to Zululand in the Year 1837”.

Quotes about Dingane

• Pray to your God to keep me from the power of Dingaan.
  • Mzilikazi to Robert Moffat, when the latter exhorted Mzilikazi to refrain from despotic and cruel acts, and to restrain his plundering indunas, lest the eternal God would frown upon him and deprive him of his power, as quoted by Moffatt in Missionary Labours and Scenes in Southern Africa (1842), Cambridge Library Collection, p. 556
• Dingarn's conduct was worthy of a savage as he is. It was base and treacherous, to say the least of it – the offspring of cowardice and fear. Suspicious of his warlike neighbours, jealous of their power, dreading the neighbourhood of their arms, he felt as every savage would have done in like circumstances that these men were his enemies, and being unable to attack them openly, he massacred them clandestinely.
  • Extract from Reverend Francis Owen's diary entry for 6 February 1838, the day of the Retief massacre.