Dingane has executed many past supporters of…

Dingane has executed many past supporters of Shaka in order to secure his position in the years since ascending to the Zulu throne.

One exception to these purges is another half-brother, Mpande, who is considered too weak to be a threat.

Resentment of Anglican British rule and the emancipation of enslaved people has spurred a mass exodus of the fiercely Calvinist Afrikaaner Dutch farmers (known pejoratively as Boers) from the Cape to the interior in the so-called Great Trek beginning in 1835.

They initially settle in the Natal area.

In October 1837, the Voortrekker leader Piet Retief visits Dingane at his royal kraal to negotiate a land deal for the voortrekkers.

In November, about a thousand Voortrekker wagons begin descending the Drakensberg Mountains from the Orange Free State into what is now KwaZulu-Natal.