The Mohammed Code: Why a Desert Prophet Wants You Dead (5 page)

One man totally transformed the character and spirit of this people. His name was Shaka. Shaka was a bitter and brutal youngster whose primary pleasure in life came from organizing men to kill. Shaka's mother, a disdainful, argumentative daughter of a Zulu chief, had an illicit affair with the head of a nearby clan—the eLangeni--and became pregnant. Her own people, the Zulu, despised her for this outrage. So her lover installed her in his own village, but that didn’t stop the scandal. Not one whit. Everyone in the eLangeni settlement turned up their noses at her.

When her belly swelled with her unborn, the villagers joked that she was growing large because she had an intestinal beetle—a shaka. Her son, derisively named Shaka after the alleged beetle, grew up the butt of jokes, unwanted by either tribe. eLangeni kids picked on him mercilessly, doing everything their fertile little imaginations could conceive to humiliate him. We’ll soon see how similar problems shaped the early life of Mohammed.

Culture-founders are often those who turn catastrophe into opportunity. Shaka was among them. When famine struck the eLangeni, no one wanted to give scarce food to those they loathed. So the eLangeni threw Shaka and his mother out of their kraal—our of their stockaded village--leaving the pair to die of starvation
⁵⁸
. But Shaka and his mom lived. In fact, Shaka grew up to be 6'3", powerfully-built and marvelously inventive at one particular art…the art of killing. The standard weapon in Shaka’s South African neighborhood was a long spear thrown from overhead. Shaka had the audacity to dramatically shorten its shaft, to increase the size of its blade, to strengthen it, and to turn it into an underhand stabbing weapon.

Shaka also did away with the old practice of standing at a distance from the enemy and only occasionally tossing a weapon. His idea of combat was brutally face-to-face and chest-to-chest. In fact, he came up with a trick that could only work in close contact, a way of using a shield as an offensive weapon. You hook your shield under corner of the shield of your opponent, yank quickly, spin your opponent around, then jab your vicious stabbing weapon, a weapon the length of a bayonet, into the man’s temporarily exposed side. Shaka’s new spear was named for the sucking sound it made as you pulled it out of your victim, iKlwa.

When Shaka felled a man, he added a touch that may have sprung from the thrill he felt in killing, but that would soon become yet another weapon, a terror-spreader. Shaka shouted a blood-curdling victory cry, a cry perfect for the founder of what would soon be a greedy, expansionist and imperialist culture…“Ngadla”, “I have eaten.”

Despite his role as an outcast, Shaka proved a master at creating the seeds of new military techniques. He boosted his speed and stability by tossing away the slippery sandals worn by traditional warriors. Shaka ran barefoot until his soles hardened so that he could sprint over stones, briars, and any other obstacle in his path. Then, equipped with his breakthrough techniques, he joined the army of the local militant empire builder, Dingiswayo, and became a battlefield nightmare of a kind South Africa had never seen.

Dingiswayo was so impressed by Shaka’s killing abilities that he rewarded this strange new warrior with a huge promotion. The warlord sent Shaka back to the Zulus who had rejected him and his mother. But Shaka didn’t merely come back to the Zulu as an honored citizen. Dingiswayo gave Shaka the ultimate revenge. He made Shaka the tribe’s new chief.

How did Shaka handle this position of authority? First, he consolidated his hold by murdering everyone who had ever insulted him or his mother. Then he reorganized the tribe's psyche… and its military. To make it clear that this was a tribe that would be reborn in a new image, in the image of Shaka, and to make it plain that the tribe would be reborn or else, Shaka ordered the Zulus to destroy their old kraal and to build a new one. He demoted all the young men who were about to graduate from youth to adult status, and he militarized the society. He divided all the men into fighting units, then began something few Zulus had ever seen before. He armed his reluctant new followers with the short spears he’d devised, with new shields larger and stiffer than the old ones, and drilled his troops in the battlefield maneuvers he had invented, practicing them until they dropped.

From now on Zulu adult males would not just be summertime warriors. They’d be full time, disciplined, mass murderers…a culture-shift that would also be crucial to Mohammed. The days of disorganized milling about on a field, staring at an enemy a hundred feet away, and occasionally lobbing a half-hearted spear were over. So were the days of declaring victory after one flesh wound and going home. From now on every adult male was either an expert at close-quarter killing …or he was dead.

What did this give Shaka? One of Africa’s most ferocious Bantu standing armies.
⁵⁹
But that was just the beginning of Shaka’s genius at creating new forms of social organization. Shaka trained his troops mercilessly, making them soldiers in a powerfully unified, army-ant-like social structure. He divided his men into four tactical units whose precise coordination, training, and discipline was critical. First in battle came “the chest”, a main body that attacked the enemy face-to-face, pinned it down, and prevented its escape. Then came “the horns”, flanks that raced out on either side and surrounded the enemy in a pincer movement. Finally there were “the loins”, a reserve that sat behind the battlefield with its back to the fighting to prevent its emotional involvement from draining its energy. The loins were a backup, a fail-safe mechanism sent into battle to close any gaps or to shore up any weaknesses.

Shaka had introduced something southern African Bantu people had seldom seen before: sophisticated military strategy. Tactics. To execute military tactics, it helps to have a militarily-motivated people, a murder-motivated people, a people whose personality apes that of a leader like Shaka.

Zulus were not that kind of folks when Shaka first took them over. But they sure as hell were by the time he was finished. Shaka insisted , for example, that his troops do what he’d done when he was out in the wilderness honing his newly-invented killing skills. He made his fighters toss away their sandals and run barefoot. Yes, not walk but run. Run as fast, as hard, and as long as they could.

Not everyone was pleased with the idea of exposing his bare feet to the sharp stones, roots, and thorns of South Africa’s pathways. So Shaka instituted a simple procedure for weeding out those without the guts to run barefoot. He had an open area scattered with thorns, then ordered his men to dance barefoot on this specially-prepared ground. Anyone who didn't look as if he was thoroughly concentrating on his dance steps—anyone who even winced with pain--was executed.
⁶⁰
In other words, Shaka kept those he could mold to his own style and killed those whose personalities did not lend themselves to an imitation of his bitter determination and absolute ferocity.

One result: by the time Shaka was finished, his troops could cover fifty miles barefoot in a single day. Napoleon’s troops, who had been in action just a few years earlier in Europe, were considered miracles of modern efficiency because they could cover 25 to 30 miles. But that was a mere
half
of the mobility of Shaka’s troops.
⁶¹

Shaka was delighted to discover that by the time that he was finished, his men were so disgusted with peace and so in love with war that their kraals had to be built at many a spears’ throw from each other.
⁶²
If those Kraals weren’t separated by enough space, the men in each would do their best to bash the blood and brains out of their overly-close neighbors in the kraal next door.
⁶³

The eLangeni—the tribe who had made Shaka’s life miserable when he was young—woke up one the morning and found their kraal surrounded
⁶⁴
. Expecting the usual lenient treatment meted out by the half-hearted Zulu warriors they’d known in the past, they surrendered without a fight…something that also happened often in Mohammed’s career as a military commander. And as we’ll soon see in the life of Mohammed, this surrender didn’t win the eLangeni mercy. Mercy was a quality Shaka Zulu squelched in his men and apparently strangled utterly in himself.

Shaka lined up the eLangeni men and picked out those who had mocked him when he was a child. He gave presents of oxen to the few who had been kind to his mother. Then he asked those he’d rewarded to stick around and see how the new culture he was crafting handled those who had not been so generous to their new lord and master. Every one of the men who’d spat on and made fun of Shaka when was a kid was paraded to the high fence surrounding the kraal and impaled on its stakes. Shaka ordered that the victims be left dangling, tortured and alive, like frantically flipping live fish on an upright fondue skewer, for the fourteen hours of a long, hot day. At nightfall he ended the misery of the miscreants by commanding that the fence be set on fire, barbecuing the men hanging from its shafts.
⁶⁵

At this point the Zulu army was still microscopic. It consisted of a mere three hundred and fifty men. But its regimented and brutal members were a whole new kind of people--a people formed in the image of their leader.

The form of warfare Shaka was about to roll out would be as psychologically brilliant as it was physically unique. It was designed to shatter not just the weapons and bones, but the confidence of his enemies. In his first major battle, with the Butelezi, Shaka introduced one of his psyche-smashing maneuvers. The warriors on his front line bunched close together and carried their shields with the edges facing the enemy so they seemed like a minuscule force as they approached the foe. The chests of the Butelezi swelled with arrogance and disdain at the sight of this puny Zulu mini-gang. Then Shaka’s men suddenly fanned out. Troops who had been hidden behind the vanguard appeared as if from nowhere, and all of Shaka’s soldiers turned their shields suddenly with their broad fronts facing the enemy. The pitifully undersized Zulu force now seemed to have tripled in size in a flick. The cocky Butelezi's hearts sank. Shaka had counted on this shock value and on the panic it produced to help him win.
⁶⁶
In other words, Shaka was an expert at the manipulation of an emotion that we’ll later see was critical to both the military and peacetime strategies of Mohammed—terror, a fear so overwhelming that it shakes loose the very roots of the soul.

Shaka was ruthless at enforcing obedience and absolute conformity to the pattern of personality he’d laid out for his new group. Wherever he went, his retinue came complete with executioners who kept their king happy by snapping a dozen necks or by dashing a couple of skulls nearly every day
⁶⁷
. It didn’t take much to get you killed in the presence of his majesty. If you sneezed while Shaka ate or if you made him laugh when he was trying to look serious, that was it. You were dead before you had a chance to take your next breath. This brutality wasn’t just handy for maintaining decorum in Shaka’s immediate vicinity. Word spread, and the string of murders for mere nothings kept people near and far in line.