Nguni people

Nguni people
AmaNguni

Top left, Xhosa; Top right, Ndebele; Bottom left, Zulu; Bottom right, Swati
Total population
31,618,000[citation needed]
Languages
Nguni languages IsiXhosa, IsiZulu, Siswati, Ndebele
Religion
Christianity and (uThixo or Qamata) Unkulunkulu
Related ethnic groups
Sotho-Tswana peoples, Tsonga people, Khoisan, San people and Ngoni people

The Nguni people are a linguistic cultural group native to and formed in South Africa, made up of ethnic groups formed indigenously in South Africa from hunter-gatherer pygmy and proto-agrarians, with offshoots in neighboring colonially-created countries in Southern Africa. Swazi (or Swati) people live in both South Africa and Eswatini, while Ndebele people live in both South Africa and Zimbabwe.

A group of the Nguni living in present-day Malawi and Zambia migrated from South Africa in the early 19th century , they known as AbaNgoni or Ngoni.

The Xhosa were formed out of pastoralist blended from pygmies and proto-Bantu agro-pastoralists and established federations (AbaThembu, AmaMpondo, AmaXhosa, and AmaMpondomise) in the 5th century AD. The Xhosa are said to trace their name back to a Nguni leader named Xhosa.

The recent homeland of the Xhosa people is marked by lands in the Eastern Cape from the Gamtoos River up to Umzimkhulu near Natal, which confined and restricted their pastoral ancestors from the rest of the Cape by an expanding and setting of the VOC Cape Colony frontier.

This closed frontier was set in the late 1700s.

The Xhosa often called the "Red Blanket People," are speakers of Bantu languages living in south-east South Africa and in the last two centuries throughout the southern and central-southern parts of the country.

Both the Ndebele of Zimbabwe and the Ngoni migrated northward out of South Africa in the early 19th century, during a politically tumultuous era that included the Mfecane and Great Trek.

In South Africa, the historic Nguni kingdoms of the Ndebele, Swazi, Xhosa, and Zulu are in the present-day provinces of the Southern and Eastern Cape, Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal, Limpopo and Mpumalanga. The most notable of these kingdoms are the Zulu Kingdom, which was ruled by Shaka, a warrior king whose conquest took place in the early nineteenth century, and the Xhosa Kingdom, existed for 11 generations before the start of the Frontier Wars in 1779.

Overall, the Nguni cultural group is made up of the eMbo, Lala, Ntungwa, Hlubi, Xhosa, Mthethwa Paramountcy, Ngidi, Ndwandwe, Zulu, Ngoni, Swati and Ndebele ethnic groups.

In Zimbabwe, the Ndebele people live primarily in the province of Matabeleland.^[1]