Langalibalele (isiHlubi: meaning 'The scorching sun', also known as Mthethwa, Mdingi (c 1814 – 1889), was king of the amaHlubi, a Bantu tribe in what is the modern-day province of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. He was born on the eve of the arrival of European settlers in the province. After conflict with the Zulu king Mpande, he fled with his people to the Colony of Natal in 1848. During the diamond rush of the 1870s, many of his young men worked on the mines in Kimberley, where they acquired guns. In 1873 the colonial authorities of Natal demanded that the guns be registered, Langalibalele refused and a stand-off ensued, resulting in a violent skirmish in which British troops were killed. Langalibalele fled across the mountains into Basutoland, but was captured, tried and banished to Robben Island. He eventually returned to his home, but remained under house arrest. His imprisonment was a watershed in South African political history that split the colonial population of the Colony of Natal. Context The Bushmen, a hunter-gatherer people, were the original inhabitants of the modern-day province of KwaZulu-Natal. Historians are divided as to when the Bantu, a pastoral people, first migrated southward into the province, although most think it was well before 1200. By the end of the 17th century, they had certainly settled there and displaced the Bushmen, who migrated into the foothills of the Drakensberg. The amaHlubi, a Bantu tribe speaking a Tekela dialect, had settled in the northern part of the province between the Buffalo and Blood Rivers. During the first decade of the nineteenth century the AbaThethwa King Dingiswayo, a neighbour of the AmaHlubi, set about consolidating the various Nguni people under his leadership. In 1818 he was killed in battle and after a civil war, power passed into the hands of one of his lieutenants, Shaka, King of the Zulu clan. King Shaka expanded the Zulu clan into a kingdom for the first time since King Malandela KaLuzumana died way back in the year 1551, where he divided the kingdom into two clans, AmaZulu and AmaQwabe, thus they were no longer a united nation until King Shaka kaSenzangakhona united them once again in over 350 years, by attacking neighbouring clans and assimilating the survivors; his actions led to The Great Scattering. At the time of King Langalibalele I's birth, European settlements in Southern Africa were confined to the British controlled Cape