30 AFRICAN POLITICAL SYSTEMS
the smaller political groupings and to find out who a man's chief is, one asks either 'Who is your chief?' or 'Of^whose district are you?' The relation of the political unit to land may be defined: any one coming on to land belonging to a political authority became subject to that authority, and all his subjects were entitled to land in his area.
The Zulu nation may therefore be defined as a group of people owing allegiance to a common head (the king) and occupying a defined territory. They combined under the king to attack or defend themselves against outside groups. In addition to controlling relations with other Bantu-speaking peoples and the Europeans, the king exercised judicial, administrative, and legislative authority over his people, with power to enforce his decisions. He performed religious ceremonies and magical acts on behalf of the nation. All the tribes which made up the nation spoke dialects of the same language and had a common culture.
The kings Mpande and Cetshwayo had no subjects directly under their control. They lived in a tract of land occupied only by royal homesteads and military barracks1: outside of this tract Zululand was divided into a large number of political groups. The inhabitants of the largest divisions of the nation I call 'tribes', and their heads I call 'chiefs'. The tribes were divided into smaller groups (wards) under relatives of the chief or men of other clans (indunas), responsible to the chiefs.
The king was approached with ceremonious salutations and titles of respect which, say the Zulu, increased his prestige. He was addressed as the nation. What tradition and history was common to all the Zulu had to be told in the names of the Zulu kings and it was largely their common sentiment about the king and his predecessors which united all Zulu as members of the nation. At the great first-fruits ceremonies and in war-rites, the king was strengthened and cleansed in the name of the nation. He possessed certain objects, inherited from his ancestors* and the welfare of the country was held to depend on them. This ceremonial position of the king was backed by his ancestral spirits. They were supposed to care for the whole of Zululand, and in the interests of the nation the king had to appeal to them in drought, war, and at the planting and first-fruits seasons. They were
1 All military barracks were royal homesteads. They were built on the plan of ordinary homesteads but were very large, housing some thousands of men.