The Nguni Group comprises principally the Zulu, Xhosa and Swazi-speaking peoples of South Eastern Africa whose languages and cultures are closely related. Through European contact and conquest during the past century and a half, their way of life has been considerably affected. Musically, many non-indigenous forms and features have been adopted by certain sections of each community, but we shall here be concerned only with what still survives of their truly indigenous music.For individual music-making, instruments of several varieties—particularly musical bows—were formerly used by all Nguni peoples. But their communal music seems always to have been exclusively vocal, apart from the occasional use of ankle-rattles in dance-songs.
Zimbabwean Ndebele and Zulu might be likened, in a very broad sense, to American English and British English, in their relationship. Mzilikazi and his few followers left Zululand in 1822, and in the 1840s founded a new nation, over 1,000 km. to the north. There are certain differences in pronunciation and tone. Divergence is likely to have been bilateral: while Ndebele shows clear signs of non-Zulu influence in certain respects, Zulu on the other hand is probably not quite the same today as it was in 1822
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