The Xhosa Wars, also known as the Cape Frontier Wars, were a series of nine wars between the Xhosa people and European settlers, from 1779 to 1879 in what is now the Eastern Cape in South Africa. They are also known as "Africa's 100 Years War", with the different conflicts seen as a series of flare-ups in one long war of attrition - the longest in the history of colonialism in Africa.

The wars saw the beginning of the use of firearms by the Xhosa armies. However they nonetheless saw the Xhosa people's loss of most of their land, and the incorporation of its people into the British Empire.

The first settlers from Europe in the Cape were the Dutch who established a colony in and around current day Cape Town. This was initially just a small settlement for supplies for ships stopping on their way around the Cape to and from India.

Over the years more and more Europeans arrived. They first settled in and around Cape Town and later moved away from Cape Town into the valleys further afield. Over time, settlers began migrating further away from the areas around the Cape to find new farming land, and because the Cape Peninsula has a Mediterranean-type climate with a warm dry summer and a cold, wet winter (the early explorers named it the Cape of Storms because of the north-west gales sweeping up from the Antarctic in the winter months) which made cattle and grain farming difficult. Further along the eastern Cape seaboard the climate changes with milder and dry winters, and rainfall during the warm summers, suitable to the cultivation of grain, sorghum and millet, and to cattle-keeping. The expansion was principally to the east along the coast because to the north of Cape Town was the vast, open, semi-desert of the Namaqualand, Karoo and Kalahari.

Trevor Noah (born 20 February 1984) is an award winningSouth African comedian. He has also been a radio DJ, actor and TV host.

Trevor Noah had a small role on the South African soap opera, Isidingo in 2002, when he was 18. He then began hosting his own radio show Noah’s Ark on Gauteng’s leading youth radio station, Yfm. Noah then went on to host an educational program on SABC2 followed by hosting The Real Goboza, a gossip show on SABC1.

Noah dropped his radio show and acting to focus on comedy, and has performed with South African comedians such as Riaad Moosa, Darren Simpson, Marc Lottering, Barry Hilton and Nik Rabinowitz, international comedians such as Paul Rodriguez, Carl Barron and Paul Zerdin, and as the opening act for Gabriel Iglesias in November 2007 and Canadian comedian Russell Peters on his South African tour.

Noah has performed all around South Africa in The Blacks Only Comedy Show, Heavyweight Comedy Jam, the Vodacom Campus Comedy Tour, the Cape Town International Comedy Festival, the Jozi Comedy Festival, and Bafunny Bafunny. His stand up comedy specials include The Daywalker, and Crazy Normal both of which have been released on DVD.

Sobhuza I (Ngwane IV) Dlamini (ca. 1780–1839?) was king of Swaziland, from 1805(?) to 1839(?). Born around 1780, his father was Ndvungunye (Mavuso II, a.k.a. Zikhodze), and his mother was Somnjalose Simelane. He was called Somhlolo, "the Wonder," upon his birth either because his father had been killed by lightning before he was born, or because of certain irregularities of his delivery, or both. Swazis celebrate Somhlolo Day every September 6 as their Independence Day.

Few of the dates concerning Sobhuza I's life are secure, being based on interpretations of oral tradition. The Rev. A. T. Bryant, whose Olden Times in Zululand and Natal (1929) was the standard reference on Northern Nguni oral historical tradition until the late 1970s, dates Ndvungunye's accession to kingship to 1797, suggesting a birth date for Sobhuza at about that time. However, Bryant derived that date from his view that Ndvungunye died and Sobhuza succeeded in 1815, from which he mechanistically counted back eighteen years, which he had set as an arbitrary standard average length of a royal reign. Modern scholarship has pushed estimated dates of Sobhuza's birth and accession to the kingship backward in line with general reinterpretations of oral traditions about Northern Nguni state formation and the rise of the Zulu Kingdom, and placed the date of Sobhuza's death at 1839, rather than 1836 as Bryant had argued. Dating of Sobhuza's birth to ca. 1780 derives in part from his generational association with Dingiswayo of the Mthethwa and Zwide of the Ndwandwe, and in part from the fact that by the mid-to-late 1830s he was an elderly man who could not travel on foot. When Sobhuza became ngwenyama remains uncertain, with estimates ranging from 1805 to 1815.