After many vicissitudes, the Bhaca moved down into Thembuland where they attacked the Right Hand House amaTshatshu, causing them to flee to Maqoma for safety.

The Bhaca entered into an uneasy alliance with the Mpondo and launched a joint attack on the Bomvana but this was repulsed by the Paramount, Hintsa.

The war broke out when a Cape government commando party patrolled land near the Kat River which was occupied by Rharhabe chiefs Maqoma, Tyali and Botumane in December 1834.

These patrols increased the bitterness that Maqoma and Tyali had after they had been forcibly removed by the Cape government from the Tyume Valley in 1833.

On 21 December 1834, large force of some 10 000 RharhabeXhosas led by Maqoma, and Tyali swept into the Cape Colony, devastated the country between the Winterberg and the sea.

[2] On 14 April 1835 British governor Sir Benjamin d'Urban confronted King Hintsa with a large army.

d'Urban dictated the following terms to Hintsa: That all the country from the Cape's prior frontier, the Keiskamma River, as far as the Great Kei River would be annexed as the British "Queen Adelaide Province", and its inhabitants declared British subjects, and all the cattle initially claimed from the Xhosa's to be returned to the Cape Colony.

[2] Invited to peace talks by the governor of the Cape, Harry Smith, the British demanded 50 000 cattle in compensation for the 1834 war, and that Hintsa order his chiefs to surrender.

Southey told another guide, Cesar Andrews, to draw his gun because Hintsa was saving the horse's strength and obviously planned to escape.

The Chief had ridden into a thicket and, as he emerged back into the path, smiled at Smith, who immedieately regretted his suspicions.

The Chief had suddenly urged his horse past the Guides and was galloping across open country towards a village near a river.

He eased his horse, to allow it to recover wind, and then spurred it once more until he came alongside Hintsa, who stabbed furiously with his assegai.

Smith's own horse at that point was racing too wildly to round easily, but George Southey and the other Guides had caught up.

George Southey, who spoke Xhosa fluently, took aim and fired, shattering Hintsa's head and scattering his brains and skull fragments over the bank.

That night he expressed in his diary his regret that some had allowed 'their insatiable thirst of possessing a relic of so great a man to get the better of their humanity and better feeling, which teaches us not to trample on a fallen foe'.

'Thus terminated the career of the Chief Hintsa,' he wrote in his official report of the event, 'whose treachery, perfidy and want of faith made him unworthy of the nation of atrocious and indomitable savages over whom he was the acknowledged chieftain.'

Some of Hintsa's bracelets and the assegai he had thrown at Smith were sent home to Juana as his own souvenirs of the man of whom he had held so many conflicting views.

[7] Details such as the king trying to flee, throwing his spear "harmlessy" and crying "mercy" are likely to have been added so as to diminish his status in history a bold military leader.

His wars, the Xhosa Kingdom and its subsequent demise laid the foundation of the formation of South Africa as a country.

Knowledge of his legacy is transmitted through oral history by poems and stories and he is often compared to his great-ancestor, Tshawe kaNkosiyamntu.

The Gcaleka Xhosa monarch, Xolilizwe Sigcawu, and his court refused to sanction the planned burial of the skull because they said it was not the disembodied head of Hintsa.