A Ngoni Kraal

While building my Ngoni army I thought it might be cool if each army had a bit of themed scenery to go with it. After a little pondering I thought a royal kraal might be cool.

Now I’ll admit I have no idea if the Ngoni still built huts and kraals that resembled those from their original homelands once they settled around lake Nyasa. As they moved North the Ngoni incorporated a number of different ethnic groups in their ranks and, I assume, picked up new techniques and styles of buildings so that their dwellings could have resembled lots of different style . Unfortunately A Google search brought no useful info at all .

I do know that  Ngoni society had names for different groups among them split up between those that came from the original homeland and those that joined latter. It seems that those descended from the original Ndwandwe and Swazi had higher social status than those who joined latter and kings and chiefs could probably draw a lineage back to the original refugees. Given that I took a punt that a Royal kraal would be built using techniques from the orginal homeland to emphizise a kings links to his Ndwandwe roots…..that could of course be absolute rubbish but it was a good enough excuse for me.

So I purchased three resin Zulu huts from Empress Miniatures and started collecting twigs to build a palisade. I had a few left over Zulu civilians and a chief from some packs I had purchased, for making my army baggage train, so I painted them up to populate the kraal. For the palisade I just cut the twigs and hot glued them to lolly sticks and painted them. In the end what I ended up with was this