Johannesburg, the wealthiest city in Africa and home to more than 12,000 millionaires is about to become a ghost town. Just over a week before Christmas, there’s a lull in the traffic as homes in both the suburbs and the sprawling black townships empty out.

On 16 December, the Day of Reconciliation marks 187 years since the Battle of Blood River when a party of 464 voortrekkers or white pioneers who had left British rule in the Cape to search for a homeland, moved east and passed through the Zulu kingdom. The trekkers, born in Africa of Dutch and French descent and speaking a blend that would become known as Afrikaans, had been granted free passage by the Zulu monarch Dingaan; with their wagons, horses and cattle they were looking for a place to settle.

Dingaan had taken the throne in 1828 by murdering his half-brother King Shaka, founder of the Zulu nation and a military genius to rival Alexander the Great. Shaka defeated surrounding clans and incorporated them as the Romans did with their empire, and it’s because of him that Zulus remain the largest ethnic group in South Africa.

But Dingaan’s rule was now threatened by another sibling, Mpande, who had established good relations with the white migrants,........

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