Definitions
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun A name given in South Africa to a large predatory true ant which is said to capture white ants and keep them as slaves in its own colonies.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- proper noun plural (Ethnol.) A warlike South African Kaffir tribe.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun a Bantu language sometimes considered a dialect of Zulu
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
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Examples
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In 1893, in what became known as the Matabele War, the British South Africa Corporation moved to put down a rebellion by Ndebele people, an offshoot of the Zulu nation in the area that would become Rhodesia, and then Zimbabwe.
The Gun C. J. Chivers 2010
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So I wasn't anxious to help them, for then -- you know what happens when the Matabele are the stormers!
Benita, an African romance Henry Rider Haggard 1890
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The bravest of the Matabele was their legendary chief, Uwini, who claimed that magical powers allowed him to dodge lethal gunfire.
Home | Mail Online 2009
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This they did in about twenty minutes, the firing on both sides being heavy but strange to say not a man of ours was hit while the Matabele dropped in all directions.
The Gun C. J. Chivers 2010
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The Matabele fell by the thousands beneath a hail of machine-gun fire, and their lands were soon rechristened Rhodesia.
Companies to Colonies Jeffrey Collins 2010
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Before 1980 Zimbabwe was a white-supremacist British colony named after the British financier Cecil Rhodes, whose company, the British South Africa Company, stole the land from the indigenous Matabele and Mashona people in the 1890s...
Ellen Brown: Is QE2 the Road to Zimbabwe-style Hyperinflation? Not Likely Ellen Brown 2010
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More to the point it was well established that he was a criminal, he having set his genocidal, North Korean-trained Shona attack dogs on the hapless Matabele people in the early 1980s.
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Before 1980 Zimbabwe was a white-supremacist British colony named after the British financier Cecil Rhodes, whose company, the British South Africa Company, stole the land from the indigenous Matabele and Mashona people in the 1890s ...
Ellen Brown: Is QE2 the Road to Zimbabwe-style Hyperinflation? Not Likely Ellen Brown 2010
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More to the point it was well established that he was a criminal, he having set his genocidal, North Korean-trained Shona attack dogs on the hapless Matabele people in the early 1980s.
Archive 2008-06-22 2008
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Before 1980 Zimbabwe was a white-supremacist British colony named after the British financier Cecil Rhodes, whose company, the British South Africa Company, stole the land from the indigenous Matabele and Mashona people in the 1890s...
Ellen Brown: Is QE2 the Road to Zimbabwe-style Hyperinflation? Not Likely Ellen Brown 2010
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