This is not true. The Nazi movement was at its fundaments racialist and about ethnic hatreds. You gloss over the extreme Left components in the early party when the Socialist phrase was still taken seriously by some, and it was not about communists but ‘internationalism’ and the rootless, which always meant Jews and other minorities.
What boringly reasonable counterfactuals.
What about a giant Zulu Empire, that just kept expanding until it covered the whole of sub-Saharan Africa? 
Imagine a ‘cold war’ between the Zulus and the Aztecs! 
I’ll get my copy of “Civilization II” fired up …
Again, you have this backwards. Especially given that anti-Semitism had been around in Germany before Communism was even conceived of.
Didn’t Germany used to look like that? Why couldn’t there4 be an African Bismark?
Sure, but only becaue there’s so many capita. But would you say " it is not the primary unit of identity" is accurate? i.e would people see themselves as e.g. Indian first, Sikh/Tamil/Punjabi second? I highly, highly doubt it.
And “relatively rarely the cause of deadly violence”? This is a country where one entire region has been ethnically cleansed as recently as 1990, and has ongoing ethnic-motivated massacres.
The Zulu Kingdom was never going to be an empire. While I don’t subscribe to the Great Man theory of history, it’s clear that it was strictly Shaka who made the Kingdom what it was, his heirs would not be able to sustain his gains, never mind expand it.
I think you took my post a tad more seriously than I meant it to be taken. 
A giant Zulu Empire is more interesting than likely … the reasons it was unlikely are legion.
You got me.
Although there’s something to be said for a Khoisan empire, bursting out of the desert like Fremen, riding their battle-oxen (this bit is actually historically semi-accurate!) and trampling all before them. Making everyone submit to their tongue-clicking commands, or suffer…
I’m going to base my speculations on a single counterfactual: quinine didn’t exist, and so Europeans didn’t have a half-way effective preventive/treatment for malaria.
That being the case, the general outlines look like this: As happened historically, the Arabs establish outposts of their culture in East Africa. Likewise the Portuguese sail around Africa and find a route to India and beyond. The Portuguese partially but not completely conquer former Arab holdings, and on the Guinea coast in the west set up ports for the slave trade. The Dutch establish outposts on the Cape.
The bifurcation from actual history comes in the 18th century. when in actuality new ways of refining cinchona bark made it more effective, and at the same time the British started dominating the seaways. In the counterfactual British imperial expansion is hampered by devastating mortality rates from malaria. As a result the British are largely limited to outposts on the coasts which are seen as hardship duty, and they are much more dependent on alliances with the locals (including semi-acclimated Portuguese and Afrikaners) rather than garrisoning large forces. While a moral movement against slavery still takes place, it’s much less successful because of Britain’s limited ability to project power into the interior and it’s dependence on good relations with slave-holding tribes. European firearms technology and trade goods trickle into the continent, and those groups that adopt the musket overpower their less advanced neighbors resulting in considerable upheaval.
As late as the end of the nineteenth century large parts of the continent are still “Darkest Africa”, all but unknown to Europeans beyond second-hand reports. The germ theory of disease and the discovery that the Anopheles mosquito is the vector of malaria allows some advances (mosquito netting, draining swamps), and better firearms are helpful against hostiles, but it’s still a recklessly brave Breton or Frenchman who dares explore deep inland. European explorers are still mapping the interior and meeting previously uncontacted tribes as late as the start of WW2, and the most remote areas like the Congo remain as poorly explored as the Amazon.
Shaka started with a few villages and conquered and ruled an empire the size of Portugal, with no horses. That was unlikely by itself.
Whoever controls the !|kharagugu root controls the Universe!
The proto-Nazis, and the party’s founders, were brawling with the Young Communist League long before 1933. Political opponents were their first targets. The hatreds of previous centuries were obviously still very strong, but in the 20th century there was (perhaps by necessity) a new, political/ideological basis for what transpired. That makes the Holocaust, and other atrocities, much easier to understand.
The fading Ottoman Empire was rife with anti-Armenian (and anti-other Christian minorities) sentiment, but it wasn’t universal. It wasn’t until tens of thousands of Armenian nationalist militia members worked in concert with the Imperial Russian military to launch attacks on Ottoman targets, resulting in a certain amount of ethnic cleansing, that the regime in Istanbul commenced with the deportations, leading to mass killings by both commission and neglect.
There was no ethnic-nationalist rebellion against the German state, but there had been considerable militant leftist activity (including elements with which I identify; if only they’d won!) in the wake of the war and the monarchy’s fall. In part due to longstanding anti-Jewish and anti-Roma attitudes, it was easy for many Germans to believe, and then convince others, that these minorities had been all over such actions, and thus did not belong, and required elimination one way or another.
And what does that have to do with Africa? Recall that in Rwanda, there was a lot of violence in areas that were pretty much all-Hutu. Ethnicity doesn’t explain foreign interference (of any sort, although it partly explained under-the-table support for white regimes), which has done so much to destroy African political/social/economic development. Ideology explains much more.
I doubt it also, but I think the ratio (per capita) matters. It’s often forgotten when one fails to take into account the sense of scale in such matters.
About a third the size of Portugal. The Zulu kingdom was about 11,500 square miles (30,000 square kilometers). Portugal is about 35,000 square miles.
You’re right. I had assumed the Zulu Kingdom encompassed more or less all of what is now KwaZulu-Natal (36,433 sm).
Well, if Person X had/hadn’t died in infancy, well who knows what might have happened.
I’m not much of a believer in the Great Person school either, but there are some people who rearranged the deck chairs pretty decisively. Without Alexander you don’t have the hellenic empires. Or if Alexander hadn’t died in his 30s, the gods know what sort of mischief he might have gotten up to.
So, the whole XXXXX empire doesn’t exist today, because person XXXXX was killed in battle before he assumed supreme leadership of the XXXX army, and went on to rout his enemies and found the XXXX dynasty which ruled XXXX for XXXX years, which prevented the incursion of YYYY into XXXX, instead they went to ZZZZ and really fucked things up there, which means WWWW never happened there.
But in the case of the Zulus, we know the heirs of Shaka (his brothers) were fuckups. This isn’t a counterfactual.