Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Bambatha Rebellion was triggered by a poll tax of one pound introduced by the Natal colonial administration, added on top of an existing hut tax. The tax was designed to force Zulu men into wage labour and fell hardest on communities already suffering from land evictions, overcrowding, and a cattle epidemic that had killed ninety percent of local herds between 1896 and 1897.
Bambatha was a Zulu chief from the Mpanza Valley, in what is now a district near Greytown, in the British colony of Natal. After the colonial government deposed him as chief, he gathered supporters and from the 3rd of April 1906 conducted guerrilla attacks on colonial forces using the Nkandla forest as a base.
Between 3,000 and 4,000 Zulus were killed during the rebellion and its suppression, while 36 colonial soldiers died. More than 7,000 Zulus were imprisoned and 4,000 were flogged. The suppression cost the Natal colonial government £883,576.
Mahatma Gandhi, then working as a lawyer in South Africa, encouraged Indian South Africans to support the colonial suppression of the rebellion, arguing it would legitimise Indian claims to citizenship. He commanded a stretcher bearer corps of 21 Indian volunteers assigned to treat wounded white soldiers. By 1927 he had reversed his view, writing in The Story of My Experiments with Truth that the rebellion was "No war but a man hunt."
On the 10th of June 1906, Colonel Duncan McKenzie's force of 4,316 colonial troops surrounded Bambatha's rebels at Mome Gorge and attacked at sunrise, inflicting heavy casualties. Colonial forces reported that Bambatha was killed in action, but his supporters believed he escaped to Portuguese Mozambique. A later DNA test of the alleged body failed to produce a definitive answer.
The rebellion's suppression intensified support among white colonists across Southern Africa for uniting the separate colonies under a single government capable of maintaining white supremacy. The Union of South Africa was subsequently formed in 1910, four years after the rebellion.
In 2006, the centenary of the rebellion, a ceremony declared Chief Bambatha a national hero of post-Apartheid South Africa. His image appeared on a postage stamp and a street was renamed in his honour. The hip-hop musician Afrika Bambaataa also takes his name from Chief Bambatha and the rebellion.