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    The Zulu War 1879
    The Zulu War 1879
    The Zulu War 1879
    Ebook122 pages3 hours

    The Zulu War 1879

    By Ian Knight

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    About this ebook

    The Zulu War of 1879 remains one of the best known British colonial wars and included two battles whose names reverberate through history. At Isandlwana the Zulus inflicted a crushing defeat on the British; the gallant British defence at Rorke's Drift followed and re-established British prestige. Yet as this book shows, there was more to the war than this. Six months of brutal fighting followed, until the Zulu kingdom was broken up, its king imprisoned and the whole structure of the Zulu state destroyed. Years of internecine strife followed, until the British finally annexed Zululand as a colonial possession.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateJun 6, 2014
    ISBN9781472810205
    The Zulu War 1879
    Author

    Ian Knight

    Military historian Ian Knight has been writing about nineteenth-century British colonial campaigns for thirty years. His book Zulu Rising received universal critical acclaim, and he is a winner of the Anglo-Zulu Historical Society’s Chief Buthelezi Medal for his lifelong contribution to Anglo-Zulu studies. A former editor of the Journal of the Victorian Military Society, he is a regular contributor to historical journals. He has advised on and appeared in a number of television documentaries, including C4’s Secrets of the Dead and the BBC’s Timewatch.

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      Book preview

      The Zulu War 1879 - Ian Knight

      Background to war

      The Zulu kingdom

      The area now known as Zululand lies on the eastern coast of South Africa, cut off from the interior by a barrier of mountains known as the Kahlamba – or to the first white travellers as the Drakensberg, or Dragon Mountains – and from the Indian Ocean by a line of heavy surf and open beaches, broken only by the silted mouths of unnavigable rivers. The cloud-bearing winds blowing off the ocean have deposited rain for aeons in their passage across the uplands, creating powerful river systems which have cut winding passages through the corrugated hills on their way back down to the sea. Historically, before human habitation left an indelible mark on the geography, much of the area was open grassland, broken here and there by primordial forests on the ridge-tops, and by thorn-bush in the hot valley floors. The earliest human inhabitants, who survived into modern times as the San ‘Bushmen’, retired to the mountain foothills in the face of the inexorable advance of both black and white pastoralists, and maintained a fragile toehold until finally driven out in the middle of the 19th century. For at least 800 years the area has been home to robust African societies, while the fragmentary historical record suggests that the ancestors of the people we know today as the Zulus were in place at least as long ago as the 15th century.

      At the end of the 18th century, the area of modern KwaZulu-Natal – between the Phongolo river in the north and the Umzimkhulu in the south – was populated by a large number of autonomous chiefdoms, who spoke broadly the same language, and who followed a way of life based largely on cattle. Cattle provided not only a means of sustenance – milk was a staple, and beef eaten on festive occasions – and hides for clothing and shields, but also a means of assessing wealth and status. An exchange of cattle was essential to the marriage contract, and almost every religious rite was accomplished by means of a sacrifice to the ancestral spirits. The people themselves lived in small family homesteads (umuzi, pl. imizi), each one a cluster of dome-shaped huts, made of thatch fixed over a framework of saplings and arranged around a central cattle pen, which represented home to a single family – a married man, his wives, offspring and dependent relatives. Each chiefdom was ruled over by a royal house, which produced successive generations of chiefs (inkhosi, pl. amakhosi), who dispensed authority with the assistance of a council of elders.

      The wide range of grasses which characterised the region – which supported cattle throughout the year – and general fertility of the soil away from the rocky hilltops encouraged a considerable population density, and a gradual fixing of political boundaries. In the late 18th century, however, this society was wracked by a series of conflicts of growing intensity between chiefdoms. Historians still debate the causes today, and rising population, protracted drought, and a conflict to secure dominance of the trade routes which filtered out from the Portuguese enclave at Delagoa Bay have all been convincingly argued. Quite possibly, it was a combination of all these factors, aggravating each other to various degrees. For whatever reason, in the 1790s the chiefdoms along the line of the Black and White Mfolozi rivers began to fight each other, and the old autonomous chiefdoms began to draw together to form larger, more militarily secure groupings. This process lasted for the best part of 30 years, and became increasingly violent; by the time it was over, one chiefdom had come to dominate them all – the Zulu.

      The original heartland of the Zulu people lay along the banks of the Mkhumbane stream, on the middle reaches of the White Mfolozi. Originally no more than a minor player in these conflicts, caught between the more powerful Ndwandwe chiefdom in the north-west, and the Mthethwa in the southeast, the Zulu rose to prominence thanks to the abilities of their young inkhosi Shaka kaSenzangakhona. Ambitious, dynamic and a talented military commander, King Shaka first threw off the overlordship of the Mthethwa, then in a succession of campaigns between 1817 and 1824 drove out the Ndwandwe. By the time of his death in 1824, Shaka had established a new kingdom, a conglomeration of existing groups under the rule of the Zulu elite. The core of this kingdom extended between the Black Mfolozi in the north and the Thukela in the south, while many groups in the country beyond were prepared to acknowledge Shaka’s authority.

      Even before Shaka died the seeds of the future conflicts had been sown. European interests in South Africa dated back to the 17th century, when the Dutch had established a way station at the extreme tip of the continent – the Cape of Good Hope – to service their ships on the long maritime haul to the Indies. In 1806 the British, as part of their global war against Napoleon and his allies, seized control of the Cape from the Dutch. The British, too, had little interest in the interior of Africa, but a momentum of settler expansion had already built up on the colonial frontiers which was difficult to contain. With the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815, the far-flung possessions of the British Empire were awash with adventurous young men made suddenly unemployed by the outbreak of peace, and this created a climate of mercantile opportunism which led directly to British involvement in Zululand. In 1824 a group of British and Dutch traders, led by an ex-Royal Navy lieutenant, Francis Farewell, crossed a dangerous sandbar and established a settlement on the edge of a lagoon which they grandly named Port Natal. Port Natal lay some 50 miles (80km) south of the main centres of Zulu settlement, but it was to King Shaka that the settlers looked for protection – and profit. To this unlikely beginning did all British claims in the area subsequently belong.

      The pattern of the relationship between the Zulu kingdom and the white newcomers was established over the next 20 years. For a decade, the Port Natal community remained no more than an anarchic outpost, a frontier settlement beyond the reach of British law. From the beginning, however, it attracted political refugees from Zululand who sought the protection of the whites, and whose presence the Zulu kings regarded as an inevitable evil. In the 1830s, however, a widespread disillusion with British authority among the Dutch-speaking settlers on the eastern Cape frontier, further south, led to a new wave of white expansion. The settlers – known to history as the Boers – crossed into KwaZulu-Natal from the interior, and were soon drawn into a bloody conflict with the Zulu over grazing land. This conflict irrevocably compromised the British group at Port Natal, who took the opportunity it afforded to break free of Zulu control. Yet the Boers could not escape the British so easily; the prospect that they might use Port Natal as a means of communicating with rival European powers provoked an armed intervention by the Imperial authorities. Redcoats seized Port Natal in 1842, and the following year the hinterland – known as Natal – was annexed to the British Crown.

      The political boundaries between Natal and the Zulu kingdom were fixed at the line of the Thukela and Mzinyathi (Buffalo) rivers, but in fact the fortunes of both were inextricably linked. Although whites exercised political power in Natal, the majority population was African, many of them groups who had resisted King Shaka, or who were political refugees from the Zulu kingdom itself. The arrival of the whites had thereby facilitated the creation of an African population on the very borders of Zululand which was generally hostile to the Zulu Royal House. The Zulu kings could no longer administer their own affairs without considering the reaction of both white and black Natal, while in turn many settlers were economically dependent on the profits to be made from hunting and trading expeditions in

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