Zululand

The Battle of Isandhlwana by Charles Edwin Fripp

On the afternoon of 22^ndJanuary 1879 the might of the Zulu nation wiped out a British army column. Later that night further action took place with more bloodshed. In the evening, conditions in one field hospital were appalling. There was one toilet and one cooking stove. There was a single surgeon to care for twenty-nine soldiers recovering from combat injuries or illness. There were limited medicines. Then the hospital was attacked and the thatch roof caught fire. Temperatures inside reached 48 degrees. This was the next Zulu assault, now at Rorke’s Drift in Natal, South Africa.

Within a week news had spread of the earlier crushing and embarrassing defeat of the British army at Isandhlwana. This was quickly pushed aside by stories of the later courageous rebuff. Then came the books, and then came the films. After those came the construction of myths.

Who were these magnificent warriors? They were amongst the most strongly built inhabitants of Africa. “Their system was based upon an effective combination of universal military service and obligatory blood-lust. No Zulu was considered to be a man until he had ‘washed his spear in blood’.“ They measured their wealth in heads of cattle. Their kings were pugnacious both politically and culturally. To this day they are a successful tribe, described by my Africa born niece as loud, adorable and arrogant.

I am of the generation of English brought up in the 1950s on war films that depict British bravery and pluck. Most were filmed in monochrome and starred John Mills, Harry Andrews or Alec Guinness. They were gritty, dour portrayals of famous battles when the Allies won, often against superior troops. At the age of fourteen I went to see a different film, Zulu. It is dramatic and hardboiled. It’s difference being it was filmed in colour. What stood out was the red coats of the British soldiers, their starkly white pith helmets, the magnificent brown torsos of the Zulus and the glistening blood. It is gory, cruel and unrealistically romantic. The distinctive musical soundtrack is by John Barry. This film made a big impression on me. I promised myself that one day I would visit the site of this battle.

In December 1982 I made my first visit to South Africa. Despite making attempts to travel north from Durban to Rorke’s Drift I failed to make the trip. One day I shall, I thought, one day. That day came in November 2019, a day when the thermometer didn’t reach double digits and the rain came slashing sideways from the Oskaberg hill. Not until I was embarked on this expedition did I realise the significance of the defence of Rorke’s Drift in 1879. In reality, it had little significance on the passage of events that followed. Yet the outcome of the defence had made an impact back in Britain far greater than the actual subsequent operations in the war in South Africa. Before planning this latest journey I had barely heard of the battle for Isandhlwana (that is, apart from Richard Burton’s rich voiceover in the film). Oh but how that name takes hold of my senses now.

The result of the first action on 22^nd January exposed the arrogance and incompetence that senior British Army officers could demonstrate. There was incompetence in getting basic tactics correct in preparing for a battle that they knew was imminent. Petty rivalry and niggling personal slights played a part. I find all this barely understandable in a military force that had swept aside opposition in other parts of the Empire. A lack of true leadership shown by Lord Chelmsford, when coupled with his lackadaisical communications skills, produced disastrous consequences. With the sheer number of representatives of the Imperial Crown in the Cape, there was plentiful intelligence on the Zulus. Chelmsford, through hubris or lack of nous, chose to think he knew best. He should have known that successive Zulu chiefs from Dingiswayo, then Shaka, Dingane, Mpande and Cetshwayo had brought stealth and passion to unifying the Zulu clans into a potent warrior force. To me, Chelmsford wantonly underestimated the sophistication of the Zulu.

My two days exploration of both battle sites of Isandhlwana and Rorke’s Drift left me with a sense of great tragedy. A legacy of violence hangs over this land a hundred and forty years later. In 1879 service in the British Army in South Africa was not for the faint hearted. It was rough, often hopeless and for far too many, fatal. Officers and men, (there were few notable women in this quest to expand the British Empire), were facing Impis whose lives were based totally on combat. King Shaka ruthlessly forged a single nation of warriors whose manhood could only be proved in washing the spears. There is at least one notable woman in the background; Shaka’s mother Nandi, who in her girlhood was a “wild, strong-willed maiden”, influenced much of Shaka’s youthful development. Zulus grew up in the embrace of a binary culture of farming and warfare. If the redcoats came to steal their land and cows they must be killed. And not just killed; they were eviscerated. This was to let the evil spirits out and cleanse the body.

When the British forces were overrun by the traditional ‘horns of the bull’ formation of Zulus at Isandhlwana the death toll of Europeans was 858 alone. By dusk there were over 3,500 bodies - including Natal Kaffirs and the fallen Zulus - strewn across the land. Blood permeated the earth all the way to Fugitive’s Drift, a crossing over the Buffalo River five miles away. The river formed the border between Natal and Zululand. Fifty-five survivors of the battle attempted to ford the river in the belief they would be safe on the Natal side. Two of the ardent would-be heroes were named Neville Coghill and Teignmouth Melville. Melville had rescued the Queen’s Colour from the battlefield; it brought dishonour to the whole regiment if a Colour was lost. He reached the river with another soldier and attempted to cross with the cumbersome Colour. Midstream they got into difficulty when their horses were disabled. Meanwhile, an injured and incapacitated Coghill, still mounted, had reached the river ahead of Melville and had reached the Natal bank. Seeing that Melville was in trouble Coghill forced his horse back into the river in an attempt to rescue Melville and the Colour. Coghill’s horse was shot and he was thrown into the water. Despite pulling Melville out of the water they were too exhausted and injured to climb far up the bank to safety. They were both hacked to pieces by Zulus who had followed them through the water. The Colour disappeared off downstream but was recovered later.

I found my way to a steep bank overlooking the Drift. There is a cross here overlooking the river that commemorates the two officers. I spent a while surveying the scene of desperation and bloodletting, reflecting on the horrors experienced by men who thought they had survived the main battle. Lt. Coghill and Lt. Melville were the first two recipients of a posthumous Victoria Cross. (A regulation stipulating that the V.C. could only be awarded to living souls changed in 1907.)

The attack on Rorke’s Drift should never have happened. The Zulu chief Cetshwayo had instructed his reserve impis, who had not fought at Isandhlwana, not to pursue the fleeing British and cross the Buffalo into Natal. The leader of the 4,000 reservists was Dabulamanzi kaMpande. Disobeying Cetshwayo his impi wanted to prove themselves in battle and set off towards Rorke’s Drift that they knew to be occupied by the British. When they arrived there, some ten miles from Isandhlwana, they found the small settlement, a Swedish Mission station. (Otto Witt had taken it over when the founder, an Irishman named James Rorke, died in 1875.)

There were three officers at Rorke’s Drift to whom the eventual defeat of the Zulus can be attributed: James Dalton, John Chard and Gonville Bromhead (played by Dennis Folbigge, Stanley Baker and Michael Caine in the 1964 film that was in an inaccurate representation of the actual battle). They were junior, inexperienced and yet highly organised officers doing a job that was largely driven by common sense. In the context of the entire British war with the Zulus they ended up as minor characters. Fortunately, Dalton in particular possessed a type of strategic brain that was missing in those officers in the main army ten miles away earlier in the day of 22^nd January 1879.

The Zulu impi arrived late in the afternoon. By 9:30 the next morning 300 Zulus lay dead, many more were mortally wounded. Just 17 British troops died. There was one man, John Williams, whose behaviour in the defence of the hospital stands out. To me he was a hero. The makeshift field hospital was made up of a number of rooms that were not connected. Once the Zulus had set fire to the thatch roof the only exit from these rooms was onto a veranda; but this was occupied by the rampaging native fighters. 

So Williams took up a pickaxe and forced a hole in the room he was in and dragged through the hole the ill patients to the next room. All the while the temperature was nearing 50 degrees. He proceeded to make two more holes in neighbouring rooms, collecting more patients as he went, before escaping out of a window in the side of the building. As our party made its way around the recreation of the hospital at Rorke’s Drift, I could only wonder in horror of the conditions Williams was working in and admire the guts and bravery of the man. He was one of eleven men awarded the Victoria Cross that night.

For those British serving in South Africa the action at Rorke’s Drift quickly passed into history. The Zulu army, having experienced triumph at Isandhlwana, never recovered from the reverse it suffered later that night. The battles and skirmishes that followed brought more personal stories that cling to this landscape. Into the picture stride two men with the stout British names of Redvers Buller and Chops Mossop.

With a fellow officer, Brigadier General Evelyn Wood, Buller had a plan to take on 1,000 Zulus camped on a plateau at Hlobane. Accounts of the battle describe the valiant attempts by Buller, on horseback, leading his men up steep crags to scale the mountain. First Buller attacked from the east, then from the west. All night his troop fought in an electric storm. Flashes of lightening highlighted Buller’s whereabouts to the impi who quickly moved to cut the soldiers off. Mossop was a trooper mounted on an extraordinary horse called Warrior. Multiple times Mossop and Warrior rode round crags to encounter groups of Zulus. Through a close rapport between rider and horse they escaped each brush with death. Inevitably Mossop and Warrior were wounded by the Zulu assegais and both became exhausted. Warrior’s saddletree was broken and gouged into his withers. Despite the horse’s pain and Mossop’s smashed arm they eventually reached the safety of the nearby camp at Kambula. The next morning Mossop went to examine his poor horse. “He found Warrior lying down and obviously far gone. Chops knelt and took his head in his lap; the horse recognised him, whinnied once and died.”

Through that night Buller had ridden up and down his lines of troops, constantly urging his men on. Frequently they rode in to Zulus who had by now surrounded the British on the plateau. Buller fought, rode, harried and numerous times rescued one of his men from being hacked to pieces. For his work that day and night, Redvers Buller was awarded the V.C.

For fifty-five years since watching that film I had a yearning to know more about the war’s characters. Some of them have now brought this landscape alive for me. Their stories add a sense of romance, pain and irony to the living land, now managed by ancestors of warriors that fought in 1879. In 2019 I met Mphiwa Ntanzi, whose grandfather and great-grandfather both fought for Cetshwayo at Isandhlwana.  Mphiwa conducted our visit to the battle site. He speaks with passion and clarity, using the inimitable clicking consonants, a feature of the Khoisan group of languages. From the back of his throat comes the sound of a spear thrust forward into a British belly and then the flesh sucking at the blade as it is withdrawn. He became excited, transfixed almost, at the telling of the events which he has done so many times. He embodies today a pride in the Zulu impis that inflicted defeat on the power of the British Empire. To my way of thinking it is entirely right that he feels this passion. I rejoice in his people’s hour of glory that was fairly won in battle. At this time in our lives of reassessing the force of imperialist white men powering their way into black lives and their land, the history of the Zulu nation is worthy of a deeper reflection.

Mphiwa - his grandfather fought here

Another contemporary figure in this landscape is Douglas Rattray, a historian at Fugitive’s Drift. His father David established a guest’s lodge at Fugitive’s Drift in 1989. David, Douglas and Mphiwa acquired a shared passion for telling the stories of the men who fought over the Ntanzis’ landscape. They have shared a keenness for the oral tradition of Zulu history. All around we found reminders of the tragedies surrounding the men who died a mile from here on 22^nd January 1879. I found no jingoism within Douglas and Mphiwa. That is one of the beautiful aspects to spending time with them. They helped me understand what Chard, Bromhead and Ntanzi lived through on 22^nd January 1879 and also the part the landscape played and how it presents today a window into the awful events that day.

I found it both exciting and humbling to tread the ground which 140 years ago hosted great drama and feats of almost unbelievable human endeavour. Beneath the field at Isandhlwana lie the bones of men slaughtered in the pursuit of an age-old desire for land. For the British it was also action to gain supremacy over a native (and by implication inferior) race. For the Zulus, they wanted to farm. Yet, maybe for a race whose instinct was to fight, that was not enough. The conclusion of the war was a terrible outcome for the Zulus and South Africa, the legacy of which lasts to this day. I think back to my visits to Soweto and the townships at Cape Flats.

With our sundowners in hand my wife and I looked out from Fugitive’s Drift west to Rorke’s Drift and north to Isandhlwana and contemplated what we felt. Today there is just wilderness. Where the gently undulating terrain in 1879 was carpeted in scrub, today it is covered with stubby trees and bushes. The sphinx’s head of Isandhlwana Mountain still rises up above a landscape now largely devoid of human drama. The rolling hills are peppered with small settlements providing home for descendants of the warriors, perpetuating a vigil over a graveyard of ghosts.

There are many books, (some listed below), films and articles devoted to both the history of the Anglo-Zulu wars and the military men who fought in them. Deliberately I have not recounted the detail of the battles – these books do a comprehensive job of that. Yet what none of them did for me was get under the skin of the people described, nor do they convey the passion and culture of the individuals taking part. (Unlike so many accounts of the Somme battles that portray the human experience of warfare.) Nor do they weld together successfully the lives of exceptional human beings to a distant land and interpret the impact of one on the other. This land reshaped the lives of Cetshwayo, Ntanzi, Coghill, Melville, Dalton, Chard, Bromhead, Buller and Mossop as they became defined through their actions in Zululand. It seems to me that the British action was carried out in the name of hypocrisy. Many of the politicians and top military brass in London cared little for the quest for even more British Empire in remote country north of the Cape. William Gladstone said of South Africa “we have chosen most unwisely…to place ourselves in the strange predicament of the free subjects of a monarchy going to coerce the free subjects of a republic”.

Boers and British imposed a terrible life on native Africans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Their imperial ambitions did not start out with a desire to subdue the Zulu, but that ended up being a consequence. The Dutch, British, German and Chinese settlers and conscripts who followed the ‘discovery’ of the Cape, raped the land between the Indian Ocean and the riches of the Transvaal and left it a poorer place. There is no gold here, nor precious stones. Maybe the Zulu nation, founded and built up on the basis of tilling the land and warfare, could not prosper after the arrival of men and women from Europe with a colossus of white civilisation. The Zulus are still largely based in the Natal landscape. They still have a king. Zulu is still the most widely spoken language in southern Africa, their tribe the largest. Zulu society has not changed much since the time of Shaka. Then the chiefs had land and cattle. Now they have land and a fancy car. The lack of both employment (in the modern sense) and a universal wealth from farming is keeping many Zulus oppressed. So they hang on to the past and in the process feel free of development and the threat of change. These proud African people deserve a better life than the one the white men bequeathed.

Bibliography

The Last Zulu King; the life and death of Cetshwayo; C.T. Binns; 1963

The Washing of the Spears: the rise and fall of the Zulu nation; Donald R. Morris; 1965

Heaven’s Command; an Imperial Progress; James Morris; 1973

The Covenant; James A. Michener; 1980

The Curling Letters of the Zulu War; ed. Adrian Greaves & Brian Best; 2001

Zulu Rising; Ian Knight, 2011

Zulu Warriors; the battle for the South African Frontier; John Laband; 2014

With special thanks to Shelley Pomeroy.