Rorke's Drift and Isandlwana 1879 E-Book

Chris Peers

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 194

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

On 22 January 1879 a powerful British column invading Zululand was decisively defeated beneath a hill called Isandlwana. Later on the same day, 4,000 Zulus attacked a garrison of no more than 100 British troops at the mission station at Rorke's Drift, only a few miles from Isandlwana. The British held out against all reasonable expectations, eventually beating off their attackers and winning eleven Victoria Crosses between them. The location where these battles were fought have been places of pilgrimage ever since. Rorke's Drift & Isandlwana 1879 is a guide to assist the visitor to the two sites with details on how to get there and where to stay. It also discusses the background to the Anglo-Zulu War, the two battles themselves and seeks to make sense of the events that happened there.

Leseprobe

First published in 2017

The History Press

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This ebook edition first published in 2017

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© Chris Peers, 2017

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EPUB ISBN 978 0 7509 6969 7

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Contents

one

Introduction and Acknowledgements

two

Background to the Anglo-Zulu War

three

The Opposing Armies

four

The Campaign Begins

five

The Battle of Isandlwana

six

The Fight at Rorke’s Drift

seven

The Aftermath

eight

Getting There

nine

A Visit to Isandlwana

ten

A Visit to Rorke’s Drift

Recommended Reading

Bibliography

Introduction and Acknowledgements

At the beginning of 1879 a series of events occurred in what is now Kwazulu-Natal Province, South Africa, that shook the British Empire to its core. At that time Britain was by far the greatest of the European ‘great powers’ that were in the process of dividing the rest of the world among them, and as the world’s leading industrial economy it could provide its armies with the very latest in military technology. Africa, on the other hand, was generally regarded as backward and unsophisticated, its warriors still relying on spears or obsolete and dilapidated muskets traded by unscrupulous arms dealers. Two of the continent’s greatest kingdoms had already suffered defeat at the hands of the British – Ethiopia in 1868 and Ashanti in 1874, both of them principally because of the inability of their unquestionably courageous fighting men to stand up to British firepower in pitched battle. Within South Africa itself the Xhosa of the Eastern Cape had just lost the last of nine Cape Frontier Wars for the same reason; although the Xhosa spearmen could be deadly when fighting from ambush, their armies quickly melted away under fire from breech-loading rifles. But on 22 January 1879 a powerful British column invading Zululand was decisively defeated beneath a hill called Isandlwana – not by trickery or ambush, but in what used to be called a ‘fair fight’ in the open – losing nearly half its men, including a whole battalion of regular infantry virtually wiped out. Then, later on the same day, a garrison of no more than 100 British troops was attacked furiously by forty times their number of Zulus at the mission station at Rorke’s Drift, only a few miles from Isandlwana. But on this occasion the British held out against all reasonable expectations, eventually beating off their attackers and winning eleven Victoria Crosses (VCs) between them – still the most VCs ever won in a single day’s action. This epic story would be enough by itself to explain the enduring interest in the war, but it was the release in 1966 of Cy Endfield and Stanley Baker’s film Zulu that secured its place as the archetypal tale of Victorian heroism.

The spectacular view eastwards across Zululand from the grounds of Rorke’s Drift Lodge on the slopes of the Biggarsberg Mountains.

The two sites where these battles were fought have been places of pilgrimage ever since. Naturally they have always been especially popular with British visitors, although an increasing number are now coming from the USA and other countries. Sheer distance means that they are still a once in a lifetime trip for many enthusiasts, but they are relatively accessible, even for those with limited mobility, and a visit will often form part of a longer tour of South Africa, a country that offers a wide variety of fascinating experiences. Isandlwana and Rorke’s Drift are separate battlefields, located about 14km apart, but for several reasons it makes sense to treat them together. The battles were fought on the same day, between elements of the same armies, and a few men even fought in both. It would be impossible to understand the action at Rorke’s Drift without a knowledge of the events that took place a few hours earlier at Isandlwana. Visiting the sites today underlines even more emphatically the close connections between them. No one is likely to travel so far to see one of them without visiting the other less than an hour’s drive away, and the tours run by both international operators and local guides are almost invariably organised on this principle. At the sites themselves there is also a considerable amount of overlap in the information on display. The memorial to the 24th Regiment of Foot at Isandlwana, for example, commemorates the dead of both battles, and the visitor centre there features one of the most comprehensive rolls of the defenders of Rorke’s Drift. Conversely, the easiest way to understand the effects of the terrain at Isandlwana is to examine the excellent three-dimensional terrain model at the Rorke’s Drift museum.

Both sites have been affected by modern development, but from a visitor’s point of view they have if anything been enhanced rather than damaged: the buildings at Rorke’s Drift, for example, post-date the battle, but have been built on the same foundations as the originals and in a very similar style. The surrounding countryside is just untamed enough to give a flavour of Africa, but there are now luxury lodges within easy reach. Coach tours starting in Durban or Johannesburg regularly bring parties from further afield. Nevertheless, the battlefields are seldom overcrowded, except perhaps when special events are organised, and independent travellers will often have the sites almost to themselves.

Relief map of Kwazulu-Natal. (copyright www.freeworldmaps.net)

The aim of this guide is to assist the visitor to these two sites with details on how to get there, where to stay, and how to make sense of the events that happened there nearly 140 years ago. The principal source of information is the author’s visit in October 2015. Many people will prefer to go on an organised tour, with professional guides included, an option that will take a lot of the work out of planning a trip. For those who are on a tighter budget, or simply prefer to travel independently, it is perfectly possible to do so, and they should find all the information they need here. It is also to be hoped that the up-to-date overview of the current condition of the battlefields may be of interest to those who are not currently planning a visit, or have done so in the past.

In order to get the best out of a tour it is necessary to understand at least the general outline of what was a very complicated – and still controversial – sequence of events. In the case of both battles there are a handful of accounts from the Zulu side, but these come only from junior officers or rank and file warriors, so while they can shed very useful light on particular events we have next to no information on the Zulu battle plans.

The great majority of the British participants at Isandlwana were killed there, including both colonels, and all the officers and men of the regular infantry companies, while those men who survived escaped before the final phase of the battle. Therefore, many of the events surrounding it have to be pieced together from fragmentary and sometimes contradictory accounts. These can be supplemented by battlefield archaeology and what is known as ‘inherent military probability’, which basically involves asking ‘what would – or should – professional soldiers have done in this situation?’ Several modern accounts have done an excellent job of this, but the fact remains that we know less than we would like to about what actually happened. Of course, because this was a disaster for the British Army, there has also been a long-running controversy about who was to blame. I have tried on the whole to steer clear of this, having much sympathy for the view that it is more constructive to look at it not as a British defeat but as a Zulu victory. Rorke’s Drift, on the other hand, is very well documented, at least from the British side. We have several detailed accounts from participants, including the report of the officer commanding, Lieutenant Chard, and another from an experienced senior non-commissioned officer (NCO), Colour Sergeant Bourne. The names of the combatants (with a few minor uncertainties), the casualties and even the nature of their wounds are recorded, while in some cases we are given, or can reconstruct with varying degrees of certainty, the precise movements of individuals during the battle. But even here we can hardly expect the survivors to have kept a detailed record of events as they were happening, and the inevitable confusion of battle is reflected in their various accounts.

I offer the version given here not as an expert on the Anglo-Zulu War, but merely as someone with a little knowledge of nineteenth-century African warfare who has seen the battlefields with what he hopes is a fresh eye. It is not the intention to go into great detail about every phase of the fighting, as the historical events have already been very well covered in numerous books, a selection of which are listed in Recommended Reading and in the Bibliography. My brief account of the battles is intended purely to explain something of the background to the non-expert visitor. It is based almost entirely on secondary sources and information supplied by the people mentioned below, supplemented by personal impressions of the terrain, and has no real pretensions to scholarship. Inevitably it will reflect a personal opinion on some questions that are still debated, but those who want to examine the issues in depth should consult the works of the experts. Those individuals credited here have provided many insights that I have found very valuable, but they can in no way be held responsible for any errors, omissions or misinterpretations on my part.

Among the many people who have helped with the research for this guide, I would particularly like to thank the following:

Paul and Christine Lamberth and the staff at Rorke’s Drift Lodge. Thanks to Paul’s vast knowledge of the area and its history I have been able to visit places I would otherwise not have seen, and to understand much more clearly what I was seeing. I can recommend him very highly as a guide.

Thulani Khuzwayo at Rorke’s Drift. Thulani has been extremely generous with his time, and in conversations with him I have gained new perspectives on the Zulu view of their own history as well as on events in present-day South Africa.

Ray Boyles, for the loan of books, CDs and photographs from sites I have not managed to visit, as well as for his extensive list of useful contacts.

Alan Rogers and John Peers, for trusting me with their photographic equipment.

And not least my wife Kate and my children Megan and John, for patiently putting up with me disappearing to the other side of the world and pretending it was all ‘work’.

A note on measurements and distances: South Africa today uses the metric system, but Lord Chelmsford’s army used imperial feet, yards and miles, or more informally paces – a system with which many older British people are still more familiar. For most purposes, such as distances when travelling by road, I have adopted the metric measurements that the visitor will encounter on road signs and other local sources of information, but where a mention of distances on the battlefields is derived from a nineteenth-century source I have left it in its original form.

The landscape of northern Zululand, looking south-west from the St Lucia–Hlobane road in the direction of Ulundi. Even today the contrast is marked between the more enclosed and wooded countryside of Natal south of the Buffalo and Tugela rivers, with its fenced farms, sugarcane fields and eucalyptus plantations, and the wide horizons of Zululand proper.

LANGUAGES

South Africa has eleven official languages – more than any other country in the world – but English is the most widely spoken, and the only one that you are likely to need. The most commonly encountered local idiom is ‘braai’, which is a barbecue, but if you have to ask directions anywhere, also remember that a ‘robot’ is a traffic light. Place names in Kwazulu-Natal may be derived from English, Afrikaans or isiZulu, as the Zulu language is properly known. In the nineteenth century isiZulu was not a written language, and British writers rendered local words and place names in a bewildering variety of ways. Isandlwana, for example, appears in different sources as Isandhlwana, Insalwana or even Isandula. I have tried to give these words in the form which the battlefield visitor is most likely to encounter today, but there will inevitably be a few inconsistencies. Names, especially those of places and military units, often begin with a prefix before the noun, which is written with a lower case initial letter: for example the language isiZulu or the uKhandempemvu Regiment. However, well-known places are usually rendered in English in a more familiar form, hence you will see Kwazulu rather than kwa-Zulu, and Isandlwana rather than iSandlwana, a convention that I have followed here.

The Zulu language contains a number of sounds that cannot easily be expressed in English, and which English speakers often struggle to reproduce anyway. Suffice it to say that in the modern written language the letters c, q and x represent different types of clicks, so that in the name of the town of Nqutu, for example, the ‘q’ is pronounced by curling back the tip of the tongue against the roof of the mouth and then flicking it forward. This seems easy enough after a few minutes’ solo practice, but doing it fluently in conversation is another matter. Luckily the local people are very tolerant of outsiders’ efforts, and if you end up saying something like ‘Nkutu’ they will still know where you mean. In fact, all Zulus of school age and above will be fluent in English, though most seem to be genuinely appreciative of efforts to address them in their own language, however haltingly. In contrast to the situation in so many places, they will not ignore your pitiful efforts or insist on speaking to you in English regardless. It is not within the scope of this book to offer lessons in isiZulu, but even a casual ‘sawubona, unjani?’ (‘Hello, how are you?’) is a good way to break the ice (the expected answer is ‘ngiyaphila’, ‘I am fine’). ‘Yebo’, ‘yes’ or ‘OK’ seems to have got into the South African idiom generally, and you might hear it even in conversations carried on in English.

SHAKA ZULU

The Zulu nation was founded by King Shaka kaSenzangakhona (the prefix ka meaning ‘son of’), who reigned from 1816 to 1828, and whose nephew Cetshwayo kaMpande was on the throne in 1879. Outside South Africa Shaka has long enjoyed a reputation as a tyrant, a monster of cruelty who murdered his own people on a whim, and whose campaigns of conquest depopulated huge areas of the interior. This is not the place for a lengthy discussion of the real nature of his rule, but the visitor may be surprised to discover that the view of Shaka prevalent in Zululand today is very different. For those arriving in Durban by air the first clue will be the name of their destination: King Shaka International Airport. From the coast road south of the town of kwaDukuza-Stanger – once the site of the king’s kraal, or base – a sign points to Shaka’s Rock, where the king is said to have sat and contemplated the sea and the invaders that it was bringing to his land. (An alternative story, more in line with the traditional ‘monster’ theme, has it that he threw his enemies from the rock to drown.) In the town itself a memorial marks the spot where he was assassinated. In Durban a major new attraction is uShaka Marine World, situated on King Shaka Avenue. And near Eshowe there is Shakaland, a theme park that offers reconstructions of traditional Zulu life and culture. As long ago as 1994 the king’s new image was the subject of an academic book, Inventing Shaka, by Daphna Golan (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1994), and since then the process has continued. Today, the visitor might well find it hard to discover anyone in Kwazulu-Natal, black or white, who has a bad word to say about him.

Their argument is that the stories of his cruelty were invented or exaggerated by the white traders who wrote about him in order to emphasise their own courage and sell their books, and certainly many of them are old chestnuts, told about countless tyrants throughout history. The undoubted tragedy that the wars of his reign involved for large areas of southern Africa could be seen as an unintended consequence of Zulu success in what were essentially defensive campaigns, and in any case the devastation might have been exaggerated by white men who took advantage of the chaos to seize land. On the other hand, Shaka undoubtedly founded a great nation – admittedly by violent means, but that was hardly unusual in that time and place – and showed himself to be an outstanding military innovator. He was forward thinking in his attitude to European inventions and was interested in such unlikely subjects as the migration of birds. It is even possible that his notorious disapproval of marriage and sexual activity was prompted by a realisation that overpopulation was driving much of the unrest in the region. It is difficult to untangle the reality from the conflicting traditions, and much of what we think we know about Shaka’s life might be mythical in any case, but it is obvious that as a symbol of local pride he continues to extend his influence well beyond the Zulu people themselves.

Background to the Anglo-Zulu War

A detailed account of the causes as well as the conduct of the war is beyond the scope of this guide. The visitor to this rather remote corner of Africa might, however, be excused for wondering what the British Army was doing there in the first place, and what threat the Zulus could possibly have posed to warrant the deployment of a full-scale expeditionary force so far from home. The ultimate cause of the war was that the Zulus – whether they knew it or not – occupied a strategic position on the sea route to India. India was by far the most important of Britain’s overseas possessions, and the source of immense wealth for its traders and investors.The main reason for the British occupation of Cape Town in 1806 was its value as a supply base and naval port on the sea route to India around the Cape of Good Hope. Unlike most of the continent, the southern tip of Africa proved inviting to white settlers – both the Boers, descendants of the Dutch farmers who had arrived in the seventeenth century, and the more recent British immigrants – and the authorities at the Cape were gradually forced to extend their power inland to protect and control them. In the 1830s many Boers trekked north in the hope of escaping British control, eventually establishing independent republics in the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. Meanwhile, the British founded what was to become the city of Durban on the east coast, in a region that earlier Portuguese explorers had christened Natal.

The Natal colony was well beyond the imperial frontier at that time, and the settlers’ claim to the area was based on an award by Shaka, the ruler of the neighbouring Zulu kingdom, who in 1824 had granted permission for a small colony of traders to establish themselves there. This Zulu kingdom was a very different sort of political entity from most of those encountered by white settlers elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa. Its role in the history of the region was so dominant that it is easy to forget that in 1879 it had only been in existence for around sixty years. The Zulus were a branch of the Nguni people, descendants of the Bantu from the north who had brought their cattle to graze on the rich grasslands of what is now Kwazulu-Natal hundreds of years before. Cattle, in fact, were fundamental to Zulu culture and society, and remain so to this day. In the eighteenth century the tribes living north of the Thukela (or Tugela) River and east of the Drakensberg Mountains had been grouped into four main clans: the Ngwame, Mthethwa, Ndwandwe and Qwabe. As their population grew and grazing land became scarcer, a series of increasingly bitter wars broke out between the rival clans. At first these were fought in the traditional style, which mainly involved hurling insults and spears from a distance, a practice known as giya. But around 1816 a young soldier of fortune named Shaka, who had formerly been in the service of the Mthethwa chief Dingiswayo, seized power among a small sub-clan called the amaZulu or Zulus, the ‘people of heaven’, and revolutionised their tiny army with a series of military reforms. The throwing spears were abandoned and replaced by the famous short stabbing assegai, or iklwa; shields became larger, and the Zulus were instructed to abandon their indecisive skirmishing tactics and instead to charge their opponents and kill them in hand-to-hand combat.

Historians still debate the question of whether Shaka actually invented the new weapons and tactics or merely popularised them, but either way there can be no doubt of their effectiveness. Over the next decade he destroyed one rival army after another, incorporating many of the defeated into the rapidly growing Zulu kingdom, while sending others fleeing in all directions. This upheaval affected the entire south-eastern quarter of the continent, and later became notorious as the mfecane, or ‘crushing’. In fact, most of the Zulus’ neighbours in the late nineteenth century – the Swazis to the north, the Sotho in the Drakensberg and the Matabele of what is now Zimbabwe, to name only the most prominent – were descended at least partly from these refugees. Shaka was assassinated in 1828, but the kingdom he established endured. Under his successor, Dingaan, the Zulus fought against the Boers who were trekking up from the Cape Colony, and suffered a disastrous defeat when they tried to attack a prepared wagon laager at Blood River in 1838. A subsequent Boer invasion force was ambushed on the White Imfolozi River and forced to retire, but the discredited Dingaan was overthrown in the following year by his half-brother, Mpande. Meanwhile, British and Boer settlers were flooding into the territory south of the Thukela River, and in 1844 Natal was officially annexed by Cape Colony.