LIKE LIONS THEY FOUGHT
The Zulu War and the Fall of the Last Black Empire
in South Africa
Robert B. Edgerton
New York: The Free Press, 1988
320 pp. $22.95
There were seven bloody, brutal battles and uncounted small, sanguinary encounters in the Zulu War of 1879, and Robert B. Edgerton has described them all, or nearly all, in this newest book on the Zulus.
There has been an increasing interest in the Zulus in recent years, fueled by films such as Zulu and Zulu Dawn; the television mini-series on their great king, Shaka; a considerable number of books and magazine articles; and by newspaper accounts of the Zulus' growing influence in South Africa under Gatsha Buthelezi, their present leader. Most accounts of the war, both on film and in print, have described the conflict only from the British side. Edgerton has shown, as best it can be shown, the war as it appeared both to the Zulus and to the British and this has made his account particularly attractive. If his tale is a tad tendentious, it is because the author's sympathies are more with the Zulus than with the British--as perhaps they should be, given the circumstances.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century the Zulus were a small tribe, but under the leadership of a king named Shaka, or Chaka, who developed an efficient army that he taught to fight with assegais (short stabbing spears), they conquered and absorbed all their neighbors and formed a powerful African nation about the size of Georgia. Shaka thus made the name Zulu a synonym for terror.
The Zulu nation survived Shaka's assassination in 1828, although its history became less bloody. Many of the institutions and customs he had established or initiated survived as well, notably his military system: an army composed of impis (regiments) formed by age groups who were taught to fight in a crescent formation, the horns enabling them to make double envelopments. Even though they had grown less bellicose, they were still dreaded. As white settlers, mostly Boers and Britons, moved into the neighboring British colony of Natal, the presence of the Zulus north of the Buffalo and Tugela rivers made them apprehensive. It was primarily this fear of the Zulus that caused the outbreak of war.
In the previous fifty years, although there had been civil war within Zululand, the Zulus had lived in peace with their neighbors in Natal, of whom in 1879 about 23,000 were European and almost an equal number were Indian. Cetshwayo, the Zulu king, had no quarrel with the white men and had no designs upon their lands or other property. But the white settlers felt themselves living on the edge of a volcano, for they knew that if the Zulus in their thousands ever chose to attack, they would be powerless to resist. They therefore maintained a constant clamor for British protection.
In 1877 Britain annexed the Boer republic known as the Transvaal and Sir Theophilus Shepstone, the secretary for native affairs in South Africa--a man with a "talent for duplicity"--and Sir Henry Bartle Edward Frere, Governor of Cape Colony and high commissioner for native affairs in South Africa, aspired to throw the
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