by Jan Morris
In 1875 this magnificent slab of country, ranging from the heavenly wine valleys of the Cape to the arid plateau of the Transvaal, was as usual in tumult. The obdurate Transvaal Boers were constantly at war with the blacks upon their ill-defined frontiers, and were also threatening to cock a snook at the Empire by building a railway to Delagoa Bay, in Portuguese East Africa, to give themselves an independent outlet to the world. The Zulus were in a fighting mood, their young warriors chafing for battle, their elders resentful of Boers and Britons alike. The British had internecine squabbles of their own, and by employing the imperial sleight of hand to acquire the newly discovered diamond field area in Griqualand East, they had gravely offended the Afrikaners of the Orange Free State.1
Over it all, though, the British believed themselves to have rights of paramountcy, or at least trusteeship, and the whole inflammatory muddle, Carnarvon reasoned, could be cleared if Africa south of the Zambesi could be amalgamated into a single imperial unit. In particular the South African Republic of the Transvaal, which prescient imperialists already foresaw as the future epicentre of South Africa, must be drawn back into the imperial brotherhood which its leaders had so stubbornly eluded for so long. The British would outnumber the Boers in such an association, the blacks would be subdued by sweet reason, and the imperial authority could devolve its authority and cut its costs without taking undue risks (for as a Colonial Office specialist had declared only a few years before the opening of the Suez Canal, the Cape was unquestionably ‘the true centre of the Empire’, and upon the security of the Simonstown base might depend the whole imperial future).
First Carnarvon tried persuasion, sending out to Durban that inescapable champion of empire, Major-General Sir Garnet Wolseley, K.C.B.—ostensibly as Governor of Natal, really as an apostle of federation. For a time he hoped that a confederation might actually be convened under the chairmanship of Britain’s Only General, but Wolseley’s charm proved less effective with the Boers than with the susceptible British colonists, and the plan came to nothing. Carnarvon was therefore goaded into a very different tactic. In the spring of 1877 he ordered, if not explicitly at least between the lines of his instructions, the annexation of the South African Republic.
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The Transvaal had this in common with the British Empire, that it distinctly lacked system. The Voortrekkers who had pushed across the Vaal and encamped upon that bitter and remote plateau had taken with them their own ideas of an acceptable society—one in which Government interference was limited to the minimum, and burghers were free to trek where they liked, farm how they liked, treat their natives as the Bible taught them and their elected rulers with absolute familiarity. They were an intensely political people, but parochial. Their little State was racked always with dissension, and the writ of the Republic ran feebly among the scattered farmsteads of the veld. As always, the Boers wanted only to live the lekker lewe. For the most part they left commerce to the thousand or so English settlers in the Republic. They honoured their own ideals of privacy—farms so big that one could not see the smoke from the next man’s chimney—and they maintained a labour system that still looked to foreigners very like slavery. The Transvaal was a fundamentalist State. It had no real frontiers, only a rudimentary administration, and no regular army, but it believed in God’s hierarchy: whites on top, blacks below, and an unquestioning obedience to the Mosaic law.
Federation apart, there were persuasive arguments for the seizure of this queer republic. Disraeli was taking the imperialist bit between his teeth, and probably reasoned that a small and successful coup would win votes. There were rumours of gold up there; the Boer treatment of the blacks still stuck in British gullets; the idea that the Boers might be plotting with the Germans, the French or the Portuguese was disturbing to the imperialists; there was a very real possibility that the Zulus might overwhelm the Republic and precipitate a wider war. Besides, the Republic was in such a miserable condition that it only deserved annexation. It was bankrupt, official salaries sometimes being paid in postage stamps, and its President, the mild-mannered predikant Thomas Burgers, was constantly at odds with the extreme fundamentalists, the Doppers, who thought him an irreligious heretic—he did not believe, it was reliably rumoured, that the devil had a tail, and he had sacrilegiously allowed his own head to be engraved upon the Transvaal gold sovereign. Split by the endemic Boer antipathies, threatened by its black neighbours, the South African Republic seemed ripe for Victoria’s maternal embrace.
The Empire’s agent in the affair was Sir Theophilus Shepstone, one of the best-known Englishmen in South Africa, and a veteran imperialist. Shepstone had spent most of his life in Africa, being the son of a Wesleyan missionary, and his clan was to figure repeatedly throughout the late Victorian history of South Africa. He had been Secretary for Native Affairs in Natal, he spoke Zulu and Xhosa, he was called by the Africans ‘Somtseu’, or Mighty Hunter, and had no love for the Boers. A silent cunning man, his high brow and dark eyes, set above a large severe mouth and a cleft chin, made him look paradoxically piratical, like an evangelical Disraeli. Shepstone was sent to Pretoria, the Transvaal capital, as Special Commissioner to the South African Republic, ostensibly to report on the situation there, but with secret instructions to annex the republic if he found that enough Transvaalers wanted it—or for that matter, he was told verbally, if they did not. Such a mission suited his temperament. He was not a very straightforward man. A lifetime of African intrigue had given him an African approach to life and affairs, and he rode into the Transvaal in what might be called a tribal frame of mind.
There he goes along the dusty road to the capital, in many ways the archetype of the British imperialist in Africa—shrewd, calculating, pious, half-educated, overbearing, elated by his recent KCMG and accompanied by his private secretary Rider Haggard (‘a leggy-looking youth’, as was said at the time, ‘who seems the picture of weakness and dullness’). Two or three clerks rode with him, and they were escorted by a troop of mounted policemen. The Boer farmers along the way, lounging outside their farmsteads in their floppy hats and corduroy leggings, smoked their pipes impassively as the little convoy passed; and the British traders whose stores they used for lodgings along the road, when the troopers had fed their horses and His Excellency had retired to his tent for dinner with young Haggard, curiously inquired after the purpose of the mission, and doubtless drew their own conclusions.
After a month’s leisurely travel they reached Pretoria. It was the simplest of capitals then. It had not existed at all until 1856, when four squabbling Trekker republics had united, and it was still little more than a village on the veld, flowered and dusty. An avenue of blue gum trees led into town from the south, and trees and gardens were everywhere—fig trees beside every verandah, roses on every trellis, willow-trees to mark the bungalow boundaries, with rows of rich vegetables behind. Along the dirt-streets rumbled the great ox-wagons of the Boers, not much changed since the days of the Trek, their long teams of oxen flicked still by ox-hide whips from wagoners far behind. On the stoeps the burghers comfortably sat, and the women wore clogs and poke bonnets. Sparkling watercourses gave the town vivacity, and all was bathed in the brilliant smokeless light of the high veld, the most exhilarating light on earth.
In the centre of town was Church Square, the heart of the republic, and of Afrikanerdom. There stood the thatched Reform Church, and the Raadsaal with its broad steps, where the burghers of the Volksraad deliberated, and outside whose doors, every three months, the people met in Nachtmaal—half a religious ceremony, half a folk-gathering, when marriages were celebrated, babies were baptized, feuds were consummated and the square was cluttered with market stalls, tents and wagons. Into this symbolic spot, this kraal of the Boers, Sir Theophilus Shepstone confidently rode: and presenting himself to the President, who cautiously welcomed him as ‘a friendly adviser’, he presently set in train the extinction of the Republic
Shepstone was soon able to persuade himself that most of the
Boers wished to join the Empire again. ‘Great majority of Boers,’ he cabled Carnarvon, ‘welcome change.’ This was quite untrue. The vast majority of the Boers had not shifted their views about the British Empire since their forebears first escaped from it forty years before. The Transvaalers were, however, unprepared and divided; President Burgers was sick and weak; on April 12, 1877, the annexation of the South African Republic was declared. Shepstone’s mounted policemen paraded smartly in Church Square, and Haggard himself ran the Union Jack up the Raadsaal flagstaff. The Volksraad was suspended. The President was pensioned off. Sir Garnet Wolseley arrived to assume the administration, proclaiming the Queen’s will that the Transvaal should continue to be for ever an integral part of her dominions in South Africa—until, he added, warming to his theme, the River Vaal reversed its flow. Two generations after the Great Trek, the British had caught up with the last of the Voortrekkers.
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At home the Liberals fiercely attacked the annexation. Gladstone, as leader of the Opposition, called the Transvaal a country ‘where we have chosen most unwisely, I am tempted to say insanely, to place ourselves in the strange predicament of the free subjects of a monarchy going to coerce the free subjects of a republic’. The public, though, generally approved of the move, and Carnarvon was encouraged to proceed with further plans for federation. He appointed to the Governorship of Cape Colony Sir Bartle Frere, an eminent Anglo-Indian administrator, who would he hoped be the first Governor-General of the confederacy.
Frere was a bold and frank expansionist, and in Cape Town he enjoyed the advantages of remoteness. There was no cable from London yet, and telegrams had to come by steamer from the Cape Verde Islands, taking at least 16 days. The next move in the South African drama was accordingly all his own. Ignoring prohibitions from home, behaving as his dauntless predecessors might, long before in India, in January 1879 he carried things a stage further by ordering a British invasion of Zululand, another awkwardly independent segment in the patchwork of South African sovereignty.
The Zulus were still among the most alarming of the African peoples. Dingaan’s grandson Cetewayo was king now: he had been crowned in 1873 by Shepstone himself, as representative of the Great White Queen, with an ad hoc crown like Cakobau’s in Fiji. He himself was not a very military man, but his armies remained ferocious. 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’, and warriors of the Zulu army were compulsorily celibate until they had killed or wounded an enemy, which made for warlike men and sanguinary women. With their terrible feathered panoplies, the inexorable jogtrot of their advance, the scream and eerie hiss of their war-cries, and the massed black immensity of the impis, organized by age-groups and often 20,000 strong, in which they moved shield to shield across the grand landscape of Zululand, they were among the most spectacular of all the theatrical enemies the British empire felt itself obliged to fight. They had very few guns. They relied upon their heavy assegais, and upon simple tactical manoeuvres—in particular a double encircling movement, in which an enemy found itself, half-paralysed with terror like a hypnotized chicken, swamped by the mass of the Zulu frontal force (‘the chest’) while smaller racing impis (‘the horns’) swept behind to cut off their retreat.
The Zulus were splendid of appearance and very brave, and there were Englishmen who swore by their integrity. Bishop Colenso was the most famous of Zuluphiles, but scattered throughout Zululand were English traders and missionaries whose lives were in Cetewayo’s hands, and who found themselves treated fairly, even generously. Shepstone, who had lived much of his life among the Zulus, had a high opinion of their abilities: the English trader John Dunn had married into the Zulu royal family and become a Zulu chief himself, ruling over some 10,000 people and maintaining forty-nine wives.1 But they were inconceivably bloodthirsty. To them as to the Ashanti, or to Speke’s lion-stepping king of the Buganda, human life was scarcely sacrosanct. Death was part of the natural order, and could be hastened without degradation. Zulus who broke the kingdom’s rigid social laws were ruthlessly tortured or killed, and captured enemies too found themselves lightly chopped about with assegais. The nation was like a vast black predator lurking in its downlands, now pouncing upon the Swazis or the Basutos, now threatening the British or the Boers. Everybody was scared of the Zulus, and the British in particular were nervous that some grand Zulu washing of the spears might trigger off a native rising throughout South Africa.
Frere had early reached the decision that this ferocious people must be subdued, if South Africa was to be ordered. Carnarvon had resigned in 1878, disagreeing with Disraeli’s policies towards Russia, and his successor as patron of South Africa federation was Sir Michael Hicks Beach, a remote and ineffectual politician. Frere accordingly followed his own instincts. He used as his casus belli an old Boer-Zulu frontier dispute, which had been settled in Cetewayo’s favour by a British commission of inquiry. The disputed land would only be handed over, he told the King, if the Zulus would disband their terrible armies, reform their draconian code of justice, and receive a British Resident at their capital, Ulundi. He demanded, in fact, the disbandment of the old Zulu order, and the abdication of its military power. Such a demand was, of course, no surprise. Cetewayo must have expected it sooner or later; even Colenso recognized its inevitability, and approved the ultimatum. The Zulus were given thirty days to reply, and when no answer came, in January 1879 three columns of the British Army, 16,000 strong, crossed the northern frontier of Natal, and invaded Zululand.
Lord Chelmsford was the British commander in this, perhaps the best-known of the colonial wars, and many another military figure now familiar to us haunts the background of the drama—Butler, Buller, Colley, the ubiquitous Wolseley. Chelmsford was born Frederick Thesiger, of a family which had emigrated to England from Saxony a century before, and he had enjoyed a conventionally varied imperial career: in Canada, in India, in Ireland, in Abyssinia. He had married the daughter of an Indian Army general, had commanded at Aldershot, and was exceptional among the often choleric commanders of the day for his qualities of reticent tact and sympathy.
But tact and sympathy, alas, were the last qualities needed to crush the merciless Cetewayo, who had 50,000 men under arms, and who had once replied to a mild British protest about the frequency of executions in Zululand: ‘Do not consider that I have done anything yet in the way of killing…. I have not yet begun; I have yet to kill; it is the custom of our nation and I shall not depart from it’. The fascination of the Zulu War is its confrontation of temperamental opposites, each fighting by their own military standards a war of text-book orthodoxy. If the Ashanti campaign was like an exhibition war, this was like a war in fiction, so wonderfully apposite were its settings, and so faithfully did its shape conform to dramatic unities. There were three memorable battles: each meant something different to the British, and together they composed a pattern of action that was to become almost compulsory in the later campaigns of the British Empire—the opening tragedy, the heroic redemption, the final crushing victory.
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The tragedy was Isandhlwana. Setting off into the uplands of Zululand in the glorious stimulation of a South African January, Lord Chelmsford meant to make this a quick war of attrition. He wanted to destroy the impis wherever they were, and with all the paraphernalia of the Victorian wars, the heavy guns and the traction engines and Hale’s patent rockets, the great shire horses brought specially from England, the inescapable naval brigade, the customary cloud of locally recruited irregulars or militia-men, the worldly-wise columns of redcoats, he made straight for Ulundi, but hoped to meet and obliterate the main body of the Zulu army on the way. He himself commanded the central column of the force, entering Zululand at a crossing over the Buffalo River called Rorke’s Drift, where an Irish farmer had built a store thirty years before, and where there was now a mission house. Ten miles beyond the ford t
he soldiers reached a level plain among the Nqutu Hills, and there, where the track ascended northwards towards a saddle in the ridge, they pitched camp.
This was Isandhlwana. It was a place of grim magnificence. Above the plain there arose a crook-backed mountain, whose outline was unmistakable, and could be seen crouching tawnily among the low surrounding ridges from far away across the downs. The plain itself, rising gently towards the peak, was enclosed by folded hills, pierced here and there by ravines to the wider flatlands beyond. A shallow stream ran across it, but gave no sparkle to the scene, and there were few trees to be seen—only the brown and shaly ground, the shadowed ridges all around, and the ominous crooked silhouette of the mountain above. Isandhlwana looked just what it proved to be: a killing ground. The British pitched camp there without laagering or entrenching, despite advice they had been given by the Boers, who knew all about Zulu wars. Instead pickets were posted, mounted vedettes were dispatched to the surrounding heights, and a guard was set on the saddle beside the peak, with a view up the trade to the north.
There was no sign of the enemy on the night of January 20, but next day a reconnaissance force clashed with an impi to the northwest, and Chelmsford himself, hoping he might have found the main enemy force, marched off over the hill with about half his men. As a result almost all the others died: for while the general was away, on January 22, 1879, the main body of Cetewayo’s army did indeed appear—some 20,000 warriors, pouring in a black and feathered mass over the Isandhlwana ridge, sweeping aside pickets and outposts as they advanced upon the plain. Most of the British soldiers had never seen Zulu fighting men before, and the experience was nightmarish. They were like people from another world. They wore ear-flaps of green monkey-skin, otter-skin headbands, high ostrich plumes—they carried shields covered with white hide, or red with white spots—they moved at a horrible changeless trot, rattling their assegais against their shields, hissing between their teeth, and shouting ‘Usuthu! Usuthu!’—Cetewayo’s personal warcry.