In theory the Zulu nation after Isandhlwana was as well armed as the remnants of the British center column and twenty times more numerous. But just as the Ottoman harquebusiers at Lepanto never mastered the European practice of massed musketry formation and firing in unison, so Zulu sharpshooters saw firearms as simply a more effective indigenous weapon—a knobkerrie with better penetrating power or an assegai with superior range—to enhance the traditional emphasis of individual battle prowess. Zulus nearly always aimed high, on the logic that like a javelin cast, the gun’s projectile would otherwise quickly lose momentum and fall. Although they captured a number of field guns at Isandhlwana, and even dragged caissons and supply wagons off, the impis never employed such artillery against the British—lacking not merely the experience and knowledge of heavy gunnery but also the discipline to load, sight, and fire heavy weapons at regular intervals, not to mention the skilled teamsters to hitch draft oxen to caissons.
Ports and oceangoing ships were central to European power, bringing in an almost endless stream of manufactured firearms and supplies to the conflict. In the Zulu War, men, guns, food, and ammunition were continually shipped in from Cape Town and Durban. After the disaster at Isandhlwana, an entirely new British army—nearly 10,000 additional enlisted men and more than 400 officers—in less than fifty days began arriving in Natal from England. Usually, native armies had no conception that a Vera Cruz or Durban was a mere transit station that allowed Spanish or British conquistadors to tap whatever manpower they needed in a matter of weeks from an overcrowded and restless Europe thousands of miles—but only weeks—away.
Aztec, Islamic, or Zulu forces almost always depended on rapid envelopment and outflanking movements, which had worked so well against neighboring indigenous tribes. Without much improvisation they relied on highly trained, far more mobile, numerically superior, and courageous warriors to ambush or surprise smaller, plodding European contingents—successful enterprises in local landscapes of dense brush, forest, or jungle. Traditional battle rituals, even in the final battles with Europeans, were usually not altogether jettisoned, meaning that indigenous people were less likely to fight at night, rarely followed up their occasional military victories with unchecked pursuit, and sometimes allowed cultural (e.g., religious festivals, pre-battle dancing and eating festivities, annual fertility rites) or natural (e.g., seasonal considerations, unusual astronomical observations) phenomena to override sheer battle efficacy. After Lord Chelmsford invaded, Cetshwayo mustered his army and then had his witch doctors induce vomiting among some 20,000 frontline troops. It took three days to administer the tonic, parade each warrior before a massive vomiting pit, and have them wait fasting until the entire army was “cleansed,” severely weakening the critical stamina of the impis.
Westerners, from the Greeks onward, also had an array of war-making rituals: pre-battle sacrifices, harangues, and music; sacred days of truce; ceremonial dress and drill. But these traditional practices were sometimes rigged, often postponed, or even abandoned altogether should military necessity determine otherwise. Predictably, most European armies did not practice pre-battle rituals of fasting, vomiting, purging, or self-mutilation that might impede the effectiveness of soldiers on the battlefield. More likely, as preparation for the fighting, European troops were to receive a rum ration, a stern exhortation, or a last-minute reminder of firing protocol. Since Greek times pre-battle sacrifices and rituals had been faked, since they served more as morale boosters than as real communication with the gods.
The Europeans were willing to fight 365 days a year, day or night, regardless of the exigencies of either their Christian faith or the natural year. Bad weather, disease, and difficult geography were seen as simple obstacles to be conquered by the appropriate technology, military discipline, and capital, rarely as expressions of divine ill will or the hostility of all-powerful spirits. Europeans often looked at temporary setbacks differently from their adversaries in Asia, America, or Africa. Defeat signaled no angry god or adverse fate, but rather a rational flaw in either tactics, logistics, or technology, one to be easily remedied on the next occasion— and there was almost always a next occasion until conquest—through careful audit and analysis. The British in Zululand, like all Western armies, and as Clausewitz saw, did envision battle as a continuation of politics by other means. Unlike the Zulus, the British army did not see war largely as an occasion for individual warriors to garner booty, women, or prestige.
Indigenous peoples more often fought alongside Europeans than did individual Europeans with natives. Cortés found help in the hundreds of thousands of Tlaxcalans in Mexico, as did the British with the so-called Kaffirs in Africa. Both the Aztecs and the Zulus found essentially no Europeans willing to fight alongside them against other white invaders. Narváez wished to destroy Cortés, not the Spanish cause, and thus after his defeat most of his men joined in to march on Tenochtitlán. John Dunn at times helped the Zulus, but in the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 he quickly rejoined the British. Not a single European fought in Cetshwayo’s ranks against the British, although nearly all Boers despised English government in Africa. In contrast, thousands of Africans joined various colonial regiments.
Trouble for Europeans occurred most often only against their own colonials; the Boers in Africa and the Americans both fought costly wars of independence against the British, employing weapons, discipline, and tactics that were in many cases the equal of or superior to those of their British overseers. The Boers, for example, killed far more Englishmen in a single week of the Boer War—nearly 1,800 at Magersfontein, Stormberg, and Colenso alone from December 11 to 16, 1899—than did the Zulus during the entire fighting of 1879!
Many scholars have been reluctant to discuss the question of European military superiority because either they confuse it with larger issues of intelligence or morality or they focus on occasional European setbacks as if they are typical and so negate the general rule of Western dominance. In fact, the European ability to conquer non-Europeans— usually far from Europe, despite enormous problems in logistics, with relatively few numbers of combatants, and in often unfamiliar and hostile terrain and climate—has nothing to do with questions of intelligence, innate morality, or religious superiority, but again illustrates the continuum of a peculiar cultural tradition, beginning with the Greeks, that brought unusual dividends to Western armies on the battlefield.
Zulu Postmortem
The aftermath of Rorke’s Drift is a fair enough representation of the typical colonial war that was waged in the latter nineteenth century, one repeatedly acted out in the Congo, Egypt, the Sudan, Afghanistan, and the Punjab. After the victory of the garrison at Rorke’s Drift, Lord Chelmsford, with a vastly augmented army, renewed his invasion of Zululand. Besides the earlier bloody standoffs that year at Ineyzane (January 22), the River Intombi (March 11), the siege of the small garrison at Eshowe (February 6–April 3), and Hlobane (March 27–28), the British then fought three decisive battles at Kambula (March 29), Gingindhlovu (April 2), and Ulundi (July 4). In the first two of these final three engagements, British and colonial troops, in fortified camps, would have utterly annihilated the attacking Zulus had the latter pressed their near suicidal charges and human wave attacks to the bloody end.
In the last battle of the war at Ulundi, fought near King Cetshwayo’s headquarters, a British square—replete with artillery and Gatling guns— deliberately abandoned its fortified camp to march out in open challenge, thereby prompting an attack by the Zulus, who had learned of the futility of charging fortifications, but not the equal stupidity of trying to break a solid formation of European riflemen in an unobstructed plain of fire. In less than forty minutes, the British square of some 4,165 Europeans and 1,152 Africans repulsed 20,000 Zulus, killing at least 1,500 in the process and wounding twice that number, many of whom wandered off to die in hiding.
When it was all over, the British and Zulu dead were buried on the field of Ulundi; in typical Western fashion the British erected
a plaque over those they had wiped out: “In Memory of the Brave Warriors who fell here in 1879 in defence of the Old Zulu Order.” The British, like the Spanish in Mexico and the Americans in the West, had not merely defeated their more numerous enemies but destroyed their autonomy and culture in the process. Books continue to be written about the handful of British redcoats who heroically held firm at Rorke’s Drift, but not more than a few dozen names remain of the several thousand courageous Zulus who were blasted apart by Martini-Henry rifles. In that regard, they tragically joined the thousands of anonymous Persians, Aztecs, and Turks who were killed en masse and remain forgotten as individuals, as real persons apart from the historian’s bloodless figures of “40,000” killed or “20,000” lost. In contrast, the engine of Western historiography—itself the dividend of the free and rationalist tradition—commemorates in detail their far fewer killers. Without a Herodotus, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, or Gianpietro Contarini, men’s bravery in battle fades with the rot of their corpses.
When the Zulu War broke out in January 1879, Cetshwayo could count on somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000 available troops. Six months later the British had shot down at least 10,000 on the various battlefields of Zululand, and no doubt nearly as many later succumbed to wounds. No accurate record of Zulu dead was ever made; but the absence of medical care and the nature of the Martini-Henry .45-caliber slug suggest that thousands of wounded throughout the war died of shock or infection, or simply bled to death. The heavy, soft projectile of a Martini-Henry rifle, not to mention the ordnance of the Gatling gun and artillery piece, made a horrific hole in the human body, as the crippled and ugly scarred bodies of the few surviving Zulu veterans attested. Indeed, on one of the worst days in English colonial history, January 22, 1879, the British army nevertheless may well have killed more than 5,000 Zulus at Isandhlwana, Rorke’s Drift, and Ineyzane, or between 12 and 16 percent of the entire Zulu army.
By war’s end most of the Zulu nation’s cattle were killed, scattered, or stolen. Its system of imperial regimentation was shattered, as the British imposed an unworkable peace, by dividing up Cetshwayo’s kingdom into thirteen warring states—a solution that by design precluded prosperity in Zululand and further war against its neighboring European colonies. The “victory” of 1879 was achieved at the cost of only 1,007 British soldiers killed in battle, along with 76 officers. A small, undetermined number of additional troops succumbed to tropical disease and wounds. For the six months of the war the British soldier had on average killed ten or more Zulus for every trooper lost, despite being generally outnumbered at various battles by magnitudes of between five and forty to one. The legacy of the British invasion, battlefield conquest, and rather shameful settlement that divided the Zulu people into impotent warring factions was the end of an independent state and the virtual destruction of an entire way of life.
ZULU POWER AND IMPOTENCE
Shaka
Africa produced no more warlike tribe than the Zulus. Of the hundreds of tribal armies of the continent, none were as sophisticated as Zulu impis in either their organization or their command structure. In native wars on the continent no other tribe could match Zulu discipline. Alone of native armies, the Zulus had largely abandoned missile weapons, in favor of a short spear in order to fight at close ranges. Yet a minuscule British force obliterated Africa’s most feared military in a matter of months. How was that possible?
Like the Aztec empire before the Spanish invasion, the Zulu nation was a relatively new creation when the Europeans arrived in Natal in real numbers during the nineteenth century. For nearly three hundred years prior to 1800, the Zulus were but one of dozens of nomadic Bantu-speaking tribes who slowly migrated into what is now Natal and Zululand. But at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Dingiswayo, a chief of the Mthethwa, one of many Nguni tribes, radically departed from the traditional Bantu practice of local raiding and skirmishing by seeking to incorporate defeated tribes into a national army.
In his effort to build a federated system through the creation of a professional military, Dingiswayo curtailed the past practice of ritualistic wars fought mostly with missile weapons over grazing rights, in which casualties remained relatively light and noncombatants were largely untouched. In the eight years of his reign (1808–16) Dingiswayo laid the foundations for the Zulu empire by overturning the ancestral protocols of Bantu culture in southwest Africa, incorporating rather than exterminating or enslaving defeated tribes, seeking commerce with the Portuguese along the coast, and making civilian life itself subservient to military training. One of his most successful lieutenants, the revolutionary leader Shaka of the tiny Zulu tribe, eventually assumed control of the empire (1816–28) and transformed it to serve an enormous standing army, in ways unimagined even by old Dingiswayo himself. Shaka’s revolutionary changes in military practice mark the real rise of Zulu power, a warring kingdom that would exist for the next sixty years (1816–76) until the British conquest. Before being murdered by his siblings in 1828, Shaka had entirely altered the African manner of war, resisted white encroachment, slaughtered 50,000 of his enemies in battle, and gratuitously murdered thousands more of his own citizens in increasingly frequent bouts of imperial dementia. The legacy of Shaka’s twelve-year reign was a loose imperial coalition of some half million subjects and a national army of nearly 50,000 warriors. During the decade of formation of the new Zulu empire perhaps as many as 1 million native Africans had been killed or starved to death as a direct result of Shaka’s imperial dreams. South Africa thus illustrates a mostly unrecognized characteristic of the European colonial military experience: in Africa, Asia, and the Americas, both indigenous tribes and Europeans usually killed more of their own people in battle than they did one another. Between 1820 and 1902, for example, Shaka and his successors killed vastly more Zulus than did Lord Chelmsford, and the Boers slaughtered far more British than did Cetshwayo.
A Garrison State
Much myth and romance surround the Zulu military, but we can dispense with the popular idea that its warriors fought so well because of enforced sexual celibacy or the use of stimulant drugs—or even that they learned their regimental system and terrifying tactics of envelopment from British or Dutch tradesmen. Zulu men had plenty of sexual outlets before marriage, carried mostly snuff on campaign, only occasionally smoked cannabis, drank a mild beer, and created their method of battle advance entirely from their own experience from decades of defeating tribal warriors. The general idea of military regimentation, perhaps even the knowledge of casting high-quality metal spearheads, may have been derived from observation of early European colonial armies, but the refined system of age-class regiments and attacking in the manner of the buffalo were entirely indigenous developments.
The undeniable Zulu preponderance of power derived from three traditional sources of military efficacy: manpower, mobilization, and tactics. All three were at odds with almost all native African methods of fighting. The conquest of Bantu tribes in southeast Africa under Shaka’s leadership meant that for most of the nineteenth century until the British conquest—during the subsequent reigns of Kings Dingane (1828–40), Mpande (1840–72), and Cetshwayo (1872–79)—the Zulus controlled a population ranging between 250,000 and 500,000 and could muster an army of some 40,000 to 50,000 in some thirty-five impis, many times larger than any force, black or white, that Africa might field.
Unlike most other tribal armies of the bush, the Zulus were no mere horde that fought as an ad hoc throng. They did not stage ritual fights in which customary protocols and missile warfare discouraged lethality. Rather, Zulu impis were reflections of fundamental social mores of the Zulu nation itself, which was a society designed in almost every facet for the continuous acquisition of booty and the need for individual subjects to taste killing firsthand. If the Aztec warrior sought a record of captive-taking to advance his standing, then a Zulu could find little status or the chance to create his own household until he had “washed his spear” in the blood of an ene
my.
The entire nation was regimented—as in the manner of classical Sparta—by age-class systems that might supersede even tribal affiliations. Boys were to undergo formal military training and serve as baggage carriers at fourteen or fifteen. By late adolescence most Zulu males were expected to be full-fledged warriors who could run fifty miles a day without shoes as they entered the impis. Cohorts of bachelors were arranged into lifelong regiments, and men were not allowed to marry officially until their late thirties without special compensation; thus the ability to establish an independent family served as a great social dividing line within the army. Under Shaka’s system as many as 20,000 males under the age of thirty-five were to remain unmarried and subject to constant military service. Even the older warriors, who could take legal wives and establish their own kraals, or autonomous households, often found themselves instead on lengthy campaigns.
Yet a notion of enforced “celibacy” among warriors is exaggerated, since Zulu males routinely engaged in a variety of sexual activities short of full penetration with women. Rather, “celibacy” meant that warriors were not allowed to pair off with permanent mates to form autonomous households or to have intercourse with virgins until their late thirties. Since the delay in childbearing among young women meant a reduction in Zulu fertility itself, such age-class rites may in fact have been intended by Shaka to control the population of Zululand—and the unsustainable exploitation of grazing land by cattle ranching in an already overpopulated landscape.
Whatever the exact cause of the peculiar practice of age-class regimentation, the result was an unusual esprit de corps among troops, as impis— marked by distinctive names, particular headdresses, jewelry, feathers, and shield insignia—usually fought as separate units for the entire life span of their warrior age-cohorts. Tactically, the Zulu mode of attack was simple but efficient. Battle deployment was named after the Cape buffalo, as each impi was divided into four groups, comprising the flanks or “horns” of two younger regiments. These wings quickly spread out around both sides of the enemy, hoping to encircle the opposing force and drive it back against the “chest” or veteran regiment of the impis, while the “loins” or aged reserves would then come up when the hostile force was fully engaged. While predictable, the standardization of attack proved successful against rival tribes of the plains, given the Zulus’ uncanny ability to sneak undetected through the grass and brush, sprint to surround and enclose a surprised enemy, and then finish him off in close combat with stabbing spears and billy clubs.
Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power Page 41