Crossing the Buffalo

by Adrian Greaves

  Disaster of a colossal magnitude was about to befall the unsuspecting Boer families gathering in the area now known as Bloukranze and Weenen; all were totally unsuspecting and eagerly anticipated Retief’s return with the promised permission to settle. Under cover of darkness, the Zulu impi approached the sleeping Boer families and then launched their merciless attack. Immediately south of the Tugela river the most appalling horror and bloodshed was unleashed. Throughout that Friday night and the following day the trekkers further back from the direct line of attack sought desperately to rally whatever men they could and bring the remaining women and children to the relative safety of wagons hastily drawn up into protective laagers. By dawn on the Sunday, the stabbed and mutilated bodies of 531 elderly Boer men, women and children were spread over an area of 20 square miles. An estimated 300 coloured servants had also died violently at the hands of King Dingane’s warriors.

  The surviving trek leaders, Maritz and Cilliers, were helpless to prevent thousands of head of cattle, sheep and horses from being driven off by the Zulus. While the survivors surveyed the terrible scenes of death and devastation a Boer scouting party arrived with news that the Zulus had withdrawn. But grieving had to wait; much was to be done to prevent the circling vultures from descending. The days ahead were critical in view of the possibility of a renewed assault and the crucial decision had to be made whether to trek back over the mountains and abandon Natal or take revenge. A clear majority, especially of the women, forcefully insisted on punishment and retribution. The decision of a public meeting late in March was that the combination of the highly respected Boer leaders Potgieter and Uys would be granted equal status, each to command his own men, in order to punish King Dingane.

  Early in April the first punitive expedition of 347 well-armed men departed from the main Boer laagers. Across the Buffalo river, at the Italeni valley, the waiting Zulus camouflaged themselves as cattle by hiding under their cowhide shields and easily decoyed Uys and his followers into a carefully planned trap. Potgieter, deeply suspicious, held back; the Uys strategy of rounding up Zulu cattle did not appeal to him at all. Soon encircled by the Zulus, Uys and his men tried desperately to shoot their way clear in order to escape the overwhelming odds but in the process Uys was fatally stabbed and his young son, Dirkie, not wishing to leave his father, also perished.

  Potgieter and his men now had to face the waiting trekkers and report their failure. Panic once again set in at the realization of defeat and, even worse, another leader’s death; renewed serious thought was given to abandoning Natal. Potgieter was labelled a coward and accused of treason. He left Natal a haunted man and, due to the seriousness of the situation, many others were tempted to follow him back to the Cape.

  Once again it was the women who implored their menfolk to remain, this time fiercely demanding that King Dingane should be made to pay personally. Conditions for the Boers were extremely difficult and the constant threat of Zulu attacks forced them to remain in laager. Local grazing was soon exhausted and the Boers’ food supplies were minimal. Crisis loomed; Maritz was on his own and within weeks he became desperately ill and died. Like Moses, he saw the Promised Land but was not destined to live in it.

  A month or so after Maritz’s untimely death another Boer leader, Andries Pretorius, responded positively to a plea to join the trekkers in the vicinity of the Little Tugela near Loskop. The trekkers’ situation was extremely grave; Pretorius found a demoralized people and an epidemic of measles raging through the Boer camps. Pretorius was immediately elected Commandant General and within days he set out with another force of 468 well-armed men along with 120 coloured servants and sixty-four battle wagons. Each wagon was drawn by only ten oxen, as they would be very lightly loaded; though cumbersome and slow-moving, they would be absolutely essential for forming a laager. Wherever the scene of battle was likely to be, it would be grassland and therefore it was imperative to prepare ‘veghekke’, or fighting gates, in order to deny to the Zulus any gaps between the wagons drawn together for protection. Ammunition bags were prepared in order to make reloading of old muzzle-loading muskets quicker; biltong, rusks and coffee were to suffice as rations. A strong disciplinarian, Pretorius demanded total obedience and made it clear that he would not tolerate independent dissidence, the factor that led to the previous undoing of the Boers and which was to prove a problem in future. Proclaiming ‘Unity is Strength’ (to become the Transvaal Republic motto and later that of the Union), he did not hesitate to take the preacher Sarel Cilliers to task when he volunteered to lead some fifty men into what surely would have amounted to a repeat of the recent rout at Italeni.

  Ever the tactician, Maritz had wisely thought to bring with him two of his personal small cannons. These, and a longer-range ship’s cannon belonging to Pretorius, were to prove invaluable. On the eve of the battle some 700 oxen and 750 horses along with the wagon leaders and trekkers (among them three Englishmen) were brought into the roughly D-shaped laager. Whip-sticks supporting lanterns were in readiness should the impi attack during that night. However, a thick mist prevented the warriors from creeping nearer; but, ironically, the heavy mist seriously alarmed the trekkers as the threat of their gunpowder becoming damp and useless was very real.

  The mist lifted at daybreak as the trekkers waited for the inevitable Zulu attack and the fact that it was Sunday gave the dramatically tense situation a special religious significance for them although it was of no consequence to the Zulus. Commanded by Chief Ndlela, the Zulus charged the Boer position but were unable to breach the barrier of wagons. In spite of the din of battle, the animals within the laager did not panic, as the Boers had feared; they could so easily have wreaked havoc by breaking loose and stampeding to escape the confines of a relatively small enclosure. Victory was assured by mid morning as the impi fled; released from the defensive position the mounted Boers gave chase and hastened the Zulus’ speedy withdrawal.

  Although the battle of Blood River has long been considered to be one of the greatest victories in Boer history, the trekkers had, in fact, laid themselves open to siege. How much longer would those animals have behaved under such stressful circumstances without grazing? How much longer would the ammunition, the food and, above all, the water have lasted? The lessons learned after the earlier Boer defeat at Vegkop alerted the Boers to the fact that the Zulus, victorious or otherwise, always drove away stock. Chief Ndlela had been determined to attack the Boers during darkness and in doing so, his plan could possibly have met with success had the night not been so dark and misty resulting in the Zulu army repeatedly losing themselves as they tried to surround the Boers. Fortunately for the Boers, the dawn caught Ndlela’s force divided by the river, and at opposing ends of the Boer position.

  The official copy of the battle report displayed at the Blood River Museum boldly describes the short battle that followed, and explains how the Ncome river became known as Blood River.

  The mist gradually cleared and Sunday dawned bright and clear. Pretorius gave the order to shoot as soon as sights and targets could be distinguished. With a total disregard for danger, the Zulus charged but within a quarter of an hour they were forced to withdraw to a position 500 metres away. When they launched the second attack they were fired upon with deadly accuracy. Once again, the Zulu attack was repulsed and they retreated to a distance of 400 metres. Pretorius now directed the copper cannon towards the hill where the leaders of the Zulu force congregated. The second and third rounds burst among the Indunas and led to a third fierce attack lasting nearly an hour.

  Soon after the Zulus had retreated once again a mounted commando of a few hundred men led by Field Cornet Bart Pretorius launched an attack upon them. Twice the commando was driven back but at the third attempt, they managed to split the Zulu force in two. The greater part of the commando force now emerged from the laager and deployed from the north and south along the river where hundreds of fleeing Zulus were shot amongst the reeds and in the river until the river ran red. At this point Nd
lela’s three thousand crack impis went into action. They attempted to cross the river at the drifts above and below the hippo pool but were swept along by the hordes of fleeing warriors being shot down by the Boers. At last the entire Zulu army took flight in all directions. The pursuit lasted until midday when the commando returned to the laager where 3,000 Zulus lay dead.

  Zulu folklore certainly acknowledges a Boer presence at Blood River but not that a major battle took place, nor that they suffered such serious casualties. In 1999 a new Zulu museum was built on the Zulu river bank overlooking the battle site, and as visitors there discover, claims of any Boer victory are strongly rebutted. Disregarding the cross-river interpretation of events, it is curious that the Boers, armed with antiquated firearms, are still believed by their descendants to have accounted for 3,000 Zulu fatalities in the same time-span that the British defenders at Rorke’s Drift, armed with sophisticated breech-loading Martini-Henry rifles, also used at point-blank range, accounted for only 351 Zulus. Nevertheless, it was at Blood River that the Zulus learned to avoid a tightly compacted enemy in possession of firearms. They also discovered that the rounds fired by the Boers had a limited effective range. Over a distance of more than 100 yards the Boer low-velocity rounds would bounce off an angled shield. This knowledge resulted in the Zulu belief that their shields were magical, especially when doctored with magic muti, a belief strongly held and maintained for the next sixty years until the Zulus met the British at the battle of Isandlwana.

  According to Boer history, Pretorius then seized the initiative and, with the Zulus in disarray, he led an élite mounted group of Boers towards the now abandoned and still smouldering ruins at Mgungundhlovu with the intention of giving a Christian burial to the mortal remains of the Retief party, exposed to the harsh extremes of the elements for ten months and under the eyes of an ever-watchful flock of vultures provided with carcasses on a regular basis. Pretorius apparently found Retief’s body still with his bag containing the treaty signed by King Dingane. The miraculous recovery of the treaty, together with the eyewitness reports of those who found it, along with the details of its content, were accepted without question until some eighty years later when the account of the battle came under close scrutiny. Then, in 1923, a heated debate ensued; indeed, a Cape judge who had visited Natal in 1843 claimed that ‘the deed or writing formally ceding this territory to the emigrant farmers was written out by the Reverend Owen’. Yet on the day previous to Retief’s massacre Owen, now an apparent eyewitness to Dingane’s treachery and the alleged very writer of that document, must have been in a state of extreme shock when he recorded in his diary:

  Two of the Boers paid me a visit this morning and breakfasted only an hour or two before they were called to eternity. When I asked them what they thought of Dingane, they said he was good; so unsuspicious were they of his intentions. He had promised to assign over to them the whole country between the Tugela and the Umzimvubu [sic] rivers, and ‘this day the paper of transfer was to be signed’.9

  The Reverend Owen made no mention in his diary of having ever written the treaty and certainly did not know that it had been signed two days before. Discrepancies would undoubtedly abound if the treaty could be found and examined – if only in that three Zulu witnesses had allegedly signed their names. Could they write, and if they could, who had taught them? Accounts by the trekkers themselves certainly differ greatly. Was forgery necessary? Perhaps so: the Boers knew that their actions against the Zulus would be questioned by both the London Missionary Society and the British government who would certainly oppose their occupation of Natal. A mutually signed document was imperative to validate the considerable number of Boer claims to settle in Natal. A point of interest is that when the noted Afrikaner G.E. Cory made a public address in Bloemfontein in 1923, he also cast a thoroughly researched doubt on the treaty’s genuineness, possibly as a result of the discovery of Owen’s diary. The ensuing emotional storm forced him initially to silence then to sanctuary, until the occasion of the opening of Piet Retief’s old Cape home, on the eve of the Day of the Vow, 15 December 1923. Addressing the meeting, Cory made a public apology and declared that he had been mistaken in his findings and that the treaty was in fact genuine. And that was the end of that particular matter.

  A memorial church was built, today a fine museum housing Voortrekker artefacts including Retief’s glass flask bearing the mason’s insignia which was purportedly rescued from the scene of mutilation where, according to the accompanying museum description, ‘about nine or ten Zulus to each Boer dragging their helpless unarmed victim to the fatal spot where they commenced the work of death by striking them on the head with knobbed sticks’. It is perhaps more likely that this flask was found along with other various items retrieved from what remained of King Dingane’s great amakhanda. Retief’s satchel, having survived intense extremes of weather and protected the treaty so miraculously, then seems to have conveniently disappeared, as did the original treaty, during the Boer War six decades on. The battle of Blood River has nevertheless been a mighty symbol, ruthlessly exploited since 1838, to further the political and religious cause of the Afrikaner. Professor Ben Liebenberg has argued that earlier Afrikaner historians exaggerated the significance of the battle out of all proportion. He wrote:

  This view, that Blood River saved the great trek overestimates the significance of the battle. At that stage, only a section of the Voortrekkers were in Natal. The rest were in the present Transvaal and Orange Free State and they wanted to live there. If the Zulus had won at Blood River, the great trek would, at most, have failed in Natal and not elsewhere. It is therefore not correct to say that the victory at Blood River saved the great trek.10

  Regardless of events at Blood River, Boer farmers continued to trickle into the more northern reaches of Zululand while the British concentrated on developing Natal and mistakenly left Zululand and the ‘Boer problem’ to Dingane’s successor, King Mpande. Britain annexed Natal in 1844 and it became a British colony the following year; most of the Natal Boers abandoned their farms in protest and set off to rejoin the other fledgling Boer ‘republics’ seeking independence from British rule. The gathering Boer trekkers began settling on the central plateau. They named the settled area the ‘Free Province of New Holland in South East Africa’ and its centre of crowded wagons became known as ‘Pietermaritzburg’ after two Boer notables, Piet Retief and Gert Maritz. At the same time the British formally occupied Port Natal and renamed it ‘Durban’ after Sir Benjamin D’Urban, Governor of the Cape Colony, and the relationship between the Zulu kings and the British authorities in southern Africa remained sympathetic. In January 1853 and February 1854 respectively, Britain first recognized the Voortrekkers’ South African Republic (the Transvaal) and then the Orange Free State; it was a desperate gesture to offload the enormous financial and military burden of protecting these two Boer states. It was also a shrewd political gamble to protect the valuable British coastal colony of Natal from the incessant conflicts of the African interior. By 1878 the problem of white incursion had grown out of control, and the British would be forced to act.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Zulus, Defenders of the Buffalo River

  A very remarkable people the Zulu.

  BRITISH PRIME MINISTER DISRAELI, 1879

  Neither Lieutenant General Lord Chelmsford, the senior British military commander in South Africa, nor his political master, Sir Bartle Frere, expected the Zulus to be a match for the British forces being assembled along the Natal border with Zululand. Such a positive attitude reflected an overwhelming confidence in the prowess of the British military, especially when the obvious discrepancies between the two opposing armies were considered. The British force in South Africa was tightly disciplined and well led by experienced officers and NCOs; its soldiers were battle-hardened from the recent Cape Frontier War and they were well armed with modern Martini-Henry rifles and supported by artillery. Opposing this seemingly invincible force was the Zulu army, a part-tim
e, primitively armed native force whose military role was to serve the king as and when required. It was a necessity that had not arisen during the previous twenty-two years.

  For an invasion of Zululand to succeed, the British commanders needed the support of Natal’s white settler population; civilian volunteers, their wagons, horses and oxen would all be needed to supplement and support the British line regiments that would lead the invasion. A propaganda campaign was set in motion to elicit this support. A ‘celibate, man-slaying machine’ was Sir Bartle Frere’s famous description of the Zulu army, a widely reported comment containing sufficient innuendo to stoke the fears of Natal’s European population that their safety, especially that of their womenfolk, was in dire peril from the Zulus. Missionary tales of sexually frustrated warriors lusting for blood helped to create a distorted image of naked raping warriors in the minds of the European civilian population. It was an image that Frere deliberately orchestrated through the press, and he unashamedly used its acceptance by the civilian population to justify his invasion of Zululand. This propaganda was successful because so little was known of Zulu life, or of the structure and purpose of the Zulu army. Anthony Trollope, a visiting British writer who found the Zulus a complaisant people living in sympathy with their time and environment, commented: