Crossing the Buffalo

by Adrian Greaves

  Once King Cetshwayo realized that the British invasion of Zululand was inevitable, he sought a decisive defeat of the invaders. Knowing the British possessed overwhelming firepower, he argued against the traditional Zulu mass frontal attack, preferring the use of untried siege tactics. He reasoned that, once trapped or starved into submission, the invaders would be forced to withdraw to Natal rather than face a humiliating defeat on the battlefield. He accordingly instructed his generals to bypass the invading columns and isolate them from their supply lines. This tactic soon proved highly effective against the Coastal Column, which the Zulus successfully besieged at Eshowe. It was very nearly successful against the Northern Column at Khambula until Colonel Buller goaded the approaching Zulu army into a premature attack on the well-prepared British position. King Cetshwayo was also a shrewd diplomat: he knew that, once the British invasion force was cut off from Natal, he could seriously embarrass Britain internationally and force Lord Chelmsford to sue for peace.

  However, King Cetshwayo’s generals had no intention of changing their plan. They were autonomous and either unable or unwilling to follow the king’s orders. Their warriors were prepared for the final phase of the coming battle and would use Shaka’s shock tactics of the mass charge and close-quarter fighting to the death.

  The British commanders were aware of the principles behind Zulu tactics but they never expected the Zulus to use the tactics on a large scale. At Isandlwana, Zulu commanders were successfully able to control an extended advance across a 5 to 6 mile front to the extent that they completely encircled not only the British position but also the mountain of Isandlwana itself.

  Popular myth records the Zulus moving in to attack the British position at Isandlwana in mass formation. However, the reality was an attack in open skirmishing lines although at Isandlwana these lines of warriors were up to a quarter-mile deep. Certainly, from a distance, such a large force carrying shields would have appeared very densely packed. The Zulus advanced at a steady jogging speed and would complete the final attack at a run. Once among the enemy, the short stabbing spear or assegai was most effective. The Zulus rarely used their firearms to any effect.

  Many writers have credited Shaka with the development of the impondo zankomo but researchers are aware that the Xhosa tribes were also familiar with its effect. Certainly the technicalities were more effectively used by the Zulus who, in training, would create feints with one horn to confuse the enemy. Such a tactic succeeded brilliantly at Isandl-wana; the Zulus manoeuvred and advanced the main body and left horn into full view of the British while the right horn slipped unnoticed behind Isandlwana and encircled the British position. The British were only aware of the right horn when, according to Commandant Hamilton-Browne who watched the battle 2 miles from Isandlwana, they emerged in force from behind the mountain, driving the column’s bellowing and terrified cattle from the undefended wagon park straight into the unprotected rear of the British position.

  After the Zulu success at Isandlwana Natal was utterly helpless to defend itself, the British invasion force was part-defeated and part-surrounded, yet King Cetshwayo failed to capitalize on his victory. Had he ordered his army into Natal, the consequences for the black and white Natal population would have been horrendous and the subsequent history of the area would have been equally difficult to imagine.

  CHAPTER 4

  Trade, Diamonds and War

  Perhaps now there may be rest.1

  KING CETSHWAYO

  For much of the nineteenth century, British political policy in southern Africa continued to be mainly reactive, but other factors were also beginning to emerge which sharply focused British attention on the urgency of unifying the region; border disputes were a constant problem requiring supervision by British troops, immigrants from Europe were pouring into the area in increasing numbers, hugely valuable diamond reserves had been found and political and racial instability was increasing. In an attempt to bring to an end the regional rivalries and the never-ending border wars the British wanted to superimpose a single authority over the various southern African states – a policy known as Confederation. With such a controlling administration in place, a reliable and stable policy could theoretically control economic production and the resulting trade would greatly benefit Britain.

  Such a unified area could then develop its own military system, albeit trained and supervised by British officers, which neatly solved the problem of Britain supplying and maintaining hugely expensive Imperial troops for distant peacekeeping. During the 1870s Confederation was becoming an increasingly important factor in British foreign policy following its successful implementation in lands as various and distant as India, Australia, the Leeward Islands and, most recently and successfully, Canada; under Confederation these areas flourished. The policy developed as a result of financially expensive lessons learned by Britain while administering her other distant colonies and lands: in southern Africa, with its diverse and mutually antagonistic populations, Confederation was considered essential.

  Economically, Southern Africa had remained a commercial backwater until October 1867 when an unexpectedly large number of diamonds were discovered at the junction of the Orange and Vaal rivers, and the location was most inconvenient for Britain. Jurisdiction of the area was strongly disputed between the Boer-governed Transvaal and Orange Free State. Unhindered by any official controls, many thousands of prospectors headed for the district from all over the world and created the thriving town of Kimberley. These hardy diamond-diggers ignored any form of local administration while evidence gradually mounted of the financial potential of further valuable discoveries. In 1871 the lack of control over such great wealth and associated commercial benefits caused Britain to resolve the matter; under some protest from the Free State, British officials deftly moved the boundary and then annexed the diamond-mining area to the Crown. This annexation, so soon after the annexation of the neighbouring territory of Basutoland in 1868, undoubtedly turned many tribal leaders away from any thoughts of co-operation with the British.

  After the British assumed control of the Transvaal mining area they reached an accord with the Zulu king, Mpande kaSenzangakona, father of Cetshwayo; this 1840 accord formally defined the lines of the Tugela (uThukela – ‘river that rises with alarming suddenness’) and Mzinyathi (Buffalo) rivers as the boundary between the two states. No such convenient physical obstacles fixed the borders between the Zulu kingdom and the Transvaal in the west, and after the 1850s and 1860s, Boer farmers had steadily encroached on Zulu-owned land in ever-increasing numbers. After the first Boers crossed the Drakensberg mountains in 1838, their settlements had continued to spread progressively towards the heartland of Zululand, itself protected by the virtually unfordable Tugela river. This barrier along the border temporarily deterred further encroachment by the Boers and certainly accorded with official British understanding of the boundary, confirmed in an earlier official dispatch from Mr (later Sir) Theophilus Shepstone that when the Boers first arrived in Natal in 1837-8,

  they found the subjects of Dingana, King of the Zulus, occupying the whole of the upper part of Tugela Valley, including the lower parts of the Mooi, Bushman’s, Sunday’s, and Buffalo Rivers.2

  Throughout the whole existence of the Natal colony, King Mpande and then King Cetshwayo had made repeated representations to the government of the colony concerning successive Boer encroachments into Zulu territory. Shepstone invariably dismissed these protests on the grounds that they were ‘temporizing and evasive’. Shepstone’s dispatches describe the Zulu claims as ‘substantially just and those for the republic [Boers] as being simply the result of an unscrupulous lust for land’.3 Indeed, dispatch after dispatch indicates that King Cetshwayo was implicitly obeying Shepstone in refraining from hostilities and awaiting an amicable solution of the difficulties.

  Shepstone’s ‘do nothing’ policy prevailed until the Boers announced on 25 May 1875, in the name of the Boer Republic, that large areas of Zululand were their t
erritory. Following this announcement, which seriously irritated King Cetshwayo, Boer settlers again began moving into Zululand and these new incursions were opposed by the Zulus with increasing vigour. One such area of heightened tension was an unofficial extension of the Boers’ Transvaal into Zululand, which lay between the Buffalo and Blood rivers immediately north of Rorke’s Drift. It was evident to all parties that relationships between the Boers and Zulus were seriously deteriorating and decisive action, beyond sabre rattling, needed to be taken. King Cetshwayo had traditionally regarded the encroaching Boers as his enemy and treated them with great suspicion and disdain, whereas he had long regarded the British as his true friends.

  Boer intrusion into Zululand was perceptively described by Mr Osborne, Colonial Secretary to the Transvaal Government in 1876, who wrote, ‘The Boers, as they have done in other cases, and are still doing – encroached by degrees upon native territory.’ King Cetshwayo had also alerted the British to the problem created by the Boers when he wrote:

  Now the Transvaal is English ground. I want Somtseu [Sir Theophilus Shepstone] to send the Boers away from the lower part of the Transvaal, that near my country. The Boers are a nation of liars;they are a bad people, they lie, they claim what is not theirs, and ill-use my people.4

  The British made no reply. Then, during April 1877, a serious confrontation between the Zulus and Boers began to develop as a result of trekkers moving onto virgin land unanimously recognized as Zulu territory. Secretly supported by the Secretary for Native Affairs, Sir Theophilus Shepstone, King Cetshwayo decided to resolve the problem once and for all by massing an impressive force of over 30,000 warriors at strategic crossing points along the Boers’ Transvaal border. Before the king could give the order for a full-scale Zulu attack, two events occurred in quick succession, either by coincidence or by astute British diplomatic design. Firstly, on the very same day, 12 April 1877, Shepstone was actually attending a secret meeting with the Boers, with the sole intention of persuading the Boers to surrender the Transvaal to British authority, on the logical grounds that the Transvaal government was bankrupt and the Zulus were about to attack. Agreement was swiftly reached whereupon Shepstone then and there annexed the Transvaal to the British Crown. Secondly, Sir Theophilus Shepstone immediately ordered King Cetshwayo to withdraw his army. The secretary to the annexation team, Melmoth Osborn, read the declaration to the assembled Boers. He appeared to suffer from a bout of chronic anxiety mid-proclamation; he commenced trembling and his voice failed. Shepstone’s 20-year-old clerk, H. Rider Haggard, stepped forward to continue reading the script.

  King Cetshwayo reluctantly complied with Shepstone’s order but sent a strong letter warning him that he had intended driving the Boers ‘beyond the Vaal River’. The Zulus believe to this day that Shepstone deceitfully encouraged Cetshwayo to amass his impis on the Transvaal border in order to coerce the Boers into submission. Likewise, the Boers accepted Shepstone’s annexation in the belief that at Shepstone’s call a ‘cloud of 40,000 Zulu warriors hung upon the Transvaal border’ 5 threatening them in the rear.

  Shepstone’s motive behind this annexation may well have been to initiate Britain’s policy of Confederation across southern Africa but, in pursuing this policy, Shepstone had unwittingly inherited responsibility for the rapidly developing Zulu and Boer land dispute. Prior to annexation, the British had viewed the Boers as ‘foreigners’. Now that these people had involuntarily become British subjects by virtue of the annexation, the problem of the disputed territory converted itself from being an insignificant Boer-Zulu controversy into a potentially serious dispute between Britain and the Zulus. At the time King Cetshwayo welcomed British annexation of the Transvaal, as he believed it would protect Zululand from further unwelcome Boer attention, and in a note he informed Shepstone of his relief at the outcome:

  I am pleased that Somtseu has let me know that the land of the Transvaal Boers has now become part of the land of the Queen of England; perhaps now there may be rest.6

  Later, however, King Cetshwayo would describe Shepstone – who had previously enjoyed the Zulu title ‘Somtseu’ or father – as a ‘cheat’ and a ‘fraud’. As for Shepstone, he had never fully trusted the Zulus. Shepstone wrote in a letter to Lord Carnarvon, ‘The sooner the root of the evil, which I consider to be the Zulu power and military organisation, is dealt with, the easier our task will be.’7

  Mr Rider Haggard wrote that the financial effects of annexation on the Transvaalers were magical and that credit and commerce were at once restored, but only a few months later he was much more cautionary. He wrote:

  When the recollection of their difficulties had grown faint, when their debts had been paid and their enemies [Zulus] quietened, they began to think that they would like to get rid of us again, and start fresh on their own account with a clean sheet.8

  Meanwhile, Lord Carnarvon, the Colonial Secretary in London, appointed Sir Bartle Frere as High Commissioner to South Africa and Governor of the Cape in order to accelerate the pace of Confederation. Frere, an experienced senior administrator from his time in India, soon became convinced that the independence of the Zulu kingdom posed a threat to his policies, although initially he was more concerned about the threat posed to the ports and harbours of southern Africa by the rapidly growing Russian Navy.9 Border problems between black and white apart, the threat of violence was inherent in the policy of Confederation since many groups, both African and Boer, were opposed to British rule. In Frere’s mind the Zulus posed the lesser threat so it was upon them that he focused his short-term attention. He interpreted the Zulu king’s protestations concerning the ‘disputed territory’ as nothing more than belligerence, and came to believe that a demonstration of force against the Zulu nation would not only intimidate broader opposition to the Confederation scheme; it would also demonstrate Britain’s strength. Frere’s belief marked a dramatic shift in the relationship between the Zulu kingdom and the British; the first step had unwittingly been taken along the path towards open conflict between the two former friends.

  Matters again came to a head during early 1878 when a number of newly arrived Boer and displaced black settlers joined those already illicitly farming a particularly sensitive Zulu area – the same area which was generally becoming known as the ‘disputed territory’ directly to the north of Rorke’s Drift. In the British tradition of apparent compromise, Frere deferred the problem by reluctantly constituting an independent Boundary Commission to resolve this long-running boundary issue once and for all.

  The original proposal for a Boundary Commission came from Sir Henry Bulwer, the Governor of Natal and a long-time friend of the Zulu people. The Commission was specifically to adjudicate on title to the disputed territory. King Cetshwayo was consulted and he agreed to abide by the Commission’s decision on condition he could nominate three senior indunas to participate. The Commission’s principal members consisted of three highly respected officials: the leader, Michael Gallwey, a barrister who had become the Attorney General of Natal in 1857 at the age of 31; Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Durnford RE who had served in South Africa for many years and who knew both the area and the Zulus thoroughly; and John Shepstone, brother and deputy of the Secretary for Native Affairs. The Boers sent Piet Uys, a farmer who had lost relatives to Dingane’s impis; Adrian Rudolph, the Boer Landdrost of Utrecht; and Henrique Shepstone who served on his father’s staff in Pretoria. The Commission sat for nearly five weeks during which time they considered voluminous verbal and written representations.10 Gallwey utilized all his legal training to evaluate the material impartially, a task made especially difficult because several Boer documents proved to be fraudulent while a number of Zulu reports were manifestly unreliable. Gallwey concentrated the Commission’s attention on two main issues: who owned the land prior to the dispute and whether any land under dispute had been properly purchased or ceded.

  It has to be remembered that no boundary line had ever been agreed between the Zulus and Boers and that for many
years a number of local Zulu chiefs had repeatedly implored the British Governor in Natal for advice and help in dealing with examples of Boer aggression. It had long been Boer policy – if policy it may be called – to force the Zulus gradually to edge further and further from their rich pasture lands. Hitherto, little notice had been taken of Zulu petitions. The Boundary Commission finally decided that the disputed land had always belonged to the Zulus and, furthermore, the Boer settlement of Utrecht must also be surrendered. The Commissioners eventually delivered their unexpected verdict in July 1878 to an astonished Sir Bartle Frere, who dealt with the matter by placing the document under lock and key.

  While Frere was still pondering how to deal with the Commissioners’ report an incident occurred on 28 July 1878, which Frere used to encourage widespread anti-Zulu sentiments. Some of the sons of a local chief, Sihayo kaXongo, crossed the river border to capture two of their father’s absconding wives who had been accused of adultery. They were duly apprehended and marched back across the border, only to be clubbed to death in accordance with established Zulu tradition. The incident received officially orchestrated publicity, out of all proportion to the event, in order further to inflame white public antagonism against King Cetshwayo. Even the pro-Zulu Bulwer was forced to agree that the danger of collision with the Zulus was growing and he wrote that ‘the system of government in the Zulu country is so bad that any improvement was hopeless – we should, if necessary, be justified in deposing Cetshwayo’.11 This opinion had been reinforced by disgruntled missionaries, Norwegian, German and British, whose collective endeavours over many years to convert the Zulus had met with widespread resistance; they withdrew from Zululand and wrote copious letters to the newspapers and government in favour of war. With equal fervour Bishop Colenso argued against the missionaries’ campaign for war as a prerequisite of Christianity. On 2 April 1878 Durnford wrote to his mother on this subject: