Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power

by Victor Davis Hanson

  THE IMPERIAL WAY

  Why Fight the Zulus?

  Most conflicts do and yet do not begin over disputed borders. So it was with the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, which ostensibly started from disagreement over the exact boundaries between Zululand and the European provinces of Natal and the Transvaal, but in truth was inevitable, given the colonials’ desire for more land, labor, and security. Other than the pretext of a preemptory attack, the British had no ostensible reason for invading Zululand. Even most of the state ministries in London wanted nothing to do with a war in southern Africa at a time when the empire’s more critical interests in India, Afghanistan, and Egypt required its full resources. No observer on either side ever made the case that a Zulu army had crossed into either Natal or the Transvaal to prompt hostilities. King Cetshwayo’s repeated orders were to avoid sending his impis across the borders of Zululand.

  Although other parts of South Africa were relatively uninhabited when land-hungry Dutch and English ranchers and farmers first settled there during the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, Zululand was the ancestral home of a number of tribes and had been relatively ignored by Europeans. But by the outbreak of the war in 1879 a general division of lands in southwest Africa had been well established, one that marked clear boundaries for King Cetshwayo’s autonomous and densely inhabited Zulu kingdom. Yet in early January 1879 Lord Chelmsford crossed the Buffalo-Tugela River with a combined force of more than 17,000 men and invaded the Zulu nation on orders from the high commissioner of South Africa, Sir Bartle Frere. Whereas Chelmsford was ostensibly “protecting” Natal, his real mission was to find the Zulu impis, destroy them in pitched battle, capture Cetshwayo, and thereby dismantle the autonomous Zulu nation itself. The Anglo-Zulu War from the beginning was a war of aggression against the Zulu people, fought to eliminate forever the threat of a huge indigenous army mustered across the border from relatively sparsely populated British and Boer settlements. The administrator of the Transvaal, Lord Shepstone, candidly outlined the British concern over the presence of Zulu impis: “Had Cetshwayo’s thirty thousand warriors been in time changed to labourers working for wages, Zululand would have been a prosperous peaceful country instead of what it now is, a source of perpetual danger to itself and its neighbours” (J. Guy, The Destruction of the Zulu Kingdom, 47).

  After years of border disputes with the Boers of neighboring Transvaal, the question of Zululand’s territorial integrity had earlier been put to a British-sponsored boundary inquiry commission, which promptly reported to Frere that the disputed lands in question probably belonged to the Zulus! Boer aggression, accompanied by British acquiescence, not Zulu imperial expansion, the commissioners found, had prompted the border crisis. Because of the nature of European—and especially Boer—methods of cattle ranching, literally thousands of acres were needed for each autonomous family, creating an absurd paradox of the local landscape: a colonial population that demanded enormous amounts of formerly tribal land, but lacked the population density on its own to defend the very range it had expropriated. In neighboring Natal province over 80 percent of the land— some 10 million acres—was owned by just 20,000 Europeans, leaving 2 million acres of the least desirable countryside to be fought over by 300,000 African natives. The European colonials alone did not have the wherewithal to protect what they had so boldly taken.

  Because the British government had no real interest in annexing Zululand—there was little natural wealth there, plenty of disease, and a proud, hard-to-rule population—and since there was no evidence of Zulu aggression toward either Natal or the Transvaal, the exact reasons why the British army invaded in 1879 still remain a mystery. Immediate motives are probably to be found in the wide latitude given the unpredictable Frere, who was determined to prompt a war at all costs in the belief that the tide of history was inevitably against the peculiar brand of Zulu militarism—and that with the conquest of Zululand he might be recognized as the imperial proconsul of a new and huge confederated South Africa.

  Specifically, Frere and his staff were mostly concerned with the Zulu army of some 40,000 warriors, an extraordinary muster from a people that probably numbered fewer than 250,000. To Frere’s way of thinking, the existence of such a powerful native military on the borders of European colonies was a disaster waiting to happen, especially given the Zulus’ warlike record of conquest during the past century and the white colonials’ constant demand for grazing range. Frere apparently glossed over the fact that the Zulu army had been mobilized and yet at peace with the British for some thirty-seven years and that the disruption of the prevailing and peaceful status quo would have to start with the Europeans. The complaints of the more levelheaded Sir Henry Bulwer, the governor of Natal, that the British should honor the results of their own board of inquiry, were swept aside. Frere instead sought to extend the protection of his government to the aggressive Boer settlers, who were eager for the imperial army of England to settle scores with their old nemesis, the Zulus.

  Desperate to precipitate hostilities, Frere seized on three incidents that he proclaimed made war unavoidable. A Zulu chief, Sihayo, had dragged back two of his adulterous wives from Natal, a British protectorate, and then executed them in Zululand—a deed shocking to Frere’s own sense of British imperial territorial sanctity and purported English nineteenth-century morality in general. King Cetshwayo then refused to hand over Sihayo. In response, the British, like Greek princes who pledged to sail to Troy over a perceived abduction, felt that a question of honor demanded a prompt rejoinder to the kidnapping. Next, an imperial surveying party along the Tugela River between Zululand and Natal was detained—though not harmed—by some Zulu hunting parties, who rightly suspected that such a mapping expedition was a prelude to formal annexation of some of their borderlands. Finally, to Frere’s further chagrin, some missionaries had recently fled Zululand, claiming that their Christian Zulu converts were often treated poorly and sometimes killed by Cetshwayo.

  Largely on such secondhand information, and apparently on grounds that Zulus did not conduct themselves in their own country as English gentlemen, Frere believed that he had legal cause for a full-scale invasion of a sovereign Zululand. His final ultimatum demanded that Cetshwayo abandon his remarkable system of military organization and with it his enormous army altogether. The reply of the Zulu king, variously translated and sometimes erroneously reported in a variety of sources, was striking for its candor and pride:

  Did I ever tell Somtseu [Shepstone, the British representative to Zululand] I would not kill? Did he tell the white people I made such an arrangement? Because if he did so he deceived them. I do kill; but do not consider that I have done anything yet in the way of killing. Why do the white people start at nothing. I have not yet begun to kill; it is the custom of our nation and I shall not depart from it. Why does the Governor of Natal speak to me about my laws? Do I go to Natal and dictate to him about his laws. . . . (Cf. D. Morris, The Washing of the Spears, 280)

  Both Boer and English colonial settlers—slavery had been outlawed in southern Africa for decades—wanted cheap manual labor to develop their farms and the infrastructure of colonies in Transvaal and Natal. They obviously resented the idea that 40,000 adult male Zulus were subject to military service and hardly likely to cross the border unarmed and needy as cheap migrant laborers. Sir Garnet Wolseley, who replaced Chelmsford as commander in chief of British forces at the conclusion of the war, also jotted down in his diary the British view of an ideal postbellum Zululand:

  Our dispute with Cetshwayo who had been guilty of cruelties to his people: that he took life without trial & that under his rule neither life nor property were even safe. That by the military system he maintained, he prevented the men from marrying & from working & so kept them poor. . . . In future all men should be allowed to marry & to come & go when they liked & to work for whom they liked, so that they might become rich & and prosperous as we wished them to be. (A. Preston, ed., The South African Journal of Sir Garnet Wolseley,
1879–1880, 59)

  In addition, local entrepreneurs relished the idea of a sizable British military commitment to the colony—the crown would eventually spend some £5.25 million during the Zulu wars—and so lined up to supply the army. The horse and stock owners, wagonmakers, and teamsters of Natal welcomed the opportunity to hike prices to astronomical levels, as did colonial residents who appreciated the infusion of capital and manpower into southern Africa. Chelmsford and the British officer corps in Natal also were eager for the chance for a cheap, quick, and glorious victory that could only advance their careers. There was keen competition among officers to win assignments for the envisioned invasion—a military adventure anxiously anticipated as short, relatively safe, and full of opportunities to win glory against an admittedly brave but technologically backward foe.

  Europeans and the Other

  In a wider sense, the war was also a result of a more insidious British, and characteristically European, attitude toward indigenous peoples, predicated on a strange blend of chauvinism, violent imperialism, and often misguided goodwill. To the British, Cetshwayo’s army was an impediment to the chance of “civilization” for his people, who logically should gladly embrace the religion and culture of a “superior” race. Christianity might bring to the Zulus an end of polygamy, random murder and execution, occasional cannibalism, mutilation of the dead, degrading nudity, sodomy, and what the missionaries considered a bizarre array of ritualistic sexual practices that surrounded the purification of warriors — uku-hlobonga, or intercrural (between the legs) sex without phallic penetration for the unmarried warriors, and sula izembe, full sexual intercourse for the married after the fighting to “wipe the ax.” English law would also prevent the random killing of Cetshwayo’s subjects and lead to a fixed rather than nomadic citizenry, thus providing the necessary foundation for an efficient capitalist economy that would respect private property and foster a higher standard of living—or else.

  In 1856, the British pointed out, in a vicious civil war Cetshwayo had butchered more than 7,000 of his brother’s warriors, along with another 20,000 of his own tribal family, including the aged, women, and children. That killing field on the Tugela River was thereafter known as Mathambo, “the Place of the Bones.” Earlier, Shaka had killed ten times the number of Cetshwayo’s victims. Zulu kings, like the Aztec monarchy, had killed far more indigenous people in their own tribal wars and random murder sprees than did the Europeans on the battlefields of their conquest. On the eve of his succession, Cetshwayo had murdered nearly every brother, half brother, cousin, and remote relative in Zululand who could conceivably contest his claim to the throne.

  The power of the British army was felt to be proof enough of the general superiority of the European way of life—or so it was thought on the eve of what Frere and Chelmsford assumed would be a rapid conquest. In any case, the British crossed the border on January 11, and Frere proudly wrote, “I hope that by God’s helping a very few weeks will now enable us to get rid of the incubus which has so long strangled nearly all life in these Colonies” (C. Goodfellow, Great Britain and South African Confederation, 1870–1881, 165).

  Like the Spanish experience in Mexico and the American westward expansion, the British conquest of Zululand followed an often predictable sequence of events that over some four centuries characterized European entry into Asia, the Americas, Australia, and Africa. By 1800 Europe accounted for only 180 million of the world’s nearly 900 million residents, but occupied or controlled in some form or another almost 85 percent of the world’s land surface. By 1890 two-thirds of all oceangoing ships were British, and half the maritime commerce of the world was facilitated by British-built vessels—most of the transport across the seas in some way facilitated or profited British imperialism. The productive capacity of British factories and the skill of the imperial fleet and merchant marine meant that troops and supplies could be landed at any place on the globe in a matter of weeks—an ability shared by no other country outside Europe and few within. In some sense, Britain was in Asia, Africa, Australia, and the Americas simply because it alone of the peoples of the world easily could be.

  Initial European maritime exploration of the sixteenth century had led to sporadic colonization of foreign lands, followed by eventual full-scale invasion and conquest. Small numbers of Europeans—the French in Southeast Asia, the Spanish in the Americas, the Germans in central Africa, the British almost everywhere—usually provoked hostilities by either annexing land outright or trespassing on indigenous hunting or grazing territory in search of minerals, gold, ports, or water. Colonists and traders often followed, intent on permanent settlement. Legal documents—whether fiats of the Spanish crown or wordy proclamations of British bureaucrats—were hurriedly crafted and read to illiterate native royalty to provide the necessary Western pretext for annexation. It was an odd but characteristic Western custom to read out a list of grievances before a European army slaughtered its native and illiterate foes. Lord Frere, like Cortés before, was careful to predicate his destruction of an entire nation on the published premise of legal and moral right: he issued a thirteen-point statement of demands, which an illiterate Cetshwayo could not read or whose logic he could not fully fathom even when translated.

  Often initial and tiny expeditionary forces, due to European arrogance in command, overreliance on mere technology, and ignorance about the enormous size of indigenous armies, were slaughtered—the Noche Triste and Isandhlwana could be matched by countless other debacles in Indochina, America, central Africa, and India. The later sale of European firearms at times during the nineteenth century gave native peoples some respite, such as the slaughter of American cavalrymen at Little Big Horn (1876), the British debacle at Maiwand in Afghanistan (1880), and the Ethiopian victory over the Italians at Adwa (1896). But such European setbacks—the great majority confined to the latter nineteenth century when easily operated repeating rifles and plentiful cartridges were traded freely with indigenous peoples—were almost immediately followed by renewed attacks of wiser, better-equipped, and better-led Western armies that sought not merely more land but, as purported vengeance, the entire conquest and at times destruction of a people.

  Throughout colonial fighting, the desecration of European dead after an initial defeat—the sacrificed Spaniards on the pyramids of Mexico City, the disemboweled at Isandhlwana, the decapitated British at Khartoum—was felt to be cause enough later to give no quarter and to annihilate, as long as the Europeans slaughtered in pitched battle according to their ideas of fair rules of engagement. Almost always, Europeans were outraged when they discovered the decapitated, scalped, or disemboweled corpses from their small overrun garrisons. They felt that such mutilation—outside of battle, committed against the dead, inclusive of women and children—was a far more depraved act than their blasting apart the bodies of indigenous warriors with cannon and rifle fire—acts committed in battle against the living warrior class.

  Tribal leaders such as Montezuma, Crazy Horse, and Cetshwayo occasionally appear as sympathetic figures in European chronicles. Native written accounts do not exist other than in oral interviews collated by Christian missionaries and explorers. Indigenous leaders often naïvely announced that the repulse of European interlopers might mean an end to hostilities, clueless that their own temporary victory over an advance European force sealed their fate against a second wave of Westerners who welcomed the pretext of revenge to cement their plans of conquest.

  Cannibalism and human sacrifice, the mutilation of the dead, murdering prisoners, idol worship, polygamy, and the absence of written law were typically cited as pretexts for European annexation of territory during their four centuries of colonialism in the Americas, Asia, and Africa. Unlike their adversaries, the French, Spanish, and British announced that they killed thousands reluctantly and as an unavoidable precursor for improving the lot of indigenous peoples through the difficult process of Westernization. Missionaries, high church officials, and intellectuals in Britain o
bjected to the rapacity of empire building, but sought remedy through amelioration or assimilation rather than withdrawal: Zulus should be Westernized, made into civilized British subjects, and thus protected under the law from both imperial oppression and their own indigenous savagery. Few, if any, of the most liberal critics counseled that the Europeans should go home and leave the Zulus in peace—or as the case might be, free to murder and to continue tribal war among their own.

  Usually, a Cortés or Chelmsford found plenty of indigenous allies to help his cause, as Europeans sought to target first the most numerous and warlike tribes of the region to be conquered, on the theory that the fall of an Aztec or a Zulu nation would end native unrest in the environs and find sympathetic allies among those who had previously been brutalized by just such warlike regimes. Providing firearms or European material goods to natives also ensured that there were always plentiful tribal contingents in the Americas or Africa who would join in on European expeditions, eager for plunder, safety from their enemies, and a continuous supply of other sundries from Western traders. Nor should we forget that many natives, victims of decades of tribal slaughter, hated the Aztecs and Zulus far more than they did the Europeans.

  The fighting itself, at least in these first-generation colonial struggles, had a typical scenario which pitted technology and discipline against courage and numbers. Thus, the Zulus, like the Aztecs, did not manufacture their own firearms and did not understand Western decisive battle in which lines of soldiers sought to charge or fire in careful unison, and to do so in order and on command before, during, and after the melee. The Zulus had captured or traded for guns for decades, but the British idea of sustained and regular mass volleys—itself a result of careful training and a comprehensive system of discipline—was entirely alien to the African manner of war. Even with the use of some eight hundred modern Martini-Henry rifles and hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition taken after Isandhlwana, Zulu marksmanship remained sporadic, inaccurate, and nearly always ineffective.