A poor pre-emptive strike

‘You will be in charge, although, of course, nothing will happen, and I shall be back again this evening early,’ Major Henry Spalding told Lieutenant John Chard before riding away from the British supply depot in search of reinforcements that had failed to show up on time. Chard was thus the officer in command when barely two hours later the depot, defended by only 139 soldiers and engineers, was attacked by a column of 4,000-6,000 Zulus. The subsequent battle of Rorke’s Drift would become one of the most famous in British military history.

Saul David’s history of the six-month Zulu war of 1879 arrives on the 125th anniversary of the conflict. But its timing is significant in another sense, too, because David’s detailed reconstruction of the march to war raises all too obvious parallels with the origins of today’s war in Iraq. The Zulu war was planned by local British military and civilian leaders as a pre-emptive campaign which would pave the way for the confederation of the South African colonies and allow the Empire to more fully exploit the continent’s natural resources — and which, in the words of the Cape Colony governor Sir Bartle Frere, would also end the Zulus’ ‘reign of barbarism’. Natal’s Native Affairs secretary Theophilus Shepstone described Cetsh- wayo, king of the Zulus, as a tyrant, and portrayed his large but part-time army as an imminent threat to Natal. And since the king was despised by his own people, Shepstone reasoned, only 1,000 troops would be needed to overthrow him.

Under Lord Chelmsford, a rather larger army marched confidently into Zululand and was promptly surprised and defeated at Isandlwana, losing nearly 1,400 soldiers at one stroke. Chelmsford was stunned by the loss, but not too stunned to realise that the following day’s heroics at Rorke’s Drift gave him a straw to clutch at.