Non-combatants and war: Unexplored factors in the conquest of the Zulu kingdom

Abstract

In 1879 British imperial and colonial forces invaded the Zulu kingdom and the two armies fought a number of pitched battles, amongst them Isandlwana and Rorke's drift, which have become for millions around the world emblematic representations of two fundamental aspects of imperial warfare - the superior weaponry and unflinching discipline of European troops confronting superior numbers and reckless African savagery. Ever since the 1879 invasion a voracious and uncritical reading public has consumed a vast accumulation of accounts of courageous redcoats meeting the massed Zulu charge with ranked volley-firing. Even attempts at serious analysis have failed, to my mind, to break with the imperial narrative largely because the authors are so mesmerised by the idea of men killing men that they fail to contextualise the conflict effectively. And, more recently, the imperial nostalgia which underlies conventional, histories of the invasion has seeped into the world of heritage and tourism with the result that colonial dispossession through warfare is presented as a heroic clash between the noble representatives of different military traditions, savage and civilised , which obscures with a sentimental veneer not just the brutality and injustice of the 1879 war but the fact that the invasion is a key to an understanding of contemporary misery and poverty in rural KwaZulu-Natal.