The writing on the blackboard

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

THE ANGLO-ZULU WAR OF 1879, 6 VOLUMES edited by John Laband and Ian Knight Archival Productions, £960.00, pp.3,500 ISBN 190300800X THE SIEGE OF MAFEKING, 2 VOLUMES edited by lain R. Smith Brenthurst Press, £195.00, pp.529 ISBN 0909079579 No end of a lesson, Kipling thought his country had been taught by the Boer war of 1899-1902. But he could have said the same of two preceding wars in South Africa which led to the third and greatest. the Zulu — or, as it is now called, Anglo-Zulu — war of 1879 and the war which the Transvaal fought shortly afterwards. The three had several features in common. All saw egregious display of British military incompetence and grave defeats, before victory was finally won — at least in the first and last cases — by overwhelming force. All were hymned at the time as brave adventures. And all seem today morally ambiguous. Two new books about the first and last of these wars now make a very valuable contribution to South African history.

Only 125 years ago. 'South Africa' was little more than a geographical expression, less a country than a patchwork of African kingdoms, British colonies and Boer republics. Great Britain claimed a vague 'suzerainty' — which very word's legal meaning was to be bitterly disputed — south of the Limpopo through a high commissioner, but his writ did not run over most of those lands. Lord Carnarvon, Disraeli's colonial secretary in the ministry of 1874-80, wanted to federate South Africa as he had previously federated Canada, but made a mess of it, perhaps not surprisingly given the extreme dissimilarities between the two. His one success was in buying out any claim by the Orange Free State on the new-found Kimberley diamond fields. Even though the British held the two colonies of the Cape and Natal, the position of Natal was fragile, threatened on the east by the great Zulu kingdom under Cetshwayo and on the north by the Boer republic of Transvaal under President Burgers. The one was fiercely bellicose, with its army of 40,000 celibate warriors brought up to wash their spears in blood, the other was lawless and bankrupt, practising a barely disguised form of slavery in defiance of a convention signed with the British, not to say in defiance of humanity, and attempting to hold the surrounding black tribes at bay by atrocious reprisals.

That did not prevent a serious defeat of Boers in 1875 by Sekukuni, one of the neighbouring African leaders, and in 1877, on the point of collapse, the Transvaal was annexed by Great Britain (slim as ever, the Boer leaders agreed to this on only two conditions: that they should be allowed publicly to protest against annexation, and that they should then receive pensions). Sir Bartle Frere had just been appointed high commissioner and arrived from India, where he had had a distinguished career, quite innocent of South Africa in general and the Transvaal affair in particular. He straightaway attempted to impose his authority by fighting two unneeded 'Kaffir wars' in the Transkei, against the Gaika and Galeka peoples. But he was much alarmed by Cetshwayo's strength, and wrote to London demanding more troops while at the same time sending Cetshwayo an ultimatum he knew he could not accept.

Thus began the Anglo-Zulu war of 1879. In the new year, Lord Chelmsford, the British commander, led his force into Zululand. Taking most of his troops off in search of Cetshwayo, he left a base encamped at Isandhlwana, which, on 22 January, was caught napping by a Zulu army. Not taking these 'natives' seriously as soldiers, the British hadn't bothered to laager or ring their wagons in defence. The camp was overwhelmed, and the entire garrison killed, more than 800 British officers and men and more than 800 Africans. It was one of the greatest disasters in British imperial history.

Most of the British soldiers were from the 24th Foot, the South Wales Borderers. On the same night, a tiny force of 103 men from the same regiment was attacked at Rorke's Drift by a vastly greater Zulu army, but held them at bay through prolonged and, on both sides, heroic fighting (this was the story told in the 1964 movie Zulu with Stanley Baker and Michael Caine). When the news of Isandhlwana reached England, it caused deep woe. A cartoon in Punch showed John Bull looking on as the mighty Zulu chief wrote on a blackboard, 'Despise not your enemy.' More than six months were needed to deploy a much stronger British army whose overwhelming fire-power destroyed the Zulus at Ulundi. Cetshwayo was deported and his kingdom broken up.

Many books have been written about the war, but there has been nothing before like the six volumes of The Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, part of the 'Archives of Zululand' series, not narrative history but a collection of contemporary records. More than 3,500 pages in all are reproduced in facsimile (and exceptionally well reproduced, too, as anyone will recognise who is familiar with the difficulties of this kind of printing, by Anthony Rowe Ltd). The documents range from Hansard and other parliamentary papers to eye-witness accounts and polemical pamphlets. In his Foreword, Mangosuthu Buthelezi — whose great grandfather Myanama was Cetshwayo's prime minister and commander-in-chief — points out that the archives for South African history for this period are widely scattered and often inaccessible. The editors have admirably remedied this, while warning readers that contemporary documents still need to be read with a critical eye.

These volumes have been edited by Ian Knight under the general editorship of John Laband, and in his notes Knight goes out of his way to be even-handed. Until quite recently, even English historians who weren't jingo imperialists tended to justify the war by saying that the nature of the Zulu kingdom made a settled existence for South Africa impossible and that its power had to be broken, as if that didn't beg a few questions. By contrast, Knight's verdict that the war was "an act of unwarranted British aggression' now seems hard to dispute. And yet, with any amount of even-handedness, there is bound to be an imbalance in telling the story which no editor can put right: in a war where one side was pre-literate, all the written and printed documents by definition come from the other side, and there is a sad paucity of contemporary Zulu testimony. It is poignant to read the official list of the British dead at Isandhlwana, from Lieutenant-Colonel H. B. Pulleine to Drummers C. Andrews and T. Perkins, and Boys J. Gurney and J. S. McEwan (how old were they?). But there are no lists at all for the great numbers of Zulus killed at Rorke's Drift and Ulundi.

Apart from the larger sweep of the war, the documents illuminate individual episodes. lithe most stirring tale on the British side was Rorke's Drift, one of the sorriest was the death of the Prince Imperial, only son of Napoleon III. After the collapse of the comic-opera Third Empire in 1870, the deposed emperor and his family took refuge in England. Young Louis Napoleon went to the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich (later merged with Sandhurst, where his memorial stands to this day), but for political reasons he could not be commissioned in the British army. He nevertheless begged to be allowed to join his many friends in the field, and accompanied Chelmsford as an observer. On the afternoon of 1 June 1879, he went out with a scouting party ahead of the column to find a camp-site. The party was ambushed, the prince and two others were killed. Apart from crushing Bonapartist hopes of a restoration, this led to courtsmartial, enquiries, and bitter recrimination, detailed here in many pages.

But then the war as a whole was followed by much recrimination. If the Zulus couldn't tell their own side of the story directly, they did so indirectly through the Aborigines' Protection Society, and men like that extraordinary personage Bishop Colenso of Natal, continually embroiled in controversy both theological — he was all but deposed from his see for heresy — and political; it's high time for a new biography of him, In traditional fashion, the army had tried to find a fall guy for the Isandhlwana disaster, in the form of a Sapper officer, Colonel Anthony Durnford, a convenient choice; since he had been killed there he couldn't answer back. But his brother Lieutenant-Colonel Edward Durnford could, and so did the Colenso family, who had befriended Anthony Durnford. Their attempts to clear his name, and their attacks on Chelmsford, make riveting reading, as do the polemics against Frere by F. W. Chesson, the Tam Dalyell of his day, a trouble-making MP of whom I would like to know more: he isn't in the DNB.

In military terms. the Anglo-Zulu war had been undistinguished on the British side; in political terms, its consequences were more unsatisfactory still. The Transvaal Boers had only submitted to the British because they were frightened of Cetshwayo: once his threat was gone, they flexed their muscles again. Frere continued his incompetent meddling until he was recalled, but not before he had provoked another war, this time with the Transvaal, at the end of 1880. The British were bundled out from north of the Vaal apart from four beleaguered small garrisons; one of them was at Potchefstroom, a township 150 miles south-west of Pretoria, whose prolonged siege is the story told in A Rain of Lead by Ian Bennett, reviewed here (28 July) by James Delingpole.

A new commander, Sir George Colley, had arrived in Natal, and now led a completely inadequate force into the Transvaal. Nothing appeared to have been learned since the Zulu war, certainly not Cetshwayo's words on the blackboard. Despising the Boers as much as the Zulus, the British quite failed to recognise that, however backward and oppressive the Transvaal was, the Boers when properly led were as good as any mounted infantry — itself a concept the British did not properly grasp — on earth. The invading force was knocked about at Laing's Hill, and then utterly routed at Majuba in February, where Colley was killed. Between the two wars, Gladstone had returned to office. He had condemned the annexation of the Transvaal when he was in opposition, and did not want to enforce it now merely for the sake of imperial prestige. By the Pretoria Convention, the independence of the Transvaal was recognised anew, though in terms whose ambiguity was almost designed to make future trouble, and the war itself had scarcely done much to enhance England's standing in South Africa.

What Afrikaners used to call the First War for Freedom did not have to be followed by a Second War for Freedom in 1899, although by the last decade of the century the two sides were spoiling for a fight, and South Africa had in any case been utterly transformed in 1886 by the discovery in the Transvaal of the greatest goldfield on earth. But there was certainly a political line leading from Majuba and the Pretoria Convention to the outbreak of the Boer war two decades later by way of the Jameson Raid. When that war began, the Boers of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State were strongly placed. They could have driven straight for the great ports of Durban and Capetovvn, seized them before British reinforcements could arrive, and forced Lord Salisbury's government to make terms; that is by no means a remote 'if' of history. To do that, the Boers needed to hold the Natal passes, and contain three isolated British garrisons at Ladysmith, Kimberley and Mafeking, simply masking and bypassing them. Instead, they laid full-scale and pointless siege to the three, fatally missing their opportunity and wasting their substance.

Much the longest of the sieges was Mafeking, 217 days in all. The siege lasted through the early months of the war, witnessing the British disasters which culminated in 'Black Week' in December, and the endurance of the defenders gave the British public some compensation. The relief of Mafeking in May came after the surrender of another large Boer force and marked a turning of the tide, ending the first phase of the war and initiating, what no one then foresaw, two years of cruel guerrilla warfare. Although the story of Mafeking has been told before, it has never been told in such detail. The Siege of Mafeking is a collection of essays by wellchosen scholars and writers covering various aspects of the siege in altogether comprehensive detail, Almost more to the point, the two volumes are a triumph of book production, quite beautifully printed with integrated colour and using a tremendous collection of contemporary photographs from the collection of the late Harry Oppenheimer, who started Brenthurst Press as his own private press. In the spirit appropriate to the occasion, Marcelle Weiner of the Brenthurst Press tells us that

Oppenheimer 'prized the pursuit of wisdom and understanding above all material wealth', and it is true that his fortune enabled him to build a great library and subsidise printing of the highest quality. A recent acquisition was the extraordinary Mafeking papers of Major Courtenany Vyvyan, one of the senior officers during the siege, put to good use here.

Simply as military history, the siege of Mafeking may not have been very important, but it was intensely interesting for other reasons. One could almost adapt F. R. Leavis's phrase and say that it was an episode in the history of publicity rather than of warfare. The garrison was commanded by Colonel Robert Baden-Powell, and the future creator of the Boy Scouts thereby became a national hero, worshipped by the music halls and public which had begun to take its tone from the cheap press. His officers included Major Lord Edward Cecil, one of Salisbury's remarkable children, a famous wit in his day and a most amusing writer to this, Lieutenant Lord Charles CavendishBentinck, and Captain Gordon Wilson, whose wife Lady Sarah was a daughter of the Duke of Marborough (and aunt to Winston Churchill who was busy elsewhere in South Africa). And so, in a war which the London press anyway treated as a great lark. Mafeking took on the aspect of an aristocratic house party. The Mafeking Mail, printed inside the besieged town, was written with relentless jocosity, and the high spirits of the high-born made a wonderful story for those brave souls who kept the home fires burning in Fleet Street.

Among individual essays, Fransjohan Pretorius writes about the besieging 'burghers' and Thomas Paken ham about the besieged British, while Tim Jeal, Baden-Powell's best biographer, writes about `13-P. as commander. Pretorius shows the degree to which the Boers were — their perennial problem — quarrelsome and divided, with much grumbling and dissatisfaction about the way the siege was conducted, and the sheer length of the siege does indeed show how much worse the Boers were at static set-pieces than at war of movement. Pretorius is also brutally frank in describing Boer treatment of the Africans: General 'Koos' Snyman ordered unarmed blacks who had been captured to be shot simply because they got in his way. No less frank, Jeal shows B-P's extravagant vanity and ambition. He was one of the great careerists of his age, to an extent which startled his brother officers, and the siege was the very opportunity he had been waiting for. Even Queen Victoria was taken aback when B-P put his own head rather than hers on the siege stamps printed inside Mafeking. He too had numerous critics on his own side until they were silenced by his apparent success.

In another chapter. Pakenham writes about `mafficking', the hysterical outburst of rejoicing, not far from a public orgy, which swept London and other English cities when news came of the relief on 17 May. That day, or night, saw perhaps the apogee of British imperialism in its gaudy, proud prime. A hundred years on things look different. lain R. Smith has edited these volumes with exemplary detachment, and a necessary updating means that there are chapters on women in the siege, and on blacks, for long the forgotten bit players. Blacks were sometimes armed by the British, although this was denied later since it offended the conventions of the day, and all blacks fighting for the British were liable to be shot summarily if captured by the Boers. In fact, during the siege, blacks outnumbered whites about four to one inside Mafeking, but this vexed BadenPowell. As food ran ever shorter, and the garrison were reduced to eating the foul produce of boiled-up horses, the blacks were unwanted mouths and Baden-Powell tried to drive them out on to the veldt, where they knew they would starve if they weren't shot. Besides that, at least five black men inside Mafeking were tried, after a fashion, for stealing food or for spying and — the British being none too squeamish either — shot.

In concluding essays, Christopher Saunders looks at the Mafeking's aftermath, and its place in history. As he says. the popular press had done everything it could to build up 'the myth of Mafeking' (and not just the popular press: the Times even suppressed the more critical dispatches of Angus Hamilton, its own correspondent, foreshadowing its treatment of its Berlin correspondent in the 1930s). There was inevitably a reaction, not just the debunking of B-P, but a truly amusing succession of changes in attitude. A hundred years ago, progressive opinion opposed the war and admired the Boers. Only later did the same progressive opinion come to see the Boers, or Afrikaners, as the most accursed people on earth, and South Africa as a quite different morality play. However that might be, what we can safely say now is that it was this period, and these three wars, that saw the making of South Africa.