Zulu
The Washing of the Spears : The Rise and Fall of the Zulu Nation. By Donald R. Morris. (Cape, 55s.)
SIXTY years before Dr Verwoerd was born, the Boers in Natal resolved at a meeting of their Volksraad that 'all the Kaffirs who are now residing amongst us, should be separated on one side and . . . if they refuse to obey, they should be removed by force.' For these people apartheid is nothing new; and the continuing efforts to establish it as a system of racial co-existence make the history of the Zulu nation all the more pertinent and tragic.
Several isolated bits of this • history—:mostly in the form of biographies and battle chronicles —have made their appearance in the last few years; and now comes this voluminous survey, which attempts to draw all these pieces together into a single coherent narrative. Its author is an American who began his painstaking task eight years ago when he was a naval officer stationed in Berlin. His publishers claim that his account is definitive. It is certainly very long. It begins in the fifteenth century when the first Europeans landed on the harbourless • coast of South Africa to replenish their water casks; and it ends (more than 600 pages later) with the Zulu nation defeated in their final struggle to stem the tide of white civilisation. In the course of reconstructing this saga, Commander Morris takes the reader on a good many detours which do not seem entirely relevant to his theme.
Having disposed of this warning to the im- patient, it should be said that no one with a taste for such excursions so agreeably conducted could possibly find any part of this book in the
least tedious. The author's style is quiet and unobtrusive, well suited to his torrid material; he knows how to tell a good story; and his numerous character-sketches of Bantus and Britons alike are always sympathetic and often perceptive. Particularly well done is his account of Shaka, the ruthless giant whose powerful will united the Zulu tribes into a ferociously dis- .ciplined nation, and whose grotesque disregard of human life and suffering resulted in his own murder in 1828. But by then Shaka had formed an army of frightening power, an army trained to fight with nothing but shields and stabbing assegais of his own design, and to trot fifty miles a day in bare feet. This was the army that his nephew, Cetshwayo, inherited, and against which the blithely confident British forces in Natal marched in January 1879 to begin what one of their officers believed would be a 'pleasant military promenade in Zululand.'
Ten days after the crossing of the Tugela River the pleasant promenade was abruptly halted in the shadow of the Isandhlwana Moun- tain by a long black line of Cetshwayo's warriors advancing at a run in perfect skirmish- ing order and in utter silence. But although the Zulus washed their spears triumphantly at Isandhlwana, they could not prevail against the rifles and guns at Rorke's Drift and Kambula.
Thus the power of the Zulus in Zululand, as had seemed inevitable from the days of Shaka, was destroyed by the British and the Boers. Two generations of men have died since the Zulu War, and the problem of Zululand is not settled yet. Commander Morris's thorough and under- standing book provides a sad commentary on the enduring attitudes of mind that have made the solution of such problems so intractable.
CHRISTOPHER HIBBERT
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