Zulu Warriors: The Battle for the South African Frontier

by John Laband

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the British embarked on a concerted series of campaigns in South Africa. Within three years they waged five wars against African states with the intent of destroying their military might and political independence and unifying southern Africa under imperial control. This is the first work to tell the story of this cluster of conflicts as a single whole and to narrate the experiences of the militarily outmatched African societies.
 
Deftly fusing the widely differing European and African perspectives on events, John Laband details the fateful decisions of individual leaders and generals and explores why many Africans chose to join the British and colonial forces. The Xhosa, Zulu, and other African military cultures are brought to vivid life, showing how varying notions of warrior honor and manliness influenced the outcomes for African fighting men and their societies.

Genres: History, Africa, South Africa

345 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

John Laband is a South African historian and writer, specialising in Anglo-Zulu and Boers wars. He is Professor Emeritus and Chair of History at Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada, and is a Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge University, England.

Reviews

[Todd Price · Rating 4 out of 5]

Laband’s work is a chronicle of the history of warfare in South Africa between the native African tribal groups and the British military and colonists. Admittedly, I knew next to nothing of this era of history in the late 19th Century, aside from knowing the Zulu scored a major victory over the British at the Battle of Isandlwana in 1879. Laband chronicles the history of the region and the many smaller wars fought prior to the Zulu War of 1879. For anyone unfamiliar with this region’s history, it can be a challenging read, but Laband provides some excellent context and cultural information to ease the reader’s understanding.

My own studies have focused heavily on Native American history and conflicts in the United States. I found amazing parallels between the South African and North American native wars against European colonizers. There are great similarities to the great Western Indian wars in America, occurring at roughly the same time in the 1870’s. The parallels between the Zulu victory at Isandlwana in 1879 and the Lakota-Cheyenne victory over Custer at Little Bighorn in 1876 are striking. This was challenging for me, as I would imagine it will be for any not familiar with Anglo-Zulu South African history, but it is a fascinating story well worth the time to learn about.

[Neil · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a detailed and compelling history of the British wars against African tribes and nations in southern Africa in the late 1870s, concluding with the destruction of the Zulu and Pedi nations in 1879. The research and documentation here seems first-rate, and I found Laband's insights into many of the motivating factors for these wars useful in my thinking about British imperialism in southern Africa. Laband goes into detail about the British use of African soldiers to fight in these wars, for instance in the use of Swazi soldiers to defeat the Pedi in the conflict that closes this book. He also notes that many of the African warriors (though not a majority of them) understood how to use firearms and deployed them against the British. Also fascinating (though only a minor point in the overarching scheme of the book) is the idea that many of the Zulu warrior ritual practices, though not done out of malice, disgusted the British to such an extent that they were less likely to be lenient in their military interactions with the Zulus.

The main insight I noted for my thinking, however, has to do with the ways that the British repeatedly imagined a unified black African resistance that could threaten British control of South Africa. Though some of the different African ethnic groups coordinated in fighting the British, there was never any way that all of the African tribes could have managed a single, unified uprising. Despite this reality (and the ways that the British deployed African troops to do their own fighting), the British repeatedly feared a "black conspiracy." One wonders if this fear came in part from a lack of knowledge of tribal groups, anxieties left over from the Sepoy Rebellion, or a sense of the small number of British and Dutch settlers in comparison to massive African nations.

I strongly recommend this book for those interested in British imperial history and imperialism in South Africa, though it is an academic book and is rather dense. It provides a very clear view of the kinds of military conflict that involved the British and black Africans in the late nineteenth century.