Illustrated History of South Africa: The Real Story

East of the town of Dundee on the banks of the ominously named Blood River in the Natal midlands stands a most unusual memorial: a rough circle of wagons grouped in a formation known as a laager, a defensive position that is virtually impossible to penetrate without modern armaments and an almost suicidal determination, But as a pale sun broke through the dawn fog on 16 December 1838, that is exactly what a force of more than 12000 Zulu warriors attempted to do; and every one of them confidently believed that it would be all over in minutes. Inside the laager the 468 men of the Wenkommando (Victorious commando) checked their muskets and uttered a final prayer, some of them remembering a vow made a few days previously that if God gave them victory this day would be kept sacred forever. Every white schoolchild in South Africa is taught what happened next; and if ever they should forget, a reminder comes religiously once a year when, just as the authors of the vow intended, services of thanksgiving are held by the descendants of the victors. The descendants of the Zulu, naturally, do not celebrate; for them that battle at the Ncome River, renamed Blood River by the Boers after hundreds of Zulu were shot down in its waters, was probably the most signal disaster in their history, the beginning of an end that would follow in 1879 at the hands of British redcoats in the Battle of Ulundi. THE BATTLE FOR LAND As colonial skirmishes went, the Battle of Blood River was a fairly minor affair; 3000 dead Africans and a handful of wounded Europeans was more or less par for the course in a world where white adventurers were overrunning indigenous people from New Mexico to New South Wales. The Zulu flung themselves against the Voortrekker laager at Blood River for exactly the same reason as Mzilikazi’s Ndebele had done two years earlier at Vegkop across the Orange River: because they were convinced that the Europeans wanted their land. The Voortrekkers, in turn, invaded Zulu territory because their accustomed lifestyle had been interrupted in the Cape by what they saw as oppressive British administration. Ironically, the land that Blood River won for the Voortrekkers, the promised Republic of Natalia, was soon to be taken from them by the very people whose rule they had abandoned in disgust – the British. Blacks, British, Boers… and blood; the history of our troubled country is steeped in the stuff, as Africans fought one another, the Boers fought the British, and both fought the Africans. There are, sadly, few moments in our past of which we can be jointly proud as a nation; we don’t even have the comfort of a declaration of independence to temper the greed and gore, only the creation of the Union of South Africa, which at least patched up differences between Brit and Boer but at the as-yet uncounted cost of denying rights to blacks.