Durban - War is 90 percent stupidity and 10 percent genius. That is how a first-time visitor to the Zululand battlefieds of Isandlwana and Rorke’s Drift summed up the experience.
The visitor was my brother-in-law, John Larkin, formerly from Durban and Pietermaritzburg, who now lives with his wife Jill, in Boston in the US. When my family visited them, we were taken to the War of Independent battlefields of Lexington and Concord. Last weekend, we reciprocated their hospitality by taking them to two of our famous battlefields.
We arrived at Dundee’s Royal Country Inn (founded in 1886) on Friday evening, and warmed to the quaint charms of the three-star hotel. Our comfortable bedrooms were off a garden courtyard, surrounded by covered verandas with old-fashioned red polished floors.
Along the corridors, in the lounge and in the cosy pub, there are many illustrations, paintings and memorabilia commemorating the Anglo-Zulu and Anglo-Boer wars.
Dundee is a good jumping off point to visit dozens of battlefields involving Boer, British and Zulu forces. We had hired tour guide and military historian Johann Hamman, to show us around and he transported us to the battlefieds on Saturday morning. The cost was R1 700 for five of us.
My wife, son and I had been to the battlefields before, several years ago, and had been fortunate enough to be guided around Isandlwana by the legendary David Rattray of Fugitives Drift Lodge and around Rorke’s Drift by the impressive Rob Caskie. On that occasion, Rattray was also guiding former banker Tom Boardman and his guest, billionaire Patrice Motsepe.
Rattray was and Caskie is a superb storyteller, and Rattray in particular, developed a following for his ability to passionately tell the story from the Zulu side, recounting displays of enormous courage by the regiments as they took on the British empire’s professional soldiers. He was murdered in 2007.
Hamman, our guide, joked that he would have to bring his A-game after hearing some of us had been guided by Rattray and Caskie. But he need not have been concerned. He was immensely knowledgeable with a fine grasp of detail and able to chat about a host of subjects, and with good humour.
On our drive the drought was visible all around us, with streams and rivers low, crops stunted and cattle thin.
We arrived at the St Vincents Mission visitor centre at Isandlwana and paid R30 each entry for ourselves and our guide. Among the other tour parties enjoying the good coffee was a large group of rugby players from a Scottish regiment.
At Isandlwana we stopped at the memorial to the Zulu warriors, the isiqu, or necklace of valour made up of beads, thorns and lion claws. Set into the stone-clad perimeter wall of the base are four bronze headrests representing the Zulu regiments deployed in the battle.
After giving King Cetshwayo an ultimatum in December 1878 to disband the Zulu army, three British columns under Lieutenant-General Lord Chelmsford crossed the Thukela and Buffalo rivers in January 1879 and invaded Zululand.
He made three fatal errors. He badly underestimated his opponents, the terrain, and the weather.
On January 22, the Zulu army of 20 000 attacked and over-ran the British camp at Isandlwana, killing 1 357 troops, colonial and African volunteers. Although the British had superior weaponry, they were badly led, while the Zulu commanders were tactically astute – and the warriors showed great bravery, outflanking the British front line by using the famous horn’s of a bull strategy. About 1 000 warriors died.
On the British side, fugitives of the battle fled along a torturous route today known as the Fugitives’ Trail. Only those on horseback made it out alive.
All across the battlefield, below the sphinx-like mountain are cairns of white stones, marking the burial site of the British soldiers, often where they fell. There are many.
More sombre, we next went to Rorke’s Drift, where a British garrison stationed at the Swedish Mission station, fought an 11-hour battle against 4 000 Zulu warriors, later the same day and into the next. Warned that the Zulu army, led by King Cetshwayo’s half-brother Prince Dabulamanzi, was coming, the garrison was able to reinforce its defences with bags of mealies and biscuit boxes.
The building housing the hospital was set alight and the defenders showed great courage in being able to evacuate most of the patients. Of about 150 defenders, 17 were killed in battle and of the remainder all had wounds of some sort. Eleven Victoria Crosses were awarded to the defenders of Rorke’s Drift.
Some historians believe the Zulu casualties were close to 1 000.
Before being guided around the battlefield, we again paid an entrance fee of R30 each, and ate our packed lunches from the hotel at a picnic spot. There is also a restaurant on site.
There is an excellent scale model of the battlefield that helps put things in perspective.
Here again, one could not help but be moved by the loss of life in war and the individual courage of soldiers and warriors in the opposing armies. I may be out of line here but I wonder if those fellow South Africans alive today, who so glibly talk of war and revolution, and torch buildings and property during protests, would do so after visiting these battlefields.
During the day, we bumped into several other tour parties, some from lodges in the area, of which there are several.
According to Hamman, the tours are still very popular with mainly British visitors, but in the past two years there has been a noticeable increase in the number of South Africans visiting the various battlefields.
Our group agreed it had been a worthwhile experience.
Deon Delport, Independent on Saturday