In a tour de force for a sub-Saharan culture, the Zulus fielded the best pre-gunpowder infantry since the Roman legions, and wielded their impis with a skill that would be studied in military academies around the globe. It was their bad luck that they did this in the 19th century when technology stacked the odds so heavily against them. I of course cannot do a post on the Zulus without including this:
And this:
The above did not happen at the battle, but it should have. Colour Sergeant, give us the last word:
While both films took a few liberties with character consolidation, they were quite instructive of the time and accurate in regard to the events themselves.. It is difficult to find one country in Africa that benefited from colonization and this example well demonstrates the point.
“It is difficult to find one country in Africa that benefited from colonization and this example well demonstrates the point.”
In my days working with folks from the International Mission Board I befriended people from Africa who would dispute that point. Not that it was all a paradise in the colonial holdings, but as a dear friend I met from Nigeria used to say, it isn’t as if Africa was a garden spot of peace, love, joy and John Lennon songs before the Europeans arrived (or the Muslims before them for that matter). Just the fact that it allowed the Gospel to make it to that part of the world was seen as a benefit. A few years ago our parish had a priest from W. Africa who echoed that sentiment. Again, not defending the bad, but trying not to fall into the modern ‘has anything good come from west of the Urals?’ thinking so common today.
“It is difficult to find one country in Africa that benefited from colonization and this example well demonstrates the point.”
The reverse is true in regard to those countries experiencing Western colonization. In reference to the Zulu War it ended the tyranny over a huge number of subject peoples conquered by the Zulus during the 19th century. In reference to the other blessings of colonialism I will defer to Monty Python:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc7HmhrgTuQ
It is difficult to find one country in Africa that benefited from colonization and this example well demonstrates the point.
Think harder. Except in Ethiopia and the Sahel, these were pre-literate societies with no technology above and beyond handicrafts. Hunter-gatherer societies were common. Life itself wasn’t particularly valued and those prevailing in inter-tribal warfare were not at all adverse to transporting their enemies to the coast and selling them to slave traders. And, of course, the only religion was animism.
Note, you had actual colonies in the subtropical and temperate zones at the continents southern extremity. You had some plantations in highland zones in East Africa and some knots of Europeans in mining towns and the like of the sort depicted by V.S. Naipaul in a bend in the river. For the most part, the Europeans in Africa were a rotating population of civil servants and soldiers. In East Africa, these were supplemented with East Indian merchants (who were wretchedly scapegoated after 1960). These were dependencies, not colonies, for the most part.
Custer’s, Fetterman’s and Isandhlwana’s debacles were relatively exceptional.
When the white colonizers could set up stout defenses in favorable ground they generally survived with minimal losses.
In the American Plains Indian Wars such fights included: the Hayfield, the Wagon Box, Beecher Island, Adobe Walls, Rosebud Creek, and Reno Hill on the Little Big Horn.
In addition to Rourke’s Drift, 40 years earlier, December 1838, Boer Pretorius led a commando against 12,000 Zulus. He laagered on a point of the Blood River where his laagered wagons were covered on two sides by cliffs and water with ample powder and shot . The Zulu could only approach in a narrow, hemmed in space [think Hannibal] and they killed 3,000 of them with not one friendly KIA. Praetorius was seemingly reacting to a Zulu atrocity wherein they had invited a Boer named Retief and his people to a peace ceremony and then impaled and brained every one of them.
In addition, Kipling thought the Fuzzy Wuzzy in the Sudan was a better fighting man. They broke a square I think at Suakim. There is no accounting for poetic license.
My distinct recollection is that European colonies in Africa, especially British colonies, experienced considerable native African immigration from the non-colonized regions of Africa. As imperfect as their colonial administration no doubt was, both economic opportunity and justice were in better supply.