kaMpande, who was crowned the Zulu king in 1873, mobilized the Zulu army, which had become weak under his father's (Mpande's) rule. Many of the basic principles of the army came from the Zulu king, Shaka. "When faced with [the 1879 British] invasion, the Zulu king could put 30,000 men into the field in an attempt to preserve the Zulu state."

These Boers wanted to acquire more land and gradually they began moving into the northwestern part of Zululand.17 Cetshwayo's foreign policy prior to 1877 was built on an alliance with the British in Natal, but then in April of that year Sir Theophilus Shepstone, the long-time friend of the Zulu, helped to bring about the annexation of the Transvaal, which made it a British colony. Then the boundary dispute became a British-Zulu question, rather than strictly a Boer-Zulu problem.

Boer-Zulu problem.18 During this same time period, Lord Carnarvon, the Colonial Secretary in London, sent Sir Bartle Frere to South Africa to put his plan for the federation of African states into effect. Neither Frere nor Carnavon knew much about South Africa, and neither man understood the situation's complexity. They did not comprehend how the people they wanted to unite differed, nor did they understand the traditional history of hostilities among the people of the area

On 22 January 1879, the British army suffered its worst colonial defeat of the nineteenth century when 1,500 men armed with the most modern weapons then available were wiped out at the battle of Isandlwana by a Zulu army—an impi—of 25,000 warriors armed only with spears. That an army of this size had slipped past British reconnaissance on the open veldt of South Africa to mount such a successful attack was remarkable in itself, but a second battle on that same day at a small mission station named Rorke's Drift made these events more remarkable still. Here, 120 men decided to stand and fight rather than flee the advancing impi that had just wiped out their comrades. At bayonet point, they fought a last-round defense against 4,000 Zulu warriors which earned them a victory and eleven Victoria Crosses—the highest number of the highest award for bravery ever bestowed on a single day in British military history. In 1964, this remarkable battle was immor talized in Cy Enderfield's classic film Zulu which, among other things, provided Michael Caine with his first screen role and generated an interest in the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 which has sca

The nub of his argument is that from the 1880s, as more and more Africans in Natalbegan to experience colonial rule as oppressive rather than protective, many began to alignthemselves politically with figures who were emerging as leaders of resistance tocolonialism. The rebellion of Zulu royalists under Dinuzulu, son of Cetshwayo, againstBritish colonial rule in Zululand in 1888, and his subsequent exile for 10 years to St Helena,was important in casting the Zulu royal house as a symbol of resistance. The granting of‘responsible government’to Natal in 1893 brought to power a succession of settlergovernments whose increasingly harsh rule pushed more and more Africans, especiallyyoung male migrant labourers, into identifying with the cause of the Zulu royal house. Thiswas shown up dramatically in the Natal rebellion of 1906, when many rebels in the regionsouth of the Thukela looked to Dinuzulu for leadership. Though he took no active part inthe rebellion, his conviction and imprisonment for treason on minor charges in 1908 furthercemented the position of the Zulu royal house in the eyes of many people as a focus ofpolitical loyalty. With this came a growing acceptance of an identity as‘Zulu’

In 1879, he tells us, large numbers ofAfrican men in the colony of Natal joined up as soldiers to assist the British army in itsinvasion of the neighbouring Zulu kingdom and its overthrow of the Zulu royal houseunder King Cetshwayo

olonial officials,missionaries, and African intellectuals were all playing roles, often contradictory ones, inthis process: these need more teasing out than the author gives them.