[knocking]
Hey Indy, great to see you. Welcome to our big, white, empty room.
Hey, I've been loving your videos on the Great War channel.
Thanks, I heard you guys were talking about the Zulu Empire, so I figured I'd pop over and check it out.
Hey, did you know that all this stuff leads up to a massive conflict in South Africa during World War One?
Yeah, it's a shame it's so rarely talked about when people discuss the first world war. I mean, even our series here is going to stop at the end of the 1800s.
We don't even get to cover the Boer wars.
Don't worry. We're actually covering it this week. Come over and visit us if you wanna check it out!
Sweet, I will do that! And, I'm just going to put up this box, here, for anyone who wants to come with me.
After this. I mean, I've got an episode to do.
Whoa, I should be in costume.
[intro music]
Last time, we saw Cetshwayo take over the Zulu Empire,
witnessed the dsicovery of diamonds in South Africa,
and watched British expansion push the region into anarchy and war.
Today, we pick up where we left off, the start of the Anglo-Zulu war.
Bartle Frere, the British high comissioner for South Africa, had just forced the Zulu Empire into war by offering them an ultimatum they could never accept
Cetshwayo and the Zulus prepared for battle, and Lord Chelmsford, the commander-in-chief for the British forces in South Africa,
set his men to march.
But Lord Chelmsford engaged in a monumental act of underestimation .
His greatest worry was that the Zulu wouldn't fight him, so he split his forces into three different columns
with the idea that he would encircle the Zulu, and force them to engage in battle.
This was an almost criminal act of disregard
There'e essentially no explanation for this, other than that he saw the native forces as fundamentally weak and inferior to European ones
Yes, in the past he had encountered native forces that had avoided pitched battle and had fought guerilla campaigns against him,
but simply lumping all the tribes together and assuming that they were alike would be a fatal mistake.
After all, even a cursory examination of the Zulu would tell you they were not exactly ones to shy away from a fight.
At first though, it appeared that Chelmsford may have been right.
His columns marched right into Zulu territory only to find it quiet, abandoned.
The savannah stretched on, empty, no proud MP warriors, no Zulu armies, just open grasslands
He ordered the three columns of his force to split up
with the plan for all of them to converge on the Zulu capital
His main column would march to a place called Isandlwana
where they would establish camp before advancing on the capital itself.
When he reached Isandlwana though, he split his forces again,
taking the majority of the troops in his column in search of a Zulu force they believed could be nearby
leaving only a skeleton force of seventeen hundred men to hold the camp.
But as Chelmsford ranged forward, chasing decoys or an illusory Zulu army,
the real Zulu force was working their way around his column.
On the morning of the 22nd, reports began to filter into camp of a huge Zulu force headed their way.
By 10 AM, the camp commander had sent word of this to Chelmsford,
but Chelmsford was convinced that it must be some small diversionary unit, not the main Zulu force.
He assumed the people in the camp were just getting jumpy.
At 11 AM, a party of scouts spotted a small band of Zulus, and chased them into a nearby valley,
where, to their horror, they saw 20,000 Zulu warriors sitting in utter silence.
Upon being spotted, the Zulu army sprang to life .
With this impossibly large army bearing down on them, the scouts chose one of their number to escape and bring word to the camp.
He wheeled his mount around and fled, as the rest of his fellows waged a desperate fighting retreat.
The ragged horseman returned to camp and leapt off his horse. The news had gotten through.
The camp commander again desperately sent word to Chelmsford calling for rescue, but again, Chelmsford ignored it.
Soon, the Zulu army was upon the camp.
20,000 arrayed against 1800 defenders.
The British had failed to fortify their camp, not even circling the wagons in the customary makeshift defense.
Such defenses were standard operating procedure for the British army, but Chelmsford hadn't given the order,
because by his own words, he felt it would be a waste of time.
The Zulus though, hadn't prepared to attack the camp this quickly either. They had expected to wait another day.
But, now that they'd been seen, there was only one choice left to them: attack.
Luckily, thanks to the bull's horns formation devised by Shaka at the very inception of the Zulu Empire,
every Zulu man knew his place .
Every man knew what to do.
The British camp commander, meanwhile, was really more of an admistrator than a soldier.
He didn't throw up any last-minute defenses, in fact, he did little more than having his drastically outnumbered men form a line as the Zulu charged.
By all accounts, the actual soldiers, the men on both sides, fought heroically.
The Zulu charged through the withering hail of rifle fire and artillery.
The beleaguered and outnumbered defenders lived up to their training, and put up a grim and stoic defense.
Bur as the sky darkened and the sun itself was eclipsed, the guns went silent.
The British line was ovverrun.
Desperate last stands continued in pockets across the field, with men fighting back-to-back, swinging rifles and bayonets
as ammo ran out, but the day was won.
The Zulus had crushed the British defenders.
A handful of British soldiers managed to escape Isandlwana, the worst disaster ever inflicted on the imperial army by a technologically weaker force
and made their way back to Rorke's Drift,
a small hospital encampment the advancing army had set up to handle the sick.
The survivors, the sick, and those stationed at Rorke's Drift amounted to perhaps 140 British troops,
many of whom were members of the engineering corps, or the commissariat, rather than the regular infantry.
Upon hearing of the disaster at Isandlwana, most of the men's first instinct was to flee,
but one man named James Dalton, the acting assistant commissary officer, told them all that they would never outrun a fast-moving Zulu column
while burdened with the sick and the wounded.
And so, the decision was made.
Though victory seemed impossible, they would fight.
Unlike the Isandlwana battle though, these men prepared themselves.
Upon hearing of the approaching force, the order was immediately given to use everything they had to fortify Rorke's Drift.
Flour bags and biscuit tins were turned into walls.
Holes were punched in the sides of nearby wooden buildings for shooting through.
Hospital beds were turned into barricades, and every soldier who could walk was positioned for the defense.
Fortunately for them, the rapidly-approaching Zulu force wasn't the same army that had crushed them at Isandlwana
but rather the loins of that force's bulls' horns formation.
The reserve force of 4000 warriors that hadn't been committed in the main battle.
They were commanded by Cetshwayo's half-brother, a less disciplined, rash commander
who had just now violated his orders to simply chase the enemy to the border of Zulu land by crossing into British territory
to raid Rorke's Drift.
Just as the defenses were being completed, the Zulu force descended upon Rorke's Drift.
For ten hours, the battle raged, fought inch by inch, room by room.
The hospital was burnt to the gorund, and the fight was pushed to the cattle pens.
But by 2 AM, it was over. 17 British troops lay dead, and about that many were wounded.
But about 850 Zulu were scattered, dead, or wounded on the hospital grounds.
Of the 20,000 bullets that had been stored at Rorke's Drift before the encounter,
it was later found that only 900 remained unspent.
Despite this miraculous last stand at Rorke's Drift, the disaster at Isandlwana and other setbacks
meant that the invasion of Zulu land was a failure.
The British forces withdrew.
But Chelmsford, desperate to repair his reputation, immediately began to prepare a second invasion,
and the British government, now actively seeking to avoid any further loss of face, rushed in reinforcements and heavier artillery.
Cetshwayo attempted to negotiate with the British,
knowing this second army to be an overwhelming force.
But Chelmsford wouldn't hear of it.
With the committed might of the British Military at his back, Chelmsford finally attacked the Zulu capital.
As the Zulu army lined up for their charge, they saw ten cannon and two gatling guns arrayed on the other side of the field.
Zulu warriors were cut down in swaths as they struggled to reach their foe.
With this total defeat and the loss of their capital, the Zul forces simply began to disperse.
The mighty Zulu army was no more.
The British captured Cetshwayo shortly thereafter,
and carved the Zulu kingdom into thirteen smaller subkingdoms, installing a new ruler into each one.
Almost immediately after these kingdoms were created, they fell into conflict,
and what can only be called civil war.
Cetshwayo, meanwhile, was brought back to England, where, surprisingly, he was treated like royalty in exile.
He met with Queen Victoria,
and his cause was taken up by some of the gentry,
to the point where he was eventually returned to the throne of Zululand.
Granted, they probably put him there because the Zulu civil war had gotten out of hand at this point,
and they hoped that returning him would reunify the region.
Unfortunately, it did not succeed.
Shortly after he returned to Zululand, he was attacked by a rival, and died a few months later.
He was succeeded by his son, who made great headway in taking back his ancestral flame
by allying himself with the Boers, granting the Dutch settlers large swaths of land in return for their help against his rivals
The British definitely couldn't allow that, though, and so in 1887, British forces finally annexed Zululand for good.
And like that, the Zulu empire was snuffed out.
[outro music]