An Historical Atlas of the Zulu Rebellion of 1906 (review)

The Anglo-Zulu War did not end, as moviegoers might assume, on 23-24 January 1879 at the battle of Rorke's Drift, where Stanley Baker and Michael Caine saw off a 4,000-strong Zulu impi with a little help from the South Wales Borderers. Nor did it end, as closer observers of the war might think, on the Fourth of July 1879, when British troops, lumbering forward in a great parallelogram bristling with Gatling guns, breechloaders, and cannon, managed to drive off a Zulu army of 20,000 men and burn Ulundi, the capital of Cetshwayo, the Zulu king.

The final act in Zulu armed resistance to white encroachment on their lands and efforts to transform them from farmers and herders into farm laborers and mine workers came only in 1906. That uprising, long overshadowed by the events of 1879 and largely forgotten now, is the subject of Paul Thompson's Historical Atlas of the Zulu Rebellion of 1906. A research scholar at the University of Natal in South Africa, Thompson hopes his heavily annotated atlas will resurrect interest in the 1906 upheaval and serve as a guide to the movements and engagements of its contending forces when the centenary of the event is celebrated in two years time. Thompson is well placed to provide this kind of stimulus. The Field Guide to the War in Zululand and the Defence of Natal 1879, one of a number of books he has coauthored with Zulu wars scholar John Laband, has gone through several editions since its original appearance in 1979.

As Thompson explains in his introduction to the atlas, the Zulu uprising came in the wake of government imposition of a poll tax on the African population of Natal province. The poll tax was levied when an earlier hut tax did not sufficiently impoverish Zulus to force them to seek employment on white farms or down South Africa's mines. Word of the new tax, however, only added to what was already a mood of economic crisis among the Zulus, brought on by government parceling out of some of their lands to white settlers, sustained drought, and an epidemic of rinderpest that had devastated their cattle herds. When the government chose to meet local refusal to pay the new tax with armed force, clashes took place with losses on both sides. The ensuing conflict was fought by "citizen soldiers" in both camps. Withdrawal of British troops from South Africa after the Second Boer War meant that the task of putting down the Zulu rebellion fell to the Natal militia. As Thompson points out (p. 2), "a militia of sorts"—the groups of retainers or amabutho around traditional chiefs—did most of the fighting for the Zulus as well. The leadership of the insurgents devolved upon one of these chiefs, Bambatha, who claimed to have the power to make his fighters impervious to the white man's bullets. This did not turn out to be the case. Some 3,000 Zulus died in the fighting, including Bambatha, who perished in the decisive battle of the war, at Mome, on 10 June. Thirty white soldiers lost their lives in the war. Repression was savage, reflecting the great insecurity felt by the white population of Natal, outnumbered as it was 10 to 1 by Africans. Around 7,000 Zulus were sentenced to prison, many at hard labor. But, as far as the white population of Natal, and indeed the rest of South Africa, was concerned, the war and subsequent repression had done what the hut and poll taxes could not. As another writer on the subject has noted, by 1909, an estimated 80 percent of the adult males in Zululand had migrated elsewhere in search of work, most of them to the gold...