At eleven o'clock on the morning of 22 January 1879, a troop of British scouts chased a group of Zulus into the Ngwebeni Valley in Zululand. The scouts came to an abrupt halt when they saw what the valley contained. 20,000 Zulu warriors sat on the ground in total silence. It was an astonishing sight.
The struggle that followed this remarkable discovery was a disaster. When the High Commissioner for South Africa, Sir Henry Bartle Frere, came up with the misguided idea of annexing the British-friendly kingdom of Zululand into a larger South African confederation by force of arms, he assumed that Zulus armed with spears, clubs and shields would be no match for the mighty British army.
Without bothering to seek permission from the British government, Frere ordered an attack on the lands ruled over by King Cetshwayo, a sensible, thoughtful ruler who had regarded the British as his friends until Frere cynically engineered him into a position where he was unable to accept Frere's unreasonable demands.
When Cetshwayo failed to agree to Frere's ultimatum to disband his army, Frere seized the opportunity to invade. Chosen to lead the invasion was Frederic Thesiger, the second Baron Chelmsford. Lord Chelmsford massively underestimated how many men he would need to take into Cetshwayo's territory. So confident was Chelmsford of an easy victory that he took only 7,800 soldiers with him. His plan was to invade Zululand with three columns of infantry, artillery and native cavalry, with each column travelling through different parts of Zululand to engage Cetshwayo's army. The ultimate goal was the capture of Ulundi - Cetshwayo's capital.
The central invasion column was under the direct command of Chelmsford. It set out from the mission station of Rorke's Drift in the British-controlled territory of Natal on 11 January, crossing the Buffalo River into Zululand. By 20 January, all three columns had advanced into the kingdom unopposed, with Chelmsford's central column reaching the hill of Isandlwana, where the fateful decision was made to camp.
Against official military policy, Chelmsford did not order the camp to be "stored" - the practice of circling the column's support wagons to create a makeshift fort behind which troops could form a defensive position should an attack occur. Instead, on the morning of the 22nd, Chelmsford left only 1,300 troops guarding the camp as he took a significant number of his men to attack what he thought was the main Zulu army. In reality, the small number of Zulu warriors Chelmsford's scouts had spotted and reported back to the general was a ruse devised by Cetshwayo's commanders to draw out Chelmsford and then attack his forces from the rear with the main body of the Zulu army. The ruse worked, and the confident aristocrat marched 2,800 soldiers away from the camp, splitting his forces in two.
While Chelmsford was looking for an imaginary Zulu army, the real one moved to the Ngwebeni Valley. Back at the British camp, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Pulleine was responsible for the camp's defence. Pulleine was an administrator, not a soldier, and it was his inexperience that contributed to the disaster that was about to unfold.
Pulleine could have been replaced at 10.30 that morning when Colonel Anthony Durnford arrived from Rorke's Drift with five troops from the Natal Native cavalry and a battery of rockets, bringing the camp's fighting strength up to 1,700 men. Durnford, an experienced soldier, was Pulleine's senior, and army tradition dictated that he should have taken command. He chose not to do so, leaving a much less experienced man in charge.
When the attack came, it came quickly. The moment the camp at Ngwebeni was spotted by British scouts, the entire Zulu army sprang into action. The plan was immediately changed from attacking Chelmsford's rear to attacking the camp at Isandlwana. Word reached Pulleine that a large Zulu force was approaching fast and in huge numbers. As the warriors began to arrive over the horizon, they began to assemble into an "impi" - the traditional Zulu formation of three infantry columns that together represented the chest and horns of a buffalo. The central column of the impi headed directly towards the camp, while the two "horns" of the left and right columns fanned out on either side of the camp to surround the British.
Pulleine sent all six companies of the 24th Foot out to engage the central Zulu column front to front. Initially, the extended British line of fire held off the attack with considerable ease with help from the two mountain guns of the Royal Artillery. The legendary Martini-Henry end-loading rifle was more than a match for an assault force armed with spears and clubs, and with a rate of fire of twelve shots a minute, the experienced soldiers of the 24th Foot were able to keep the centre column of Impi at bay, inflicting heavy damage on the Zulu side, and forcing many to retreat behind Isandlwana Hill to shelter from the hail of shells and bullets.
Unfortunately for the soldiers holding the line against the Zulu centre column, the horns of the impi began to make progress against less experienced opponents. Durnford, defending the British right flank, had already lost his rocket battery and was now haemorrhaging troops. Unlike the regular soldiers of the 24th Foot, Durnford's forces consisted of African troops who were not fully armed with Martini-Henry rifles. Only one in ten of Durnford's private troops carried firearms, and even then they were armed with inferior muzzle-loading rifles. Faced with certain death or escape, Durnford's men began to leave the battlefield before they were completely surrounded and cut off by the Imps.
With Durnford's troop numbers dwindling rapidly, the rate of fire began to drop. This decrease in fire meant that more Zulus were able to push against Durnford's line of defence, pushing it back towards the 24th Foot who were still holding the central column of the impi in check. As Durnford's men retreated towards the left horn of the impi, the 24th Foot's right flank, which up to this point had been protected by Durnford, was now dangerously exposed. Pulleine realised that he could no longer hold the line against the central and left columns of the impi, and ordered a fight back to the camp. This was done in an orderly fashion by the sturdy regulars of the 24th. Unfortunately, Durnford's retreat was anything but orderly, completely exposing the flank of the 24th's G Company, which was quickly overrun and slaughtered by Zulu warriors.
As the remaining troops fell back to camp, the sky above them darkened. An eclipse of the sun occurred at 2:29am that day, blackening the sky for several minutes. When the sun returned, not one tent was left standing in the camp, and the area was now a killing scene.
The final stand was a brutal affair. British soldiers stood back-to-back, furiously stabbing away with their bayonets while wave after wave of Zulu warriors stabbed at them with their spears and beat them with clubs. Screams rang out across the camp as soldiers were stabbed and clubbed to death where they stood.
Durnford and a brave band of native infantrymen and regulars from the 24th Foot had managed to prevent the impi's two horns from joining forces by defending a wagon park on the outskirts of the camp. They could only hold out for so long, however, and when their ammunition ran out, they resorted to hand-to-hand combat until they were overwhelmed. Durnford's body was later found surrounded by his men, all stabbed and beaten to death.
Pulleine fared no better than Durnford. His body was never formally identified and he is said to have either died early in the fighting after the retreat to the camp, or on one of the desperate last stands that took place before the end of the battle where the remaining soldiers fought on until they were overwhelmed and killed.
As the remnants of the camp began to flee, no quarter was given to the remaining British and native soldiers. Those who attempted to flee were cut down as they ran, while those who lay wounded on the ground were stabbed and clubbed to death. The trail of slaughtered British soldiers reached right back to the Buffalo River - the same river where Chelmsford's men had so safely crossed into Zululand just eleven days before.
As the enemy melted away, taking with them rifles, ammunition, artillery and supplies, the scale of the massacre became clear. Of the 1,700 men tasked with defending the camp, 52 British officers, 806 enlisted men and 471 African troops had been killed. On the Zulu side, an estimated 2,000 lay dead. The Battle of Isandlwana was - and remains to this day - the worst defeat ever suffered by an indigenous force against the British army.
When the Zulus left the battlefield in triumph, 4,000 of them split from the main army and headed for the mission station at Rorke's Drift. There, 150 British and colonial troops fought wave after wave of attacks for ten gruelling hours before the Zulus finally retreated. Eleven Victoria Crosses were awarded for the station's remarkable survival.
Isandlwana was a humiliating defeat for a British government that had not even ordered the attack on Zululand in the first place. As news reached home of both the massacre and the valiant defence of Rorke's Drift, the British public bayed for blood. The government obliged their vengeful subjects, and in barely six months an expanded invasion force had conquered Zululand. The kingdom would remain a British protectorate for the next eighteen years until it was annexed and absorbed into Natal in 1897.
And what about Cetshwayo, the brave king who stood up to the might of the British Empire and won the day? He was captured after the Battle of Ulundi on 4 July 1879. He was exiled first to Cape Town, and then to London. His gentle nature charmed many in that city, and his treatment of Bartle Frere and Lord Chelmsford began to be thoroughly condemned by many in polite society. If this is how we treat our friends, many of them wondered, what does it say about us?
Cetshwayo returned to Zululand in 1883. He died on 4 February 1884 and is buried in a field near the Nkunzane River in what is now modern South Africa. He was the last king of an independent Zululand; a friend and unwilling enemy of the empire on which the sun never set.
English (UK) 
Norsk bokmål 
Svenska 
Dansk 
Kiswahili 