British Infantryman vs Zulu Warrior by Ian Knight

Author:Ian Knight
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: British Infantryman Versus Zulu Warrior
ISBN: 9781472806109
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

INTO COMBAT

On the heights Raw and Roberts spotted small parties of Zulu foragers driving away cattle in the distance, and gave chase. Raw pursued one party who disappeared around the foot of a hill; riding up onto the shoulder to cut them off, Raw’s men found themselves looking down into the Ngwebeni Valley – and the amabutho camped there.

In that electric moment, as the horsemen appeared suddenly on the skyline, the collective tension among the amabutho broke, and whatever Ntshingwayo’s plans, the nearest warriors rose up and rushed to attack. ‘They turned and fell upon us’, reported Raw laconically, ‘the whole army showing itself from behind the hill in front where they had evidently been waiting’ (quoted in Knight 2010: 345). Raw dismounted his men to fire a volley, then mounted again and retired towards the camp. ‘At once [they] found themselves in the close embrace of the Kandempemvu’, recalled a Zulu named Muziwento, ‘even as tobacco [is mixed] with aloes’ (quoted in Natalia 8 (Dec 1978): 15).

The Zulu army spilled out of the Ngwebeni Valley in some confusion, the original order of attack forgotten. ‘We sped on at the lope like a pack of wolves’, a British missionary, Revd A.W. Lee, was told after the war, ‘spurning the dust with our feet as we passed. Men leapt aloft like spring-bok in their eagerness to get forward to their first view of the enemy. So, running, leaping we swept up …’ (NW 19 Jan 1929: 18). There were, however, several miles separating them from the British camp, and their commanders, hurrying up from the rear, had time to impose some new sense of order. ‘We heard firing on top of the rise’, said a man named Mhlahlana of the iNgobamakosi, ‘and as soon as we got on top we saw the Ukandempemvu and the white men in grips with each other. We were then brought round to get into line with the Ukandempemvu’ (NM 22 Jan 1929: 10).

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