The man chiefly responsible for this skewing of history was Baron Chelmsford, the British commander in South Africa. On 11 January 1879, the day after the expiry of the 30-day ultimatum, Lord Chelmsford's No 3 Column splashed across the Buffalo River at Rorke's Drift and entered Zululand. He was bound to resist, which is what Frere wanted him to do.Ĭetshwayo asked for more time to discuss the demands with his council, but Frere would not give him any. Frere knew that Cetshwayo could not comply with such harsh demands and keep his throne. It demanded, among other things, the disbandment of the Zulu army and the acceptance of a British resident.
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So Frere exaggerated the Zulu threat and, when the home government still refused to authorise a war, took matters into his own hands in December 1878 by presenting the Zulu king, Cetshwayo, with an unacceptable ultimatum. He quickly came to the conclusion that South Africa could not be unified under British rule until the powerful Zulu kingdom had been suppressed. Frere had been sent out to the Cape Colony as governor and high commissioner the year before with the specific task of welding the hotch-potch of British colonies, Boer Republics and independent black states into a Confederation of South Africa.
"The fact is," wrote Sir Michael Hicks Beach, the colonial secretary, in November 1878, "that matters in Eastern Europe and India… wear so serious an aspect that we cannot now have a Zulu war in addition to other greater and too possible troubles".īut Sir Bartle Frere, the man to whom this letter was addressed, had other ideas.
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Instead Disraeli's Tory administration – preoccupied with the Russian threat to Constantinople and Afghanistan – made every effort to avoid a fight. The Zulu War, like so many 19th-century imperial conflicts, was not sanctioned by the British government.