The Washing of the Spears

"This book has really stayed with me, and one thing I like about it is there is a continual undercurrent of deep respect, if not admiration, for the Zulu nation. The narrative has something of the rattling good yarn about it, while at the same time being extremely meticulously researched and scholarly at its core, but there is a lightness of touch in the tone and there are occasional wry asides. You put it all together and it adds up to a very satisfying and rich cocktail. Before the arrival of the Europeans, the Zulu people imposed themselves as the dominant tribe in southern Africa through being extraordinarily ruthless and disciplined in war. They were the Romans of southern Africa. It was an environment of extraordinary cruelty and barbarity, and there was an awful lot of witchcraft. In the first part of the book this pre-colonial Zulu world is conjured up. On reading it you have a keener understanding as to why the Zulus have been so attracted to Shakespeare’s play Macbeth . You have the elements of treachery, wizardry, bloodthirstiness, scheming and at the same time the powerful ritual, kings and hierarchies. That Macbeth -type world conveys something of what the Zulu nation was like before the arrival of the Europeans. That is conveyed richly, and often harrowingly, in the book. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Then there is the real drama, which is the arrival of the European settlers and the inevitable clash between the two. It’s told in a richly anecdotal way, but there is also an awful lot of historical material that the author draws on. The whole thing reaches its climax with the Anglo-Zulu War in 1879. The first great battle between the British Redcoats and the Zulu impis, or battalions, was an appalling defeat for the British at Isandhlwana. It was one of the very few times in the 19th century that British imperial forces were crushed. Immediately after that there was the famous Battle of Rorke’s Drift, immortalised in the movie Zulu starring Michael Caine. In the end, the Zulu nation is defeated by the British at the Battle of Ulundi and after that begins a period of relative ignominy. They are, but only marginally bigger than Mandela’s group, the Xhosa. The Zulus are definitely the mythical group, the mythical tribe of South Africa and regarded as such by everybody else. They are certainly perceived as the warriors. King Shaka, the founder of the Zulu nation, is the Homeric Achilles-type figure who resounds through history. You’ve touched upon a subject that stirs me and moves me deeply. If there’s one thing that I wrote about with more passion than probably any other when I was in South Africa it was Inkatha. Inkatha was a conservative, right-wing Zulu political organisation and – in one of the most shocking things I have seen in my travels anywhere – they aligned with the forces of reaction in South Africa. They were basically fighting and killing in order to stop the transition to democracy and yet they were black. It almost beggars belief. I consider the leader of Inkatha, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, to be a monster. But one should bear in mind that they did not represent the entirety of the Zulu nation – one can’t be so lacking in respect to imagine they were all mindless monoliths. Actually, half the Zulus were supporting Mandela’s ANC, and what you’d get in those days were the rural Zulus siding with Inkatha and the urban Zulus tending to support the ANC. Increasingly, the sense of the Zulus being a separate people unto themselves has been dissipated with time. The sense of Zulu pride still exists, yet one of the great things about the ANC is how they’ve managed to merge and mix all races and tribes in there. The former president, Jacob Zuma, is a Zulu. But he’s surrounded by people from all the other tribes. The reactionary Inkatha group is fast disappearing from the scene."