Zulu

When the world seems to be going mad you instinctively search out the familiar, things that make you feel grounded and good. One of my things is the film Zulu, a film that pervades British culture, at least for Gen Xers and the younger Boomers. It occurs to me that it may not be so well known across the Pond and that it has qualities that my friends at BW may appreciate, so here is my introduction to a remarkable film. Some of you may already know Zulu, some may have never heard of it. I’ll give you a brief personal review for those who’ve not seen it, then a more detailed look at it. The second section may ruin the film for you if you’ve not seen it yet, so, if you think you’d like to watch it, stop at the “spoiler alert”!

Zulu was released in 1964 and relates events from the Anglo-Zulu war of 1879. It shows the heroic defence of Rorke’s Drift, a small mission station on the Mzinyathi (Buffalo) river bordering Zululand and Natal at the start of the war.

At the start of the film we learn, as do the protagonists, of the massacre of some 1,300 British troops at Isandhlwana, only about seven miles, as the crow flies, from their position. Faced with the choice of fleeing or standing, they choose to stand. A good portion, some 30 or so, of the men sick and non-effective.

They prepare their defence and await the onslaught. They are attacked by anything from 3,500 to 4,000 Zulus. The rest of the film tells the story of the repeated assaults and the dogged defence. Numbers, athleticism, heroism and a high degree of organisation against a small group of regular, trained troops with rifles and a small, tight defensive position. It’s a story made for cinema. Although the film has its faults and its inaccuracies it is broadly accurate and seeing it gives you a good idea of what did happen.

Why should you watch it? It’s an epic, if ever a film was. It has big, dramatic scenery under a massive sky that reminds you of the best of Westerns, it can’t help but savour something of The Alamo. It tells, with a surprising degree of honesty, the story of two unimaginably brave groups of men fighting and dying. The music is majestic and dramatic in equal measure. It has one of the (to my mind) the four great screen portrayals of a British senior NCO, the utterly wonderful Nigel Green as Colour Sergeant Bourne*. The combat is by no means realistic by the standards of the 2000s, but it is a ‘60s film. I’m sure a modern re-make would do the fighting and dying better, or at least more brutally, but it would get so much else very wrong. They’d probably cast Whoopie Goldberg as Col Sgt Bourne.

You want another reason? Ok, it’s the film that introduced to the film going public to Michael Caine and started his career. It’s probably the only film where he doesn’t pretty much play Michael Caine.

I’ve seen the film at least a dozen times end to end, and I’ve watched favourite scenes time and time again. It’s by no means perfect, by no means totally accurate, but it is a truly great film. Col. Sgt Bourne has been someone I’ve modelled myself on (to a degree) and the heroism it portrays can’t help but be an inspiration. I hope you enjoy it.

*The others being Windsor Davis as Battery Sergeant Major Williams in the 1970s sitcom It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, Sid James as the Chief Petty Officer Thorpe in the1958 film Silent Enemy and Dickie Attenborough as Regimental Sergeant Major Lauderdale in the 1964 film Guns of Batasi.

 SPOILER ALERT

Although I love Zulu it does have faults and inaccuracies, I’m going to go into those here, along with some interesting facts that will, hopefully, add to the film for you, but some may detract, hence the warning.

The film was made in South Africa during Apartheid. The authorities did not want too many Zulu all together in one place (there were laws about such things), so the long shot scenes of hundreds of Zulu warriors are largely pairs of Zulu holding a row of shields nailed to long poles! The film was banned for black audiences in South Africa as it was felt it might give people the wrong idea. A few special showings were put on in Durban and KwaZulu for the extras themselves.

The Zulu king, Cetshwayo kaMampade, is played by his great Grandson Mangosuthu Buthelezi, Chief of the Zulus and leader of the Inkatha Freedom Party until August this year.

Like Cetshwayo, almost everyone in the film with a name and lines is a real person who was there. They are not all shown accurately, as you’ll see.

Most of the film was made on location, but the studio parts were filmed at Twickenham Studios.

The Witts

The missionary responsible for Rorke’s Drift is shown as pacifist and a drunk. He was neither. Like most missionaries in South Africa at the time he supported the British invasion of Zululand. Cetshwayo refused Christian missionaries permission to seek converts in his land and their pressure was one of the reasons for the war. Witt himself scouted for the British before the battle. His adult daughter, Margareta, didn’t exist, at least not as she’s shown. Witt was 30 at the time and had two small children, who were safely out of the way, he stayed at the Drift for the duration of the battle.

The Zulu.

The Zulu nation was based around its army. All able-bodied adult males were part of their iButho, usually translated as regiment, the plural is amaButho. It can also be thought of as class, club or lodge. The iButho was largely age based and bound together by magical ritual as well as generational ties, shared experience and training. The Zulu forces also had sub-units within the iButho and units made up of multiple amaButho. Any distinct Zulu force, whether two hundred men or twenty thousand, was termed an Impi. They were remarkably sophisticated for a force using cow hide shields and spears. The film does show very well the Zulu grasp of psychological warfare.

As is shown early in the film a whole regiment would be married at a time, Moonie style. They had a huge esprit de corps and their own uniform. Younger regiments usually had darker brown or black shields and as the unit progressed they adopted shields with more white on them. The Zulu Impi in film is the Undi Corps. They had been held in reserve at Isandhlwana and very few had been able to “wash their spears”. The senior iButho at Rorke’s Drift was the uThulwana, with white shields. They were the regiment Cetshwayo had been in as a young man. The other regiments were the iNdluyengwe, iNdlondo and uDluko.

This brings me to the whole “colonialism” thing. The Zulu nation/army was the invention of tShaka kaSenzagakohna, AKA, Shaka Zulu. He lived at start of the 1800s and was the man who developed the ruthless and sophisticated Zulu military system. From around 1816 to 1840 was the Mfecane, (the crushing/scattering) when the expanding Zulu nation depopulated massive areas of eastern South Africa. Many fleeing tribes were caught between the Zulu and the advancing Boers and British. The Zulu themselves had come down from central Africa. Many Boer families of Dutch and Huguenot descent had been in that part of Africa for longer than the Zulu. In the film men of the Natal Native Contingent, who run away, these were mostly refugee/exiled Zulus who’d fled the rule of Cetshwayo. There are no “good guys” in this story, the Zulu invaded the territory they were living in every bit as much as the British and Dutch, and most peoples on our planet today.

A little bit on the Zulu hardware. The film mostly shows the biggest style of shield, the isiHlangu. In reality the Zulu mostly used the more manageable umBumbuluzu, about 3 ½ feet long. They used a variety of spears, some for throwing, all known by the general name of assegai but their own special spear was the iKlwa. It had a short handle, a long, wide blade and was used for thrusting, rather like a Roman gladius. The name is onomatopoeic, being the thrust into and the sucking sound of the blade being pulled from the enemy’s body. Contrary to what Adendorf says in the film the guns the Zulu use in the battle are mostly old muskets sold to them by white traders. The Undi regiments had little chance to collect Martini-Henry rifles from the British dead at Isandhlwana and were not very skilled, or interested, in the use of firearms, which they considered cowardly.

The Zulu war cry “uSuthu!”, which is heard repeatedly, is the name of tShaka’s iButho and was used by all Zulu regiments.

The British

Let’s deal with the thing that grates with many English fans of the film, the “Welsh thing”. The regiment involved was the 2^nd Battalion, 24^th Foot, Warwickshire Regiment. In 1879 the regiment did have a lot of Welshmen in it, Warwickshire being a border county, the depot had been moved to Brecon, in Wales. Some years later the unit was amalgamated with the South Wales Borderers. Despite the fact that there more Englishmen than anything else at Rorke’s Drift and the regiment was still an English one at the time the film plays up the Welshness and blatantly calls the unit the 2^nd Battalion, 24^th Foot, South Wales Borderers. I’m not trying to take anything from the Welsh, or any of the brave men who fought and died, but if the facts were reversed there’d be marches in the streets. Sorry, it just winds me up.

The best known and best loved scene in the film is where Lt Chard gets the Welsh soldiers to sing Men of Harlech to counter the Zulu war chants. There are accounts of the British shouting back to the Zulu chanting, but sadly, the full on singing of the wonderful song is pure cinema. Still, a fantastic scene. Likewise, the Zulu coming back to “salute” the British at the end is made up.

The British are shown more or less accurately, they were still wearing red tunics in 1879. The last campaign where it was worn was the Sudan in 1884/5. Khaki dress was being adopted at this time. They do rather look as if they’re on parade back in Blighty, the red is too clean and bright, the pith helmets too white. I leave it to your imagination how clean their kit would have been after weeks campaigning in the South African dust without attentive and scary wardrobe mistresses to keep it all nice. The Martini-Henry rifle was a beast. 49” long, weighing over 9 lbs with bayonet and firing a .45 round. Trained soldiers could get off twelve rounds a minute and the long bayonet had plenty of stopping power too. 

The officers, Lt Chard and Lt Bromhead are the undoubted male leads and are treated accordingly in the film. Being the ‘60s they’re both clean shaven when the men they portray actually had facial hair you could lose a badger in. The real men were also both rather old to still be Lieutenants (both in their thirties). In reality, the rather lightly treated Commissariat officer Langley-Dalton organised much of the defence. It is perfectly true that Bromhead had ancestors with Wolfe at Quebec and at Waterloo.

Col. Sgt Bourne is one of the joys of the film, but also one of the grossly inaccurate portrayals. Rather than the big, middle aged, time served and solid NCO we are shown the real Bourne was a small, wiry twenty-six year-old at the time of the battle. Certainly solid and a backbone of the defence he was the sort of chap who would most likely today end up in Special Forces. You might like to know that he lived the ripe old age of ninety-one, dying on VE Day, 1945.

Likewise, the Swiss Corporal in the Natal Native Contingent, Frederick Schiess was a much younger man, being twenty-two at the time.

Private Hook is the probably most controversial portrayal. In the film he is an insubordinate drunkard malingering in the hospital. Of course, he is redeemed through his bravery comes good in the end. The real Hook was a teetotaller, a model soldier who had been posted to the hospital to defend it. His descendants walked out of film’s premier in disgust.

The pacifism thing

What can I say? It’s ‘60s movie. All things considered it could be worse. I maintain any halfway well-made war film will be anti-war, it can’t help but be. War is hell, as we know. Having characters mouth pacifist platitudes doesn’t really help the case. Surgeon Reynolds, when not trying to save lives, was out handing out ammo to the troops. As I’ve said, the Reverend Witt scouted for the British. The words they’re given to say in the film would perplex and appal the real men.

All those VCs

At the end Richard Burton narrates the roll of the eleven Victoria Cross winners at Rorke’s Drift. The VC is Britain’s highest award for bravery, and is very rarely awarded. At the time of the film 1344 VCs had been awarded, today the total stands at 1358. The battle still holds, and probably always will, the record for the most Victoria Crosses for one engagement. Cynics say this is because the British authorities wanted to draw attention from the disaster at Isandhlwana. No doubt they were grateful for the small consolation of Rorke’s Drift, but the fact is they actually had to call a halt to the awards. The unusual circumstances, the small area the engagement was fought over, the high number of survivors, mean that there were plenty of witnesses able to attest to the various acts of valour.

As I said right back at the start, this movie means a lot to my generation. I first saw it on TV at, I guess, seven or eight. More than one of my friends have sat their sons down to watch it with them at a similar age. It’s influenced many film makers, notably Peter Jackson’s rendition of the Battle of Halm’s Deep in LOTR and Ridley Scott’s battle at the start of Gladiator where he actually sampled the Zulu war chants for the scene. The excellent Victory Davis Hanson devotes a chapter to the battle in his book Carnage and Culture. I hope you enjoy it and that I’ve not spoiled it for you.