Archaeologists are trying to find what really happened at the battle of Isandlwana
Paul Kirk Amid the noise of the battle, the screams of the dying and the roar of a cannon, a desperate soldier of the 24th Regiment of Foot took shelter behind the two large boulders on the Isandlwana battlefield and poured five rounds from his rifle into the rapidly advancing Zulu army. He then either ran back to the camp or, more likely, was killed near the same boulders. Almost 120 years later an unknown assassin stood behind the same rocks and fired into the Isandlwana village with his pistol. These are the fascinating early findings of a team of archaeologists exploring the Isandlwana battlefield in KwaZulu-Natal. The battle, depending on your perspective, was either the greatest victory of the Zulu army or the greatest defeat of the British. On January 22 1879 the massed Zulu army attacked the British camp commanded by Colonel Anthony Durnford. The result was a bloodbath. While thousands of Zulu warriors died, the British lost roughly 1 200 men – the worst defeat of a British army in a colonial war. Today the battlefield is a major source of income for the surrounding communities, who benefit from the booming tourist trade. Many visiting tourists come from Wales – most of the soldiers who died at Isandlwana were Welsh.
But while the battle has been the subject of two major films, many unanswered questions remain. Much of the mystery can be traced back to the British commander in Zululand at the time, Lieutenant General Lord Frederic Augustus Chelmsford, who, in order to hide his own culpability for the Isandlwana disaster, blamed the defeat on the youthful commanders of the camp and cultivated a rumour about faulty ammunition boxes and a lack of screwdrivers. One myth of the battle is that the British were destroyed as someone forgot to pack a screwdriver to open the boxes. The archaeological team, led by University of Glasgow academic Dr Tony Pollard, began probing the Isandlwana battlefield site this week. On the first day of digging the team uncovered expended cartridge cases that tell a tale of British regulars retreating into their camp from their positions as the situation became more and more desperate. They also found expended modern pistol ammunition that they suspect was fired in one of the many politically motivated murders near the site in northern KwaZulu-Natal. Pollard and his team are not on the battlefield expecting to find great treasures. Their type of work was recently described in Time magazine as “blue collar” archaeology- not so much interested in finding golden bowls as finding what was eaten from the golden bowls. Apart from a number of cartridge cases, one of Pollard’s most prized finds on the first day of excavations was a battered officer’s chamber pot found near a donga. Said Pollard: “A private soldier would have been expected to relieve himself outside his tent. Officers had chamber pots. This example was picked up as loot by a Zulu warrior and carried some distance before the chap realised he had little use for it. The real prize for the Zulu army that day was the rifles and ammunition in the camp.” Pollard, who admits to having been fascinated by the war since watching the film Zulu, wants to know what happened on the battlefield that day and also how that battle came to affect the local communities. Pollard has already laughed off the faulty ammunition box theory. “An ammunition box was made of wood and was held shut by one screw. Anyone could break one of them open against a rock if there was an emergency.” Pollard’s counterpart, Len van Schalkwyk of Amafa KwaZulu-Natal – the newly renamed KwaZulu-Natal Monuments Council – is quick to point out that at the time, and until the modern day, there has been a tendency for white and mostly British historians to blame the battle of Isandlwana on the failure of technology, rather than to admit the Zulu army outfought the colonial force.
The excavations are still at an early stage and are planned to last five years. The volunteers doing the actual work are all from an American NGO called Earthwatch that has sponsored the project. The archaeologists are using some of the most modern equipment available to probe the battlefield, but they are dealing with a site that has been badly affected by crime. For more than 100 years treasure hunters have illegally combed the area with metal detectors and even looted graves for souvenirs. “That is the one huge problem we have,” says Van Schalkwyk. “I am dreading that this article may encourage people to comb battle sites for trophies. The analogy to picking up debris off a battle site is like cutting pages out of a library book. The information is forever lost and forever out of context.”