Courage & Assegais

THE WASHING OF THE SPEARS by Donald R. Morris. 655 pages. Simon & Schuster. $12.

At the very tip of the ravine, the trooper reined his mount in horrified astonishment. Spread out below him were the Zulu impi, or horde: 20,000 warriors crouched silent as death, carpeting the floor of the valley for more than a mile. The South African sun danced on long hide shields, glinted off a few musket barrels and a forest of assegais, the double-edged spears that sliced a man's belly to let his evil spirit out.

Five miles to the west, at Isandhlwana, a mixed command of 1,800 Redcoats, Boers and native Kaffirs braced for the oncoming attack. The impi covered the distance at a dead run. Swiftly the classic Zulu charge overwhelmed the garrison. The two "horns" raced out to either flank; their mission was to lock in the enemy flesh. The "loins" encircled the rear. The "chest," or main body, rolled like a tidal wave over the British line. By sunset, it was all over. The victorious impi vanished, leaving more than 2,000 of their own dead. But at Isandhlwana, not a single defender remained. The only survivors were the 55 Europeans and some 400 Kaffirs who had been scattered by the Zulu force.

Unseemly Start. For the Zulus, the bloodbath at Isandhlwana was their greatest triumph in a war they had not sought and could not win. The British offensive, launched in 1879, inexorably rolled on to destroy the most powerful nation that Black Africa ever produced. Author Morris has burdened the story of the Zulu nation's fitful reign and ultimate decline with unessential detail and endless digression. But the story itself survives his maltreatment.

Zulu power had begun to consolidate some 60 years before Isandhlwana under a rapacious and cruel tribal chieftain, who was called Shaka after his unseemly birth.* Viewing South Africa's teeming, disputatious tribes, Shaka had a vision of the strength that unity could bring, and he set out in 1817 to unify by conquest. Within a year, his modest impi of 350 warriors had swollen to 2,000. In ten years, an army of 50,000 enforced Shaka's will over a domain the size of Nevada.

Changed Color. Not even unconquered tribes dared to oppose a man whose executioners would cut open 100 pregnant women to satisfy their ruler's transient interest in embryology, whose fierce regiments would slaughter each other unless quartered in widely separated kraals. Toward the white man, however, Shaka assumed a friendly mien. The first British pioneers to set foot in Zululand met with a truly stunning cordiality. Executions were held in their honor. Shaka signed peace pacts with his guests, ceded them his kingdom (he had no intention of delivering), asked little more in return than a supply of Rowland's Macassar Oil. A bottle of this popular British hairdressing had arrived in some visitor's medicine chest; since it seemed to restore hair color, the aging Shaka decided that it possessed rejuvenatory powers.

He did not live long enough to find out. In 1828, covetous relatives dethroned Shaka by the usual method--murder. Over the next 50 years, successive assassinations eventually lodged a grandson, Cetshwayo, in the royal kraal at Ulundi. Fate and the British decreed that this gentle bull of a man would preside over the nation's death.

Cetshwayo desired only to coexist with the white settlers. In 1873, he submitted to a mock ceremony at which the Cape Colony's Secretary for Native Affairs, in the name of Queen Victoria, placed a tinsel crown on his royal brow. But all along the western boundary of Zululand, white colonists looked hungrily east at Cetshwayo's virgin land. To the British, that unsubjugated savage kingdom constituted an intolerable obstacle to progress.

Courage & Cannon. And so, in 1879, after presenting demands that no monarch would have met and that Cetshwayo did not understand, the British crossed the Tugela under arms. The massacre at Isandhlwana was only the first of many shocks for the British, and in the end, the campaign that they had planned to finish in two months took nine. It pitted courage and cannon against courage and assegais--and the cannon inevitably won.

Conquered and captured, Cetshwayo was sent to London, possibly for display purposes; but his great dignity, proof against the Western clothing furnished by his captors, won him popular sympathy, and he was restored to his throne. But it was not the same throne he had lost. The British had divided Zululand into 13 ineffectual kingdoms whose impis endlessly clashed for a power no longer there. In 1884, Cetshwayo died mysteriously in his kraal at 53, either of heart trouble or poison--no one bothered to determine which. By 1902, Zululand lay open to peaceful colonization. The new rulers were met by Zulu children, hawking spearheads and cartridge cases dug up from the fields where their fathers fell.

*His father, also a chieftain, dallied with a humble woman of another tribe. This was inexcusable royal behavior, and so the son was contemptuously named after the intestinal beetles, iShaka, that the Zulus held responsible for all illegitimate births.

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