Battle of Isandlwana

And the kingdom he ruled, the army he commanded, the tactics his generals used, were in the very bones the kingdom and the army and the tactics his outcast uncle had hammered into being half a century before.

So when a British column crossed the Buffalo River into Zululand in January of 1879, confident and contemptuous and dragging its cannon towards a hill called Isandwana, it wasn't marching against a rabble of savages, whatever its officers believed.

It was marching straight into the machine that a bullied fatherless boy had built out of nothing on the far side of a single lifetime.

The uncle had forged that spear.

The Zulus had a name for that hill.

They call it Isandwana.

So I'd like you to picture the camp because everything that follows turns on it.

Some 1,700 or so men were spread out on the eastern slope beneath that hill.

That's not a small thing to say in 1964.

And the film, I think, says that with absolute force.

If you want the other half of the film, incidentally, there's a later picture called Zulu Dawn, which was made in 1979 as a prequel, which actually tells the story of Isandwana, the disaster before the stand at Rourke's Drift.

And by memory, I think it has Burke Lancaster and Peter O'Toole as chilly, doomed Lord Chelmsford.

Per an article in The Collector by Greg Baer, "For the most part, cricket was an obsession of the military, and there were even complaints of British officers taking up valuable logistics space by bringing their cricket gear on military campaigns.

One such complaint was received before the Battle of Isandlwana, where the British suffered their biggest-ever defeat to indigenous forces." So is it possible that the British lost to the Zulus there because they were too obsessed with playing cricket? Unlikely, but not impossible.

Yeah, I can picture some, like-

Yeah

Because at the end, it's estimated of the...

Roughly 1,800 soldiers at Istanbulana, perhaps 50 escaped the battle alive.

And of those, there were mostly civilians and officers that were wearing black coats.

And the Zulu warriors were focusing on the soldiers wearing red coats.