On the road to Isandlwana

The Anglo-Zulu wars are not something I knew of before, or learnt about at school for that matter.

We learnt mainly about the Great Trek of the Voortrekkers and a little about the Anglo-Boer war.

I have read that our minister of education is planning to include more African history in our school curriculum and I think that it will be a good thing, unless the pendulum is just swinging all the way to the other extreme by not including the history of all the peoples in South Africa (Afrikaner, English, Zulu, San, Xhosa... so many to mention!)

So on our way down to the coast, we decided to follow a route in this book of ours:

The Anglo-Zulu Battlefields route.

In the book it consists of 3 days, but we only managed to do the first day.

Our first stop was the battlefield of Isandlwana.

The battlefield at Isandlwana - the white rocks are strewn far and wide around this hill and mark the places where the British fell.

Apparently the British gave the Zulu-king Cetshwayo an ultimatum to disband his army. The Zulu king obviously did not comply with this ultimatum and the British forces moved in against the Zulus.

The Buffalo River

At Isandlwana they met their match and the Zulus won the battle. The British who survived fled through the  Buffalo River to Rorke's Drift and the Zulus followed them.

Rorke's Drift

Charma explains (in Afrikaans) all the displays in the museum at Rorke's Drift :-)

We walked all the way up the hill that overlooks Rorke's Drift - 

We never knew that Zululand was such a vast and beautiful place. When I asked the lady at the Information Centre what the war was about - she smirked and said: "Land - they wanted our land. It has always been about land here."

How sad and true. South Africa seems to be unable to move beyond the land issue. Here in Kwazulu Natal, where there is an abundance of it (or so it seems) the issue still remains.