Alone Zulu warrior suddenly sprang out of nowhere and fired off a shot at the red-coated British soldiers. The warrior then ran off in a desperate scramble to escape. A furious barrage of rifle fire followed him—yet somehow, he managed to evade the bullets. Lt. John Chard, the officer commanding, remarked in admiration of the Zulu that he was “glad to say the plucky fellow got off.” It was Jan. 23, 1879, and the epic defence of Rorke’s Drift had just ended. Although a minor action in a far-off colonial war, it is one of the most famous battles in British military history.
The British and Zulu maintained friendly relations for almost 50 years before they came to blows in the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879. However, by the 1870s the fiercely independent Zulu, who possessed great military prowess, became viewed as a threat to expantionist British colonial ambitions in Southern Africa.
Diamonds were discovered at Kimberley in the 1860s, which became a major factor in the British desire to bring the disparate peoples of Southern Africa together under a British-led confederation. Such a confederation would allow British authorities at the Cape Colony to exert political control while also benefiting from the huge economic potential the region offered.
In 1877, the British annexed the Boer South African Republic, an act which led to a contiguous border and therefore direct confrontation with the Zulu. The Boers had a long-running border dispute with neighboring Zululand. Sir Henry Bartle Frere, the British High Commissioner for Southern Africa, sought to use the dispute to force a confrontation with the Zulu and remove the threat they posed to British ambitions in the region.
In late 1878 things came to a head following a series of border incidents. In July a wife of Sihayo kaXongo, a Zulu chief, had fled to Natal, the bordering British colony, but was pursued across the border by warriors. She was captured and returned to Zululand for execution. A week
