The battle of Blood River, or Ncome, on 16 December 1838, has long been regarded as a critical moment in the history of South Africa. It is the culminating victory by the land-hungry Boers who had migrated out of the British-ruled Cape and invaded the Zulu kingdom in 1837. 

Many Afrikaners long acclaimed their triumph as the God-given justification for their subsequent dominion over Africans. By contrast, Africans celebrate the war with pride for its significance in their valiant struggle against colonial aggression.

In this telling of the Boer invasion, respected historian John Laband deals even-handedly with the warring sides in the conflict, explaining both victory and defeat in the many battles that marked the war. 

Crucially, he takes the Zulu evidence into full account to present the less familiar Zulu perspective and to explain the decisions taken by the Zulu leaders, as they grappled with the existential threat of the Boer invasion.

Laband is a Professor Emeritus of History at Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada. He has authored, co-authored and edited over 20 books on warfare and military culture in Africa, specialising in the Zulu kingdom and in nineteenth-century colonial conflicts in southern Africa. Read the excerpt below.

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Monuments at war

Not all battlefields retain their disturbing aura of long-past bloodlust and grim exaltation, of courage and fortitude, unmanning dread and panic, anguish, pain, and violent death. Nor are their sites all marked by memorials that serve as the continuing focus of emotional commemoration.

Indeed, not all battles themselves remain the pivot of heated debate, their disputed significance freighted with present-day discord. One that does is the battle of Blood River – called Bloedrivier in Afrikaans and Ncome in isiZulu – that was fought on 16 December 1838 on flat, bleakly open, treeless grassland in what is now the Province of KwaZulu-Natal in the Republic of South Africa. Blood River vindicated the superiority of concentrated musket-fire from within an all-round defensive enclosure of wagons (a laager) over greatly superior numbers of warriors armed primarily with spears. It was the climacteric battle in a bitter war of betrayal, massacre, fierce resistance, and retribution that began in late 1837 when groups of Dutch-speaking pioneers (or Voortrekkers), who were part of a mass migration from the British-ruled Cape Colony – a movement which has gone down in history as the Great Trek – invaded the Zulu kingdom ruled by King Dingane. The intention of these Boers was to settle there and to establish their own independent republic on its soil. They fought the Zulu armies in alliance with English-speaking hunter-traders from the little enclave of Port Natal, and the war ended only in early 1840 once the Boers were able to take advantage of a civil war that broke out in the dislocated and weakened Zulu kingdom and drove Dingane from his throne. 

Successive generations of Afrikaners continued to celebrate their forebears’ victory over the amaZulu at the battle of Blood River as the triumph of Christianity over barbarism, and embraced it as an unmistakable sign of the favour in which God held their nation. The battle thus affirmed the God-given right of Afrikaners to rule over the Africans they had defeated, and out of this stirring foundation myth arose the ideology of apartheid. Afrikaners long held that this crucial event required commemoration.

With the Union of South Africa in 1910 that brought the British colonies and Boer republics of the subcontinent together in one country, 16 December was proclaimed a public holiday. It remained one until the eventual fall of apartheid 84 years later, and during these years it was annually celebrated with increasing fervour. The battlefield itself was elevated to a sacred site that became a place of pilgrimage that celebrated the Afrikaner nation and reaffirmed its political and cultural ascendancy. With increasing confidence in their dominance, Afrikaners required monuments to celebrate their history and its heroes. The most imposing of these is the enormous, monolithic Voortrekker Monument on its hill outside Pretoria, designed by Gerard Moerdyk and inaugurated on 16 December 1949. The floor of its Hall of Heroes has a central opening that reveals the cenotaph commemorating the Voortrekkers who died in violently opening up the South African hinterland to white domination, while the vast chamber’s surrounding walls are adorned by a marble frieze with 27 panels that illustrate heroic scenes from the Great Trek. 

Two years earlier, in 1947, a considerably smaller monument had been inaugurated on the Blood River battlefield. Designed by Coert Steynberg, it took the form of a massive but sombre ox-wagon sculpted out of granite and embedded into flights of steps. Over the doorway on the side dedicated to the victory of 1838 is a lunette filled by a crowded sculpture depicting three mounted Boers overwhelming four fleeing amaZulu and forcing them to the ground. In 1971 the granite wagon was moved to its present site to make way for a new monument designed by Kobus Esterhuizen to be erected closer to the river where the battle was fought. This ambitious project recreated the laager the Boers defended against the attacking amaZulu with a formation of 64 bronzed, cast-iron, life sized, and authentically recreated ox-wagons, each weighing eight tons. The bronze wagons encircle the original stone cairn marking the site of the battle, but this metal laager is not really an accurate reconstruction of the real one because in its positioning it unaccountably ignores the logic of the topography. Even so, it makes an astonishing statement on the empty plain and incontrovertibly puts the seal of Afrikaner ownership on the battlefield. Significantly, the metal laager was paid for in part by contributions raised from among ordinary Afrikaners, and spoke to their ongoing obsession with the symbolism of the site.

Yet, the battlefield was also of significance to the amaZulu whose ancestors had fought and died there. This ostentatious new memorial to the Boer victory was not only taken as an affront to smouldering Zulu nationalism, but was also spurned as yet another flaunted symbol of Afrikaner domination and apartheid policy. When the new democratic government came to power in 1994, it was very aware of the significance of Blood River for the former regime, and the extent to which it was repudiated by Africans. In 1995 it renamed the public holiday on 16 December the Day of Reconciliation, and set about making the contentious battlefield and its existing monuments more acceptable to the values of the post-colonial, democratic, all-inclusive and multi-cultural society it was then (if now no longer) sincerely promoting.

And certainly, there was no disguising that the Blood River monuments echoed the situation in 1994 where 97 per cent of all existing monuments in South Africa reflected the values and interests of the colonial and apartheid eras, and were viewed by blacks as symbols of their past alienation and disempowerment. For the new government, the challenge lay in somehow ensuring that these monuments reflected the diverse history and values of the new post-apartheid society without, at the same time, undermining its efforts to promote reconciliation and nation-building by physically removing them. As a first step in this regard, and to allay the fears of formerly dominant groups that their culture would be assailed, the government saw to it that the country’s new constitution of 1996 assured persons of all cultural groups that they would not be denied their right to enjoy their own culture.

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Yet, in practice, how were contentious monuments, offensive to large segments of the population, to be both retained and, as it were, rendered neutral? It was precisely because of the heavy ideological freight they carried that the government homed in on the monuments on the Blood River site to attempt a solution that could then be adopted elsewhere.

Monuments fell under the new Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology, and in 1998 it appointed the Battle of Blood River Reinterpretation Committee. It comprised a panel of so-called ‘diverse’ academic historians consisting of one ‘Afrikaner’ historian, two ‘English’ historians (the author was one of them), and three ‘Zulu’ ones. The committee presented its final report on 31 October 1998 at a seminar at the University of Zululand. In retrospect, the committee’s attempt to formulate an interpretation of the battle that satisfied all the ‘stakeholders’ (to use the parlance of the time) was not entirely successful, and it ended up largely reflecting the views of those most concerned to assert Zulu nationalist identity. More practically useful than this weighted ‘correction’ of past interpretations of the battle was the committee’s recommendation that the government, in order to ‘create a spirit of reconciliation’, should erect ‘a monument that would make noble the loss of Zulu life and extol Zulu bravery as much as the present monuments at the site do for the Voortrekkers.’

This recommendation was carried through with the construction of a new monument across the Ncome (Blood River) from the bronzed Boer laager and opposite to it, deliberately placed to confront it as the Zulu army had on the day of battle. Maintaining the military theme, the Ncome monument is designed to reflect the classic Zulu battle formation with the central round building representing the ‘chest’ of the attacking bull, and the curving extension either side of it the encircling ‘horns’. The outer walls of the pinkish façade are adorned by replicas of ox-hide shields painted in different patterns and colours to represent the Zulu ‘regiments’ that fought in the battle. As intended, the elegant building radiates energy and is dedicated to the brave amaZulu who fell in the battle defending their independence. Thousands (including the author) were present on 16 December 1998 when King Goodwill Zwelithini unveiled the monument. Representatives from all political parties and many cultural organisations were among the guests. Numerous AmaZulu were in traditional dress and carried traditional weapons.

The Boer laager and the Zulu monument confronting it across the river are assumed to complement each other by those who believe in the value of post-colonial monuments being positioned in the proximity of colonial ones in order that they might interact and thus define and legitimise each other. Such placement, it is suggested, allows us to acknowledge differing perspectives. And by ending one-sided representation, it helps us reconcile conflicting historical portrayals and so fosters reconciliation. That indeed was the intention at Blood River/Ncome, and the opening in 2014 of a long-deferred pedestrian bridge over the river connecting the two sites was intended (apart from any practical considerations with tourists in mind) to reconfirm symbolically the reconciliation of ancient enemies.

The problem, though, is that memorialisation cannot help but always be highly charged both politically and culturally, and simply cannot avoid leading to a contestation of the past. And a battlefield is probably the most compromised place of all to cultivate reconciliation. Monuments permanently fix the past in physical form, so when you have one that is conceived of as an attacking force and the other as a defensive formation, they belie the noble rhetoric of mutual understanding and forgiveness. The Ncome monument unashamedly celebrates traditional Zulu warrior identity and is just as grounded in ethnic nationalism as are the Afrikaner Blood River monuments opposite. The annual celebrations of the battle are still conducted separately on either side of the river by different racial groups who persist in regarding each other as the adversary, revealing ingrained antagonisms that the connecting footbridge cannot eradicate. And, as the reconciliatory spirit – so compelling when the Ncome monument was inaugurated in 1998 – continues to fade in an increasingly polarised South Africa, the bronze laager symbolically keeps on defending while the Ncome monument opposite is always attacking.

In writing this book, I am deeply aware of the historic antagonisms that the war of 1837–1840 between the Trekkers and amaZulu set in motion. I can see that, despite efforts to encourage mutual respect and reconciliation, animosities between the descendants of the original combatants still simmer on and are expressed through the battle monuments they have raised. Nor is that surprising, because the war was a critical one in South Africa’s blood-stained history of colonial conquest and African resistance, one that spawned myths that fed the conflicting ideologies. DM/ ML

The Boer Invasion of the Zulu Kingdom: 1837-1840 by John Laband is published by Jonathan Ball Publishers (R290). It will be on shelves from 3 February 2023. Visit The Reading List for South African book news, daily — including excerpts!