Isandlwana Battlefield

Interesting facts

The name Isandlwana is said to mean the second stomach of a cow, a shape the hill suggested to the Zulus.

King Cetshwayo sent his main army of about 24,000 from near Ulundi on 17 January 1879, ordering it to advance slowly and attack at dawn.

The victors carried off about 1,000 Martini–Henry rifles, two field guns, some 400,000 rounds of ammunition and around 130 wagons.

Only five imperial officers survived the battle, among them Horace Smith-Dorrien, who later became a general in the First World War.

The Queen's Colour that Melvill and Coghill tried to save was lost in the Buffalo River and recovered from the water ten days later.

Melvill and Coghill were awarded the Victoria Cross posthumously, but only in 1907, almost three decades after their deaths.

Colonel Anthony Durnford fought at Isandlwana with a left arm paralysed by wounds received in an earlier campaign.

About 4,000 Zulu reserves who had not been engaged in the battle crossed the Buffalo River and attacked the mission station at Rorke's Drift, held by some 150 soldiers.

The defeat ended the first British invasion of Zululand and led to a much larger second one, which closed with the Battle of Ulundi and Cetshwayo's capture.

A Zulu account of a lone British soldier holding out in a cave on the hillside inspired Richard Thomas Moynan's 1883 painting The Last of the 24th.

Why it is worth it

Isandlwana is a solitary hill rising out of the open grassland of KwaZulu-Natal, and at its foot, on 22 January 1879, a British invasion force suffered one of the worst defeats in the history of the Victorian army. The landscape has barely changed: rolling veld, scattered homesteads, the hill standing alone, and on its slopes the white-painted stone cairns that mark where the British and colonial dead were buried where they fell.

The British had invaded the Zulu kingdom under Lord Chelmsford. On the day of the battle Chelmsford split his column and rode out with part of it, leaving the camp under Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Pulleine, joined later by Colonel Anthony Durnford — perhaps 1,800 men in all, spread out in the open without entrenchments. The Zulu army of some 20,000, commanded by Ntshingwayo kaMahole and Mavumengwana kaNdlela, attacked in its classic formation of the horns and chest of the buffalo, closing around the camp from both flanks. By the afternoon, during a partial eclipse of the sun, the camp had fallen; more than 1,300 men on the British side were killed, and the Zulu losses were perhaps a thousand to three thousand. Two lieutenants of the 24th Regiment, Melvill and Coghill, died trying to carry the Queen's Colour to safety across the Buffalo River.

The site is a place to walk slowly and read. Regimental memorials and the cairns lie scattered across the slope below the hill; in 1999, for the 120th anniversary, a memorial to the Zulu dead was added — a giant form of the isiqu, the necklace of valour awarded to Zulu warriors, set in the shape of the buffalo's horns and pointing towards the hill where the fighting ended. The names of the Zulu fallen were never written down, so the necklace stands for all of them. The quiet of the place, and the huge sky over the empty hills, is what most visitors remember.

Getting there

Isandlwana lies in rural KwaZulu-Natal, far from any large town; the nearest sizeable town is Mondlo, about 42 km away, but visitors usually come from Dundee, about 80 km by the R68 through Nqutu. The nearest airport is Pietermaritzburg Airport (PZB), about 145 km away. The battlefields of Isandlwana and Rorke's Drift are usually visited together, often with a local guide.

Isandlwana Battlefield

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

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