IT HAS been suggested that the Zulu annihilation of the British forces at Isandlwana in 1879 could be attributed in part to poor British marksmanship, given that the Brits had the very latest breech-loading Martini-Henry rifles, while the Zulus were mostly armed with spears and knobkerries (a minority carried cheap muzzle-loading ‘trade guns’ including flintlocks).
During my recent tour of the battlefields of Isandlwana and Rorke’s Drift, it was remarked that the enormous disparity between the number of shots fired (20 000 within 10 hours) by the British at Rorke’s Drift, and the resulting Zulu casualties (estimated 600) seemed inexplicable. In Rorke’s Drift, historian Adrian Greaves says that, if this figure is correct, it “certainly appears to raise a question about the efficacy of the Martini-Henry rifle…”
Given the very small perimeter of the fortified area, a popular notion is that, virtually throughout the battle of Rorke’s Drift, the attacking Zulus were bunched shoulder-to-shoulder, rows deep, with only the width of a biscuit box or a bag of mealies separating them from the defenders. But was it like that?
Firstly, let it be said that much of written battlefield history is based on the reports of
