The Nature Of The Beast

If the trouble in North America was manageable, and in China bad, the place that wins the gold medal for the most suffering was a region that actually did produce more than enough food stuffs to feed itself but, at the same time, utterly failed to so, if you could even go so far as to say that there was even an attempt. In South Africa, by 1901, famine was just one more weapon being used to kill and, at least in this much, it had been an unqualified success. For almost a century, before anyone realized the mineral wealth of the region, cattle had been the biggest game in town. The discovery of gold and diamonds had done nothing to change to the status of the cattle industry and, this was true of even independent, native African states. Here, with the natives, it seems to be even more true in that many of these people used cattle as currency. Cows were even used to buy wives. Such was the importance of beef.

The problem with the beef industry is, if you will pardon the pun, the very nature of the beast. For anyone who is familiar with the romanticized tales of the Texan Cowboy, then you have at least heard of cattle rustling. This is one of many common problems with raising cattle and one reason why pigs have always been more popular. Cows require large tracks of land just to maintain a heard of the size required to make them economically feasible to raise. Then you have to get them from the pasture to market and normally these places are separated by vast distances, usually because that entire distance is needed for grazing.

By the 19^th century, a lot of the practical problems with raising cattle had been solved by technology. Without artificial refrigeration, the large scale distribution of beef was nearly impossible. Ships and railcars, built with large ice boxes that depended on both the natural and the artificial kind of freezing, began to enter service in the latter half of the century. Suddenly, the supply of beef could meet the demand because moving frozen steaks was far more practical than herding a live animal, which was, the only way it could be done before. It was the technology that suddenly allowed beef to supplant pork in the industrialized nations, for the first time in modern history, and on a global scale.

This is not to say that all of the problems had been solved. The popular myth of the cattle rustler has a grain of truth to it. It was a problem in Mexico and Texas before the war, where rustlers had an international border to hide behind. In South Africa, with all of it’s little microstates, the problem was even worse and this was before the war. As the war went on, the governments responsible for suppressing these lawless activities became powerless or otherwise occupied. With the economic collapse that resulted in a barter economy, theft became common and the first industry to take the hit on the chin was the one that was most exposed, the cattle industry.

Naturally, the wide expanses, covered with the sprawling herds, was the perfect place to steal one of the single biggest targets of bandits, that being cattle. While the independent raiders were a serious problem these thieves were nothing compared to the officially sanctioned bandits, that being the armies at war. Like the privateers of old, the armies had an official license to go after each others cattle and, while lacking the resources to launch an offensive against militarily viable targets, they had more than enough resources to do a proper job of cattle rustling. Raids became common and happened deep within the territories of both sides.

There were many who called on the various governments, in the patch work quilt of states, that was South Africa, to do something about this menace. The almost unanimous position of these officials was that they were doing something and that something was trying to win the war. In all fairness to those officials, it was impossible to tell if someone, who was rustling cattle, was doing it for profit or patriotism. Indeed, in retrospect, a good number of raids were done for both reasons and, anytime someone was caught they always claimed to be a soldier on a military expedition since, with the war on, stealing cattle was a capital offense and a thief would be executed while a soldier was treated as a prisoner of war, and spared.

Like everything else in South Africa, the problem of banditry was colored by the ethnic divides in a land where such things could even be deadly in peace time. This was never more true than in a certain section of the British Natal Colony. This particular region was somewhat different from others because, up till just a few decades before, it had not only been an independent nation but a growing empire in it’s own right. Outsiders knew this area, collectively, as Zululand. If the rustling problem had gotten bad and hopelessly entangled with the war in other parts of South Africa, in Zululand it had completely merged.

After the British destroyed the Zulu kingdom in the early eighties, there had been a great deal of sympathy for the Zulu in Europe and even in the white communities of South Africa. The then king of the Zulu, Cestshwayo, had been brought to Cape Town as a prisoner but, found himself riding into town on a buggy and given a parade as if he were a conquering emperor returning to Rome. These sorts of displays put pressure on the British Government for there were many who had felt the war unjust. Like many wars of this age, the casus belli of the conflict was completely contrived. Unlike others, those involved in creating the conflict had handled the matter rather poorly and the excuse for war looked to be nothing more than that.

While the excuse for the conflict was weak, at best, the real reasons for the war were far more sound and they followed the British policy in South Africa, to the letter. The war was not about expansion or conquest, but rather, unification of South Africa. It was equally about keeping the Boers away from the ocean. Even more than the Zulu, the Boers were also standing in the way of unification and, by extension, the precious railroad that Britain wanted to build from Capetown to Cairo. One of the things that kept the Boer nations in check was their lack of access to the sea and Zululand, in many ways, offered them a port. Even if it was underdeveloped, Zululand had a good coast line and many places that could serve as a good harbor.

Despite the romanticized versions of history, that paint the Zulu and Boers as mortal enemies, in constant conflict, this is not entirely true. This image was, in my opinion, largely born of 19^th century racism where the Boers needed a great and uncivilized enemy with which to play the bad guys in stories that they told their children. While the Boers and Zulu did fight, more often than not, they also cooperated with each other seeing as how they had a mutual enemy that was far more deadly. This cooperation, unknowingly, had began right from the start. The Boers had left the Cape and migrated inland to get away from the British. They did not have to conquer any land to settle because it had already been done for them. By the time of the Great Trek, as known by the Boers, Shaka was already on the scene and he had systematically exterminated most of the residents that lived in what would become the Boer republics.

Of course, Shaka had no way of knowing that this land he had emptied would be settled by others who had more firepower than he did. What Shaka did know was that, just like the Boers, he was already having trouble with the British. The irony of this is that without the British, Shaka would have never had an empire to begin with. While Shaka’s personality may have forged this once minor band of Bantu into an empire, it had been his advisors, most of whom were educated in Britain, that made it possible. Much like the Japanese, the Zulu’s had adopted European technologies and customs that aided their cause and put these things to immediate use.

The Zulu never went as far as the Japanese in their adoption of European ways. They had no problem using European metallurgy, guns, tools, and even adopting the regimental system for their almost universal military service. Again, contrary to the romanticized version, they did not hang on to most of their Bantu customs either. Shaka, and his little clique, either made up their own or heavily modified the existing customs and what they created was entirely unique. Shaka even went so far as to outlawing footwear. He would personally kill anyone he saw wearing it. While some have pointed to this as some primitive African custom the truth was that this was a fetish that was entirely owned by Shaka. The rest of the Bantu had no problem with shoes they simply lacked the charisma and sociopathic personality that Shaka used to get his way.

It was these strange customs, created by Shaka and his advisors, that set the Zulu empire on a collision course with the British. They would have been anyway because of the unification policy but, the custom of not allowing warriors to marry, until after they had seen battle, was speeding up the crisis. To put it bluntly, guys want sex and if they have to kill someone to get it, they will. While the Zulu’s enjoyed an early string of successes in the 1879 war, one that captivated imaginations world wide, they were ultimately crushed and, by 1898, Zululand enjoyed some semi autonomy within the confines of the British colony of Natal. It was far from a perfect situation however.

Great Britain could not afford to directly occupy Zululand with the number of troops it would require to keep them sufficiently suppressed so, Britain did what Europe had been doing to the rest of their colonies for centuries, that being the act of playing one group off on the other. The Zulu’s were divided up into over thirty autonomous zones and each was ruled by it’s own strongman, all of whom had problems with the others. One of these strongmen was the great grandson of Shaka himself. His name was appropriately, Dinazulu and, when the war broke out in 1898, he had been an agitator against the British for decades. He had been such a thorn in the side of the British that on several occasions they had urged other Zulu leaders to invade his territory and remove him.

None of these attempts were successful, so, eventually, the British had to directly intervene. They tossed Dinazulu in jail, at one point but, this did nothing to quell him since he still had considerable support in and outside of Zululand. Dinazulu also had other cards to play and one of them was, at the time, considered an odd one if you did not understand the politics of South Africa. You see, Dinazulu also had one particular ally who happened to have a skin color that was several shades lighter than his own. He was a Boer by the name of Louis Botha.

These two men had a history that went way back and, it is reported, that they were even personal friends. Botha actually raised a Boer Commando to help Dinazulu thwart the British backed invasion of his territory in 1884. By the time that the Boer states went to war with the British, both men were actively conspiring to lead a general Zulu uprising. It is theorized by some that, had the war not began when it did, Botha and Dinazulu would have probably started it a few years later, anyway.

The reason for this is because, even if these two most unlikely of allies were also friends, Botha was also not acting entirely for altruistic reasons. Another British policy, strongly linked with their unification policy, was one of keeping the Boers contained to the interior and, as a result, land locked. This policy showed it’s practicality when the war began because the Boers were cut off completely from their allies. Botha wanted some of Dinzulu’s coastal real estate. The Zulu’s were not using it and the Boer’s needed it. There were two problems. First, Dinzulu had to be ruling his land again and the second was another of those strange twists. Botha had more problems with his own people than the British.

While President Kruger could see the utility in Botha’s plan, he did not see anything good about Botha. He considered the man ambitious, capable, and ruthless which were qualities that Kruger sorely needed in 1898 when this plan was first hatched. The problem was that Kruger also recognized that Botha wanted the Presidency and if he successfully pulled off his Zulu coup, he could very well get it. Kruger used the Jameson raid to fend off Botha’s appeals for support in his Zulu adventure. The plan came to nothing. After the Boers were crushed, by Kitchner, Kruger began slowly loosing support, most of which was shifting in the direction of Botha. By 1901, adequate support had materialized and these two leaders, Botha and Dinzulu, were about to kick off a chain of events that would change world history.