In 1879 the British and their colonial allies invaded the independent Zulu kingdom, and within a fortnight they had abandoned the field after the headquarter column was attacked by the Zulu army at Isandlwana. They had lost well over 1,000 men, along with stores and ammunition and the means of transporting them. It took nearly six months for the British to rebuild their resources, invade again, and end Zulu independence. But the costs of the invasion terminated the aggressive imperial policy that had brought about the invasion in the first place. It was soon shelved, together with the now discredited men who had planned it.

The war has lived on in new guises in popular memory. With the help of Rider Haggard, the Zulus gained the reputation of being the bravest and the bloodiest of Africa's tribes. It was an understandable interpretive move: primitive barbarians had to have exceptional qualities to defeat the world's most advanced civilization in battle. Then the squalor, the deceit, the racist delusions, and the cruelty were overtaken by an emphasis on the glamour rather than tragedy of the war (to paraphrase the title of a book published in the 1930s). This mythological conflict between the noblest of savages and the stiff-upper-lipped imperialists reached its apogee in the film Zulu—one of the most popular British films ever made and watched to this day at Christmas family gatherings. And the books continue to roll out, telling the same stories of slaughter, well and badly, in all their different aspects and details.

As the leading and most widely published academic historian of what is still called the “Zulu War” (and the scare quotes are implicit throughout this review), John Laband has led the academic contribution to this popularization. His research has been comprehensive and accurate, and he has always emphasized that the best military history has to be situated in a context wider than the physical confrontation itself. This book is in my opinion the best on his long list of publications. The reason for this, ironically, is that it escapes to a significant degree the demands that the Zulu War normally imposes on those who write about it. The six months that the British soldiers were in Zululand in 1879 take up only some 50 pages of a 280-page text. This enables Laband to widen his perspective and deal with other conflicts that took place between 1877 and 1879 elsewhere in South Africa—all the result of the same British policy initiatives. The violent culmination of a century of violence against the Xhosa to the south of Zululand, the subjugation of the Pedi to the northwest, and the silencing of the resistance of those who lost their independence to diamonds in the interior are dealt with confidence and clarity. The maps are cartographically modest but very effective supplements to a text whose strength lies in the cohesion it gives to a period of imperial aggression, usually written about as separate episodes in which the Zulu War dominates. For this reason, I believe that this book makes a significant contribution to a period in history that needs to be more firmly incorporated into the long narrative of the British role in the making of the South African state.

Laband has, however, been unable to escape entirely the popular and historiographical forces at work in his field. Thus, the title of a book whose achievement lies in correcting the usual dominance of the Zulu War is called Zulu Warriors. Its front cover romanticizes an already romanticized and over-exploited contemporary representation of a Zulu fighter. It is not clear to what extent the author or the publisher is responsible for this, but Laband does regret that the “soaringly immense African landscape” of forty-five years ago has today been “transformed” by a “bustling tourist industry . . . into a sanitized and over-commercialized open-air museum, all fenced and gated” (6). I am not making a sanctimonious moral judgment, but a hard historiographical one when I suggest that it also has to be remembered that forty-five years ago the battle site was situated in a desolate and poverty-stricken labor reserve, the result of a process initiated by the Zulu War and finalized at the time of Laband's first visit by apartheid's forced removals. And while criticizing the consequences of contemporary tourism, Laband should perhaps have remembered that one of the stated intentions of his successful The Illustrated Guide to the Anglo-Zulu War (Pietermaritzburg, 2000) was to “guide [readers] to the actual sites of the war” (back cover).

As one expects from a prestigious university press, this is an excellently produced hardback, laid out and printed in manner that makes it a pleasure to read. But for me, the big question remains. Why was it felt necessary to present this very useful contribution to the history of the imperial presence in South Africa as just another in a long line of books on Zulu Warriors and the Zulu War? The strength of this book is that it is not.