In Zulu Warriors: The Battle for the Southern African Frontier, John Laband integrates forty years of scholarship shaped by his own prolific work in the field of military history. Eloquently written and deeply researched, his new book is arranged into six sections, which cover theaters of conflict in the Transvaal, the Eastern Cape, Griqualand West, and Zululand. This structure enables the author to assess the links between (flexible and inflexible) indigenous military strategies, African reactions to imperial and colonial invasions, and the complex outcomes of white conquest in late nineteenth-century southern Africa.

Laband begins with a novel idea: that there was an obvious, if unnamed, War of South African Unification between 1877 and 1879, which culminated in the destruction of the Zulu kingdom. During this “concerted span of three years” the British, sometimes in league with the Boers, conducted campaigns to “neuter the military capabilities of the residual independent black states . . . , disarm them, and break their political power” (7). Yet it was the global British Empire (more than the local Boer republic) that sought to impose its influence over all of southern Africa. To blunt this determined military aggression, African polities such as the Swazi aligned with the British. However, other kingdoms such as the Zulu, as is well known, fiercely resisted external interference. One of the notable strengths of Zulu Warriors is that it explores a huge range of armed African responses to encroaching white rule.

One might assume that Laband’s analysis is most convincing when he elaborates on the military capacity of King Cetshwayo kaMapande’s state in the 1870s. This is certainly true, but it must be mentioned that the author compellingly explains other patterns and practices of warfare in southern Africa, including the use of muskets by non-Zulu African polities procured during the Mineral Revolution. These muzzle loaders were among the few goods enticing young men from chiefdoms (beyond Zulu control) to sell their labor to the diamond mines. In other words, the title of Laband’s latest book should not suggest that the author unquestioningly promotes a Zulu-centric view. Far from it, his findings illustrate that the rituals of honor and masculinity as well as idioms of vengeance during Cetshwayo’s reign were not unique. They were shared customs that animated southern African martial traditions more broadly. With regard to this point, Laband makes a crucial distinction. Zulu martial culture, which he sees as an overly hyped phenomenon, was not the dynamic force that legend claims. Other traditional military systems in southern Africa were more dynamic, Laband writes, if we define martial dynamism in terms of continually updating strategy and materiel in the nineteenth century, certainly as firearms circulated in frontier zones of contact between African and settler societies.

As Laband makes clear, the gun-infused, evolving martial tradition extends back to the 1820s, when specific African polities started to consider the acquisition of firearms as indispensable to their security arrangements. The modernizing efforts of Bathlaping people (in Tswana territory traversed by the missionary Dr. Livingston and Boer traders), who learned that “firearms were essential for warfare,” offers a prime example (160). The independent Xhosa and Pedi polities also shot guns in battle. During the third quarter of the nineteenth century, firearms enabled them to capitalize on asymmetrical warfare with strategies such as setting up a fortified perch in precipitous landscape, waiting to ambush, and aiming lines of fire at their enemy. Laband reveals that commanders of Zulu amabutho (regiments) were loath to adopt such tactics, preferring instead to deploy soldiers with spears, clubs, and axes—the repertoire of edged weapons—in set-piece confrontations. This strategy meant that Zulu warriors would remain disadvantageously “hidebound by [their] established military thinking” (10). The mixed consequences would become clear in two related outcomes: the now infamous January 1879 Zulu slaughter of British imperial soldiers at Isandlwana and the total devastation of King Cetshwayo’s army seven months later on the Ulundi plain. These fateful clashes unfolded in open terrain. The first became a Phyrric victory; the second heralded the Zulu death knell.

In conclusion, Zulu Warriors is an excellent work of scholarship that will make a lasting contribution to a number of fields, not least the history of Southern Africa, African warfare, and the British Empire. Most important, Laband’s examination of changing indigenous martial practice through the acquisition and use of guns should encourage future scholars to investigate the customary applications and maintenance of firearms in southern African societies actively seeking to erase the battlefield advantage of their global and colonial enemies.