The random film generator served up "Zulu" (1964): director Cy Endfield, Michael Caine's debut, rating 7.4, genres "Drama, History, War". Looks like standard colonial epic fare from the Sunday TV schedule. But once you dig into the synopsis — "one hundred forty Welshmen against four thousand Zulus" — the arithmetic around the film turns out more interesting than the movie itself.
This battle holds the absolute record: 11 Victoria Crosses for a single engagement — more than any other battle before or since. And it happened on the same day as Isandlwana, the worst defeat of the British army by an African enemy in the entire colonial history of the empire. The coincidence of dates is suspicious: the generosity of the awards looks like an attempt by the state to console itself after catastrophe. Add in filming during the height of apartheid, a director who fled McCarthyism, and a chief playing his own great-grandfather — and a random film becomes the perfect door into one of the most ambiguous pages of Victorian history. Let's open it.
It all started not with defense, but with overconfidence. General Chelmsford invaded Zululand in January 1879, divided his forces, and left about 1,300 men at the camp near Mount Isandlwana — without trenches, without a laager of wagons. When advised to fortify, he snapped: "that would take a week". The Zulu army meanwhile had marched 80 kilometers in five days, hidden in the Ngwebeni valley, and was accidentally discovered by scouts around eleven in the morning on January 22 — a full day ahead of their planned attack.
Then the classic impi tactic kicked in — "horns and chest of the buffalo": the center pins, the horns envelop the flanks. The British stretched into a thin firing line, and somewhere at this point the defense choked on logistics: ammunition boxes stood nailed shut, screws had rusted, there weren't enough screwdrivers, and quartermasters refused to share supplies with other units. A trained rifleman could fire 10–12 shots per minute, but without ammunition even a Martini-Henry is just an expensive stick.
Result: over 1,300 killed, including 52 officers and nearly all the regulars — the only major defeat of the British by an African army in colonial history. The Zulus lost between one and three thousand men and left with trophies: about a thousand modern rifles, two cannons, and 400,000 rounds. King Cetshwayo, mourning the losses, said a phrase that became historic: "An assegai has been thrust into the belly of the nation". And in reserve, this victorious army had a corps of three to four thousand warriors who that same day turned toward Rorke's Drift ford — where a depot and hospital stood.
The Rorke's Drift garrison learned of the catastrophe from messengers who rode from Isandlwana. By accident, command fell to Lieutenant John Chard, an engineer — he was only there to repair the pontoon bridge. The officers' council quickly calculated the retreat option: a column of wounded in open country gets overtaken and slaughtered. They decided to stand — and in a couple hours constructed a perimeter from grain sacks, biscuit tins, and canned goods. About 150 defenders, nearly forty of them wounded from the hospital.
The attackers weren't the best regiments of the Zulu army, but reserves — mature warriors, the uThulwana regiment averaged around fifty years old. They'd marched fifteen miles on foot and swum a swollen river to crash into the southern wall around half past four in the evening. The fight went all night, and its main hours played out not on the parapet but inside the hospital, which had to be abandoned room by room: Private John Williams spent about fifty minutes hacking passages through walls with his bayonet, dragging out bedridden wounded, while beneath the window held by Private Joseph Williams, fourteen Zulu bodies were later found.
By midnight the defenders had one box left with six hundred rounds — and, according to historians, they all expected to die. But the Zulus exhausted themselves first: their own momentum ran out and casualties mounted — at dawn about 350 bodies were counted in front of the walls, with total dead estimated at over five hundred. The British lost seventeen killed and two died of wounds; practically everyone in the garrison was wounded. Of twenty thousand rounds in reserve, less than a thousand remained. The defense held — and then the state went awarding.
The Victoria Cross, Britain's highest military honor, was normally distributed economically — but here eleven men received it for one battle: both officers, engineer Chard and infantryman Bromhead, six privates and a corporal from the 24th Regiment (a record for a single regiment), the medical officer, the quartermaster, and even a corporal from the native contingent — Swiss Ferdinand Schiess. To be fair: more crosses were awarded on a single day (sixteen at Inkerman in 1854), and for a single operation — 28 altogether (Lucknow, 1857). But for a single engagement — Rorke's Drift's record, unbeaten to this day.
The shine of this record is marred by one nasty fact: contemporaries already then smelled the bookkeeping. The press wrote that Prime Minister Disraeli was keen to "draw a veil" over Isandlwana, and a handful of heroic crosses was a convenient way to switch the papers from catastrophe to heroism. Commander-in-Chief the Duke of Wolseley seriously criticized the awarding — he generally disliked generous distributions and about Coghill and Melvill, who saved the regiment's colors at Isandlwana (both received crosses posthumously only 28 years later), wrote sharply: "I don't like the idea of officers escaping on horseback when their men are being killed on foot."
At the same time, the regimental museum curator who examined the citations insists: each of the eleven crosses was earned according to the documents, and there's nothing to argue about. The truth, as always, is in the middle: the defenders' bravery was real, but the size and speed of the awarding was clearly therapeutic. Irony completes the picture: Chard's and Bromhead's crosses today sell at auction for four times more than any others — the market capitalization of a myth created by cinema 85 years later.
The film crew was indecently unrevolutionary for an "imperial" picture. Director Cy Endfield left Hollywood for Britain in 1951 — after the McCarthy committee declared him a communist. Co-screenwriter John Prebble — former Communist Party member, volunteer in Spain. Producer and lead actor Stanley Baker — lifelong Labourite, son of a Welsh mining family. The trio's motive, however, wasn't political but commercial — and it worked: the premiere took place on January 22, 1964, exactly 85 years after the battle, and the film became the year's hit, staying in release for twelve years before its first television broadcast.
Young Caine got the role almost by mistake: the worst screen test in the director's life, as Endfield himself put it — but the crew was about to leave for South Africa and there were no other candidates. Caine later joked that his entire career was born from the length of the bar at London's Prince of Wales theatre: the producer caught him right by the door. But historical truth for the characters was less lucky. Private Hook, in the film a joker and drunkard, was in life an exemplary soldier and convinced teetotaler: his daughters demonstratively walked out of the London premiere, and their father's reputation had to be publicly rehabilitated. Missionary Otto Witt in the picture is a cowardly pacifist with a blonde daughter; in reality he was a teetotaler and family man who cooperated with the army and left for his wife and children before the battle. The Zulus' final "salute" to the defense is beautiful fiction, as is the wall of red coats singing "Men of Harlech": the battle went on at night and ended around midnight.
Even the Welshness — Baker's signature idea — is half propaganda: the regiment was legally called the 2nd Warwickshire, relocated to Brecon six years before the war, and at most a third of the soldiers considered themselves Welsh. The famous "Zulus! Thousands of 'em!" is spoken by Colour Sergeant Bourne, who was actually twenty-four — one of the youngest in the British army. The film knew perfectly well what it was doing: it wasn't reconstructing history, it was building legend.
Filming in South Africa in 1963–1964 is a separate story. The crew of sixty Britons was officially warned: contact with people of another skin color meant prison, deportation, and "race mixing" carried whipping. Baker, according to colleagues' recollections, inquired whether the whips could be obtained directly during the process. The authorities didn't appreciate the humor. When a Boer foreman struck a Black worker, Baker fired him on the spot, and Caine swore never to film in the country under apartheid again — and kept his word.
For the Zulu extras, everything was more honest than the legends claim. The popular tale that apartheid forbade paying Black extras and they were "paid in cattle" has been documentarily refuted: 240 main extras received 9 shillings per day, additional ones got 8, female dancers slightly less. They were brought by bus from reserves over a hundred miles away, and to explain what cinema even was, they stretched a screen on the set and showed a western — the first film in the lives of many of them. The role of King Cetshwayo was played by young Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi — direct great-great-grandson of Cetshwayo; the producers initially came to hire extras and offered the role suddenly. He hesitated, fearing political consequences, his own mother choreographed the wedding dance in the prologue, and stunt assistant Simon Sabela would later become South Africa's first Black film director.
And now the signature irony of this story: a film showing Black warriors as victors — proud, disciplined, tragically honorable — was banned in South Africa itself for Black viewers: censors feared scenes of killing whites would "incite violence". Several special screenings were arranged for the extras in Durban and KwaZulu towns. On set, according to Buthelezi's recollections, it was "an oasis": whites and Blacks interacted without looking over their shoulders, for the first time in these people's lives. Inside cinema — equality, beyond the fence — racial purity police.
Strategically, Rorke's Drift was an episode that didn't affect the war's course: the Zulus were finished off with cannons and Gatlings at Ulundi six months later anyway. Without the film, this battle would have remained a footnote at regimental dinners — but "Zulu" made it the main event of the Anglo-Zulu War in collective memory. Tens of thousands of tourists annually visit both battlefields, and the amusing disproportion is that the militarily more important Isandlwana is known to the world mainly as "that place near Rorke's Drift". In 1979 they made a prequel, "Zulu Dawn" — about the defeat itself — but it didn't hold a candle: catastrophes, unlike defenses, don't sell well.
Yet the film's legacy is double and genuinely unexpected. On one hand, modern researcher Lindiwe Dovey deconstructs the final salute as the quintessence of the colonial gaze: the Zulus are "assigned" to attest that the war was fought fairly — because only the vanquished can "authenticate" the victor's justice. On the other — Buthelezi himself into deep old age defended the picture as an act of restoring pride: "we resisted the world's strongest army with shields and spears". South African Zulu journalist Mondli Makhanya recalled that in an era when screen heroes were entirely white (he mentions Rambo), this film showed him heroes who looked like him — even though South African cinemas wouldn't have shown it to him. Historian David Rattray, who built a tour school on these fields and reconciled both memories around them, died in a robbery in 2007 — his fund received part of the anniversary re-release proceeds.
The result is a rare cultural hybrid: cinema told entirely through British voices, but leaving the Zulus something more than the role of props. The enemy's bravery there isn't decoration but event. Perhaps that's why half a century later it manages to simultaneously irritate both postcolonial critics and Afrikaans conservatives — a sure sign the picture hit a living nerve.
My verdict after a couple days in the trenches of this story: Rorke's Drift is a textbook on how empires digest catastrophes. Morning — a defeat they wanted to forget, evening — a defense that could be celebrated. Eleven crosses are simultaneously both honest tribute to the real bravery of a hundred and fifty people, and state bookkeeping, transferring the "losses" account to the "glory" account. Victorian bureaucracy essentially invented rebranding: from the colonial army's worst day they made the awards system's best day.
And second, what this was all for: the film proved stronger than textbooks. The war's not-most-important battle overshadowed the most important one; a fictional salute displaced the documentary night of survivors; drunkard-Hook replaced teetotaler-Hook. This isn't an indictment of cinema — it's an indictment of our memory: we believe what's beautifully wrapped. "Zulu" is a rare case where beautiful wrapping honestly invites checking the contents: you watch it as adventure, and leave with the question of who needed this version of events and why.