“Zulu”

Directed by blacklistee Cy Endfield and filmed in apartheid Natal province in 1964, “Zulu” succeeds as spectacle and very little else. While it is obviously meant to celebrate the courage and resourcefulness of British colonial soldiers and their Zulu warrior counterparts in the battle of Rorke’s Drift on January 23, 1879, it relies on an essentially revisionist representation of the key battle it dramatizes. More significantly, its failure to present any kind of historical context ill serves the indigenous African peoples whom Endfield presumes to honor.

The battle of Rorke’s Drift occurred only hours after the massacre at nearby Isandhlwana, which cost the lives of 1,329 British soldiers--the greatest catastrophe since the Crimean War. British colonial resolve would soon be tested in the Sudan as well, with the bloody defeat of Colonel Gordon in Khartoum in 1881. Likewise, one could see reversals for the forces of capitalist civilization in the United States. Only 3 years before Isandhlwana, Sitting Bull’s warriors would vanquish Custer at Little Big Horn. In many ways, these victories of precapitalist societies would be the last gasp prior to the inexorable rise of capitalist property relations across the world. By 1900 the Zulu, the Mahdists and the Sioux would all be pacified.

“Zulu” begins with a mass native wedding--the first of many stirring scenes involving what appears to be thousands of Zulu extras. Endfield skillfully made use of what he had available. As it turns out, there were no more than 250 extras on location. Camera angles gave the impression that there were far more. As hundreds of dagger wielding, bare-breasted maidens are matched up with husbands in an arranged wedding, guests of the Zulu King Cetshwayo--a missionary (Jack Hawkins) and his daughter (Ulla Jacobsson)--watch nervously. Their fears are well grounded. During the ceremony, a messenger arrives with news that war with the British has begun. Isandhlwana has fallen to the Zulu.

Although “Zulu” is barren of historical context, it is rich in period detail. Such a mass wedding actually took place in 1878, a so-called ‘umkhosi,’ or first-fruits festival. In Zulu society this served numerous ideological and practical functions, including a gathering of ‘amabutho,’ or regiments of fighting men. As part of the tributary relations between King and fiefs, gifts of cattle and marriage partners were made to the men of his regiments. When the missionary’s daughter expresses shock, he reminds her that arranged marriages were common in their country as well, especially between wealthy older men and young attractive women.

While King Cetshwayo was presiding over this ceremony in 1878, the British were plotting to invade the Zulu homeland. Unbeknownst to the King, British South African High Commissioner Sir Bartle Frere urged the colonial secretary to see “the necessity for now settling this Zulu question thoroughly and finally.” Lord Chelmsford, who commanded the British armed forces in South Africa, wrote, “our cause will be a good one…and I hope to convince [our critics] that for a savage, as for a child, timely severity is greater kindness than mistaken leniency.”

The missionary and his daughter then take refuge in a small outpost called Rorke’s Drift, which had been the supply depot for the British column overrun at Isandhlwana. Commanded by Lieutenant John Chard (Stanley Baker), a stolid Royal Engineer who prefers building bridges to warfare, the settlement consisted of a hospital, storehouse, cattle kraal, and 140 soldiers (30 incapacitated)--all accurately described in the film.

To add a little color to the ensemble, Endfield, who co-wrote the film with John Prebble, creates a character named Lieutenant Gonville Bromhead, an epicene twit played by Michael Caine in his film debut. Caine, who would thereafter play the kind of roles we associate with his career--working-class and Cockney--nonetheless does a credible job depicting a man who would become existentially transformed by fighting into someone substantial and likable. This is essential to the film’s focus on heroism and sacrifice, which is achieved at the expense of ideology and history.

The British troops immediately begin setting up makeshift barricades out of sandbags and overturned carts. From a distance, you can hear the oncoming Zulu troops who march in formation banging the handles of their short spears against their shields. Chugga-chugga-chugga. It sounds intimidating, like a faraway but powerful approaching runaway train. When I saw first saw the film in 1964, it had the same effect on me as any apolitical white person in the audience: they are coming to get us.

For the remainder of the film, we are witness to one bloody confrontation after another as chanting and howling Zulu warriors armed mostly with spears or knives hurl themselves against the fortified settlement. At the finale, they are driven off because they are no match for the British rifles. After reviewing the stacks of lifeless black bodies, the two lieutenants seem deflated despite their miraculous-appearing victory. When asked how he feels, Bromhead (Caine) replies, “Ashamed.”

Since such a vast number of British soldiers appeared to be killed during the encounter represented in the film, one then must wonder why there was so little to celebrate. Perhaps Endfield and Prebble were mindful of Rorke’s Drift’s true history, which was not accurately reflected in their screenplay. While there was a battle at Rorke’s Drift on January 23, 1879, it was a one-sided affair entirely. Zulu scholar Magema Fuze points out, “The Zulus died in heaps there, killed by those white men in the building. They went on killing them until dawn, and in the early morning the Zulus withdrew defeated, leaving behind heaps of dead on the ground.”

James O. Gump sums up the reality behind Rorke’s Drift in his excellent “The Dust Rose Like Smoke: the Subjugation of the Zulu and the Sioux”:

“Chard’s forces, bolstered by Martini-Henry breech-loading rifles and ample supplies of ammunition, sustained fifteen deaths. In recognition of their valiant defense [Gump is being ironic here] at Rorke’s Drift, Chard and ten of his men each received a Victoria Cross, the highest honor to be bestowed on a British soldier in the nineteenth century [described solemnly by narrator Richard Burton at the film’s conclusion.]”

In other words, Rorke’s Drift was actually a “turkey-shoot” of the kind that occurred on the road to Basra at the end of the Gulf War or which has just occurred in Afghanistan. Some things never change.

In examining the motives--conscious or subconscious--of Endfield and Prebble, it would be useful to take a look at their rather singular careers. An April 21, 1995 obituary in the Independent reports:

“Born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 1914, Endfield established a reputation as a brilliant card magician while a teenager. In New York he formed a satirical fringe group that performed in clubs, and at weddings and bar mitzvahs, and went on to run an amateur theatre in Montreal for a year and to direct in the Catskills before moving to Los Angeles in 1940. Having fooled the accomplished amateur magician Orson Welles with some card-tricks of his own, Endfield parlayed his way into films by teaching Welles's producer Jack Moss tricks in return for sitting in on the shooting of Journey of Fear (1942) and the editing of The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) as an apprentice with the Mercury Theatre. From the outset, Endfield displayed an acute sense of social criticism that proved ill- advised in his times: his first film, Inflation (1942), an allegorical 15-minute short made at MGM, initially impressed the Office of War Information who had commissioned it, but was repressed before it could be released by the Chamber of Commerce for being excessively anti-capitalistic.”

Unlike other red screenwriters, Endfield was not reluctant to put politics into his films. Many audiences saw his lynch mob film “The Sound of Fury” as openly anti-American. Although he had begun to shed his ties to the radical movement after WWII, the House Un-American Activities Committee fingered him in 1951. Unwilling to name names, he became one of many blacklisted directors who moved to Britain. His last directorial effort was Universal Soldier (1971), an anti-war film starring George Lazenby and Germaine Greer. He died in 1995.

Best known for his career as popular historian devoted to Scottish culture and traditions, Prebble--like Endfield--had a leftist past. A February 6, 2001 London Times obituary for Prebble, who had just died at the age of 85, reveals the following:

“In the first part of his life he had tended to be a member of the ‘awkward squad’, whether as a Communist before the war or as an agitator in the ranks of the Royal Artillery during it. His experiences in Germany in 1945 gave him powerful insights into the nature of conquest and defeat. When he wrote the books for which he became famous, he did so not as a dry historian, measuring the facts, but as a storyteller who invested them with partisan vigour and powerful characterisation. Among the criticisms later levelled at him by academic historians was that he presented everything as a series of tragedies and in terms of conflict between Lowlander and Gael. . .

“John Edward Curtis Prebble had Scottish ancestors, among them a dissenter who fled to America in the 17th century. His father was the son of a naval petty officer who fell on hard times, working as an unskilled labourer in Shoreditch and as a porter at Smithfield meat market before emigrating to the prairie town of Sutherland, Saskatchewan.

“The North American Depression drove the family back to London, where Prebble won a scholarship to Latymer School. His first working experience was as an estate agent's clerk: collecting rents for slum landlords drove him towards communism, though the party rejected his request to serve in the Spanish Civil War.”

It is safe to say that for Prebble, the Zulu war scriptwriting project suggested to him by Endfield resonated well with his own passions for Scottish martial traditions. In either case, you have precapitalist societies resisting the onslaught of primitive accumulation. Unfortunately, despite their identifications with the underdog and their radical past, neither Prebble nor Endfield could do justice to the Zulu struggle. By the time old age had reached them, they were content to spin out colorful tales about the majesty and horror of colonial war. Kipling did this better than anybody.