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Hidden figures
The use of ‘native levies’ has long been a feature of foreign wars – but their employment and their sacrifice reached a peak during the British colonial era. Stephen Roberts uncovers a forgotten story.
There is a telling sequence early on in the 1964 film Zulu when news of the disaster that has just occurred at the Battle of Isandlwana reaches the command at Rorke’s Drift. It’s a conflab between the upper-crust Lieutenant Gonville Bromhead of the 24th Foot (Michael Caine) and Lieutenant Gert Adendorff (Gert van den Bergh), an Afrikaner officer of the Natal Native Contingent and survivor of the massacre on 22 January 1879 that was the first major encounter in the Anglo-Zulu War. Bromhead (as depicted by Caine) is unable to get his head around the loss of an entire column of 800 men, declaring it ‘damned impossible’. Adendorff responds by pointing out that it was actually 1,200 men w
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