With the smell of damp anoraks wafting up through the tent, historian Saul David makes friends with his audience straight away by saying how nice it is to see them. This is not quite the sucking-up opener it first appears. He goes on to recount how his last talk on Zulu was at MI5 headquarters and, to preserve the identities of the secret agents, they were all hidden from view behind a screen so he could hear them snorting contemptuously at some of his comments but couldn't see them.
No contemptuous snorts came from this Hay audience as the historian gave a succinct but passionate description of the disastrous British attempt to give the Zulus what a soldier of the time optimistically called "a dreadful thrashing" at Isandhlwana in Zululand in 1879. 1350 soldiers were killed and the battlefield was left blood-soaked and filled with entrails (SD described graphically how it was a spiritual ritual for the Zulu warriors to split the stomachs of the vanquished) as a result of shocking incompetence by the man in charge – Lord Chelmsford.
Despite Disraeli, prime minister at the time, using British success at Rorke's Drift a few days later to distract attention from the massacre, SD points out that "no one wins the war in Zululand" – the human cost was massive, Disraeli lost the election and the legacy of the war is still felt in South Africa today. Well, not quite everyone lost out. SD tells scathingly how Lord Chelmsford, despite being recalled from the field by Disraeli, told a pack of lies and half-truths to Queen Victoria and got showered with honours.
With a nod to the present, during his talk Saul David mentions his belief that the engineering of war in Zululand by the British (the Zulus were offered outrageous terms that they could not possibly accept) was the last pre-emptive war to be launched by the British prior to the Iraq war. He asks, with a note of hope in his voice, that anyone who knows better to correct him in questions at the end. No one does.
