South Africa Guide
KwaZulu-Natal
The Battlefields
Most of the major KwaZulu-Natal Battlefields lie in the northwestern corner of the province, where first the Boers came out of the mountains from the northeast into Zulu territory and inflicted a severe defeat on the Zulus at Blood River in 1838, 13km southeast of the tiny town of Utrecht. Some four decades later, the British spoiled for war and marched north to fight a series of battles against the Zulus, the most notable being at Isandlwana and Rorke's Drift, southeast of Dundee. If you're only planning to take in one battlefield site, then Isandlwana should be the one, and you really should take in Rorke's Drift as well to complete the day; both sites are eerily beautiful.
Twenty years on, Britain again provoked war, this time against the Boers of the South African Republic and the Orange Free State to the north and west. The Second Anglo-Boer War (also known as the South African War) was fought over control of the Gauteng goldfields. British troops were landed at Durban, in the British colony of Natal, and boldly marched north. Britain believed the campaign would be quick, cheap and over by Christmas. But in the early stages of the war, the huge, lumbering British machine proved no match for the mobile Boers who fought a guerrilla campaign that checked the British advance in northern KwaZulu-Natal.
At Ladysmith, the British endured months of an embarrassing siege, while nearby, at Spioenkop, bungling British leadership snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Although the empire successfully struck back, it took three years to subdue the South African Republic and the Orange Free State, two of the smallest states in the world, after committing half a million troops to the field in an operation that was the costliest campaign since the Napoleonic Wars nearly a century earlier.