Episode 259 - After Isandlwana and Rorke’s Drift: Ghost Armies and a Unique Truce During a Savage War

It’s the 23rd January 1879, one of the most momentous days in South African history has passed, and the ripple effect will be felt across the world.

For missionary Otto Witt it was a time of particular terror. He had fled his mission station, Rorke’s Drift, and now it was smashed to bits, the house which had doubled up as a hospital burned to the ground, the main warehouse which had been his church, broken, bloody.

Witt had fled the day before and sought out his wife and children who he’d sent on to Msinga once it became apparent the British were going to invade Zululand. Witt had lost his way up the Biggarsberg escarpment on the terrifying night of the 22nd January, and staggered into the Gordon Memorial Mission at Msinga the next morning - but his wife Elin and their 3 young children had already left. He didn’t know this — merely that she wasn’t there.

Elin had been told by refugees streaming away from Isandlwana that Otto had been killed at Rorke’s Drift. So both believed the other dead. The family spent five days believing they were widows and orphans. The confusion was only cleared up when Witt finally tracked Erin’s wagon trail to Pietermaritzburg where the family was reunited, exhausted and traumatized, but physically unharmed.

In Newcastle, Maud Bradstreet had just assisted her friend, Mrs. Hitchcock, in delivering a baby girl named Georgina. Their joy was short-lived, however, as news arrived that the Newcastle Mounted Rifles had been decimated at Isandlwana—both of their husbands were among the dead. The two women set out for the Orange Free State, a grueling week-long journey by horse and cart, surviving on very little including water strained through a mealie bag. This was the raw reality for the survivors - later in the episode we’ll hear from the Zulu.

On the morning of January 23rd, a messenger reached Helpmekaar with a brief note from Lieutenant Chard Rorke’s Drift commander Defying the grim expectations of the men at the camp, they had miraculously held their ground through the night.

Back at Isandlwana, Chelmsford had awoken his men and rode away from the scene of carnage before dawn, one of the men had found the mangled body of Lieutenant Colonel Pulleine, Isandlwana’s commanding officer, then the column passed down Manzimyama Valley. They moved past homesteads that had been abandoned only a day prior, but now the inhabitants were creeping back. Through the doorway of a single hut, they saw an Inyanga tending to amaQungebeni warriors who had likely fought at Isandlwana. The tension snapped; soldiers of the Natal Native Contingent opened fire and killed a man before order could be restored.
A seething anger swirled through the British column, Trooper Fred Jones, one of the survivors of the Newcastle Mounted Rifles was not in a forgiving mood.

“We saw red…” he admitted “
Exhausted and broken, the warriors shuffled forward, dragging their shields in the dust. The uThulwana were stunned—they thought no British soldiers were left alive after Isandlwana. For a long, tense moment, the two forces stared at one another across a distance easily covered by a bullet. Yet, neither side pulled a trigger. It was, as historian Ian Knight notes, a surreal conclusion to an extraordinary 48 hours: two armies, both feeling the weight of defeat, watching each other move silently into the distance.

King Cetshwayo kaMpande did not get an accurate version of events at Rorke’s Drift at first. Back at oNdini, Dabulamanzi reported that he had stormed and successfully taken the house… attacked again then retired…but admitted that he had suffered heavily …”

It was to take another ten days before the warriors returned to oNdini and had been ritually cleansed .. only then did Cetshwayo address them in his huge cattle kraal.
“If you think you have finished with all the white men you are wrong, because they are still coming…” he warned.