Episode 277 - Cetshwayo visits Queen Victoria and the Victorian link between Afghanistan and Zululand

When Cetshwayo kaMpande was captured after the Anglo-Zulu War, he was ferried to Cape Town and on to Robben Island. His countenance was one of dignity but that is difficult to maintain in the face of terrible sea-sickness.

The Zulu king had made it be known that he was afraid of the sea, and his nervousness compounded the queasiness.

He was also terribly sea-sick on the five day voyage from Port Durnford, modern day Richards’ Bay, and Simons Town. He and his five wives who’d joined him in captivity were ensconced in a hut that had been erected for him on the poop deck, from where he watched the activities on the shore for almost a week before he disembarked. As he observed all the ships, the developments on the coast, it became apparent that his attempt at fighting the powerful British empire had always been doomed.

When he eventually stepped onto Cape turf, his appointed custodian Captain J Ruscombe Poole of the Royal Navy escorted the Zulu King from Simon’s Town. Like Nelson Mandela’s minders much later, Captain Ruscombe-Poole was a sympathetic jailer, so too the king’s interpreter, Henry Longcast.
Henry was an Irish orphan who’d been brought up at the KwaMagwaza Mission station and had known Cetshwayo since he was a child.

An odd relationship developed between these two men, Longcast was a straighforward honourable man, and became Cetshwayo’s advisor - never betraying the Zulu King’s trust. Joining Cetshwayo in exile was Mkhosana kaZangqana, formely one of Mpande’s counsillors. Three other attendants were at hand, including the royal hairdresser, four young women of royal standing, and a female servant.

They were first to spend time in the Flagstaff Bastion of the 17th Century Castle in Cape Town, where they were alloted a suite of apartments and a parapet for daily walks. Throngs of what they called daytrippers in Victorian times, we would describe them as tourists, gathered to catch a glimpse of the Zulu King on the heights of the Castle.
Back in Zululand, Sir Garnet Wolseley had been fashioning together a new Zulu system.

Believe it or not, it resembled the system resembled what the British were trying to impose on Afrghanistan. There Lord Lytton was trying to secure the North West Frontier of India, what is now Pakistan, by breaking Afghanistan into a number of impotent principalities. There local princes who were sympathetic to British control would be handed the levers of power.

Wolseley wanted to secure the safety of Natal and the Transvaal by fragmenting the Zulu kingdom.

Sir Theophilus Shepstone was the go-to once more, along with ex-Cape Native Affairs Secretary Charles Brownlee and Natal commissioner, Sir Henry Bulwer. Shepstone’s main aim was to destroy the power of the Zulu royal family, and believed it was fragile anyway.

This was a miscalculation on numerous fronts. Cetshwayo may have been in exile, but the concept of political power in Zululand was well and truly in the hands of the extended Royal Family. Thirteen chiefs should be nominated, said Shepstone, each independent of the other but utterly dependent on the British.
Much much further north, in Afghanistan, Lord Lytton the British Viceroy of India, envisaged Kandahar province as the bulwark against the rebellious tribes of Afghanistan and the wild mountains of north western India. The British defeated Sher Ali Khan in the war between 1878 and 1880. Lytton’s vision involved separating key regions and strengthening frontier zones that could be more easily influenced from India. In this thinking, Kandahar mattered enormously. It sat astride the routes connecting southern Afghanistan to the approaches toward the Indian subcontinent, linking trade and military corridors running west toward Persia and north toward central Afghanistan.
By now, Cetshwayo kaMpande was technically free to return from exile once these arrangements had been made, but he first requesting a meeting with Queen Victoria.