Annual Booklist 2024 : Dr John Laband
Dr John Laband is a Professor Emeritus of History at Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada, and a Research Fellow in the Department of History, Stellenbosch University, South Africa. He has published extensively on warfare and military culture in colonial Africa with particular reference to southern Africa where the British army was involved in many operations. Among his books are Zulu Warriors: The Battle for the South African Frontier (Yale University Press, 2014), The Battle of Majuba Hill: The Transvaal Campaign, 1880–1881 (Helion, 2017), The Land Wars: The Dispossession of the Khoisan and AmaXhosa in the Cape Colony (Penguin Book, 2020), and The Boer Invasion of the Zulu Kingdom 1837–1840 (Jonanthan Ball, 2023). The Shadow of Isandlwana: The Life and Times of General Lord Chelmsford and his Disaster in Zululand (Greenhill Books, 2023) was Second Runner-Up for the Templer Medal in 2024.
Guns, Race, and Power in Colonial South Africa by William Kelleher Storey (Cambridge University Press, 2008)
Certain books have an abiding impact on the perception of historians at work in their own chosen fields. Fortunately, I came across Storey’s book in mid-career, not too late for it not to inform all my later writing about war and society in southern Africa during the colonial period. Storey examines the part guns played in advancing colonial settlement up to 1880 and the close relationship between hunting and warfare. He investigates the gun trade and the adoption of firearms by indigenous African societies, and explains the effects of gun-holding on social, cultural, and racial relations. Above all, Storey’s insights helped me to perceive the nexus between gun technology and politics, and to understand the accelerating colonial drive through war and conquest to disarm all African communities in order to close the South African frontier and ensure settler security.
Last Outpost on the Zulu Frontiers: Fort Napier and the British Imperial Garrison by Graham Dominy (University of Illinois Press, 2016)
British imperial garrisons protected naval bases across the empire and secured unstable frontiers. Indirectly, they became nodes for consumer markets and economic activity, and played a formative role in defining settler society. Fort Napier in Pietermaritzburg in the Colony of Natal was continuously occupied by British troops from 1843 to 1914, longer than any single fort in Africa other than the Castle of Good Hope in Cape Town. Graham Dominy, in his sprightly and engaging study of the years of the Fort Napier garrison, describes the building of the fort itself, looks beyond the garrison’s purely military purpose to investigate its ceremonial and social roles in wider society, and scrutinises the soldiers themselves, their indiscipline, brawling and mutinies, and gender relations within the fort and the city. The status of imperial garrisons changed with the political development of colonies, and the continued presence of the garrison in Fort Napier became a contentious political issue in Natal. Dominy concludes by describing the fate of the fort after the garrison left for the Western Front in 1914, and reflects on its place in memory. This book is military social history at its best.
A Military History of South Africa from the Dutch-Khoi Wars to the End of Apartheid by Timothy J. Stapleton (Praeger, 2010)
If ever a country were forged through war, it is South Africa in the colonial period and during the Apartheid era, from the First Dutch-Khoikhoi War in 1659 to the protracted South African Border War of 1966 to 1990, fought mainly in South West Africa (Namibia) and Angola. The British army and related colonial units, both settler and African, were heavily engaged in many of these conflicts, from the First British Occupation of the Cape in 1795 that ended the rule of the Dutch East Company, through seven of the nine Cape Frontier Wars (1799–1878) and the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, to the two Anglo-Boers Wars of 1880–1 and 1899–1902 – not to mention a further cluster of minor campaigns in the colonial period. During the two World Wars the South African Union Defence Force fought alongside the British army. All of these conflicts have individually attracted their specialist historians, but until Tim Stapleton’s book there was no single, comprehensive overview of South Africa at war. Nor has his informed, reliable and dispassionate synthesis been superseded.
The Wedding Feast War: The Final Tragedy of the Xhosa People by Keith Smith (Frontline Books, 2012)
The Ninth Cape Frontier War of 1877–1878 was the last of the sequence of wars fought over a hundred years that finally destroyed the independence of the amaXhosa. The troops of the British garrison of the Cape, in conjunction with settler mounted units and African levies, defeated the amaXhosa in a series of set piece battles followed by months of grinding anti-guerrilla operations. This war was also the prequel of the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, fought by the British to complete the closing of the South African frontier, and determined how it was conducted in its initial, disastrous stage. Most of the regiments and officers engaged in the Ninth Cape Frontier War went on to fight in Zululand, and Lieutenant-General Thesiger (later Lord Chelmsford) commanded in both campaigns. He and his staff were misled by their relatively easy victory against the amaXhosa to fatally underestimate the fighting qualities of the amaZulu and stumbled into catastrophic defeat at Isandlwana. Despite its significance, the Ninth Cape Frontier War has attracted less attention by historians than the previous wars in the series, and Keith Smith’s book, based on painstaking archival research, is the first to be devoted entirely to explaining its origins and describing its course in a very readable narrative.
Black Soldiers of the Queen: The Natal Native Contingent in the Anglo-Zulu War by Paul S. Thompson (University of Alabama Press, 2006)
The French, Belgians and Germans in the nineteenth century relied overwhelmingly on locally raised forces commanded by white officers in their conquest of African territories. The British used regular troops more intensively alongside militias in colonies of settlement, but in most of their African campaigns it still proved necessary to raise African troops for combat and logistical support. The Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 was one such campaign where, at its height, nearly 17,000 troops were deployed, of whom nearly 7,000 were black and fell under direct British military command. In addition, there were 8,000 untrained African levies raised by the colonial authorities for the defence of the Natal border. It seems surprising, therefore, that so very little in the extensive literature concerning the Anglo-Zulu War has been devoted to these African troops. The late Paul Thompson’s pioneering, closely researched book remedies this omission, and provides us with the only full account available of the Natal Native Contingent, Natal Native Pioneer Corps and several small African mounted units that fought in 1879. Thompson tracks how they were raised, organised, trained and armed, and then follows them throughout the campaign to their disbandment, analysing their failures in the field and the reasons for it, along with their uses and occasional successes, especially of the mounted units.
A book that needs to be written is The Slave Soldiers of Africa. This is a subject I began work on, but never took beyond an article in the Journal of Military History in January 2017 because other projects intervened, and it is now too late in my career to resume work on such a huge topic. Yet African military slavery deserves to be fully examined because it is a phenomenon marked by its unusual longevity and by its surviving social legacy. Before the colonial period military slavery was not confined – as is conventionally supposed – to the Muslim states of North Africa and the Sahel, but was also practised in many non-Muslim sub-Saharan societies in central and eastern Africa, with the notable exception of southern Africa. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, during the Scramble for Africa, the competing colonial powers (including Britain) liberated, conscripted or purchased African slave soldiers for their own armies. And although the institution of military slavery died away during the colonial period, it has re-emerged in independent Africa in various vicious forms, notably as child soldiering.