Company Of Spears

Somervile shook his head. ‘I expect they’ll come with the official papers. This is news from The Times only. But it was a desperate affair, I think. The report said perhaps four or five thousand.’

Hervey said not a word. His mind was wholly occupied by thoughts of Peto: had he not been under orders to join Codrington’s squadron? His fevered face began losing the remains of its colour.

Somervile leaned forward to steady him. ‘Hervey, my dear fellow, are you quite well?’

THE END

HISTORICAL AFTERWORD

The extraordinary ‘Indian’ gardens at Sezincote, with the statuary that so engaged Hervey and Kezia Lankester, are open to the public. So too is the ‘Mughal’ house.

Private Johnson’s brush with the Bow Street investigators was also not without foundation. At the Court of Exchequer on 29th April 1827, The King v. Giuseppe Guecco (on various counts of importing coral without payment of duty), the jury, after retiring for about twenty minutes, returned a verdict for the Crown, with an earnest recommendation of leniency. It was agreed by counsel on both sides to compound for the offence by the payment of £400.

A word on South African history: until Nelson Mandela, Shaka Zulu was probably the most famous southern African in history, though for rather different reasons. He murdered – there is no getting round the word – a million people. He was indeed most singular.

Shaka’s mother, Nandi, was a daughter of a chieftain of the eLangeni clan. Shaka’s father was a chieftain of the small, and then unknown, Zulu clan. But unwed pregnancy and a failed marriage forced Nandi to return to her tribe, where she was less welcomed than she had been then with the Zulus. Shaka grew up fatherless among people who despised him as well as his mother, the butt of every joke, ridiculed for his weakly body (and underdeveloped sexual organs), lonely and bitter.

At the age of twenty-three he was called to serve as a warrior with the Mtetwa clan and did so for the next six years. In his first battle he fought the Butelezi, winning territories that included those of the Zulu. The Mtetwa chieftain, Dingiswayo, saw his leadership qualities and earmarked him to be chieftain of the Zulu, thus making them a buffer to the Mtetwa territory. Dingiswayo made him leader of the Mtetwa army, meanwhile, and here Shaka refined his battle tactics and weapons, as well as the army’s organization. When Senzangakona Zulu died, Shaka was made chieftain.

Shaka worked his Zulu warriors ruthlessly, punishing any the sign of the slightest hesitation with death. The first people he attacked were the eLangeni clan, sparing only those who had showed him and his mother kindness. He destroyed the Butelezi clan, leaving few survivors, taking Butelezi maidens to form a seraglio which eventually numbered over a thousand. But, convinced that any offspring might someday oppose him, he shied from full consummation.

By 1817, Zulu territory had increased fourfold, and Shaka and Dingiswayo compacted to engage in a major expedition to win even more. Dingiswayo died, however, and so by 1820 Shaka ruled most of southeast Africa and Natal.

In 1824 Shaka’s mother, Nandi, died. In hysterical grief at the funeral he ordered several men to be executed, but in the chaos, over 7,000 people died. The true extent of his mental instability was revealed when he then practically ordered the clan’s death by starvation in reverence to Nandi. After three months, sense of a kind was restored, but the seed of doubt against Shaka – and perhaps in his own mind too – had been sown. Shaka and his army began to go downhill, which is where, in the winter of 1827, Matthew Hervey and his men meet them.

Students of early Zulu history may dispute my account of the first contact with Shaka’s army. They would be right to do so. Chief Matiwane owed no allegiance to Shaka. His clan, the Ngwanes, although one of the Nguni people like the ‘pure’ Zulu, had for a decade resisted incorporation into Shaka’s greater Zulu kingdom. In the course of evasion, however, they became a marauding tribe as troublesome as the Zulu to the Xhosa and others of Kaffraria. But at the time of Hervey’s brush with them the precise status of Matiwane’s warriors was unknown, and their depredations were lumped together with those of Shaka in the reports reaching Cape Town. Scholars also disagree: while published sources have tended to make Matiwane non-Zulu, later academic research has not been so certain. For instance, John Burridge Scott in a very thorough doctoral thesis (The British Soldier on the Eastern Cape frontier 1800-1850, University of Port Elizabeth, 1973) calls Matiwane’s tribesmen unequivocally Zulu. And, indeed, after Shaka’s death Matiwane declared his allegiance to the new king, Dingane, Shaka’s half-brother – as Matthew Hervey, his dragoons and the Mounted Rifles will discover to their cost in future adventures.