Anglo-Zulu War · War Crimes & Atrocities

The Darkest Hours

The Anglo-Zulu War's atrocities were primarily concentrated in the British punitive operations after the main battles were over. The war's combat phase — while brutal — was generally conducted within the norms of conventional military engagement. The killing of wounded Zulus on the battlefield, the burning of civilian homesteads during the advance, and the deliberate engineering of civil war conditions in the post-war partition of Zululand were the conflict's most significant moral failures. The initial British invasion also occurred under a pretext — an ultimatum whose terms were designed to be rejected — that constituted a policy-level deception for which Bartle Frere, the High Commissioner, was formally censured by the British government.