The Ultimatum Frere Wrote to Be Refused

Sir Henry Bartle Frere arrived in South Africa in 1877 with a mandate to confederate the region under British authority — to bring the Boer republics, the Cape Colony, Natal, and the various African kingdoms into a single political structure that would serve British imperial interests and prevent the kind of fractured, competitive chaos that had produced decade after decade of frontier wars. He was a capable, experienced administrator who had done significant work in India. He was also convinced, with the absolute certainty of the Victorian imperial class, that he knew what South Africa needed and that he was authorized to create it.

The Zulu kingdom was the obstacle. Under Cetshwayo, it had maintained its independence, its organized army, and its ability to influence events across a wide region. Frere concluded that it had to go. The problem was finding a justification that his government in London would accept. He found it — or rather constructed it — in a minor border incident: Zulu men had crossed into Natal to retrieve the wives of a chief who had fled. Frere inflated this into a pattern of Zulu aggression and assembled a commission to adjudicate border disputes. When the commission's report was less alarming than he needed, he sat on it for months while preparing his ultimatum.

The ultimatum of December 11, 1878 presented Cetshwayo with a list of demands that included paying a fine, surrendering the men involved in the border incident, disbanding the Zulu military system, and accepting a British Resident with significant oversight authority. Cetshwayo met the first conditions and attempted to negotiate the last. Frere did not wait for the deadline. On January 11, 1879 — before the time he had set had expired — Chelmsford's columns crossed into Zululand. London learned about it after the fact, censured Frere, and let the war continue.

The British government's censure of Frere was the clearest contemporary acknowledgment that the Anglo-Zulu War had been started on a pretext by an official acting beyond his authority. But censure without consequence — Frere was not recalled until 1880, after the First Boer War had added further disasters to his ledger — was meaningless. The Zulu kingdom was invaded on a manufactured pretext by a government agent who believed his ends justified whatever means he needed. That the ends were not achieved — confederation failed, the Boer War eventually had to be fought anyway — made his judgment catastrophically wrong as well as morally questionable.