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I don’t like crowds as a rule, but in the scorching heat of a typical December day in the hills of Natal I find myself totally surrounded by thousands of people. Dead people. I can't seem to turn without tripping over another dead or dying, eviscerated, dismembered body. We are standing on the site of the Battle of Isandlwana and the tortured, terrorised screams and death rattles of British soldiers are ear shattering. The scarlet of their jackets is sharply juxtaposed by the deep red of their blood seeping deep into the dry African soil - probably resulting in the tree under which I stand amid this massacre almost 130 years later.
'The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.' -- Marcel Proust “I can hear the cries when I do tours here at night in the moonlight. I never see them. I only hear them…” So replies our historian guide Rob Gerrard ominously when I ask him if he has ever seen their ghosts in the fourteen years that he’s been telling the story of the battle to mesmerised audiences.
The drama that unfolded here on the 22nd of January 1879 in the undulating hills of the KwaZulu Natal midlands of South Africa is the stuff of epic, salient legend. It’s the stuff that follows its victims and victors generations into the future as descendants ,of those branded cowards on a single day over a hundred years ago, still grapple with feelings of shame. Such as the descendants of the egregious Lord Chelmsford who lead the regiment. He extended his line of march in enemy country, split his forces and failed to co-ordinate them in the slightest degree. It was the greatest defeat suffered by the British Army during the Victorian era. A Zulu army of 24,000 warriors had moved undetected to within striking distance of the British camp in the shadow of Isandlwana Mountain. From the start the 1,700 defenders underestimated the danger descending upon them. They were swept aside with horrifying speed and the final stage of the battle consisted of desperate hand-to-hand combat amid the British camp. Over 1,300 men were killed; scarcely 60 Europeans survived. | 
