The Anglo-Ashanti Wars and the Anglo-Zulu War by Charles River Editors ISBN B0DPD3TTGN instant download

The Anglo-Ashanti Wars and the Anglo-Zulu War by Charles River Editors ISBN B0DPD3TTGN instant download

By the mid-19th century, other European powers became interested not only in the exploration of Africa but the exploitation of it, especially once the German Empire unified after the Franco-Prussian War. This began a rush, spearheaded mainly by European commercial interests in the form of chartered companies, to penetrate the African interior and woo its leadership with guns, trinkets and alcohol, and having thus obtained their marks or seals upon spurious treaties, begin establishing boundaries of future European colonies. The ease with which this was achieved was due to the fact that, at that point, traditional African leadership was disunited, and the people had just staggered back from centuries of concussion inflicted by the slave trade. Thus, to usurp authority, to intimidate an already broken society, and to play one leader against the other was a diplomatic task so simple, much of Africa would come under European influence in a short time.

Of course, there were exceptions to this rule, with the most famous perhaps being the resistance put up by the Zulu. It required a British colonial war, the much storied Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, to affect pacification. Another was the amaNdebele, an offshoot of the Zulu, established as early as the 1830s in the southeastern quarter of what would become Rhodesia, and later still, Zimbabwe, in the future. Both were powerful, centralized monarchies, fortified by an organized and aggressive professional army, subdivided into regiments, and owing fanatical loyalty to the crown. Although treaties and British gunboat diplomacy played a role, it was ultimately war, conquest, and defeat in battle that brought them to heel. The military conflict helped immortalize the Zulu in the minds of Westerners, but their history was far from finished in 1879. The Zulu persevered, only to suffer under the depredations of South Africa’s apartheid system, but they also outlasted that, and even today they remain the largest ethnic group in South

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