In the east of the country, the Zulus, led by fearsome warriors, Cetshwayo, Dingane and Shaka were forging armies and molding disparate tribal groups into a formidable nation. Ahead of their warlike advances, more peaceable peoples fled into to mountain retreats. Into a seemingly abandoned wilderness arrived the Voortrekkers (the Boers), the Dutch farmers with their oxen and wagons, spreading out from the Cape to escape the hated British, in search of land to settle and plow. In the main, they were hard, ill-educated, God-fearing folk, well-meaning in many ways, blindly prejudiced in others. And then there were the British, swooping in with their red-coated soldiers to hoover up Africa for crown colonies.
The first clashes took place from 1836-53 between the Boers (Voortrekkers) and the Zulus, the Boer-Zulu Wars setting the scene for all future disastrous relations between Afrikaans and black South Africans, with the massacre of Piet Retief and 101 of his followers, followed by the horrific Battle of Blood River.
The British arrived in 1879. First blood went to the Zulus who virtually wiped out the British forces at the Battle of Isandlwana, before heading down the valley to the mission hospital at Rorke's Drift, where a handful of men fended off an army of 4,000 winning heroic status in the eyes of the Zulus as well as the world. Between the 150 men who took part, they won 11 Victoria Crosses (Britain's highest military honor), an achievement never repeated before or since. Some think it would have been more, but it was not given posthumously at that time. The battle became even more famous as the inspiration behind the Hollywood epic movie, Zulu, starring Michael Caine.
With European firepower inevitably winning out over Zulu courage and stabbing spears, it was now left to the British and Afrikaans to sort out the pecking order. There were two Anglo-Boer Wars, in 1880-81, and in 1899-1902. The Natal Battlefields played their parts in both. The peace treaty that ended the first was signed in Newcastle. The siege of Ladysmith was probably one of the single most famous actions of the second. The most unlikely people were there. Winston Churchill, as a young reporter, was captured by the Boers on an armoured train at Chieveley, near the foothills of the Drakensberg. Gandhi, at that time living in South Africa, was a stretcher bearer on the battlefields. It was a war that introduced the khaki uniform, guerilla warfare and the concentration camp. It was, quite simply, a local war that changed the world.