A Stunning Zulu Victory

Hi all, the Zulu won the battle of Isandhlwana.fact.
but why did they comprehensibly and overwhelmingly
defeat a large british force armed with modern state
of the art weaponry,

As the frontier wars came to a close, the british were
to assume that the up-coming Zulu campaign would
prove to be pretty much of ' more of the same '. how
wrong did this turn out to be, despite the plethora of
evidence supplied by the settlers,disaffected Natal
Zulu's, and indeed their own ' intelligence dept proved
to be worse than useless.

So it was that the british crossed the buffalo river and
invaded Zululand, its on record what the british motive-
ation was for invading this independent sovereign state.
but what of the ordinary men on the proverbial shilling a
day. when the battle was in full flow and they were be-
ing driven back through the tents,what were those final
desperate thoughts of these men standing on the edge
of eternity. and all for a shilling a day,the letters sent
home by the or/nco's were in the main lucid and many
articulate.but im always left with that notion that the
british were an army of automatons,rigid and inflexible.
so, where was the motivation, who had the most to
lose. what were the Zulu's motivation as they achieved
this famous pyrrhic victory.. cheers xhosa

xhosa2000 wrote:

what were the Zulu's motivation as they achieved
this famous pyrrhic victory. cheers xhosa

The Zulu motivation seems straightforward to me. Their territory was being invaded so they wanted to send the British packing.

Regardless of the reason given, it is noteworthy that they did not attempt to follow up with an invasion of Natal, unless you count the attack on Rorke's Drift which was motivated more by vanity than policy.