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Heroism, Heroics and the Making of Heroes: The Anglo-Zulu War of 1879

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2017

Michael Lieven
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Extract

In recent years a number of studies have examined the function of heroic narratives in the propaganda of empire and the construction of “Britishness.” Graham Dawson has argued that such narratives “became myths of nationhood itself providing a cultural focus around which the national community could cohere.” In the light of the nineteenth-century chivalric ideal, the Victorian military hero was expected to be “the embodiment of the virtues of bravery, loyalty, courtesy, generosity, modesty, purity, and compassion, and endowed with an indelible sense of noblesse oblige towards women, children and social inferiors.” The English and upper-class image of the “British” hero served, among other things, to inculcate these supposedly English characteristics in the Irish, Scottish, and Welsh. Courage was taken for granted as the essential characteristic of British imperial officers in the Victorian period but, while courage is a personal quality and is not in itself a quality belonging to the public domain, heroism is, by contrast, something definitionally public. The courageous man becomes a hero only when he is declared to be one. The roots of the hero are in dramatic narrative, which spans the epic myth and the reality of war. The hero is “made” whether in a dramatic fiction or in the representation of events, though the latter produces the problem of molding reality to the requirements of the genre. Military heroes in the genre of the imperial adventure story and in the representation of “real” events are hardly distinguishable, for they are “made” to serve the same purposes. The hero is part of a story and, as Northrop Frye has argued, that story or langue has certain generic features throughout history. On the other hand, though the hero is made, the individual can, and often did, prepare and present himself for the role.

Type
Research Article
Information
Albion , Volume 30 , Issue 3 , Fall 1998 , pp. 419 - 438
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1998

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Footnotes

*

I would like to thank the participants at the York Conference in Cultural Studies on “Exemplary Lives,” in particular Professor John MacKenzie, in April 1997 for their unwitting contribution to this article.

References

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54 The war still generates a flood of popular histories that continue to mythologize the heroism of both armies with variation on the incompetence of the commanders and the suffering of war. The most perceptively scathing comments on these popularizations of the war are to be found in Guy, Jeff, The Destruction of the Zulu Kingdom (London, 1979)Google Scholar, although the book is concerned with the Zulu civil war that followed the defeat by the British rather than the war of 1879 itself. While Morris’s, Donald R. The Washing of the Spears (London, 1966)Google Scholar fed the flood it rose above these generally feeble productions through the thoroughness of his research, the balanced treatment of the combatants and the quality of his narrative. Among academic historians there is a shin from military history, narrowly conceived, toward placing the war in the context of social and political change in southern Africa ( Laband, J., Kingdom in Crisis: The Zulu response to the British Invasion of 1879 [Manchester, 1992])Google Scholar. The historiography of the war deserves separate treatment on account of the light it throws on attitudes to empire, the construction of Britishness, and the different modes of historical writing in textbooks, popular histories, and scholarly works.