Bartle Frere

Sir Henry Bartle Frere was the British High Commissioner for Southern Africa who started the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 without authority from London. He was born in Monmouthshire and made a successful career in India, where he was commissioner in Sindh and then Governor of Bombay from 1862 to 1867. He was known there for public works, for handling a financial crash badly, and for a genuine record against the slave trade in East Africa. He was sent to the Cape in 1877 to assemble a confederation of the British colonies, Boer republics and African kingdoms of southern Africa, on the model that had worked in Canada. The obstacle he identified was the Zulu kingdom, the strongest independent African military power in the region. In December 1878 he issued Cetshwayo an ultimatum requiring him to disband his army within thirty days, a demand no Zulu king could accept. He did it knowing the cabinet in London opposed a war and had told him so, and he delayed reporting it. The invasion began in January 1879. Within days the Zulu destroyed a British column at Isandlwana, the worst defeat a modern European army had suffered at the hands of an African force. Britain won the war and broke up the Zulu kingdom, and Frere was censured by Whitehall and recalled by Gladstone in 1880. He also engineered the removal of the Cape's first elected government in 1878. He was never formally punished beyond the censure and kept his baronetcy. A statue of him still stands on the Thames Embankment in London, and campaigns to remove it have recurred for over a century.

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