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David Rattray
Feb 8th 2007
From The Economist print edition
David Rattray, master-storyteller of the Zulu war, died on January 26th, aged 48
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ON JANUARY 22nd 1879, Private Samuel Wassall nearly met his maker at the Buffalo river. He was deep in that whirlpool of drowning men and horses, forcing his own mount across, when he heard a gurgling behind him. It came from Thomas Westwood, a private in the same Staffordshire regiment. Westwood was going under. Without hesitation Wassall swam his horse back, tied it up on the Zulu-held bank of the river, got Westwood to safety, crossed again to get his horse and—as Zulu assegais whistled into the water on every side of him—made it back himself to the Natal side. He lived, and he won the Victoria Cross, one of 14 awarded that day at the Battle of Isandlwana.
Meanwhile, up on a high promontory above the rocky plain, Captain Younghusband and his men were making a last stand. They had fought till they were exhausted. Younghusband now knew there was no ammunition left for their Martini-Henry rifles. He shook each of his men by the hand and said goodbye. One by one they fell to the assegais. But suddenly Younghusband spotted, from high on the mountain, one ammunition cart left behind, and raced down towards it. The Zulus couldn't believe what they were seeing. Before long, one of them killed Younghusband with a rifle shot—and then they carried him aloft on their war-shields back to the crag on which his men lay dead and dying, because he was a hero to them.
David Rattray had dozens more such stories. Of Charles Raw, chasing after a herd of cattle on “a hellish hot day”, suddenly arriving at the edge of a ravine and seeing, as far as the eye could see, thousands of Zulus squatting in absolute silence on their war-shields. Of Teignmouth Melvill, washed downstream in the rapids of the Buffalo river but still holding the Queen's Colours high above his head. Of Charles Harford, who found the case and pole of those Colours in the river mud—the embroidery torn off by the water—and who, during one sortie, had wandered off to observe a strange new species of beetle and capture it in a matchbox.
Mr Rattray, an entomologist by training, liked Harford especially. But he knew them all. He had lived with them, read their journals, and had come to see the Anglo-Zulu war through their individual eyes and voices. In 1989, after managing a game park for some years, he built a house at Fugitives' Drift that overlooked the river and the battlefield, and made the war his life.
In the combatants' footsteps he would tramp across the rocky thorn-veld of KwaZulu-Natal, taking with him a contingent of overweight tourists mopping their brows and collapsing on camping chairs. To them he would point out the white stone cairns where men had fallen, the caves where others had hidden, or
the lines at Rorke's Drift where the British, in an extraordinary stand the day after Isandlwana, had defended themselves in a field hospital behind walls of mealie bags and biscuit tins. He would talk for hours in his soft, fast, urgent voice, waving his stick over the shimmering battlefield. He could imitate the orders barked to a Victorian rocket detachment (“Point the rocket at the advancing savages. Aim the apparatus. Pull the string and stand back!”) and the rushing, hooting “Usuthu! Usuthu!” of 20,000 warriors attacking. As his stories unfolded, battle-hardened generals would find themselves in tears.
The day of the dead moon
The Zulu war ended, merely six months after it began, with the complete surrender of the Zulus and their forced incorporation into a federal South Africa. But Mr Rattray was no white triumphalist. He cared equally, and knew as much, about the Zulu side. He would remind his listeners that January 22nd 1879 was the “day of the dead moon”, an eclipse of the sun, on which Zulus were not meant to fight; that was why they had crouched in the ravine and waited. And when the young warriors disembowelled every British body, this was not gratuitous mutilation: they were helping the spirit to escape.
Brought up in segregated suburbs and schools, it was some years before he got to know Zulus. But his family bought land around the battlefield, and as a student he began to wander there with a Zulu friend, talking to farmers about their ancestral memories of the war and picking up expertly their musical, clicking language. When he settled there, local people in KwaZulu-Natal called him a “white Zulu”: their friend, and the best exponent living of the native tradition of telling stories. Although he invoked one of the bloodiest clashes between black and white, he did it with such sympathy that he became a symbol of reconciliation in South Africa.
All the more awful, then, that he was killed by Zulus. The details emerged in court from 23-year-old Fethe Nkwanyana, unmoving and unblinking before the cameras. Somebody had told him that Mr Rattray had money. He had therefore gone with five others to Fugitives' Drift on the evening of January 26th to rob him. They were all armed with guns; he himself had a Norinco pistol. But it was Banozi Ndlovu who shot Mr Rattray as he challenged them. They all ran away empty-handed.
Mr Rattray had spent his life recovering the unheard voices of South Africa's past. This one, a voice heard too often in modern South Africa, he did not live to hear.
Copyright © 2007 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.
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Overview
Feb 8th 2007
From The Economist print edition
Oil prices rose in response to colder weather in America. The benchmark price for a barrel of West Texas Intermediate climbed above $59 on February 7th.
American companies, excluding farms, added 111,000 workers to their payrolls in January. The figures for November and December were revised up by 81,000 in total. The unemployment rate edged up to 4.6% in January.
Labour productivity in America's non-farm businesses rose at an annual rate of 3.0% in the fourth quarter, according to preliminary estimates. In 2006 as a whole, the increase in output per hour was just 2.1%, the weakest since 1997.
In the euro area the volume of retail trade rose by 0.3% in December, a 2.1% increase on a year earlier. German industrial output fell by 0.5% in December, following a 2.0% rise in November.
In Britain industrial production dropped by 0.1% in December, leaving it only 0.5% higher than a year earlier.
Indonesia's central bank cut its key interest rate to 9.25%, its eighth cut in as many months. Inflation was 6.3% in the year to January, down from 17% a year earlier.
The New York Stock Exchange set a record on February 7th, when the Dow Jones Industrial average briefly rose above 12,700 during trading. In London the FTSE 100 index reached its highest level for six years.
Copyright © 2007 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.
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Output, prices and jobs
Feb 8th 2007
From The Economist print edition
Copyright © 2007 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.