60 Years Later, Colonial War Movie Zulu Is a Case Study of What Makes a British Classic

145 years ago, the British Empire was at war with the Zulu kingdoms of Southern Africa—have a guess why. The British Secretary for the Colonies, Henry Herbert, 4th Earl of Carnarvon, had attempted to replicate a recent confederation of Canadian territories in South Africa, despite the fact that they would need to conquer the several independent armed states that already existed there. When the Zulu forces defeated the Brits at the Battle of Isandlwana, a faction broke off in the battle’s final hour and attacked the mission station Rorke’s Drift, where the outnumbered 24th Regiment of Foot—against all odds—defended the post and went down in imperial history as an example of Great Britain’s heroic survival against the “barbarism” of the to-be-colonized world. This is the battle that Zulu, the now 60-year-old British war film, concerns itself with.

Zulu is positioned somewhere between David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and John Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King (1975)—two soulful projects interested as much with the faulty psychology of British colonialism (and the resistance to it) as they are in the sweeping vistas of foreign lands and exploding muskets. Zulu has none of the grace of either film: It’s a robustly made but simplistically designed epic about a ramshackle British regiment being called on to defend the British cause, descending into turgid bloodshed and offering a whiff of regret at the end to suggest, you know, that colonialist slaughter is bad.

Still, Zulu managed to forge a bit of a legacy in British cinema, thanks to a combination of triumphing at the box office, showing in Saturday morning cinema clubs for kids up and down the country, and playing on British television pretty much every other day. It’s also credited with launching Michael Caine’s career, casting him as posh English imperialist lieutenant Gonville Bromhead rather than—as he had usually been playing on TV—a rough Cockney bloke. 

Zulu has also received its fair share of flak over the years for all the reasons you might expect: perceived colonialist jingoism, historical revisionism, and unfair depictions of those made victims of the British Empire. But while Zulu is certainly not the most racist film Britain produced in its contemporary era (a low bar to clear), defenses of the film—especially those triggered by Prevent, a U.K. counter-terrorism program, including it on a list of media that could encourage white nationalism—still feel a little incomplete. 

Yes, Zulu was written by two leftists (John Prebble was a Communist Party member, while co-writer and director Cy Endfield had been named one by the McCarthyist witch-hunts), and by 1964, Britain’s empire had been proclaimed dead and its glamor had faded in the country’s populace. And yes, Zulu goes out of its way to dignify its Indigenous attackers, showing them conduct a stirring war chant that salutes as they retreat near the end. Bromhead even reflects, amidst the piles of dead and wounded Zulu warriors, that the battle has left him feeling sick. 

But these points have often been raised as justification for why the film could never be racist, for getting Zulu off the hook. A close reading of a film will never account for the entirety of its questionable politics, as you need to understand the conditions that produced it, and the reasons it was so readily accepted upon release. In other words, it’s not what stands out as objectionable, but what we easily swallow that signal the film’s worst qualities.

Prebble compared the film to a Western, where the Native Americans were substituted by Zulu warriors—a comparison which may help define tone and style, but also admits the replicated colonialist attitudes that give authority and legitimacy to white invaders staking out a nebulous and violent ideology on foreign land. Even the most colonial-critical Western still asks us to put faith in the relationship between the white American and the land they stand on (neo-westerns excluded), a mythos that Zulu casually and effectively appropriates to reframe Britain’s empire.

There’s nothing more classically Western than defending a fortress against an overwhelming siege, but in the context of the Anglo-Zulu war, this narrative conceit is more than sickening. By starting the narrative after a calamitous British defeat, right before a single regiment is outnumbered by a Zulu army, Prebble and Endfield frame one of the deadliest empires in human history as a backfooted underdog—something emboldened by the regionally accented, ramshackle officers that fill out the ranks at Rorke’s Drift.

Most egregiously, Zulu gives a glimpse of a colonialist war exclusively as Britain defending territory, as if they have any right to be stuck there. This is partly a historical fact; British forces really were holed up in a single mission station with nowhere to retreat or advance. But when history is transplanted into cinematic language, Zulu enforces the idea that the British presence in South Africa was legitimate, necessary and fairly won. When considering the fact that the country was in the full grip of apartheid when they shot the film—with strict laws prohibiting the Black cast members from even socializing with their white peers—the perspective on British interference in South Africa that Zulu passively adopts feels expressly rank.

That’s not the extent of Zulu’s issues with perspective: the Zulus get none. Aside from an opening scene where a Swedish missionary watches a Zulu wedding ceremony and Zulu King Cetshwayo (Mangosuthu Buthelezi, Cetshwayo’s actual great-grandson) learns of the victory at Isandlwana, they do not speak in the film. They take the form of a descending horde, and sounds of their war cries are looped as background noise like they’re enemies in a video game rather than an army defending their homes.

When the Zulus perform their salute to their surviving British opponents at the film’s close, it reads as a symbol of mutual dignity and honor between two equally matched sides. But this is manufactured: No such salute occurred, and its invention further softens the barbaric edges of the empire by pretending that a native people saw them as worthy of respect. As Lindiwe Dovey wrote in African Film and Literature: Adapting Violence to the Screen, “The war was not fought on equal terms, due to the superior firearms of the British, and the filmmakers therefore require the Zulus to pay tribute to the British since it is only the Zulus who can authenticate the fairness of the war.”

Considering that British forces actually committed severe and heinous war crimes once the Zulus retreated from Rorke’s Drift, just after the film ends, Zulu’s historical inaccuracies no longer become something to look past to enjoy the film, but part of the text itself. They are implicit details of a historical document, observing how Britain could not imagine itself as a monster. This is despite the fact that, with a leftist filmmaking team, working-class actors and hundreds of Black South African cast members in the post-empire 1960s, the Zulu production had every opportunity to do so—even if evidence of the war crimes were not discovered until 2003. Sixty years on, audiences are still unwilling to parse the entrenched racism in even the most unremarkable of war films, because that would mean implicating the very countries that solidified these movies as “classics” in the first place.

Rory Doherty is a screenwriter, playwright and culture writer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. You can follow his thoughts about all things stories @roryhasopinions.