Talk:Battle of Blood River

message: I deleted the following:
In 1978 a prominent Pretoria academic Floors van Jaarsveld questioned the motivation behind the commemoration of the victory and was subsequently tarred and feathered during a public lecture by members of the Afrikaner Resistance Movement. 
Reason: This is a military history article; not relevant.
Luidier 09:14, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

message: treacherous act - battered bodies - Can we make this look better than a scandalised Africaner broadsheet ? Wizzy…☎ 16:44, 21 November 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Wikidrama 

message: The Volksraad did not exist until 1857, two decades after the Battle of Blood River. When were these supposed democratic elections held? --NJR_ZA (talk) 22:38, 28 November 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Seems I was wrong here and the Volksraad article is also in error. The Volksraad did indeed exist at least from 1839. --NJR_ZA (talk) 08:40, 18 December 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Volks-Raad 

message: The page on Piet Retief doesn't say anything about the 100 people with Piet being impaled before he was clubbed to death. It says they were ALL clubbed to death, while Piet was forced to watch. I also note that the infobox says that there were "12,000-21,000 (not recorded)" Zulus present. I've read two or three other pages that give the number as "around 10,000", and it's odd that it says "not recorded", because I see in one of the comments above that someone says that "there were hundreds of witnesses who recorded the number as 10,000". One of the quoted passages int he text gives the number as 30,000. So where did the 21,000 number come from, where is the 10,000 that all the other pages mention, and how can it be "not recorded", since it's obviously been recorded a number of times, in various numbers? The problem is that the numbers don't agree, not that they were never written down.
Next, the section about the battle is somewhat disjointed. It starts out with them forming laager, the Zulus massing, the leader staying on the other side of the river. Then the Zulus attack, and are mown down. Suddenly jumps back to November again, and we're just departing to fight the Zulus, and it goes all through until they wake up one morning "to find all of Zululand there". Then, somehow, the Zulus are advancing over the dead that fell in the previous attack (even though they apparently just arrived). In between, there is some mysterious reference about the Zulus taking "3 days" to prepare magical protections:
    "In ceremonies that lasted about three days, izinyanga zempi, specialist war doctors, prepared izinteleze medicines which made warriors invincible in the face of their opponents."
Presumably this includes several days before they arrived on the battlefield, and we're not talking about them sitting around for three days while the Afrikaaners watched?
And then the mysterious
   "This could explain why Dambuza's forces were sitting on the ground close to the wagon laager when the Trekkers opened fire during the day."
This seems to be some random piece of trivia without any context or background. When did this happen? How? Were the Trekkers firing on the sitting men or someone else? Best I can come up with is that it's saying that when the initial attack came within range and the battle opened with the Trekkers firing on the advancing Zulus, for some reason, some of the Zulus were sitting on the ground rather than joining the others, and what they were likely doing is completing some magic ceremony. That seems plausible, but it's complete speculation on my part, since no further detail is given.
As for the number given of "3,000" killed, it's possible, but implausible. Even with breechloaders, that would be a very surprising number, and these guys only had muzzleloaders (if they were smoothbores instead of rifle-muskets, it would definitely be impossible). In order for less than 500 guys to kill 3,000 enemy, each would have to kill 6 Zulus (for 450 men, it rounds up to 7). This doesn't sound like a lot, but it's a much greater number than is usually achieved by warriors outside of Hollywood. It's extremely rare for a group of men to kill much more than their own number. The vast majority of shots don't hit their target (in a Civil War battle, it took something like several thousand shots fired to hit one man, on average, which means an astonishing number of shots fired on days like Antietam, where 20,000 men fell). So, for the Afrikaans to kill 3,000 Zulu is greatly outside the normal ratio, although just possible, assuming they were particularly cool-headed, excellent shots, and the Zulus bunched into large masses of men at close range and stayed there while they were gunned down. And, of course, that the Afrikaaners slaughtered the wounded after the battle, because as a rule, there are 3-4 men wounded for every 1 killed outright by gunfire (that's why the word "casualties" includes dead, wounded and missing, dead generally being the smallest number by far). I can't imagine the Afrikaaners caring for wounded Zulus, nor adding another 9,000 wounded Zulus to the already improbable casualty list, so I think it's safe to assume that around 3,000 Zulu were shot, and left on the battlefield, where they were subsequently dispatched by the Afrikaaners or simply left to bleed to death. Although, like I said, "3,000" is an impressive number, and one can't help but wonder if anyone bothered to count, or if they just looked at the piles of dead and made a quick estimate. A pile of 300 dead men looks like a lot more than it really is. AnnaGoFast (talk) 21:22, 2 February 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Impaled"?  

message: I found a source for the quotation from Bantjes' journal. Here's the section that is translated here, starting "Sunday, December 16":
In particular the sentence
is translated as
The word "thunder" (Dutch/Afrikaans donder) doesn't appear in this sentence, indeed it doesn't appear anywhere in my source. What is the source for this translation? I think a more reasonable translation would be something like
On the face of it this doesn't seem to be talking about the sound of the battle at all, but rather describing the fighting. (I presume "from their side" doesn't mean the Zulus had small arms to fire, just that the fighting was fierce on their side, hence my switching the order of clauses to clarify that.) Admittedly I'm not fluent in Dutch, so perhaps more can be read into the word  ("fierce") than I think, but I'm pretty sure "thunder" is an embellishment in the translation. Hairy Dude (talk) 18:26, 28 June 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Like thunder" 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: The Battle is recounted 3 times in succession. Can someone with expertise rewrite to eliminate redundancies and condense into a single consecutive narrative? ~ Alcmaeonid (talk) 20:10, 11 August 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Battle section repetition 

message: The negroes were tamed and made to be civilized.  Shamefully however, the black man has been allowed to revert to his feral way of mayhem and massacre. 
2600:6C56:6408:71:3563:B7D4:B0CA:3A25 (talk) 14:13, 11 June 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Civilizing the negroes 

message: “Great invasion of the Easter regions by the Bantu (Kaffirs), irritated by the constant encroachment of the Dutch cattlemen and farmers. The natives were driven back with some difficulty.”
The great Trek occurred as a result of of the abolition of the slavery of Africans in Africa. 
The current article is written as if the South Africans were not previously enslaved on their home lands. It’s written as if the Dutch were not upset about the abolition of slavery. It’s almost as if the land belonged to the Dutch to begin with and they were defending their presence against a foreign enemy. In short it’s being edited by colonizer sympathizers. MyEncyclopediaIsOlderThanYours (talk) 00:20, 16 July 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Great Invasion 

message: Hello, I was reading the article and I was just curious if there were any Zulu records on this battle. Even if they didn't largely keep written sources I want to assume there would be some recounting from the other side. I mostly mention this because I do not think the casualty count as displayed is credible. I do believe casualties listed may reflect the nature of the battle, but to give exact numbers with the evidence coming from only the winning side seems misleading. After taking a quick glance at other battles of the Great Trek, no other combat between the Zulu and Boers depicts this high of a ratio of Zulu deaths. Even British sources for battles during the Anglo-Zulu War generally depict far fewer Zulu casualties than this specific battle. The exception to this was the Battle of Isandlwana where the Zulu casualty numbers were not recorded and only estimated[1]. 
Additionally, the article claims that "While the Trekkers were being entertained by Dingane's dancing warriors/soldiers, Dingane suddenly accused the visiting party of witchcraft and ordered his men: "Bulalani abathakathi" (Kill the sorcerers...).[6] Dingane's soldiers bludgeoned Retief's party to death.[7]" The source cited in the article for this claim states that "Dingane got up and yelled "Bulalani abathakathi" ("kill the magicians") and the warrior immediately killed the Boer representatives. In reality they were killed outside the royal kraal on the execution rock called Matiwane." The way that the article is written seems to imply that the trekkers WERE in fact killed immediately, which does not seem to be the case. I believe this section should be rewritten, as the way the information is presented gives an inaccurate image of the actual events. Elaboration on how immediate the execution of the trekkers was, as well as the location of the execution, should be included.
Also, I'm fairly sure that the trekkers in the cited image have been stabbed with spears rather than being bludgeoned to death. This detail should probably be changed as well. I would suggest: "While the Trekkers were being entertained by Dingane's dancing warriors/soldiers, Dingane suddenly accused the visiting party of witchcraft and ordered his men: "Bulalani abathakathi" (Kill the sorcerers...). Retief's party was taken outside of the royal kraal and executed by Dingane's men."
I am not very experienced with Wikipedia editing or etiquette so I am currently leaving the sources and article as is, but I personally suggest that the citing of the kings excecutions and death count for the battle be re written. I also would suggest to use less definite language on this article as much of this information is obscured, although I may be unfamilliar with Wikipedia so forgive me if this is definite style of writing is standard practice Ashemus (talk) 07:16, 8 May 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Zulu/Inaccurate Sources?