WHAT do you do with your dead after the culmination of a battle? If you win, the decent thing to do is to bury them. If you lose, you’re too busy back-pedalling to worry about it – at least until later. This was true of the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, during which the British only got around to burying the remains of their dead at Isandlwana (22 January 1879) some four months later. Most of the men killed at Hlobane (28 March 1879) also had to be left where they fell.
For the Zulus, unless the deceased lived in the vicinity of the battle site, the possibility of transporting bodies to distant homesteads before decomposition set in was remote. What was more important was to get the ancestral spirit, the iDlozi, home. Once they had captured it via a twig from the umPafa tree (Ziziphus mucronata or buffalo thorn), the body of the deceased was covered with his shield to be left on the battlefield while the twig with its ancestral passenger was taken home.
The question for both sides is: what to do with the enemy’s dead? If you were British, on a roll and moving
