Last Outposts on the Zulu Frontiers: Fort Napier and the British Imperial Garrison had its beginnings in 1995 as Graham Dominy's doctoral dissertation at the University of London, under the distinguished South African scholar Shula Marks. Dominy has since served as a National Archivist of South Africa, editor of Natalia: Journal of the Natal Society, a research fellow at the University of South Africa, and currently, honorary research fellow at the Helen Suzman Foundation. Fortunately for us, Dominy has kept alive his passion for Fort Napier, and this more deeply researched and mature book is the result.
The establishment of the British Natal Colony, Pietermaritzburg's occupation by the 45th Regiment of British infantry, and Fort Napier's construction all began in 1843, following agreements made among the three major political powers in the region: the British, the Afrikaners, and the Zulu. The military occupation of Fort Napier lasted seventy-one years, the longest occupation by British forces of a single South African fort (except for the Castle of Good Hope, in Cape Town), and arguably the longest in all of Africa. It ended in late August 1914, when the South Staffordshire Regiment sounded the last “Retreat” and headed off to the Western Front.
In those seventy-one years, troops from Fort Napier participated in wartime campaigns only four times, totaling less than four years. The sixty-seven years of peace are therefore the study's primary focus, structured chronologically and thematically over thirteen chapters.
In chapter 1, Dominy selects important garrisons in the British Empire—the “open space” garrisons, as Halifax in Canada; the “jailer” garrisons, as in New South Wales and Van Diemens Land in Australia; the Maori Wars garrisons in New Zealand; and the longest lasting of all Britain's outposts, Gibraltar. He argues that Fort Napier's uniqueness lay in its longevity, the stability (real or imagined) it offered in a volatile region, the cultural and economic influences it exerted, and, above all, the fact that it “influenced not only a settler society, but a major African society [the Zulu] as well, thus justifying the sobriquet, ‘The Last Outpost’” of the British Empire (9).
In chapter 2 Dominy considers the British Army as a social institution and the thousands of mainly urban and rural poor young men from the British Isles who were sent to the far reaches of the globe to defend the British Empire, with their commanding officers drawn nearly entirely from the gentry. He focuses chapter 3 primarily on why and how the British established a military garrison in Natal in the years 1842–43. Chapter 4 contains a detailed discussion of Fort Napier's design and subsequent construction by the soldiers themselves, when the region was transitioning from the Natalia Republic (1839–43) to the Natal Colony, and Pietersmaritzburg from an Afrikaner village to a colonial capital. As Dominy observes, “While bureaucrats and ministers dithered, soldiers built. The fort grew along with the city, and a colony became a fait accompli” (34).
The garrison's role in creating the colonial state and reinforcing the sense of imperial membership among British white settlers in the 1840s, ’50s, and ’60s is the subject of chapter 5. These outcomes were accomplished primarily by (1) the ability of the garrison to dominate the economy of the town and region; (2) the technical expertise possessed by the troops; and (3) military pageantry. This last served two purposes: bolstering imperial prestige and hiding the garrison's military weakness vis-à-vis its neighbor and potential enemy, the Zulu. In chapter 6 Dominy continues this theme from the 1860s to the 1890s, when the colony faced greater threats, as with the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 and with Moshweshwe and his Basotho kingdom to the west.
In chapter 7 Dominy examines discipline, indiscipline, and even mutiny of the soldiers in garrison. Alcohol was the greatest problem, but generally, Dominy concludes, the garrison was well disciplined and adequately managed. 1887 saw a significant mutiny by the Inniskilling Fusiliers, which is the subject of chapter 8. Dominy describes the event and places it in the context of the Land Wars and passionate debates over Home Rule raging in Ireland at the time. In chapter 9 he reflects on the garrison's disproportionately larger influence in the relatively thinly (white) populated Natal Colony than was true elsewhere in the empire, along with its place in the wider society of the city and colony. The garrison was responsible for the development of class relationships and for establishing social, cultural, educational, and sporting events and organizations, all of which lasted long beyond the colony's formal end in 1910.
In chapter 10 Dominy discusses class, race, and particularly gender relationships in the garrison, demonstrating convincingly how the Victorian construction of masculinity and the military concepts of hierarchy and deference shaped these relations. Dominy devotes chapter 11 to a discussion of the garrison's economic influence on the colony, which is approached from five angles: the imperial government's expenditures on the garrison; supplies and suppliers; the degree to which the garrison provided economic security; the garrison's effect on the livestock market and on transport; and the exploitation of African labor. In chapter he 12 examines the relationships among the various levels of government—imperial, colonial, and local—and their evolution over time. In the last chapter, 13, Dominy brings the story of Fort Napier and its military garrison to an end, when the last troops left for France in 1914. But he also recounts the fort's fate since that time and its place in folk memories.
Dominy has made Fort Napier a lifelong project, and his knowledge of the site and its history is evident on every page. This is much more than the story of a place, however; it includes the history of soldiers and officers, the women who accompanied them, white settlers, Africans, Afrikaners, colonial and imperial officials, bishops and churches, wars, peace, and the legacy they all left to modern South Africa. It is well written, accessible, and likely to appeal to nonspecialists and scholars alike who are interested in the British army, imperial outposts, colonial history, and of course the specific gender, class, and race relations in nineteenth-century Natal.
