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Last Outpost on the Zulu Frontier: Fort Napier and the British Imperial Garrison

Last Outpost on the Zulu Frontier: Fort Napier and the British Imperial Garrison

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Author:
Series: The History of Military Occupation
Genre: History
Tag: Recommended Books
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Publication Year: 2016
Length: 320 pages
ASIN: B0189EHDIA
ISBN: 9780252040047

Small and isolated in the Colony of Natal, Fort Napier was long treated like a temporary outpost of the expanding British Empire. Yet British troops manned this South African garrison for over seventy years. Tasked with protecting colonists, the fort became even more significant as an influence on, and reference point for, settler society.

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About the Book

Small and isolated in the Colony of Natal, Fort Napier was long treated like a temporary outpost of the expanding British Empire. Yet British troops manned this South African garrison for over seventy years. Tasked with protecting colonists, the fort became even more significant as an influence on, and reference point for, settler society.

 

Graham Dominy’s Last Outpost on the Zulu Frontier reveals the unexamined but pivotal role of Fort Napier in the peacetime public dramas of the colony. Its triumphalist colonial-themed pageantry belied colonists’ worries about their own vulnerability. As Dominy shows, the cultural, political, and economic methods used by the garrison compensated for this perceived weakness. Settler elites married their daughters to soldiers to create and preserve an English-speaking oligarchy. At the same time, garrison troops formed the backbone of a consumer market that allowed colonists to form banking and property interests that consolidated their control.

 

Editorial Reviews

Truly places Fort Napier’s history within several broader contexts–the settlement of Natal, the response of the indigenous inhabitants, the relationships between ‘British’ and other settlers, the wider history of the British army in the period, and the novel involvement of women protesting against the British advance. This is far from a narrow ‘red coat’ history.

― Peter Stanley, author of White Mutiny: British Military Culture in India

Quite original. Rather than looking at campaigns and battles, the book shows how issues such as military parades, band performances, social events, marriages between soldiers and local settler women, and soldiers’s bad behavior shaped settler society in Natal.

― Timothy Stapleton, author of The Military History of Africa

An engrossing account, vividly illuminating the complexity of life within an imperial garrison and offering valuable insights into the impact of the military on southeast Africa’s diverse societies and on Natal’s development.

― John Lambert, Professor Emeritus of the University of South Africa and author of Betrayed Trust: Africans and the State in Colonial Natal

This remarkable account of military-civil relations on an African frontier tells how the permanent British garrison of Natal interacted with and indelibly influenced settler society in the colonial capital.

― Paul Thompson, University of Kwazulu-Natal

This is a fascinating story of wars and balls on the very fringes of empire, of exotic adventures and routine drudgery, of lightning strikes on parade, of nuances of social affectation, and of mutiny. Most of all it is a reminder of just how essential the military presence was to the growth and security of Read More…

― Ian Knight, author of Zulu Rising: The Epic Story of iSandlwana and Rorke’s Drift

In spite of its humble origins as an “obscure frontier post” (p. xv), the imperial garrison stationed at Fort Napier, situated around the city of Pietermaritzburg in the Colony of Natal, served a more significant role than merely defending Britain’s imperial periphery in southern Africa, according to Graham Dominy. He contends that, as the site Read More…

― Blake Duffield, Journal of Military History: April 2017
About the Author
Graham Dominy

Graham Dominy is a Research Fellow of the University of South Africa, former National Archivist of South Africa, and former editor of Natalia: Journal of the Natal Society.

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