Battle of Blood River, 1838: the laager on the Ncome

Few battles in African history are as lopsided in their losses, and few have been argued over for as long. Blood River, or Ncome, the name used by the museum that honors the Zulu side, was a clash between spears and muskets that lasted one morning. Its date became a political symbol for more than a century and a half afterward.²

Who won the Battle of Blood River and why?

The Voortrekkers under Andries Pretorius won. They fought from a closed ring of wagons, guarded by a river pool and a ravine, with muskets and cannon against warriors armed mainly with stabbing spears, who had to charge across open ground to reach them. When the attacks faltered, mounted men rode out and turned the retreat into a rout.³

A year of massacres

The battle came at the end of the bloodiest year of the Great Trek, the migration of Dutch-speaking farmers out of the British Cape Colony. In February 1838 the Trek leader Piet Retief and his party were killed at Mgungundlovu, King Dingane's royal kraal, and Zulu regiments then fell on the scattered Trekker camps in the foothills of the Drakensberg. The South African Military History Society puts the dead there at 540 Trekkers and their retainers, 185 of them children; Sarel Cilliers, one of the Trek's leaders, wrote of 500 slain. The place is remembered as Blaauwkrantz.⁴

The killings looked different from Mgungundlovu. The missionary A. T. Bryant, writing in 1929 from Zulu tradition and the early records, wrote that Dingane had tried to rid himself of the Boers by these massacres, and that they had only brought the newcomers back against him in greater numbers. Bryant names Ndlela kaSompisi as the king's chief minister and Nzobo, also called Dambuza, as one of his indunas; according to SAHO, most historians name these two men as the commanders of the army that went to the Ncome.⁵

A commando sent against Dingane in April was led into a trap, and its leader Piet Uys was killed, with ten men by Cilliers's account, five by Bezuidenhout's. In August the Zulu army attacked a fortified Trekker camp called Gatslaer, later renamed Veglaer, and after three days of fighting withdrew without breaking in. By then many Trekkers wanted to leave Natal. Andries Pretorius, who had arrived from Graaff-Reinet, became Commandant-General of the Voortrekkers in Natal on 25 November 1838 and at once prepared a retaliatory strike.⁶

Spears against muskets

The two sides fought in very different ways. The Zulu army was organized in regiments, each known by the color of its cowhide shields. The warriors carried shields, spears and clubs and fought at close quarters with a short stabbing spear, so they had to cross open ground to reach the enemy.⁷

The Trekkers had learned how to meet such an attack. Their weapons were muzzle-loading muskets and a few cannon, and their defense was the laager. According to the Military History Society, the wagon ring proved crucial at the Battle of the Vaal in August 1836 and again at Vegkop in October 1836, where Hendrik Potgieter and Sarel Cilliers beat off the Ndebele army of Mzilikazi; Cilliers's own account of Vegkop describes the Ndebele surrounding the little camp and trying in vain to tear the wagons apart.⁸

The vow

The commando's own journal, kept by Pretorius's secretary J. G. Bantjes, counted 464 men, including men of color, besides the commandants. On Sunday 9 December, at a river where the column halted to keep the Sabbath, Pretorius proposed a vow: if God granted victory, they would raise a house to His name and record the day of the victory so that it would be celebrated by their descendants. Cilliers led the service at which the vow was made. SAHO also dates it to 9 December, and the South African government describes it as a promise to build a church and to keep the day as a day of thanksgiving.⁹

Cilliers himself remembered it differently. In his own account he made the promise in the name of all, standing on a gun carriage before 407 men, on 7 December, and the promise was to keep the day every year as a Sabbath. The editor of the Annals of Natal warns that Cilliers's “journal” was not kept day by day but written long afterward. SAHO notes that recent research has questioned the vow, since no thanksgiving was held in the years right after the battle, although the church was built.¹⁰

The laager on the Ncome

On Saturday 15 December patrols reported a large Zulu army approaching. Pretorius rode out to look at it but, as both Bantjes and Cilliers record, judged it too late in the day to attack a force posted on such difficult ground. The commando drew its wagons into a laager, a closed ring, on the best ground it could find, between a long, deep pool in the river and a donga, a steep natural ditch. Cannon stood in the gates.¹¹

The commanders on both sides had a choice to make that evening. The Zulu generals had first taken up a strong position: Cilliers describes their army on a hill ringed by crags, with a body of men hidden in each of two ravines beside the only path, ready to close on any commando that climbed it, and Bantjes also calls the place dangerous and inaccessible. Pretorius would not go up. When the Zulu regiments came down to attack the laager instead, they gave up that advantage, and the Military History Society's summary of the battle speaks of tactical and command errors on the Zulu side.¹²

The size of the two forces is one of the points on which the sources differ. SAHO gives the Voortrekkers 470 men, close to Bantjes's count; the South African Military History Society counts 820 in the laager, including retainers and about 60 traditionally armed Zulu allies from Port Natal. For the attackers SAHO gives 10,000 to 20,000 warriors and the society about 15,000; Bantjes wrote that a prisoner spoke of 36 regiments, which he reckoned at nine to ten thousand men.¹³

The morning of 16 December

By dusk on the 15th, SAHO writes, the Zulu regiments had begun to circle the laager. SAHO describes a heavy mist that lifted only in the early hours; Bantjes remembered a clear, bright sky. As soon as the dawn allowed, the guards saw the Zulu coming on at speed, and in a moment they had surrounded the camp.¹⁴

To use their stabbing spears the warriors had to come to close quarters, and the Voortrekkers met them with musket fire and cannon fired from every gate. SAHO's account of the eyewitnesses has the first attack vanishing in the smoke and a second coming almost up to the wagons; Cilliers counted four attempts to storm the camp. The weak point of the defense was the slow reloading of muzzle-loading guns.¹⁵

Hundreds of warriors took cover in the donga beside the camp, and during a lull Cilliers led about 80 men out against them. Then Pretorius had the gates opened and sent the mounted men out. The Zulu army broke and fled. Many of the fugitives died at the river: SAHO writes that the Ncome ran red with the blood of the slain, and Cilliers that the water looked like a pool of blood.¹⁶

The pursuit went on for hours. The Military History Society's summary puts the start of the chaotic Zulu retreat at about 11 a.m., after heavy losses and what it calls tactical and command errors; SAHO says the pursuit was called off at midday, while Bantjes wrote of more than three hours of pursuit. Pretorius himself was among the three Voortrekkers wounded; none was killed.¹⁷

Counting the dead

The day after the battle the Voortrekkers counted the bodies. Bantjes gave more than 3,000, “the lowest certain number”, besides the wounded; Cilliers wrote that not fewer than 3,000 perished, and another man of the commando, Daniel Bezuidenhout, remembered 3,500. SAHO gives more than 3,000, and Bryant, writing from the Zulu side of the story, also says Dingane lost 3,000 of his warriors. The slaughter gave the Ncome its Afrikaans name, Bloedrivier, Blood River.¹⁸

All of these are counts from the winning side, or depend on it. The Military History Society points out that most of the primary sources on the Trek's battles were written from the Trekkers' viewpoint, and SAHO adds that eyewitnesses and writers differ on the details of the battle.¹⁹

After the battle

The commando marched on Mgungundlovu. Dingane had already abandoned the town and set fire to his palace, by his own orders in Bryant's account and as the commando approached in Cilliers's; on 20 December about 900 men rode in and found it deserted. On a hill nearby, where Retief and his party had been killed, lay their remains. The Voortrekkers recognized Retief by his clothes and by the bag of papers he still carried; among them, both Bantjes and Cilliers record, was his treaty with Dingane on the cession of the land. They buried the dead on the spot.²⁰

The campaign did not end there. A later attempt to seize cattle at the Ophathe Gorge on the White Mfolozi led the commando into another trap, from which it fought its way out with some loss of life.²¹

The Zulu kingdom never really recovered. Dingane's half-brother Mpande crossed over to the Boers with a large following and allied himself with Pretorius; their combined forces defeated Dingane's army, and Dingane fled north into Swazi territory, where he was killed.²²

The Voortrekkers declared the republic of Natalia, with its capital at Pietermaritzburg, in March 1839 by SAHO's dating, but it did not last. British troops occupied Port Natal in May 1842, and SAHO dates the annexation of Natal to the Cape to May 1844. Four decades later a British army fought the Zulu kingdom in its turn, and suffered a heavy defeat at Isandlwana.²³

Two museums, two stories

The battlefield itself now tells two stories. In the 1990s two museums were set up at the site: the Blood River Museum, which celebrates the Afrikaners' victory, and the Ncome Museum, which marks the heroism of the Zulu. The museologist Line Grønstad, who studied both exhibitions, found that they portray Zulus and Afrikaners as diametrical opposites and leave little room for any message of reconciliation.²⁴

The state has chosen the site for that message all the same: in 2025 the national commemoration of the Day of Reconciliation was held at the Ncome Museum, with President Cyril Ramaphosa giving the keynote address, and the government described the battle as an episode that had shaped differing and often divisive commemorations for more than a century.²⁵

A date with three names

For most of the twentieth century 16 December was a public holiday. It was observed as Dingane's Day; in 1952, SAHO notes, the National Party government, in power since 1948, renamed it the Day of the Covenant, or Day of the Vow, and used it to support its own reading of Afrikaner history. Opponents of white rule turned the date to their own purpose: the armed wing of the ANC, Umkhonto we Sizwe, launched its campaign on 16 December 1961. In 1995 the holiday became the Day of Reconciliation.²⁶