James O. Gump, The Dust Rose Like Smoke: The Subjugation of the Zulu and the Sioux (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016)
Overview: In 1876 Lakota and Cheyenne warriors annihilated Custer’s Seventh Cavalry at Little Bighorn. Three years later and half a world away, a British force was wiped out by Zulu warriors at Isandlwana in South Africa. In both cases the total defeat of regular army troops by forces regarded as undisciplined barbarian tribesmen stunned an imperial nation. Gump views both episodes as part of a global pattern of intensified conflict in the latter 1800s resulting from Western domination over a vast portion of the globe.
Central Thesis: The sovereignty of Zulu and the Sioux was compromised well before whites exacted vengeance for their humiliating defeats in 1876 and 1879 respectively.
Scope of Book: Gump’s comparative study traces the origins and aftermath of both episodes. He examines the complicated ways in which Lakota and Zulu leadership sought to protect indigenous interests while Western leadership calculated their subjugation to imperial authority.
- The Sioux and Zulu represent two expansive, aggressive preindustrial societies, each of which gained hegemony in its respective region during much of the nineteenth century—political actors in their own right—not pawns to outside forces. Both confronted Western imperialism at about the same time. Both scored significant victories—Little Big Horn and Isandlwana. (xxii-xxiii)
- Both battles served as symbolic benchmarks in the prelude and denouement of Zulu and Sioux subjugation as well. Gump demonstrates that these fates were inevitable: Britain and the United States were empire builders, technologically and culturally superior; the Zulu, an Iron Age culture, and the Sioux, hunter-gatherers, were fragmented and fractious and could not, in the former case, or would not, in the latter, be assimilated and acculturated. They were the “other” or “some other kind of being” in the way of progress and civilization.
- In each conflict inferior armies used superior tactics and numbers to crush their adversary. Sioux had better firearms. These early victories cemented each as the quintessential “noble savage” in popular culture.
- The Sioux and Zulu were both expansionist societies feared by their enemies for their militarism and ruthlessness. Each adapted to prevailing conditions to become dominant in the middle of the 19th century—the Sioux became mobile and dominated sedentary villages while the Zulu controlled pastures and croplands. (46)
- By the middle of the 19th century, however, each came face to face with white settlers imbued with a sense of racial destiny or capitalist incentives. (62) Both peoples became a barrier to advancing white frontiers.
- While the British military exercised decisive influence in the destruction of the Zulu kingdom, the Sioux demise at the hands of the US army also encompasses the demise of buffalo herds, an influx of settlers, and the construction of trails and railways.
- Indigenous collaborators allowed whites, the eventual subjugators, to dominate gradually their decisions affecting local rule. Some Sioux and Zulu chiefs ceded to whites land and political rights over frontier territory in order to hold on to their diminishing powers. Over time, this form of accommodation rended the Sioux and Zulu into two main antagonistic factions: one wanted to confront external pressures while the other hoped to keep the imperial intruders at bay by giving in to rising white demands.
- A key difference lies in the two countries end state: US sought to replace Lakota culture with Protestant Anglo-Saxon culture in order to integrate the Lakotas into American society. The British wanted to denationalize the Zulu so that their labor could be exploited for the conomic development of a confederated, white South Africa. American efforts failed.
- Three major factors influenced the US-Sioux war: Sioux control over agricultural and mineral potential of the north central plains. This was part of a global pattern of conflict in the 2nd half of the 19th C that led to Western domination of 80% of the world by WWI. And it occurred during the “breechloader revolution” and thus forshadowed industrial war carnage.
- The subjugation of the Zulu and Sioux was not only due to the forces of capitalist industrial expansion and great-power politics, however. Indiginous collaborators, Lakota/Zulu interests and their own “sub-imperialisms” played an important role in the closing frontier of North America and South Africa.
- “The white peoples encountered by the Lakotas and Zulu did not monopolize aggression, ethnocentrism, and arrogance; on the other hand, neither were whites the exclusive practitioners of civilized behavior.” (168)
Commentary: Comparitive narrative history that is both a joy to read and a slog at times. Especially as my knowledge of British colonial wars in Africa is lacking. He points out that the US Army’s futility in fighting such an unconventional enemy “reflected a larger problem—the miltiary’s failure to formulate a consistently effective doctrine in fighting such an unorthodox foe.” (110)