The 1879 Battle of Isandlwana in which King Cetshwayo and his 24,000 Zulu soldiers overran a British camp near the Isandlwana Mountain was the British Army’s greatest defeat in Africa. Eleven days after the British commenced their invasion of Zululand in South Africa, a Zulu force of some 20,000 warriors attacked a portion of the British main column consisting of about 1,800 British, colonial and native troops and perhaps 400 civilians. The Zulus were equipped mainly with the traditional assegai