rorkesdriftvc.com :: View topic - An article from the Northern KZN COURIER 05 May 2006 ?

Posted: Sat May 06, 2006 6:52 am

Something to smoke about��this article is a direct quote and does not reflect the opinion of the submitter and is intended to be of general interest only

Quote

The unbearable rightness of being wrong

The small world of the international Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 is a rather spiteful little planet to live on.

Just ask some of our tour guides around Dundee, who occasionally come to grips with writers, researchers and the "experts out there". A visit to a battlefield may lead to a nasty little article about them, somewhere out there, or believe it or not, on on-line discussion forums on the Internet.

A well known tour guide with many years of experience in Dundee, has labeled this phenomenon as "knifes in the back" and dismissed it as not worthy to pay any attention to. Maybe he is right, but the Desert Rat still wonders how the many writers on this subject, and plethora of books and coffee table wonders they have produced, deserve the right to be on any shelf.

Contradict
Many of these experts contradict each other, and even themselves, in their books, and the only lasting impression they leave, is that they do not really know.

Another Next Big Thing is the downplaying and ridiculing of each other's sources. If you take a book on the subject from a shelf, it is a secondary source, and if the author of this secondary source has used only secondary sources, i.e. other books, to write this one, it is not to be believed, and you deserve all the trouble, backlash, tongue-in-cheek and unsatisfied clients with heat rashes you can get for daring to read popular "history".

The best I have yet seen is a writer who had let it be known on the online discussion forum that some of the local tour guides (he did not mention names - they never do) let themselves to be fooled by some of the cairns on site.

Cairns
Oh, yes, he was there, he listened to it. What? We now even have the terrain wrong? Or do these cairns appear when we are not looking, and then fool us into believing they were there all the time. OK dude, so now is the time to tell me what to make of this. Are our tour guides a poor show? Are these foreigners right when they tell us we do not know what we are doing?

Oh, yes, and D R, from that place next to the river�.they do not like him, but they keep flocking back to him in their droves�..Why is this?

Or do they simply use him to get the bile going in their discussion forums when they have run out of primary source?

I am indeed beginning to wonder about what my dad used to say about sour grapes�..?

This is really a small little planet, inhabited by small little men. Like those who smashed up the markers at Isandlwana again. And again
Unquote

Posted: Sat May 06, 2006 9:36 am

Paul

He is referring in the context of cairns to me. I have indeed heard people weaving the most fantastically nonsensical interpretations of the battle around the positioning of cairns. I did not at any juncture say they were tour guides. A good many tourists turn up at Isandlwana without a guide but a cursory knowledge of the battle and then proceed to speculate their way through events - often tripping up on the cairns (metaphorically not literally!). That was what I was actually referring to.

I included an appendix in my second book encouraging people to get themselves to the battlefields from the UK and the USA (and anywhere else the book is read), and offering practical advice on how to do so. I would consider myself a friend and ally of the KZN tourist industry. There's nothing like biting the hand that feeds you!

Thanks Paul.

Regards

Mike