ssion they must be disbanded at once. Sir T.
Shepstone's message reached Zululand not a day too soon. Had the
Annexation of the Transvaal been delayed by a few weeks even--and this
is a point which I earnestly beg Englishmen to remember in connection
with that act--Cetywayo's armies would have entered the Transvaal,
carrying death before them, and leaving a wilderness behind them.

Cetywayo's answer to the Special Commissioner's message will
sufficiently show, to use Sir Theophilus' own words in his despatch on
the subject, "the pinnacle of peril which the Republic and South Africa
generally had reached at the moment when the Annexation took place." He
says, "I thank my Father Sompseu (Sir T. Shepstone) for his message. I
am glad that he has sent it, because the Dutch have tired me out, and
I intended to fight them once and once only, and to drive them over
the Vaal. Kabana (name of messenger), you see my Impis (armies) are
gathered. It was to fight the Dutch I called them together; now I
will send them back to their homes. Is it well that two men
('amadoda-amabili') should be made 'iziula' (fools)? In the reign of my
father Umpanda the Boers were constantly moving their boundary further
into my country. Since his death the same thing has been done. I had
therefore determined to end it once for all!" The message then goes on
to other matters, and ends with a request to be allowed to fight the
Amaswazi, because "they fight together and kill one another. This," says
Cetywayo naively, "is wrong, and I want to chastise them for it."

This quotation will suffice to convince all reasonable men, putting
aside all other matters, from what imminent danger the Transvaal was
delivered by the much-abused Annexation.

Some months after that event, however, it occurred to the ingenious
mind of some malicious individual in Natal that, properly used, much
political capital might be made out of this Zulu incident, and the story
that Cetywayo's army had been called up by Sir Theophilus himself
to overawe, and, if necessary, subdue the Transvaal, was accordingly
invented and industriously circulated. Although Sir T. Shepstone at
once caused it to be authoritatively contradicted, such an astonishing
slander naturally took firm root, and on the 12th April 1879 we have Mr.
M. W. Pretorius, one of the Boer leaders, publicly stating at a meeting
of the farmers that "previous to the Annexation Sir T. Shepstone had
threatened the Transvaal wit