Zulu War Imminent

So 61,000 words into my WIP, John Dunn, Heart of a Zulu, the year is 1873, and Cetshwayo has just been crowned king of Zululand. But it's a short reign. It's no spoiler, it's history after all. In five years Cetshwayo will find his country being invaded by the British Empire. And it's sad, really, because he had always considered the British as his friends.

It was the Boers on his northern and western borders who were trouble for the Zulus, and Cetshwayo considered the English colonists to the south in Natal the friendlier neighbor.

But although the Boers and Zulus were in constant disputes over land issues which broke into vicious fighting now and then, they never really had an all out war. Leave that to the English who declared war against the Zulus in 1878. Poor Cetshwayo. He tried his best to get along with the English, but they had other ideas: The fall and subsequent annexation of Zululand.