It wasn’t just my first time on a major movie, it was my first time in Africa – a continent I love and would return to later with my friend Sidney Poitier to make The Wilby Conspiracy. The landscape of the Drakensberg mountains was powerful enough, and the wildlife was incredible, but it was the African people who really made the filming of Zulu so memorable. Zulu tells the story of the Battle of Rorke’s Drift between a small detachment of a Welsh regiment (hence Stanley Baker’s interest in the incident) and the Zulu nation, in 1879.
We were fortunate not only to have Chief Buthelezi, the head of the Zulu nation, playing the Zulu leader, but a Zulu princess as our historical consultant, which meant that the battle lines of the Zulu forces were drawn up exactly as they had been. This level of authenticity made a huge difference to the impact of the film – I still think the battle scenes are some of the best I have seen in any movie. Certainly my first sight of those two thousand Zulu warriors coming over the hills and into the valley where we were filming was unforgettable. They wore their own battle dress with high head dresses and loin cloths made of monkey skins and lions’ tails and as they approached they began beating their spears on their shields and singing a slow lament mourning the dead in battle. It was an incredible sight and sound. What it must have seemed like to the handful of British soldiers holding down their position at Rorke’s Drift I can only begin to imagine. Their bravery resulted in the award of eleven Victoria Crosses in one day – a unique event in British military history. Of course, as anyone who knows their British military history will have instantly spotted, the final Zulu assault on Rorke’s Drift didn’t involve just two thousand warriors – there were six thousand. Stanley and Cy were four thousand short. Cy Endfield, ever resourceful, had the solution. In the last scene the camera pans round to show the Zulus lining the hilltops in the distance, looking down on the British below. It’s an awesome sight and you would never guess that each of the two thousand warriors up there was holding a bit of wood with two shields and head dresses stuck on the top, instantly trebling the numbers. Genius – and nearly forty years before Peter Jackson’s spectacular CGI special effects in Lord of the Rings.
The Zulu warriors weren’t the only Africans on set. One of the scenes involved a traditional women’s tribal dance and we’d recruited a mix of dancers, some from the tribal lands and some who had left and gone to work in Johannesburg. There was going to be a problem with the censor back home, though, as the Zulu costume involved nothing more than a little bead apron. Cy Endfield, resourceful once again, organised the costume department into making two hundred pairs of black knickers, which would appease the British Board of Film Censors while retaining a veneer of authenticity. He’d just managed to persuade the tribal dancers to wear the knickers when he was told that the city girls were insisting on also wearing bras. This was the ultimate test for a film director: how to get knickers on one set of dancers and bras off the others. He’d just about got it sorted it and the camera was rolling when the cameraman shouted, ‘Cut! We’ve got a lady here with no drawers on!’ The culprit was pulled out of the line. ‘What’s the problem now?’ Cy asked the translator, exasperated. The translator went over and spoke to the dancer. ‘She’s not used to them,’ was the reply when she came back. ‘She just forgot.’ That’s the first and last time I’ve heard that excuse on a film set…
South Africa was still in the grip of apartheid. I hadn’t known anything about the politics of the country when I arrived, but it made me increasingly uncomfortable to see how badly the foremen treated the black workers on the set – uncomfortable, and then plain angry. One day, one of the workers made a simple mistake, but instead of telling him off, the brute of a foreman drew back his fist and smashed him in the face. I couldn’t believe it – and started running over, shouting as I went. Stanley got there before me and I have never witnessed fury like it. He fired the foreman on the spot and got all the other white foremen together. ‘From now on,’ he said, ‘on this set, no one treats their workers like this.’ We all shared his outrage, and it was fuelled by another incident. One of our English foremen had ‘gone native’, as you might say, and had taken up with three Zulu wives. We thought nothing of this – he seemed to be having a good time – until one day filming was interrupted by the sound of helicopters overhead. It was the police. They were going to close filming down. Our foreman had committed a crime under the South African miscegenation laws that forbade sexual contact between blacks and whites. Unbelievably, punishment was either a long prison sentence or twelve lashes with a whip – or both. We realised that one of the Afrikaans foremen must have informed on us. With diplomatic skills that wouldn’t have disgraced the UN, Stanley brokered a deaclass="underline" the foreman would leave the country that night and we would stay to finish the film. It left us all with a very nasty taste in our mouths – and me with a determination never to go to South Africa again while apartheid still ruled.
Of course, Zulu represents the biggest piece of luck I personally ever had in show business, but it’s also a movie that has withstood the test of time. In fact it has achieved near-cult status, both in the UK and America, despite the fact that it didn’t have any sort of general release there originally. I think that one of the reasons for its lasting success is that it was one of the first British war films to treat a native enemy with dignity. Yes, the heroism of the British troops is celebrated, but so too is the heroism of the Zulu nation, whose forces are depicted as the disciplined, intelligent tacticians and soldiers that they undoubtedly were. The lack of jingoism means that it resonates for a modern audience in a way that other British war films just don’t any longer. It has never dated – and I remain very proud of it.
5
Hello, Alfie
There’s precious little to spend your money on in the Drakensberg mountains and I got back to London with my £4,000 earnings almost intact. Now was my chance to put things right. I went straight up to Sheffield to see Dominique. She was eight years old and mad about horses according to her grandmother, Claire, (that was obviously not something she’d inherited from me) and for the first time I felt I could do something for her. The pony I bought her from the proceeds of Zulu turned out to be the first step in what would prove to be a very satisfying career for Dominique, one I have been very proud to watch her succeed in.
Then there was Mum. She was still living in the prefab with Stanley but he was out all day at work and she was lonely without my father. My solution was to suggest she move to the flat in Brixton that Pat and I had had when we were first married. The house was owned by family and there were other people her own age all around her; it was safe and she had good company.