Zulu Dawn (1979)

In 1878, in the British colony of Natal, the High Commissioner, Sir Bartle Frere, conspires with army commander General Lord Chelmsford to ignore the instructions of Disraeli's government to keep the peace with the African tribes in order to secure possible allies against the Boers. Seeing the warlike Zulu nation as the greater threat, Sir Bartle sends their chief, King Cetshwayo, an ultimatum which he known will be rejected. As a result of this fatal decision, Cetshwayo refuses to disarm his warriors and, in January 1879, Chelmsford leads his troops across the Buffalo river into Zululand. What followed was a massacre of the British forces.