Case file · Cosmic event
Eclipse at Isandlwana
During the Battle of Isandlwana on 22 January 1879, a partial solar eclipse darkened the sky as the Zulu army overwhelmed the British camp.
1879 CE · -28.36, 30.65 · status: official
The account
Zulu and British survivors both remembered the dimming of the sun in the afternoon. Zulu accounts call it the day of the dead moon, and the eclipse became part of the memory of the battle, the heaviest defeat of a British force by an indigenous army in the colonial era.
The sceptical view
The eclipse is astronomically certain. How dark it actually grew at the battlefield, and what it meant to the fighters, rests on later recollection.