January 22 is a date with some interesting juxtapositions, and some fascinating coincidences. Maybe the most notable juxtaposition happened in 1879, in Africa. The Anglo-Zulu war was in progress. It’s not one of the conflicts you’ve probably heard of, but it was fought between the British Empire (which you’ve heard of) and the Zulu Empire (which I bet you haven’t). The Zulu Empire was consolidated in southern Africa by King Shaka in the early 1800s. It was located on the Indian Ocean coast, and within what is now the Republic of South Africa.
By the late 1800s, the European colonial powers, including England, were shipping invaders into various parts of Africa to seize territory and subvert existing governments. They encountered the Zulu Empire, and — not to put too fine a point on it — instigated a war. Henry Frere was the prime mover in this; he was appointed High Commissioner for Southern Africa in 1877 (a fairly aspirational title, since England was not the uncontested occupier of that area) and eventually presented the Zulu king, Cetshwayo, with an ultimatum. The Zulu army had to be disbanded and the Zulus had to accept British occupation. This was pretty obviously impossible for Cetshwayo to accept, so the fighting began. And therein lies our juxtaposition of January 22 events. One was the Battle of Isandlwana, on July 22, in which the British discovered they weren’t dealing with the primitive, disorganized, tribal force they may have expected. The British army was massacred despite their far superior weaponry, losing over 1,000 men in a single day.
However, on the very same day, only about six miles away, a large troop of Zulu warriors broke off from the main battle to attack the British garrison at a station called Rorke’s Drift. The British defenders were badly outnumbered, but managed to withstand the siege and won that battle. So on the very same day, just a few miles apart, the British army won and lost battles with the very same foe.
The whole Anglo-Zulu war was pretty questionable from any reasonable ethical standpoint, and even the British eventually realized it. They recalled Frere to London, and censured him in 1880. Frere died in 1884, but not in the ignominy he probably deserved. There’s stuff named after him to this day.
Besides Isandlwana, the British military has had quite a few adventures on January 22. All the way back in the year 871, it was the day King Æthelred’s Saxons were defeated by the Vikings. Note that here I’m assuming that the Saxons are more clearly the ancestors of the British than were the Vikings, but the point is debatable. Anyway, moving ahead to years when the term “British” actually meant something, it was January 22 in 1824 when they suffered another defeat in Africa when the Ashanti Empire, on the western coast of Africa (the “Gold Coast”) decisively defeated the British army at the beginning of the First Ashanti War.
In both the conflict with the Zulus and with the Ashantis, the British regrouped, returned with greater resources, and eventually won their wars. They won the second Anglo-Sikh War too, on January 22, 1849 when the last of the Sikh defenders surrendered in Multan, in what is now Pakistan. And in World War II, British troops, along with others from Commonwealth countries, captured the Libyan port city of Tobruk on January 22, 1944. So you can’t really fault the British for not winning their military misadventures. It’s more a question of whether they should have embarked on many of them in the first place.
Moving east to Russia, January 22, 1905 marked the beginning of the revolution that led to the creation of the Duma, the first Russian Constitution, and a multi-party political system. It left the Russian monarchy in place though (headed by the Tsar), and may have paved the way for another revolution a dozen years later that ousted the monarchy and enabled bolshevism to be the dominant political movement. Bolshevism, by the way, is the branch of Marxist thinking most associated with Vladimir Lenin and the Russian Social Democratic Labor party. It features centralized authority and a “dictatorship of the proletariat” (the proletariat is the working class). It was intended to be an intermediate step between capitalism and a truly communist economy. And despite the word “dictatorship,” it was also supposed to feature elections and grant power to workers’ councils. Soviet Russia was not the first example of this sort of thing; the Paris Commune of 1871 was a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Of course, it only lasted a couple of months. You can argue about it for a long time (and people certainly do), but maybe there’s something not quite stable or sustainable in there somewhere.
But I digress, because there are some more January 22 events that are worth a look. It’s the day the US CIA was conceived, in a sense, in 1946 when its immediate predecessor, the Central Intelligence Group, was created. And then in 2009, President Barack Obama signed an executive order to close the CIA’s creation, the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. You may have noticed that Guantanamo is still open — that’s because of Congress and it’s pretty complicated.
And now for the odd coincidences of January 22. They have to do with British (of course; what is it about the British and January 22?) historical figures. People like Sir Walter Raleigh, the Elizabethan-era explorer of parts of South America, and maybe more notably in the long run, the guy who introduced tobacco to Europe. And Francis Bacon, the philosopher who advocated the scientific method. And John Donne, the writer who formulated some of the most-remembered sonnets in English literature. What’s the coincidence, though? Simply this: all of them were born on January 22, respectively in 1552, 1561, and 1573.
I mean, sure, there have been other notable people born on January 22 — Ivan the Great of Russia, for one, and August Strindberg, the Swedish writer, for another. And yes, other things have happened on this day, from the first Super Bowl commercial introducing the Apple Macintosh to the bankruptcy of KMart that (arguably) marked the downfall of traditional “brick and mortar” retailers and the ascension of etailers. But those events, and maybe the others too (what do I know, after all) seem to pale in light of January 22, 2018, when Minnie Mouse received her own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. It was, after all, Minnie’s 90th anniversary. Which makes today her 96th.
