But what if instead Napoleon IV instead of joining the English, joined the Zulus instead, and fought for the Empire of Zulu?
Is this possible, and can we do to make it possible?
Speaking as a South African, no way in Hell. To get him to fight for the Zulus you need to get him to South Africa first, which if he isn't going to be joining the
British he's not going to be doing. Then he needs to have contact with the Zulus - which isn't necessarily going to be looked on favourably by his British CO's since, "hmm...the PI (his nickname in the corp)'s a Bonaparte, now he's making friends with the enemy? Whatever could go wrong there"? And then you're going to have the whole language thing. Napoléon is French. I have no idea as to the fluency of his English, but I assume it was pretty good to actually get anywhere in the British army. As a second language English speaker in South Africa who had to learn Zulu at school, I can tell you it's a
world away from what Napoléon would've been brought up with - Latin, French, English, probably German and Spanish too (father's German-Afrikaans, mother's an Anglo-Irish French teacher, so I know what I'm talking about when I say Zulu's nothing like any European language). Then there's the fact that Napoléon's
own tutor, Augustin Filon, despaired of the boy's intellectual capacity. The Prince Imperial wasn't stupid, but Filon writes how he [Napoléon] could spend
hours on teaching his pony to walk in step for a military review, and attempts at teaching him grammar generally led to him "dreaming over a dictionary". He enjoyed the lessons about Napoléon I with battles, and he was good at geography and mathematics, but I'd say he was a solid C/D student elsewhere.
Zulu was only written down in the 1850s, and a Bible translation a few years before the Second Empire fell. You're asking for a young man, who is neither brought up with the language, nor exposed to it before arriving in Africa, to learn the language in a matter of months like some sort of Flashman learning Hindustani? Also, the Zulus didn't know who the Hell he was - and even if they had, I'm not sure it would've changed the eventual outcome (although the Zulus later asserted differently). They killed him where he stood, rather than taking him back to the royal kraal. They disemboweled him, to prevent his spirit from pursuing them, IIRC but they stripped the body of valuables - one of which might've been Napoléon I's Austerlitz sword (which he had taken with him to Africa). There was a locket or a chain around his neck that they also didn't touch because of superstition, but beyond that, the body the British found was quite looted.