1972 - A Story Like the Wind (34 page)

On this sombre note they arrived back in their camp, ate a quick breakfast, packed up, arranged their little convoy in the same order as the day before, and soon were moving along the track, out into the open and down into the valley as fast as they could go. They found an ancient ford of stones in the flashing river and within an hour were home, as it felt to François, in the bush on the far side of the depression.

!#grave;Bamuthi found great satisfaction in this. He told François paradoxically: ‘We must still travel as fast as we can but now we can let our bodies be long’; a Sindabele way of indicating that !#grave;Bamuthi thought they could now relax.

His reason was that the country through which they would be travelling henceforth was healthier and less dangerous because it was on higher and steadily rising ground. Soon they would be in the untroubled world of friendly Matabele people. The dangers from the bush and ruthless men were ended. Indeed !#grave;Bamuthi promptly practised what he preached. He started telling François all sorts of fascinating things about the people among whom they would soon find themselves; their history, and the nature of the land. They were men of uLangalibalela’s own clan, the Amasomi; People of the Red-Winged Starlings.

Time, as a result, passed quickly for François and he was surprised when they found themselves in a cleared area in the bush and among friendly Matabele kraals, where they were made most welcome. Was it not after all one of the greatest of Sindabele commandments that ‘The road is king’ meaning all ‘ travellers of goodwill should be received and helped like royalty? That night they slept safely in another Matabele kraal only a few miles from the hill on which the great uLangalibalela himself lived. At dawn the next day they were on their way again though they were beginning to tire, because as !#grave;Bamuthi explained, he had come out of his sleep with a heart urging him that they had less time than ever to lose if they cared for a successful outcome of their mission.

This last lap of the journey was made memorable for François by the way !#grave;Bamuthi prepared him for their reception at uLangalibalela’s kraal. He started by telling François something of the history and standing of uLangalibalela. He did so without turning his head but with his eyes fixed and observant as always on the bush around him. He then carried on the conversation in as natural and clear a voice as if he and François were sitting face to face in his own hut.

Although he had never protested to anyone before, he told François, it was very wrong to think of uLangalibalela just as a witch-doctor. He was, of course, a doctor yet he was different from any European doctor !#grave;Bamuthi had ever seen. !#grave;Bamuthi knew that European doctors were great men who made power ful medicines for curing those sick in body. uLangalibalela did this but he also healed those who were ‘thin’ in heart and mind. He knew Europeans went for this kind of sickness to churches and consulted those men always dressed in clothes like the white- breasted crows of the land: the men they called in Sindabele, ‘Heaven-Herds’. uLangalibalela was so great a man precisely because he, as one man, did all those things for which Europeans needed at least two men, since he was both a doctor of the body and healer of fading shadows.

François, he was sure, immediately would recognize the difference on seeing uLangalibalela. Men who were only doctors of the body, or men who were just sorcerers in his experience were always sleek, fat, fond of food and snoring away without dreams. Did they not have the saying, The inyanga Heaven-heard and Doctor who fasts not will see the back of Heaven turned on him’, (that is, conquered by fate). But uLangalibalela, ever since he had been a little boy, had been a ‘house of dreams’. He hardly slept at all, fasted a great deal and’ate apparently only things which would make his dreams ‘white’ (Sindabele for clear) and ‘strengthen his power of seeing things that were still to come over the rim of the years’.

!#grave;Bamuthi could go on for days telling François about uLangalibalela’s upbringing and show him the pool where a voice had first spoken to him out of a whirlwind and where the birds had come to share his food. He knew the sheer purple cliff from which he had been commanded to dive far below into a narrow stream full of boulders to prove he was worthy of the voice of the wind. And he told François how, in spite of all discouragement from his family and people uLangalibalela, from there on, insisted on following voices other people could not hear. But the immediate matter now was that in moving into uLangalibalela’s presence, they should do so in the right way.

For instance, when they arrived near his kraal, they must not go straight up to it but sit down just near enough to be in view of the people around the prophet. Hard as it might be, they would then have to wait until someone came to fetch them, because anything else would be a sign of great disrespect and forwardness. Ultimately, when someone did come to bring them into the presence of uLangalibalela, how, for instance, would François address so great a man?

François thought that was easy because he knew the polite Sindabele greetings too well, ‘Why, Old Father, I’m not all that ignorant! I will raise my right hand as high as I can above my head with the palm open and say ‘I see you, indeed I see you’.’

François as always uttered this greeting with enthusiasm because he much preferred it to the stiff ‘How do you do?’ There was always something extremely comforting and human to him about the Sindabele greeting, being- a sign that he had been recognized and accepted for himself, whereas he had had so many ‘How do you do’s?’ from people of his own kind who really could not have cared less how he did. In any case, when uttering the perfunctory greeting most Europeans had just looked at him uneasily, as if all their eyes could be expected to do was to condescend to recognize he was a child or boy, as he now would have preferred, and then were relieved of so petty a duty and free immediately to look away. No, to see and to be seen for what one was and felt to be, was for him a real greeting, almost as good as Mopani’s embrace. He felt certain that with all the urgent hope he had of their mission, combined with the faith he already had in The Right Honourable Sun-Is-Hot, he would be able to utter the traditional greeting in a manner which would infallibly carry conviction.

But to his amazement !#grave;Bamuthi gave him a pitying ‘I might have known it’ sort of look before saying severely, ‘No, Little Feather. That will not do at all. Of course you must begin, ‘I see you, indeed I see you’ but then you must immediately go on to say also, ‘But you will be here tomorrow when I have gone and can no longer see you, to see me and things that I cannot see for myself’.’

‘Is that all, Old Father?’ François asked, not ungratefully but none the less sufficiently embarrassed by his ignorance on such an important subject to be unable to keep the merest tinge of a defensive sarcasm from coming into his voice.

‘No,’

!#grave;Bamuthi replied firmly. ‘You will then take your hat from your head and stand there silent until uLangalibalela speaks to you. He may not speak for a long time and when he speaks he may say: ‘I do not see you.’ In that case, I will ask his permission to send you back to the place where we have been waiting to fetch Night and Day, Little Finger, the tin and bottle from the Princess of the Pots, saying. ‘We have brought things with us to open your eyes’…It is also possible that he may say: ‘Yes, I see you’ and, though the eye will cross the river before the body [a Sindabele way of warning François not to count his chickens before they are hatched], he could even go as far as to say: ‘I see you as I have seen you since you left your kraals by the Amanzin-tetse three daybreaks ago.’ That, of course, would be the best sign of all, because it would mean that his mind is already at the heart of our matter…But whatever his answers may be, you will have to be ready to bring him the gifts we have brought with us.’

Thus thoroughly initiated, François arrived within sight of their destination.

Even the earth and nature, or so François felt, looked as if they had recognized the special nature of uLangalibalela’s being and calling. His kraal and the numbers of kraals of devoted followers who had attached themselves to him, were situated on a broad hill in the middle of a rich valley. The hill had been cleared of all brush and wood, except for some wild fig and marula trees to provide it with places of dark and cool shade. Up to this moment the land they had crossed on their journey had either been of black, brown or yellow earth. But the earth of uLangalibalela’s hill was a rich, magenta colour, vibrating with quick electric intensity under the hot sun. It was all the more brilliant because until they arrived at the stream which ran at the foot of the hill they had been travelling in deep shade, and it was only as they came out of it, by the ford of bright water that the ample hill rose before their eyes with a blinding brilliance.

At the same time, they heard from everywhere on the hill above them, the lovely clear voices of women singing as they went about their work of tilling such obviously fruitful earth:

This is the earth of uLangalibalela
,

It is not for you baboon
.

These are the roots of the earth of uLangalibalela
,

It is not for you swine of the bush
.

This is the fruit of the earth of uLangalibalela
,

Who knows the tongue of birds
,

Keep away, all keep away
.

And there is the end of the matter!

They would go on singing this over and over again. As they sang and François’s eyes became adjusted to the brilliant light, he was amazed to notice rows of beautiful, massive young black women stripped to the waist, advancing step by step in long lines, lifting up the long-handled Matabele hoes to the rhythm of their singing and bringing them down all together as if with one instead of twenty hands. Each time the hoes struck the earth, they would follow up the ‘baboon’, ‘swine’, ‘bird’ or ‘animal’ (for the song was a syncopated catalogue of all the parasites that threatened the cultivator in the bush) with-. ‘And there is the end of the matter!’

!#grave;Bamuthi noticed François’s amazement and remarked: ‘You can tell the greatness of a prophet by the number of women who gather round him.’

This seemed so mysterious an observation to François that he immediately asked !#grave;Bamuthi for an explanation.

It was quite simple, !#grave;Bamuthi replied, because it was well known among the Matabele that their women flocked to the man who could make ‘white’ for them the things that they saw in the darkness of their own hearts but, in the manner of all women, could not utter for themselves.

Speaking, they climbed the hill and, though it was obvious that the scores of women singing and working in their fields had seen them, they behaved as if they had not noticed the strangers at all. When they were some two hundred yards from the largest kraal on the hill which they took to be uLangalibalela’s own, !#grave;Bamuthi stopped and made them both sit in the sun on the edge of the shadow of a great wild fig tree.

By this time it was exceedingly hot and François thought it ridiculous not to sit in the cool shade of the tree but !#grave;Bamuthi rebuked him, saying that apart from being rude to treat the shade of uLangalibalela’s trees as if it were their own, how were the watchers at uLangalibalela’s kraal to tell what sort of men they were if they made themselves dim with shadow?

Fortunately they had hardly sat down, when François noticed a young boy coming running towards them from uLangalibalela’s kraal. !#grave;Bamuthi saw him too and was obviously extremely astonished and pleased by the sight. The young boy arrived at such a pace that he was out of breath. He panted out a polite reply to their greeting before hurrying on to say that they were to go at once to uLangalibalela’s kraal.

Hintza, as always inclined to assume that he was an exception to every rule, started to follow François. But !#grave;Bamuthi begged François to make him stay behind, saying that the invitation to come forward had only been for men and not for animals. Hintza was only a dog and like a dog would have to stay with Night and Day and Little Finger until properly invited.

François and !#grave;Bamuthi, therefore, arrived at the entrance to the kraal alone. The kraal had in its compound another large fig tree which threw an opaque purple shade over the centre.

Coming out of the blinding sun under such a mantle of Roman shadow, the kraal looked empty to them both. They stood at the entrance hesitating and wondering what to do.

At that moment from somewhere within the imperial folds of the shadow, there came a clear, firm, authoritative and resonant voice, uttering in ringing Sindabele the words: ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’

!#grave;Bamuthi was so overwhelmed and put out by the voice that, had the matter not been so serious, François would have been unable to prevent himself from laughing.

However, !#grave;Bamuthi managed to gather his senses together and to whisper hoarsely in Francis’s ear. ‘Not a word of greeting, Little Feather. All the greetings have been abolished, for all those ‘Yes’s’ mean he has already heard the greetings that were ready in us to be uttered and that he has already seen us.’

‘But what do we do next?’ François in his turn was overawed by the bounty of uLangalibalela’s welcome for there was no doubt from the tone and texture of the voice that it could only have been that of the prophet.

‘We just stand and wait,’

!#grave;Bamuthi replied.

But they did not have to wait because uLangalibalela immediately spoke again, giving another demonstration of how foolish it is for men to plan in advance for a future that they do not know.

‘Who is absent then?’ the same voice demanded.

This greatly impressed !#grave;Bamuthi. He took a deep breath and whispered: ‘You see what a great seer he is, Little Feather: he answers with questions. His question says that all the persons necessary for the
Indaba
[consultation] are assembled and that we are to come forward at once.’

They started forward in such a hurry that François did not see in the shadow ahead of him a ridge of grey stone sticking up above the ground, and promptly he stumbled over it. He felt very foolish and could not imagine a less propitious and more undignified way of coming into the presence of the great man. But he was to discover later that fate had led him to introduce himself in the best possible manner to uLangalibalela. That ridge, he was to find, was made of stone from the river at the bottom of the hill. This stone was held to have derived from the river-water the property of coolness. Since uLangalibalela and his followers held that heat was a great source of evil, they had put a ridge of stone in all their kraals so that all strangers coming to visit them would stumble over it, and in the process have the heat extracted from them.