Men of Men (29 page)

Thus Kamuza now wore the
isicoco
of the induna and, as he spoke over the fire in his dry whisper, his slanted eyes black and bright as those of a mamba in the firelight, men listened
– and listened with great attention.

It was a measure of the gravity of the news he carried from the north that Kamuza began the council – the
indaba
– with a recital of the history of the Matabele nation. Each
of them had heard it first with their mother’s breast in their mouths, had drunk it in with her milk, but they listened now as avidly as then, reinforcing their memories so that when the time
came they would be able to repeat it perfectly in each detail to their own children, that the story might never be lost.

The history began with Mzilikazi, war chief of the impis of Zulu, warrior without peer, beloved comrade and trusted intimate of King Chaka himself. It told of the black sickness of King Chaka,
driven mad with grief at the death of his mother Nandi, the Sweet One. Chaka ordering the year of mourning in which no man might sow seed, on pain of death; in which the milk from the cows must be
thrown upon the earth, on pain of death; in which no man might lie with his woman, on pain of death.

Mad Chaka brooded in his great hut and looked for cause to strike down all around him, even the most trusted, even the most beloved.

So it was that Chaka’s messengers came to Mzilikazi, the young war chieftain. They found him in the field with his impis about him, five thousand of Zululand’s bravest and finest,
all of them still hot from battle, driving before them the spoils they had taken – the captured herds, the young and comely girls roped neck to neck.

The king’s messengers wore the long tail feathers of the stately blue cranes in their headdress, token of their solemn mission.

‘The king accuses the induna Mzilikazi,’ began the first messenger, and looking into his arrogant face Mzilikazi knew that he looked upon the face of death. ‘The king accuses
Mzilikazi of stealing the king’s share of the spoils of war.’

Then the second messenger spoke, and his words were an echo of the king’s black madness, so that the words of King Chaka stood in the air above Mzilikazi’s impis the way that the
vultures circle above the battlefields on wide and motionless pinions.

If the sentence of death had been upon him alone, Mzilikazi might have gone to his king and met it with courage and dignity. But his five thousand fighting men were doomed also, and Mzilikazi
called them his children.

So Mzilikazi reached out and seized the king’s messengers, and for a moment the earth seemed to lurch in its courses, for to touch those who wore the blue crane feathers was to touch the
person of the king himself. With the razor edge of his assegai, Mzilikazi slashed the blue feathers from their heads, and threw them into the faces of the grovelling messengers.

‘That is my reply to Chaka – who is no longer my king.’

Thus began the great exodus towards the north and, seated over the watch-fire, Kamuza, the king’s man, related it all again.

He told the battle honours of Mzilikazi, the renegade. He told how Chaka sent his most famous impis after the fleeing five thousand, and how Mzilikazi met them in the classic battle tactics of
the Nguni, how he waited for them in the bad ground.

Kamuza told how Mzilikazi threw the ‘horns of the bull’ around the impis of Chaka, and how his young men shouted ‘
Ngi dhla!
I have eaten!’ as they drove in the
steel; and the listeners in the dark hut murmured and moved restlessly, and their eyes shone and their spear hands twitched.

When it was over, the survivors of Chaka’s shattered impi came to Mzilikazi and, on their knees, swore allegiance to him, to Mzilikazi who was no longer a renegade, but a little king.

Kamuza told how the little king marched north with his swollen impi, and how he defeated other little kings and became a great king.

Kamuza told how after Chaka was murdered by his brothers, Dingaan, the new leader of the Zulu nation, did not dare to send out more impis to pursue Mzilikazi. So Mzilikazi flourished, and like a
ravaging lion he ate up the tribes. Their warriors swelled his fighting impis, and his Zanzi, the pure-blooded Zulu, bred upon the bellies of the captured maidens and the Matabele became a nation
and Mzilikazi became a black emperor whose domain overshadowed even that of Chaka.

The men about the fire listened and felt their hearts swell with pride.

Then Kamuza told how the
buni
, the strange white men, crossed the river in their little wagons and outspanned upon the land that Mzilikazi had won with the assegai. Then Mzilikazi
paraded his impis, and they danced with their war plumes aflutter, and their long shields clashing as they passed before him.

After he had reviewed the might of his nation, Mzilikazi took the little ceremonial spear of his kingship, and he poised before his impis and then hurled the toy-like weapon towards the banks of
the Gariep river on which the white men had outspanned their wagons.

They took them in the hour before dawn, at the time of the horns, when the horns of the cattle can first be seen against the lightening sky. The front ranks of racing black warriors received the
first volley of the long muzzle-loading guns, absorbing it as though it were a handful of pebbles thrown into a stormy black sea.

Then they stabbed the bearded men as they worked frantically with powderhorn and ramrod. They stabbed the white women as they ran from the wagons in their nightdresses, trying to carry the
second gun to their men. They snatched the infants from their cradles on the wagonbed, and dashed out their brains against the tall iron-shod wheels of the wagons.

Oh, it was a rare feast that they set for Mzilikazi’s chickens, the grotesque naked-headed vultures. They believed it was an ending – but it was only a beginning, for the Matabele
were about to learn of the persistence and the dour courage of these strange pale people.

The next wave of white men came out of the south, and when they found the abandoned wagons and the jackal-chewed bones on the banks of the Gariep, theirs was a fury such as the Matabele had
never encountered in all their wars.

So the
buni
met the impis on the open ground, refusing to be drawn into the ravines and thorn scrub. They came in pitifully small squadrons on shaggy ponies to dismount and discharge
their volleys in a thunder of blue powder smoke. Then they went up into the saddle to wheel away from under the wall of charging rawhide shields, and reload and circle back to let loose the thunder
again into the mass of half-naked bodies glistening with oil and sweat.

The
buni
built fortresses on the open plain, fortresses with their wagons’ bodies which they lashed wheel to wheel; and they let the impis come to die upon the wooden walls of the
fortress, while their womenfolk stood close behind them to take the gun while the barrel was still hot and pass up the second gun, charged and primed.

Then when the impis drew back, mauled and shaken, the wagons uncoiled from their circle, like a slow but deadly puffadder, and crawled forward towards the kraal of Mzilikazi. And the dreadful
horsemen galloped ahead of them, firing and circling, firing and circling.

Sadly Mzilikazi counted his dead and the price was too high, the red mud through which the iron-shod wheels churned was puddled with the blood of Zanzi, the blood of Heaven.

So he called his nation, and the herd boys brought in the herds, and the women rolled the sleeping-mats, and the little girls balanced the clay cooking-pots upon their heads, and Mzilikazi put
fire into his kraals and led the Matabele nation away. A vast throng of people and animals were guarded by the depleted impis, while the white men on their sturdy ponies drove them and pointed them
the way the sheepdog works the flock. Mzilikazi led them northwards until they crossed the great river into a new land.

‘Now the white birds are gathering again,’ Kamuza told the young men about the watch fire. ‘Each day they come up the road to Thabas Indunas, and they bring their tawdry gifts
and the little green bottles of madness. Their words are sweet as honey on the tongue, but they catch in the throat of those who try to swallow them as though they were the green bile of the
crocodile.’

‘What is it they seek from the king?’ Bazo asked the question for all those who listened, and Kamuza shrugged.

‘This one asks for the right to hunt elephant and take the teeth, this one asks for the young girls to be sent to his wagon, another wants to tell the nation of a strange white god that
has three heads, another wishes to dig a hole and look for the yellow iron, yet another wishes to buy cattle. One says he wants only this, and another only that, but they want it all. These people
are consumed by a hunger that can never be appeased, they burn with a thirst that can never be assuaged. They want everything they see, and even that is never enough for them. They take the very
earth, but that is not enough, so they tear it open like a man tearing a child from the mother’s womb. They take the rivers, and that is not enough, so they build walls across them and turn
them into lakes. They ride after the elephant herds and shoot them down, not just one or two, not just the big bulls, but all of them – the breeding cows and the calves with ivory no longer
than your finger. Everything they see they take; and they see everything, for they are always moving and searching and looking.’

‘Lobengula must eat them up,’ Bazo said. ‘He must eat them up as Mzilikazi his father would have eaten them.’

‘Hau!’ Kamuza smiled his thin twisted smile. ‘Such wisdom from my brother. He recalls how Mzilikazi ate the white men on the banks of the Gariep, and lost a land. Listen to
Bazo, my children. He counsels the King Lobengula to throw the war spear and loose his impis as Cetewayo the King of Zulu did at the Hill of the Little Hand. How many Englishmen did Cetewayo slay?
There was no counting, for their red jackets lay one upon the other like the snows of the Dragon Mountains when the sunset turns them to fire, and their blood fed the land so that the grass still
grows greener and thicker and sweeter upon the slopes of the Little Hand to this day. Oh a fine killing, my children, a great and beautiful stabbing – and afterwards Cetewayo paid for it with
the spear of his kingship. He paid for it with his royal herds, he paid for it with the liver and heart of his young men, with the grassy hills of Zululand. For after the avengers had made the
great slaughter at Ulundi they took it all, and they placed chains of iron upon Cetewayo’s wrists and ankles and they chained his indunas and his war captains and led them away. Now Bazo, the
wise, would have you know what a good bargain King Cetewayo made, and he urges Lobengula to make the same bargain with these white men.’

Bazo’s expression remained grave and dignified while Kamuza chided and mocked him but he twisted the snuff-horn between his fingers and once he glanced to the dark corner of the thatched
hut where the long war shields and the broad assegai were stacked.

But when Kamuza finished, Bazo shook his head. ‘No one here dares counsel the king; we are his dogs only. No one here doubts the might and resolve of the white men, we who live each day
with their strange and wonderful ways. All we ask is this: what is the king’s word? Tell us what Lobengula wishes – for to hear is to obey.’

Kamuza nodded. ‘Hear then the king’s voice, for the king has travelled with all his senior indunas – Babiaan and Somabula and Gandang – all the indunas of the house of
Kumalo – they have gone into the hills of Matopos to the place of the Umlimo—’

A superstitious tremor shook the group, a little shiver as though the name of the wizard of the Matopos had crawled upon their skins like the sickle-winged tsetse fly.

‘The Umlimo has given the oracle,’ Kamuza told them, and then was silent, the pause theatrical, to pique their attention, to dramatize the effect of his next words.

‘On the first day the Umlimo repeated the ancient prophecy, the words that have come down from the time of Monomatapa. On the first day the Umlimo spoke thus:

They had all of them heard the prophecy before, but now it had a new and sinister impact.

‘The king has pondered the ancient prophecy, and he says thus: “The white birds are gathering. Eagle and vulture – all of them white, they roost already upon the roof of my
kraal.”’

‘What is the meaning of the stone falcons?’ one of his listeners asked.

‘The stone falcons are the bird gods that the ancient ones left at the burial place of the old kings, Zimbabwe.’

‘How will stone birds fly?’

‘One has flown already,’ Bazo answered this time. ‘One of the stone falcons stands close by us now. It stands under the roof of Bakela, the Fist. It was he who took the falcon,
and carried it away.’

‘When the other birds fly, then war will sweep over Matabeleland,’ Kamuza affirmed. ‘But listen now to the oracle of the Umlimo.’ And their questions were stilled.

‘On the second day the Umlimo prophesied thus:

‘This was the prophecy of the second day.’

Again they were silent as they pondered the words then, mystified, they looked to Kamuza for the meaning of the prophecy.

‘Lobengula, the Black Elephant, alone understands the meaning of the prophecy of the second day. Is he not versed in the mysteries of the wizards? Did he not pass his childhood in the
caves and secret places of the wizards? Thus says Lobengula. “This is not yet the time to explain the words of the Umlimo to my children, for they are momentous words indeed, and there will
be a time for the nation to understand.”’

Bazo nodded and passed his snuff-horn. Kamuza took it and drew the red powder up into his nostrils with two sharp inhalations of breath and, watching him, Bazo did not dare to voice his own
suspicion that perhaps Lobengula, the mighty thunder of the skies, was as mystified by the prophecy of the second day as was the little group around the fire.