Shaka the Great (3 page)

Hai-yi hai-yi! I like him when he pulled the Buffalo from its place. I like him when he tore down the thatch. When he swallowed their treachery and then spat out vengeance! Trampler of Burned Grass! Sky that Thunders in the Open! Hai-yi hai-yi! But he is more, too …

He is the “duplicitous Zoolacratical tyrant” of Nathaniel Isaacs, that halfwit who spent a brief time at Shaka's court, while still a teen, and repaid the King's hospitality by slandering him after his death. As did Farewell and Fynn, it has to be said. To their shame, when later accused of having served in Shaka's army, they sought to vilify their deceased patron by claiming they'd been threatened with death if they didn't accompany the “Zoola impis.”

Hai-yi hai-yi! He is Father of the Sky, son of Mother Africa, this strange southern land with its heat and mist, its frostbitten crags and singing veld, its blossoming deserts and painted caves where elongated wildebeest lope through the darkness. And those other, even more secret places, older than time: man-ape remains; the thumb that twitched, curled and held; the occipital lobe that tilted upward toward the stars. Ancestors of the ancestors. Pleistocene Woman who, fleeing a predator one day, ran into the waves and, to protect the baby clutched to her chest, walked upright … And he is more!

He is Rider Haggard's Chaka, which is to say the lover of Nada the Lily, and Umslopogaas' Father, who foresaw his own greatness and who rose out of a time of chaos and cannibalism to bring order and bloodthirsty benevolence. He is E. A. Ritter's Shaka Zulu, a warrior-king in the Arthurian mold, with the iklwa as his Excalibur; visions of Avalon amid the birth pangs of apartheid. He is an aquarium and an airport, a simile and a model for capitalist middle management, a justification and also a metaphor. For certain whitey academics, political toadies who think cynicism and spite acceptable substitutes for scholarship, he is a nobody: just the Paltry Potentate Pushed Down the Coast by the Portuguese.

Hai-yi hai-yi! But he is more, too, this man of the moon who understood the power of the sun of the men from across the waters. Come close, my Brothers and Sisters, and I will tell you!

Come close.

Izindaba zami lezi …

These are my stories, of long ago and far away.

Uma ngiqambe amanga …

If I have lied, I have lied the truth.

If this is not the way things were, it's the way they should have been.

To these white people, Shaka gave girls from his harem, who became their wives. They bore them many children, now comprising several clans, and those clans are still known by the surnames of their fathers. They are distinguishable by being white, but they are black in all other respects.

From
The Black People and Whence They Came
by Magema Fuze (translated by H. C. Lugg)

Strange to relate there was no Scotsman in the party.

From
The Diary of Henry Francis Fynn
(eds. James Stewartand D. McK. Malcolm)

They came from the sea.

In the beginning it was colonization by shipwreck, although even that's stretching a point. The Great Scramble would only begin much, much later, and these bedraggled Long Noses were more intent on survival than acquiring territory for their tribes across the waters. You could almost say that the missionary position in those days was to be on your knees gibbering for mercy. And they were helped to their feet and led to the village, where giggling children followed behind them and young maidens peeked at them from behind their fingers. Fed and rested, they were sent on their way, often with the benefit of a guide.

These aliens were too afraid to be fearsome and, if you include the Phoenicians—the Ma-iti of the Nguni chronicles—and the Arabs who reached the Mkuze River on the south-east coast of Africa toward the end of the thirteenth century, they had been washing up forever. Their comings and goings were a part of the folklore shared by the Zulus, Mthetwas, Xhosas and other Nguni nations who had settled on the coast of what would later become South Africa.

Then in 1415, at about the time the Chinese emperor was taking delivery of a giraffe from Malindi, Portuguese forces captured Ceuta on the North African coast. The port had been used as a base by Barbary pirates, when they had raided the Portuguese coast, destroying villages, taking the inhabitants captive and selling them in African slave markets. The Infante Henrique, Duke of Viseu and third son of King João I, took part in that expedition. He was twenty-one at the time, and the experience changed his world view. He got to thinking, considering the angles, as the alidade of his inner astrolabe swung rapidly between exploration, conquest and wealth. He certainly wasn't the first to see how reconnaissance could be disguised as noble and courageous exploration, while paving the way to conquest that
would bring in the riches. But the Ceuta campaign enabled him to add an entire new vane to his astrolabe called Africa. Everyone knew about the Mediterranean coast and Egypt, of course, but he was now looking the other way, and saw another coast that could be followed downward and, possibly, even around.

One of the key discoveries of the Age of Discovery being more of a Homeric
Doh!
Moment, the prince got to work and, as Henry the Navigator, he initiated the European wave of exploration that would ultimately bring the White Man to Shaka's court.

About the first thing he did was ensure Portugal equipped herself with the right kind of ship for the job. This turned out to be the 35-meter-long three-masted caravel. With Arab-style lateen sails and a shallow draft, it was ideal for hugging the coast, exploring shallow waters, navigating reefs and sailing up rivers. By the time of Henry's death in 1460, Portugal's influence stretched as far as the Cape Verde Islands, six hundred kilometers west of Senegal.

In 1482, Diogo Cão reached the coast of Angola, where he erected a
padrão,
one of the two-meter-high stone crosses he'd brought along in order to mark the expedition's most important landfalls.

In the wake of the mariners came the traders, settling wherever a victualling station was needed on the coast. They brought in copper ware, cloth, tools, wine, horses and, later, arms and ammunition. In exchange, they received gold, pepper, ivory and slaves.

But India was still the prize. With Venice controlling the older land and sea routes across the Persian Gulf, the only way Portugal was going to get there was by sailing south, then turning left and left again, as it were, all the while using Africa as a balustrade. Geographers of the time reckoned this could be done without impaling one's ship on an iceberg, therefore João II duly sent Bartolomeu Dias along to give it a shot.

Things went reasonably well until he reached the Namibian coast, and saw lush greenery give way to a moonscape desert as dry as old bones, yet caressed by waters as icy as a pope's heart.

Dias didn't know it at the time, but he'd now entered the realm of Adamastor, tyrant of the seas, ruler of the wind, with his clay-clogged, steel-wool hair, his scowling hollow eyes and his yellow fangs. And Adamastor
bided his time, letting a sense of unease grow among the members of the expedition, as they eyed that inhospitable coast and mulled over what they faced should they find themselves shipwrecked. For if they didn't first freeze to death in the waters of the Benguela current, they'd burn up on those sands.

Then, after Dias had gingerly planted a
padrão
on the promontory of Luderitz Bay, Adamastor finally struck. Herding the mariner and his caravels out into a storm, he tossed them southward into the middle of nowhere.

Thirteen days passed before Dias could set about finding Africa again. First he turned east, groping for the north-south coastline that had been their companion these many months. Then, growing ever more frantic, he sailed due north—and finally made land at Mossel Bay, on a coast that now stretched directly from east to west. He continued on to the Great Fish River, to make sure this wasn't just another bump in the continent, then he turned back.

And it was only now, on their voyage home, that he rounded Cape Agulhas, Africa's southernmost tip, and discovered the Cape of Good Hope. (He, with no little feeling, called it Cabo das Tormentas—the Cape of Storms—but the king later reckoned Cabo da Boa Esperança would inspire more confidence among investors.)

That was in 1488, and Dias had shown it could be done, but almost ten years would elapse before a Portuguese expedition finally reached India by this same route.

That one was led by Vasco da Gama, and in December 1497 he sailed into the uncharted waters that lay beyond the Great Fish River. As Christmas was near, he christened the lush green coast he was passing “Natal,” to commemorate the Nativity.

A few days later, a headland running parallel to the coast caught his eye. He named it Ponta de Pescaria and sailed on, blithely missing the bay hiding behind this imposing bluff. It was only in 1554 that Manoel de Mesquita Perestrello, coming back from India, found Rio Natal for Portugal. Even so, the sheltered harbor was soon forgotten.

In 1652 the Dutch chose Table Bay, at the Cape of Good Hope, as the site of a settlement tasked with supplying provisions for the ships of the Dutch East India Company. As the years passed a mud fort evolved into
a star-shaped stone castle, Company employees became settlers, vineyards were planted, and slaves imported. By 1793 the colony had a population of fourteen thousand burghers, of whom only four thousand lived in or near Cape Town. Hunters, traders and nomadic cattlemen called Trekboers had meanwhile pushed the borders of the settlement eight hundred kilometers eastward.

In 1806 the British occupied the Cape. As the century entered its late teens, they began to hear talk of great upheavals further along the coast, but they had other more immediate matters to deal with. Like pacifying the Xhosas, who stubbornly insisted on hampering the colony's expansion beyond the Great Fish River, on the basis that they had got there first.

As a result, the nearest European settlement to the Zulus remained Delagoa Bay, where Lourenço Marques had established a trading post back in the 1540s.

But these Portugiza were different from the other savages who washed up on the beaches from time to time. Familiarity had long ago bred contempt; and they had been there, dying of fever, for so many generations that they were seen more as a mongrel offshoot of the Maputo tribe they customarily dealt with than as representatives of a mighty foreign nation.

Ascending to the Zulu throne in 1816, Shaka was more interested in the other tribes who came from across the water. Or rather—and this is where he differed from most of the other rulers in the region—he knew there was more to learn here than appearances might suggest.

That was thanks to his great mentor, Dingiswayo. For while in exile, fleeing his father's wrath, the Mthetwa prince had befriended a White Man who may have been the last survivor of an expedition dispatched from the Cape in 1807 and tasked with seeking an overland route to Portuguese East Africa. Dingiswayo agreed to guide the man to the coast but, after a few months, the barbarian contracted a fever and died. Dingiswayo inherited the man's horse and his gun, then decided it was time to go and claim his own birthright. Although the gun was useless, lacking powder and shot, and the horse would soon die (this long being insalubrious territory for these naked zebra), they were nonetheless impressive talismans that played no small part in helping the Wanderer regain the throne.