Winnie Mandela (2 page)

Suddenly Holden heard the thin, pathetic cry of a child. He shook his head, convinced that his mind was playing tricks on him after the recurring images of small mangled bodies on the blood-soaked grass. Then he heard it again. He stepped back, out of the circle of conversation and muted laughter, slowly following the sound. It became louder, leading him to a large, flat slab of stone. He started pushing at it and heard the crying again, unmistakably coming from underneath the stone. He squatted, lifted the heavy stone and saw in the half-light that it covered a hole in the ground where, to his astonishment, he saw a small child
.

He lifted the child out as gently as he could. It was a small boy of about two, whimpering weakly, limp with fear, barely alive from hunger and exposure. The young Englishman quickly carried him back to the camp. Clearly, the child’s mother had hidden him there from the marauding Zulus who swept across the area, praying that he wouldn’t be found by wild animals or warriors, and that she might be spared to return and fetch him – or that by some miracle, someone with a kind heart would find him and save his life
.

The tiny boy was as terrified as a small animal, and the men tried to comfort and
reassure him as best they could. They wrapped him in jackets and a blanket, fed him and put him to sleep close to the fire
.

The next morning, Holden tied the small Pondo boy onto his back as he had seen the Xhosa women do. He swung into the saddle wondering whether the child’s father was one of the slain warriors lying under the rising sun on the battlefield. Or had he gathered his cattle and set out to start a new life, grieving for a lost wife and a small son, presuming they were dead? With the tiny body snuggling against his back, he galloped off towards the safety of the colony, and his farm
.

Behind the disappearing backs of the white man and the black boy
*
lay the ashes of the Pondo people’s hopes and dreams; a black, smouldering scar in the soft green of the countryside
.

*
Bowker entrusted the boy to the care of a black woman on their farm, Tharfield, and promised her a cow to nurture him back to health. He was named Resurrection Jack, and remained part of the Bowker family’s weal and woes for seventy years.

F
ROM THE COLOURFUL QUILT
of intertwined clans and tribes that make up the Xhosa people, two have become household names due to their links with Nelson Mandela: the Tembu, from which he stems, and the Pondo, which gave the world his former wife, Winnie.

Just as familiar as the Mandela name is that of the mighty Zulu king, Shaka, and the nineteenth-century history of the Pondo and the Tembu is closely interwoven with that of Shaka and his successor, Dingane.

At the end of the 1700s, the area encompassing Natal and southern Mozambique became an extended battlefield as a power struggle raged between the tribal kings of the period. Among the consequences was a phenomenal amalgamation of military force, and Shaka’s rise to dominance. His bloody conquests caused major upheaval in all of southern Africa north of the Cape Colony: the Highveld region north of Natal, the Orange Free State and Transvaal, and even as far as present-day Botswana and Zimbabwe. Those who fell victim to Shaka took flight in all directions, causing the greatest chain reaction of catastrophes in African history – known as
mfecane
, ‘the crushing’.

In mid-1820, during the winter months in South Africa, Shaka – having consolidated his position as king of the Zulu in a trail of terrifying destruction and bloody atrocities – sent envoys to Ngoza, paramount chief of the Tembu, with an offer to unite their forces. Ngoza contemptuously responded with an insult that could only be interpreted as a declaration of war.

Ngoza and his ally Macingwane, chief of the Qunu, readied themselves for battle against the mighty Zulu. Shaka was confident, and had no reason to doubt that his superb fighting force would be victorious. But midway through the battle, a terrified messenger brought word that the Xhosa were driving back Shaka’s invincible army. The threat, however, was short-lived, and Shaka’s warriors forced Ngoza’s people from their land on the Mzinyathi River. Subsequently, Ngoza was murdered, and many of his people were incorporated into the Pondo tribe under King Faku.

In 1827, Shaka decided to attack Faku’s people along the banks of the St John’s
River, as well as the Tembu who had settled inland. He began preparing for the campaign in September by sending spies – members of Ngoza’s Tembu who had retreated to Zululand, and were familiar with Pondoland – to assess the enemy’s position.

In October, Shaka’s mother, Nandi, died. Shaka worshipped her, and he was devastated. In the months immediately after Nandi’s death, thousands of Zulus died in Shaka’s mourning rituals, which brought his nation to the brink of famine and destruction.

By the autumn of 1828, Shaka felt the time was ripe for the Pondoland campaign, and decided that what was originally planned as a purely military expedition would serve as the
iHlambo
, or mourning hunt, for his adored mother. The
iHlambo
required the warriors to spill the blood of their enemy, and Shaka relished the thought of a great ‘washing of the spears’ in Pondo blood, as befitted Nandi’s eminent status. The battered Zulu nation fervently hoped that the campaign would be the last convulsion of their king’s savage anguish.

During May, June and July, Shaka’s
impi
moved south, killing and plundering as they went. The inland division under Manyundela, one of the king’s favourite generals, attacked and virtually destroyed the Tembu. But Manyundela was killed in the battle, and a raging Shaka ordered the execution of hundreds of warriors for not preventing his death.

For the campaign against the Pondo, Shaka selected his senior general, Mdlaka, and a force of some 10 000 warriors. As word of their advance spread, the Pondo fled south. The Zulu
impi
moved as far as the Umtata River, destroying the deserted kraals as they swept through the region. On the return journey, as they crossed the Umzimvubu River and moved out of Faku’s country, the Pondo thought the threat had passed, but as they emerged from hiding, the Zulus turned around and attacked and captured Faku’s capital, along with 30 000 head of cattle.

It was the aftermath of this campaign that was discovered by Major General Dundas, Civil Commissioner of Albany and Somerset, when he arrived in Pondoland in August with a small scouting force, the first military expedition involving the British 1820 Settlers in South Africa. Among the men riding with Dundas were four Bowker brothers, one of whom, Holden, recorded the out-come of the battle and the blood-curdling results of Faku’s encounter with Shaka’s forces.

By the end of July 1828, a defeated and war-weary Faku was moving towards the Cape Colony with the remnants of his people. Ironically, Shaka the conqueror held the vanquished Faku in high esteem. Henry Francis Fynn, the Zulu king’s famous English adviser, chronicled Shaka’s overtures to Faku:

Owing to the knowledge I had of Faku, the King of the Pondos, Shaka asked me one morning if I thought, were he to withdraw his army, Faku
would consent to becoming his tributary. I replied in the affirmative and recommended, as an inducement, the return of the girls who had been captured and sent to him by the army, and refraining from destroying more corn. To this he assented. He accordingly sent messengers to Faku with proposals for peace, at the same time returning the females as proof of his
bona fides;
he, moreover, directed his army to withdraw and to stop destroying the corn. Several chiefs of petty tribes in Faku’s neighbourhood, with messengers from Faku, returned with the army to thank him for his liberality in thus sparing their lives. They were rewarded with presents of cattle selected from those that had been taken from them.
¹

Faku’s wisdom and pragmatic leadership in accepting Shaka’s proposals of peace and cooperation were an important reason why the Pondo managed to survive as a cohesive unit.

Shaka was murdered in September 1828 by his brothers Mhlangana and Dingane, and Mbopa, a high councillor and major-domo of his royal kraal. After a violent quarrel with Dingane in March 1829, Nqetho, a chieftain of the Qwabe tribe, rounded up his people and fled south. He clashed with a number of clans and tribes en route to Pondoland, where he encamped near Faku, the paramount chief, who had become a force to be reckoned with. His land had been overrun in waves by Zulu warriors, Zulu refugees, the Ngwaneni and British troops, and finally he was confronted by the Qwabe tribe, but he had built up substantial forces, strong enough to drive the Qwabe back. Nqetho had no choice but to return to Zululand, where Dingane ordered him killed.

In stark contrast to the hostility that governed their associations with other black groups, the Xhosa leaders, including Faku, generally opted for non-aggressive and diplomatic cooperation with the white settlers in the region. When Petrus Lafras Uys inspected the land beyond the Great Fish River, which was the domain of Hintsa, the Xhosa chieftain generously gave him permission to settle in the northern reaches, where the Pondo had settled. When Uys arrived, Faku welcomed him.

The Pondo king’s cooperation with the white settlers was not the first example of such collaboration by his people. His ancestry indicated a fairly significant injection of white blood – proof of more than mere business relations between the Pondo and the white settlers.

The east coast of South Africa was the scene of many shipwrecks during the eighteenth century. On the night of 4 August 1782, the East Indiaman
Grosvenor
ran aground when the captain, certain that the ship was still some 300 miles offshore, ignored the urgent warnings of a seaman on watch. The captain’s next mistake was to estimate that the shipwrecked survivors would reach Cape Town in no more than two weeks. They set off in high spirits, but the captain’s calculations
of distance were even worse on land than at sea. After four months, six of the survivors reached a frontier farm hundreds of miles from Cape Town, having suffered severe exposure and hunger. A search party found another dozen, but the rest disappeared without trace.

Rumour persisted that black chieftains had taken some of the missing women as their wives, and, in 1790, an expedition sent to investigate these reports made an astonishing discovery. All the inhabitants of a kraal on the Umgazana River, some four hundred in all, were half-castes – the descendants of three elderly white women who had survived another, unidentified shipwreck as children years before. Some of the inhabitants of the kraal had recognisable English names like Bessie, Betty and Tommy, and others went by adulterations of Geoffrey, Thomas and Michael.

But in time, traces of the blood that had been mixed with those of the black clans all but disappeared. Later expeditions searched for the kraal of half-castes, but it was never found again. By the nineteenth century, very few of the blacks along the coast could trace their descent from shipwrecked whites. Among those who could was Faku.

One of the strongest Pondo clans is the Ngutyana, from whence came Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. From about 1820 to 1850 her great-grandfather, Madikizela, was a powerful warrior chieftain in the Umkomaas area of Natal, but the Ngutyana eventually settled near Izingolweni between Port Edward and the Transkei village of Bizana.

Madikizela earned a reputation as a fierce and merciless leader and seized large tracts of land and a substantial number of warriors and cattle. But even he was no match for Shaka’s might and, caught up in the death throes of the
mfecane
, he moved south with his followers and cattle, and settled in Pondoland, where he raided Faku’s kingdom. The wise Faku, whose diplomacy with Shaka had safeguarded his people’s survival, decided it was better to have Madikizela as a friend than a foe. He bowed the knee to the marauder and offered him his sister as a wife, and the Madikizelas came to be known as ‘the nephews of Faku’.
²

A century after the heyday of Faku, a little girl was born to the Madikizela clan. Her name was Nomzamo, but the world would come to know her as Winnie Mandela.

Despite traditional norms and general compliance with their subordinate role, Xhosa women were held in high esteem, and it was not uncommon for them to be accepted in leadership positions. One such example was Yese, mother of Ngqika, chief of the Rarabe tribe.

Yese is the subject of the first documented history of the enormous power and influence Xhosa women could exercise within their customarily patriarchal society. She also offers another example of an intimate interracial relationship.

Yese was a Tembu, the tribe from which brides were traditionally chosen for Xhosa royals. Said to have been a great beauty when she was young, she became extremely fat as she matured, and as her girth expanded, so did her influence over her son and their people.

Legend has it that Yese appeared to Mlawu, the son and heir of the tribal chief, Rarabe, from a cloud of mist on a mountain, and became his wife. In 1782, when their son, Ngqika, was three years old, both Mlawu and Rarabe were killed in battle against the Tembu. Regency over Rarabe’s tribe was entrusted to Yese and Ngqika’s uncle, Ndlambe, until the boy came of age.

Yese’s power and special status were unique in Xhosa history. Many of the Rarabe saw her as a chief and her position was never questioned, not even when she was seen to be married to a white hunter, Coenraad du Buis, who fled to Ngqika’s domain after involvement in an uprising against the British who offered a reward of £200 for his capture, dead of alive. He was given protection by Ngqika for several years and subsequently became a councillor and served as chief adviser to Ngqika. But Ngqika did nothing without first consulting his mother, and treated her with the utmost reverence. Du Buis apparently produced a sizeable clan of half-castes, and it is generally accepted that this is the origin of some of the white blood still evident today in many fair-skinned Xhosas.