The Covenant: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  The pudgy king was right; Nxumalo never saw him again, but remembered him often and with the warmest feelings, for he commanded respect. As Nxumalo told his new bride, ‘I can’t understand it. Mzilikazi started out with his people like a band of brigands on the run. Now he’s forming a kingdom.’ Among the clans Mzilikazi’s followers touched in their wild movement they became known as the fugitives—the Matabele—and under that name they would flame through the generations, the tribe that outsmarted Shaka of the Zulu.

  When Nxumalo crossed the Umfolozi River in the spring of 1827 he found the Zulu tense and frightened, for the Female Elephant had fallen ill, and her son was dispatching messengers to all parts of the kingdom to see if anyone had found a bottle of Rowland’s Macassar Oil which would darken her hair and prolong her life. A member of Nxumalo’s kraal, seeing the master returning with a new wife, hurried to him with a warning: ‘Three messengers who returned without the oil have been strangled. If you say you have none, you may be killed. So tell him immediately that you heard of a source at the north.’

  ‘But I didn’t.’

  ‘Nxumalo, if the Female Elephant dies, we’ll be in great trouble.’

  ‘But why should I lie to him? He will soon learn the truth.’

  The matter was solved by the grieving king: he did not ask for Fynn’s magic liquid. What he wanted was news of Mzilikazi. ‘He has fled,’ Nxumalo said bluntly. ‘He feared you as the king and knew that he could not stand against you in battle.’

  ‘I didn’t want to fight him, Nxumalo. I wanted to enlist him as our ally.’

  He had much more to say; with his mother’s illness reminding him of his own mortality, the succession to his throne was uppermost in his plans, but at midafternoon all this was swept aside when a trembling messenger came with the awful news: ‘The Female Elephant has died.’

  ‘My mother? Dead?’

  Shaka withdrew into his hut, and when he walked out an hour later he was in full battle dress. His circle of generals and the nation’s elders watched anxiously, but he betrayed no sign of the titanic grief welling up inside him. For half an hour the great leader rested his head on his tall oxhide shield, keeping his eyes on the ground, where his tears fell in the dust. Finally he looked up, wild-eyed, to utter one piercing scream, as if he had been mortally wounded. That scream would later echo to the farthest reaches of his kingdom.

  With Nxumalo and three generals close behind, he went to his mother’s kraal, and when he saw her dead body, with one sweep of his arm he ordered every serving woman to be readied for her final journey: ‘You could have saved her, but you didn’t.’

  When Nxumalo saw that his beloved wife Thetiwe was among those pinioned by the knobkerrie team he shouted, ‘Mighty King! Do not take my wife.’ But Shaka merely looked at him as if he were a stranger.

  ‘They could have saved her,’ he mumbled.

  ‘Mercy, Companion-in-the-Battles.’

  With a powerful hand Shaka gripped his advisor by the throat: ‘Your wife cured my mother’s eye. Why could she not cure her now?’ And Nxumalo had to stand silent as lovely Thetiwe was dragged away. With nine others she would share Nandi’s grave, but only after all the bones in her body were broken in such a way as to keep her skin intact, since the Female Elephant demanded perfection in her dark place.

  Now word flashed along the riverbanks that Shaka’s mother was dead, and almost as if they were being driven by unseen herdsmen, the Zulu came out to mourn. Wailings pierced the air, and lamentations filled the valleys. People threw away their bead adornments and tore their clothes, and looked askance at anyone whose eyes did not flow with tears. The world was in torment.

  All the rest of that day and through the night the wailing continued until the earth itself seemed to be in anguish. Some men stood transfixed, their faces upturned, repeating over and over the shrieking dirges, and others spread dust over themselves, screaming all the while.

  At noon next day, 11 October 1827, the awful thing began. It was never known exactly how it started, but one man, crazed by thirst and lack of sleep, seems to have stared at his neighbor and cried, ‘Look at him. He isn’t weeping,’ and in a flash of hands the indifferent one was torn apart.

  A man who sneezed was charged with disrespect for the great mother and was slain.

  A woman coughed twice and was strangled by her own friends.

  The madness spread, and whoever behaved in any conspicuous manner was set upon and killed by the mob. A woman who looked like old Nandi was accused of having stolen her countenance, and she perished. A man moaned his grief, but not loudly enough, and was clubbed.

  On and on, throughout all that long afternoon, the grief-stricken citizens wailed their laments and watched their neighbors. Five hundred died near the hut of the Female Elephant. The footpaths were strewn with bodies, and as the late-afternoon sun struck the maddened faces, spies looked to see whether the eyes held tears, and if they did not, the owner was strangled: ‘He wasn’t weeping for the mother.’ Soon a thousand lay dead, then four thousand.

  In sheer exhaustion some finally had to sit down, and when they did so, they were slain for lack of veneration. Heat of day caused some to faint from lack of water, and they were stabbed with assegais as they lay. Others wandered to the Umfolozi for a drink, and as they bent to reach it they were stabbed. Two unfortunate old men with weak kidneys had to urinate and were pierced with spears for their irreverence.

  Gangs raged through the area, peering into every kraal to see if any had failed to honor the dead woman, and when recalcitrants were found, the huts were set afire and the occupants roasted. A mother suckled her child, whereupon the crowd roared, ‘She feeds when the great mother lies dead,’ and the pair were slain.

  Through the day Shaka remained in the royal kraal, unaware of the killings as he received a file of mourners who tried to console him with chants honoring the Female Elephant. Their bodies trembled with fever; they fell to the ground and tore at the earth; and each expressed an honest grief, for Nandi had indeed been the mother of the nation. Beyond the kraal the hills rang with cries, and toward sunset Shaka rose: ‘It is finished. The great mother has heard her children.’

  When he left the kraal he saw for the first time the extent of the madness, and as he passed over bloodstained earth he muttered, barely coherently, ‘It is finished.’ He ordered two regiments to put an end to the mass killings, but undisciplined bands now rampaged far into the countryside, acting on their own and killing anyone who showed inadequate remorse, even in distant villages where news of Nandi’s death could not have penetrated. ‘You should have known,’ the fanatics cried as they wielded their assegais.

  Shaka’s Dark Time the Zulu named these last three months of 1827, and the outside world would never have known the extent of the tragedy had not Henry Francis Fynn been visiting with Shaka on the day Nandi died. He would report seeing seven thousand dead himself, and from the distant countryside he received additional reports.

  When the first spasm ended Shaka turned to the normal procedures for national mourning, and Nandi was accorded the full rites given a great chief: ‘For one year no man may touch a woman, and if any woman appears pregnant, having made love when my mother lay dead, she and the child and her man shall be strangled. From all the herds in this kingdom no milk shall be drunk; it shall be spilled upon the ground. No crops shall be planted. For one year a regiment shall guard her grave, twelve thousand in constant attendance.’ Initial hysteria was forcefully channeled into absolute obedience, and now additional people were killed if they drank milk or lay together.

  At the end of three awful months those closest to Shaka convinced him that the nation he had worked so diligently to construct was imperiled by these excesses, and he terminated all prohibitions except the one against pregnancy, for he could never comprehend the need for sex. At a vast ceremony ending the Dark Time, herdsmen were ordered to bring their beasts, one hundred thousand in all; their bellowing would be the final salute to the Femal
e Elephant. When they were assembled, Shaka demanded that forty of the finest calves be brought for sacrifice, and as the little creatures stood before him, their gall bladders were ripped out and they were left to die. ‘Weep! Weep!’ he shouted. ‘Let even animals know what sorrow is.’ Then he bowed his head as the contents of the forty gall bladders were poured over him, purifying him at last of the evil forces that had hastened the death of his mother.

  The diviners and witch doctors, seeing a chance to reestablish their authority, seized upon Nandi’s death as a way to chasten the king: ‘We know what caused her death, Mighty Lion. A cat walked past her hut.’

  Shaka listened avidly as the diviners revealed what dark spells had been cast by women who owned cats, and when the indictment was complete he roared, ‘Let all with cats be found!’ And when these women were assembled, including one of Nxumalo’s wives, he screamed at them, demanding to know the poisons they had disseminated through their cats. When the terrified and bewildered women, three hundred and twenty-six of them, could make no sensible reply, he ordered them slain, and they were.

  One morning Shaka took Nxumalo aside, seeking to recapture the friendship he knew he needed: ‘I’m sorry, trusted guide, that Thetiwe and the other died. It was necessary.’ When Nxumalo nodded, acknowledging the king’s power, Shaka pointed out: ‘I gave you the women. I had a right to take them away.’ Again Nxumalo assented, and Shaka said, ‘I wanted the world to see how much a son could love his mother.’

  And that speech was the beginning of the final tragedy, for when the king endeavored to assure Nxumalo that all was again well between them, the latter thought not of his words but of a gentler king far to the north with whom sanctuary might be found. Shaka noticed his lack of response, and his dissatisfaction with the one man who might have saved him was launched.

  Ironically, Shaka decided to cast Nxumalo aside at the precise moment when he was needed most, for the Zulu were beginning to see that the welfare of their recently established nation depended upon a man subject to irrational behavior; they also saw that since he had no sons, he had no direct heirs, and that if he died in one of his paroxysms, the kingdom would be adrift.

  Unlucky chance also worked against him, for if the Female Elephant had pushed him to glory, another woman of equal determination was now ready to destroy him. Mkabayi, his father’s sister—whose name meant Wild Cat, an ominous portent—had nursed a smoldering resentment against Shaka from the moment he usurped the Zulu leadership, and now, seeing the disarray of the kingdom, she infected two of Shaka’s half brothers with her poison. Dingane and Mhlangana began to meet secretly with her, and after a few tentative discussions, realized that they must enlist the support of some military leader. The fact that Nxumalo had lost two wives—killed by Shaka’s orders—made him a likely candidate.

  The brothers had to approach him with caution, for if he betrayed a single intimation, Shaka would kill them all. So Dingane, a clever, conniving man, asked, ‘Nxumalo, has it ever occurred to you that the king might be mad?’

  He had been expecting just such an opening from someone, but he, too, had to be cautious, not knowing the true temper of the brothers. ‘You saw him at the punishment of the Langeni,’ he said. ‘He forgot who I was.’

  ‘Advise us straight. If anything happened to the king—his biliousness, I mean—would the iziCwe run violent?’

  ‘My men love their king.’

  ‘Were … two of your wives … slain?’

  He did not like the devious way Dingane asked his questions, so once more he was evasive: ‘Shaka gave me three women. He said he had a right to take two of them back.’

  The brothers were satisfied that Nxumalo wanted to join them but was fending them off, so Dingane said bluntly, ‘You must know you’re to be smelled-out at the next gathering.’ Nxumalo only looked at him, unbelieving, so Dingane whispered, ‘One witch-seeker said to me, “That Nxumalo, two wives dead. It must be an omen.” Your bamboo skewers are being hardened. Before this year is out, you’ll hang screaming in the tree.’

  Nxumalo properly interpreted this as a suggestion that he take up arms against the king, but even though his allegiance to Shaka the man had begun to erode, his tradition of obedience to the concept of kingship remained, and he could not at this first meeting abandon it, so with great daring, well aware that the brothers might feel they must kill him to preserve their secret, he said, ‘Dingane, I know what you’re plotting. And I understand. My heart is broken by what Shaka has done to me, and I hate his madness. But I’m his general and I can’t …’

  It was a fearful moment, with lives in balance, but the brothers had to risk it, for to succeed in their conspiracy, they must have this general: ‘Would you be able to forget that we have spoken to you?’

  ‘As a soldier I cannot act against my king, but I know he is destroying the nation. I will remain silent.’

  When he left, the brothers smiled, for they were certain that Shaka would do some additional outrageous thing that would alienate even Nxumalo. The king was marked for murder.

  Shaka sensed that the dynamics of the situation required him to keep his army on the move, so he advanced into new territories, well to the south toward the Xhosa, and for the first time his regiments gained only a modified success; he executed more warriors than ever before for cowardice. He allowed his regiments no rest, but sent them feverishly to new lands in the north, and again they encountered disaster.

  ‘Where’s Nxumalo?’ the king cried in anguish one afternoon.

  ‘He’s with his regiment,’ a knobkerrie said, not wanting to irritate Shaka further by reminding him that he had ordered Nxumalo to be confined.

  ‘Never here when I need him. And Fynn fails to bring me the magic oil.’ He almost whimpered. ‘So much work remains, I must not die.’

  And the executioners wailed, ‘Deathless-Stomper-of-the-Rhinoceros, Fearless-Slayer-of-the-Leopard, you will never die.’

  ‘What is death?’ the tormented king asked. ‘And before you answer that, what is life?’

  Four attendants who were accustomed to nod gravely at everything he said were suddenly seized by the knobkerrie gang, and two were stood to the left of the king, two to the right. ‘Kill those,’ Shaka said, and the two on the left were slain. ‘They are death,’ the king said, ‘and these are life. Tell me—what is the difference?’ And he kept this grim tableau in place for three hours, staring and pondering.

  Then with a leap high into the air he roared, ‘Fetch me the women who were pregnant before my edict,’ and more than a hundred women in all stages of pregnancy were dragged before him. With sharp knives he began to slice open their bellies to see for himself how life progressed, and as he continued his studies with the later women, the first ones lay dying in a corner.

  When word of this hideous experiment flashed through the kraals, disseminated by men whose wives had been taken, Dingane exulted: ‘Now we’ll have Nxumalo with us!’ And he took his brother to the kraal where Nxumalo was being held and told him, ‘Shaka has taken Nonsizi. He’s going to cut her apart.’

  ‘What!’ Like a bull elephant crashing through trees, Nxumalo burst out of the kraal to save the lovely girl Mzilikazi had given him, and when he ran in maddened circles, Dingane said, ‘Over there!’ pointing to Shaka’s kraal.

  Nxumalo arrived in time to see the knobkerrie men pulling the hundred and sixth woman to Shaka’s table, and it was as Dingane had warned—Nonsizi of the Matable. ‘Shaka—she is my wife!’ he cried, but with an impatient shake of his head the king indicated that his helpers were to remove this interruption.

  ‘Shaka!’ Nxumalo repeated. ‘That’s Nonsizi, my wife.’

  In a kind of stupor, the king looked up, failed to recognize his general, and said, ‘She cannot be your wife. All women belong to me.’ And while Nxumalo was pinioned, the king dissected Nonsizi, then hurried to the last three women, crying, ‘Now I will know. I won’t need the hair oil!’

  In that awful scream-filled moment an
y vestige of allegiance or obedience vanished, and as soon as Nxumalo could break away, he sought the brothers and said, ‘Shaka must be killed.’

  ‘We knew you’d join us,’ the king’s brothers said, and they took him to their aunt, Mkabayi the Wild Cat, who said grimly, ‘We must strike the tyrant now.’ And it was her force of character, allied with Nxumalo’s, that sealed the king’s fate.

  Had the plotting been left to Dingane, Shaka might have escaped, for when that shifty fellow realized that he might actually have to stab the king, he began to vacillate, until one night Nxumalo grabbed him by the strands about his neck and whispered, ‘We shall kill him together—the three of us. He must be removed.’ Forever obedient, he was now obedient to the needs of the Zulu.

  But he had still to face two extreme tests, in one of which lay a bitter irony. In a kraal near his, in which the king kept some four hundred of his wives, there was a girl named Thandi, who had served briefly in a women’s regiment before the king selected her to be his wife. Once during a lull in maneuvers Nxumalo had encountered her while she was resting beside the Umfolozi, and they had invited each other to enjoy the pleasures of the road, and several times after that Thandi had contrived to be in the vicinity of the iziCwe, and on two different nights they had run a terrible risk by making real love, with the possibility that she might become pregnant.

  He found her so delightful, so fresh in her attitudes, that he had started accumulating cattle to pay her lobola, when the king abruptly chose her for his own. True to his custom, Shaka rarely came near her; once during their years of marriage he had spent part of an evening talking with her, boasting of his prowess in battle, but even though she had listened attentively and said several times, ‘How brave you must have been,’ she never saw him again. That brief encounter was supposed to suffice for the fifty remaining years she would spend in the royal kraal.