by Fred Khumalo
Jean-Jacques walked towards the witness stand.
‘You may sit down, sir,’ said the court orderly.
‘I prefer to stand, sir, at least until the judge walks in.’
As he stood, he started drumming a rhythm on the wooden stand. Then he began chanting, his chant gaining in volume and momentum: ‘Abelungu oswayini, basincintsh’itiye basibize ngoswayin’.’ Whites are swine; they deny us tea, and then call us swine.
‘You can’t do that,’ said the court orderly, touching his truncheon.
But Jean-Jacques ignored him. He continued chanting. The public gallery went completely silent, the spectators mesmerised by the man’s urgent chant.
Abelungu oswayini, basincintsh’itiye basibize ngoswayin’.
He was back in the forests of Arques-la-Bataille, chopping trees, breaking stones in the quarry, doing his bit for the war effort.
He walked out of the stand. The orderly tried to stop him, then changed his mind and reached instead for his truncheon. He clasped it firmly – but he made way, allowing Jean-Jacques to walk to the open space in front of the judge’s bench, which stood on a raised platform. As Jean-Jacques scanned the crowd, he caught a glimpse of Jerry’s familiar face, next to Thierry, in a gaggle of eager journalists. Then, facing the empty bench, Jean-Jacques lifted his hands in the air, his legs bent at the knees, in readiness to dance.
Still chanting ‘Abelungu oswayin’’, he raised his arms high, twirled about twice and then slammed his feet rhythmically on the wooden floorboards. Crying out with each slamming of the feet: ‘AJI! AJI!’
As he stamped, he allowed his voice to soar above the excited murmurs from the public gallery. ‘They might have emasculated me, they might have refused me a gun, they might have lied about their reasons for bringing me to Europe, they might have confined me to the kitchen, to tree-felling duty, to breaking stones at the quarry, but they couldn’t stop me from dancing the death dance. Today I am dancing the death drill, I’m telling my story. Whether I die or not does not matter any more. No one can deny me my own dance of death – Abelungu oswayin’!’
When the judge appeared from a side door, the court orderly shouted, ‘Order in the court. Order! Order!’
Jean-Jacques bowed respectfully before the judge but did not stop chanting and dancing. ‘I know I’m going to die. I should have died on that ship. Should have died out there in Dieppe, from German bullets. I should have died before I was born.’
‘ORDER! ORDER!’
‘I should have died many times before. So what is death now? But my story must be heard.’
‘ORDER! ORDER!’
‘I am dancing my death drill. No one can take it away from me. This death drill is my truth. They made me leave my spear, my shield, back home those many years ago. So I am going to fight with my words, turn my words into bullets. This dance is my history, my heritage, my story that they tried to suppress. This is my death drill, my dance of death, my dance of truth.’
Like the men on the Mendi, he danced, the rhythmic slamming of feet gaining momentum with each movement. Slam-slam! Slam-slam!
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The story about the sinking of the SS Mendi has haunted me from the time I was a child. Unlike many childhood tales, I acquired this story not from the mouths of my paternal grandfather and my maternal grandmother, both of whom shaped my imagination through the tales they told me; this story first reached me through the medium of music.
As a young boy, I loved music so much that I became part of Ingede Higher Primary School choir as a tenor. We sang pieces by both European and African choral composers – everyone from Handel to R T Caluza, from Hayden to Myataza. We sang in isiZulu, my mother tongue, in Sesotho, isiXhosa, and even English, which was a language so foreign to us that even though we sang these foreign songs with gusto and confidence, most of the time we did not know what they were all about. We just concentrated on the notes, on the music, twisting our tongues around strange words.
Then we were introduced to a haunting dirge, ‘Amagorha eMendi’. Written in isiXhosa, the short, haunting piece of music was composed by Jabez Foley, one of the most illustrious black composers, in memory of the more than six hundred men who had gone down with the Mendi when it met its demise off the coast of the Isle of Wight.
Having internalised the song, I started hearing more stories about these soldiers. Maybe the stories had always been there – it was just that they did not make sense before then. The song had contextualised and humanised the lives of these men.
When I reached Standard Nine and read South African history at a more advanced level, reference was again made to the sinking of the SS Mendi. But it was just a footnote to a chapter on South Africa’s involvement in the war. The ancestors whispering to me and my classmates through the pages of that book were silent on why black men had enlisted in a war that was clearly not theirs in the first place. Why would they throw in their lot with the British Crown, the very authorities who had not so long ago enacted the Native Land Act of 1913, which had seen the country’s black majority being consigned to thirteen per cent of the land? The very Crown that had imposed countless taxes upon them? The very Crown that had put the final nail in the coffin of the Zulu Kingdom, the last such entity on the subcontinent? Why would they support a regime that had continuously denied them the right to vote, that had denied them a say in the affairs of the ‘native’ community, as blacks were still then called?
Years later, when I was already a journalist and novelist, I realised that the hooks of the Mendi story were digging deeper into my psyche. The story wouldn’t leave me alone. I realised that, in order to exorcise myself of the Mendi demons, I simply had to write the story once and for all. But where to begin? Were the survivors still alive? How to locate them? Imagine my exhilaration, then, when, in 2004, I chanced upon a book by Norman Clothier called Black Valour – The South African Native Labour Contingent, 1916–1918 and the Sinking of the Mendi.
I wolfed down the 177-page book in one sitting, after which I wrote an opinion piece on the subject – for Rapport newspaper. A year later I, alongside John Battersby of the Sunday Independent and Chris More of the Sowetan, was invited by the French government (the Foreign Affairs department, to be exact) for a two-week briefing on that government’s revised foreign affairs policy with specific reference to Africa. During our stay there, at no urging from our side, we were driven from Paris all the way to the coast, where we were given a tour of South African war graves. And there, in Dieppe, the graves of some of the members of the Native Labour Contingent were pointed out. Coincidence? Fate?
It was after having seen the battle scenes and the graves that I began thinking about taking Clothier’s book further – by bringing to life the individual stories of these men; by creating something of an epic in memory of their selflessness and courage. It is no coincidence that South Africa’s highest national order for bravery is the Order of Mendi. The story of the Mendi is at the heart of our nationhood, but we have yet to do justice to this narrative. This is my humble contribution towards this effort.
Now sadly out of print, Clothier’s book served not only as an inspiration, but also as a lighthouse which always helped put me back on course whenever I got lost in the sea of this vast, sprawling narrative. Clothier kept me anchored, but also pointed me to further sources which helped immensely in putting matters into perspective and reading the story in its proper context. If I have misread or misinterpreted the sources, the fault is mine.
‘Jantoni’, referred to on page 62, alludes to John Dunn, a white hunter sheltered by King Cetshwayo, the last independent ruler of the Zulus, only to betray his protector and later proclaim himself a white Zulu chief, marrying hundreds of Zulu maidens.
The lines quoted on page 202 are from a letter written by Captain Louis Hertslet that appears in Norman Clothier’s Black Valour (page 50). The King’s speech on pages 254–5 is reproduced there as it appears in Clothier’s book (page 140), as are the transcripts of
Acland and Stump’s dialogue on pages 258–9 and 260 (pages 86–8), and sections of the court’s report quoted on pages 261–3 (pages 88–90).
On page 208, the lines ‘We are drilling the death drill. I, a Xhosa, say you are my brothers. Zulus, Swazis, Pondos, Basutos, we die like brothers. We are the sons of Africa’ appear. This piece of oratory is attributed to real-life character Reverend Isaac Wauchope Dyobha in oral accounts of the sinking. It has also been repeated in various written texts.
Details about 20 February 1917 that appear on page 258 are taken from the 1917 wreck report for Mendi and Darro, available at http://www.plimsoll.org/resourcess/SCCLibraries/WreckReports2002/21285a.asp.
Stimela Jason Jingoes, referred to on page 265, was a real-life character. His account of life with the Labour Contingent is captured in the book A Chief Is a Chief by the People: An Autobiography of Stimela Jason Jingoes (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), from which some of the quoted utterances are taken.
I am indebted to Professor Bill Nasson and Professor Albert Grundlingh, both history professors at Stellenbosch University at the time of writing, who shared with me their insight into and experience of the South African War and the sinking of the SS Mendi through their writings and informal chats with me. While I’m at it, let me express my heartfelt gratitude to the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study where some chapters of this book were written. Thank you, Professor Hendrik Geyer and team.
This book probably wouldn’t have been finished without the unstinting (but certainly stinging!) support of my colleagues at Wits University (MA Creative Writing class of 2013–2014). Thanks, especially, to my supervisor Dr Christopher Thurman, and to programme convenor Dr Gerrit Olivier, who gently but firmly put me back on course whenever I got seduced by the allure of the narrative at the expense of historical accuracy. My unreserved thanks also go to Dr Michelle Adler, also of Wits University, and Professor Michael Green, of Northumbria University, for their thorough and constructive comments on the manuscript.
A bow to my good friends Dr Danyela Demir of the University of Augsburg and Dr Meg Samuelson of the University of Cape Town for their detailed responses to my original text. Thanks to Professor Zakes Mda (Enkosi Gatyeni), Professor Kgomotso Michael Masemola (Nazo-ke mf’ethu!) of the University of South Africa, and Dr Grace Musila of Stellenbosch University for their faith in the project.
My wife Nomvuzo was a virtual widow during the writing of the bulk of this book – Enkosi, MaMgebe omhle! Thanks to my son Vusisizwe Freddy The Famous for reading my very long and sometimes long-winded first draft and giving me honest, detailed feedback. Son, you rock!
SOURCES AND SUGGESTED FURTHER READING
Clothier, N. Black Valour – The South African Native Labour Contingent, 1916–1918 and the Sinking of the Mendi (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1987)
Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Let Us Die Like Brothers (twenty-minute film about the SS Mendi disaster and the involvement of black South African men in the war), London, 2006
Grundlingh, A. ‘Mutating Memories and the Making of a Myth: Remembering the SS Mendi Disaster 1917–2007’, South African History Journal, Volume 63, Issue 1, 2011
Kay, J. The Lament of the ss Mendi, radio documentary, BBC Radio 4, London, 19 November 2008
Kessler, S. The Black Concentration Camps of the Anglo–Boer War 1899–1902 (Bloemfontein: The War Museum of the Boer Republics, 2012)
Morris, W. Off The Record (animated short film), Flanders: The History Channel, 2008
Nasson, B. Uyadela wen’osulapho: Black Participation in the Anglo–Boer War (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1999)
Nasson, B. The War for South Africa: The Anglo–Boer War (1899–1902) (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2010)
Perry, J and C (eds). A Chief Is a Chief by the People: The Autobiography of Stimela Jason Jingoes (London: Oxford University Press, 1975)
Wreck Report for ‘Mendi’ and ‘Darro’, 1917:
http://www.plimsoll.org/resources/SCCLibraries/WreckReports2002/21285a.asp
http://www.delvillewood.com/sinking2.htm
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