by Wilbur Smith
However, they were not alone. In the centre of the village stood a setenghi, an airy open-sided hut of white mopani poles, and a roof of neat thatch. In the shade of the setenghi there were men waiting, but these were entirely different from the strange throng which had met them at the entrance of the village.
Each of these men sat upon a low carved stool. Though some of them were grossly fat and others skinny and stooped, they were all of them surrounded by an almost palpable air of dignity and authority. Though some were white-headed with snowy woollen beards and deeply wrinkled faces and others were in the prime of their life and powers, they all of them wore upon their heads the simple black headring of gum and clay.
Here assembled in the secret valley of the Umlimo were what was left of the leaders of the Matabele nation, men who had once stood at the head of the fighting impis as they formed the bull-formation of encircling horns and crushing chest. Some of them, the eldest, remembered the exodus from the south driven by the mounted Boer horsemen; they had fought as young men under great Mzilikazi himself and still wore with pride the tassels of honour which he had awarded to them.
All of them had sat upon the councils of King Lobengula, son of great Mzilikazi, and had been on the Hills of the Indunas that fateful day when the king had stood before the assembled regiments and had faced eastward, the direction from which the column of wagons and white soldiers was entering Matabeleland. They had shouted the royal salute ‘Bayete!’ as Lobengula poised his great swollen body on gout-distorted legs and then defiantly hurled the toy spear of kingship at the invaders who were still out of sight beyond the blue horizon. These were the indunas who had led their fighting men past the king in review singing his praises and the battle hymns of the regiments, saluting Lobengula for the last time, and then going out to where the Maxim guns waited for them behind the wagon-sides and plaited thorn bush walls of the white men’s laager.
In the midst of this distinguished assembly sat three men – the three surviving sons of Mzilikazi, the noblest and most revered of all the indunas. Somabula, on the left, was the eldest, victor of a hundred fierce battles, the warrior for whom the lovely Somabula forests had been named. On the right was Babiaan, wise and brave. The honourable scars laced his torso and limbs. However, it was the man in the centre who rose from his ornately carved stool of wild ebony and came out into the sunlight.
‘Gandang, my father, I see you and my heart sings,’ cried Bazo.
‘I see you, my son,’ said Gandang, his handsome face made almost beautiful by the joy that lit it, and when Bazo knelt before him, he touched his head in blessing, and then raised him up with his own hand.
‘Baba!’ Tanase clapped her hands respectfully before her face, and when Gandang nodded his acknowledgement, she withdrew quietly to the nearest hut, where she could listen from behind the thin reed wall.
It was not for a woman to attend the high councils of the nation. In the time of the kings, a lesser woman would have been speared to death for daring to approach an indaba such as this. Tanase, however, was the one that had once been the Umlimo, and she was still the mouth-piece of the chosen one. Besides which, the world was changing, the kings had passed, the old customs were dying with them, and this woman wielded more power than any but the highest of the assembled indunas. Nevertheless, she made the gesture of retiring to the closed hut, so as not to offend the memory of the old ways.
Gandang clapped his hands and the slaves brought a stool and a baked clay beerpot to Bazo. Bazo refreshed himself with a long draught of the thick tart bubbling gruel and then he greeted his fellow indunas in strict order of their seniority, beginning with Somabula and going slowly down the ranks; and while he did so he found himself mourning their pitiful shrunken numbers, only twenty-six of them were left.
‘Kamuza, my cousin.’ He looked across at the twenty-sixth and most junior of the indunas. ‘My sweetest friend, I see you.’
Then Bazo did something that was without precedent, he came to his feet and looked over their heads, and went on with the formal greetings.
‘I greet you, Manonda, the brave!’ he cried. ‘I see you hanging on the branch of the mkusi tree. Dead by your own hand, choosing death rather than to live as a slave of white men.’
The assembled indunas glanced over their own shoulders, following the direction of Bazo’s gaze with expressions of superstitious awe.
‘Is that you, Ntabene? In life they called you the Mountain, and like a mountain you fell on the banks of the Shangani. I greet you, brave spirit.’
The assembled indunas understood then. Bazo was calling the roll of honour, and they took up the greeting in a deep growl.
‘Sakubona, Ntabene.’
‘I see you, Tambo. The waters of the Bembesi crossing ran red with your blood.’
‘Sakubona, Tambo,’ growled the indunas of Kumalo.
Bazo threw aside his cloak and began to dance. It was a swaying sensuous dance and the sweat sprang to gloss his skin and the gunshot wounds glowed upon his chest like dark jewels. Each time he called the name of one of the missing indunas, he lifted his right knee until it touched his chest, and then brought his bare foot down with a crash upon the hard earth, and the assembly echoed the hero’s name.
At last Bazo sank down upon his stool, and the silence was fraught with a kind of warlike ecstasy. Slowly all their heads turned until they were looking at Somabula, the eldest, the most senior. The old induna rose and faced them, and then, because this was an indaba of the most weighty consequences, he began to recite the history of the Matabele nation. Though they had all heard it a thousand times since their infancy, the indunas leaned forward avidly. There was no written word, no archives to store this history, it must be remembered verbatim to be passed on to their children, and their children’s children.
The story began in Zululand a thousand miles to the south, with the young warrior Mzilikazi defying the mad tyrant Chaka, and fleeing northwards with his single impi from the Zulu might. It followed his wanderings, his battles with the forces that Chaka sent to pursue him, his victories over the little tribes which stood in Mzilikazi’s path. It related how he took the young men of the conquered tribes into his impis and gave the young women as wives to his warriors. It recorded the growth of Mzilikazi from a fugitive and rebel, to, first, a little chieftain, then to a great war chief, and at last to a mighty king.
Somabula related faithfully the terrible M’fecane, the destruction of a million souls as Mzilikazi laid waste to the land between the Orange river and the Limpopo. Then he went on to tell of the coming of the white men, and the new method of waging war. He conjured up the squadrons of sturdy little ponies with bearded men upon their backs, galloping into gunshot range, then wheeling away to reload before the amadoda could carry the blade to them. He retold how the impis had first met the rolling fortresses, the squares of wagons lashed together with trek chains, the thorn branches woven into the spokes of the wheels and into every gap in the wooden barricade, and how the ranks of Matabele had broken and perished upon those walls of wood and thorn.
His voice sank mournfully as he told of the exodus northwards, driven by the grim bearded men on horseback. He recalled how the weaklings and the infants had died on that tragic trek, and then Somabula’s voice rose joyfully as he described the crossing of the Limpopo and the Shashi rivers and the discovery of this beautiful bountiful land beyond.
By then Somabula’s voice was strained and hoarse, and he sank down onto his stool and drank from the beerpot while Babiaan, his half-brother, rose to describe the great days, the subjugation of the surrounding tribes, the multiplication of the Matabele cattle-herds until they darkened the sweet golden grasslands, the ascension of Lobengula, ‘the one who drives like the wind’, to the kingship, the fierce raids when the impis swept hundreds of miles beyond the borders, bringing home the plunder and the slaves, that made the Matabele great. He reminded them how the regiments, plumed and befurred, carrying their great colour-matched war shields had pa
raded before the king like the endless flow of the Zambezi river; how the maidens danced at the Festival of First Fruits, bare-breasted and anointed with shiny red clay, bedecked with wild flowers and beads. He described the secret showing of the treasure, when Lobengula’s wives smeared his vast body with thick fat and then stuck the diamonds to it, diamonds stolen by the young bucks from the great pit that the white men had dug far to the south.
Listening to the telling of it, the indunas remembered vividly how the uncut stones had glowed on the king’s gross body like a coat of precious mail, or like the armoured scales of some wondrous mythical reptilian monster. In those days how great had been the king, how uncountable his herds, how fierce and warlike the young men and how beautiful the girls – and they nodded and exclaimed in approbation.
Then Babiaan sank down and Gandang rose from his stool. He was tall and powerful, a warrior in the late noon of his powers, his nobility unquestioned, his courage tested and proven a hundred times, and as he took up the tale, his voice was deep and resonant.
He told how the white men had come up from the south. To begin with there were only one or two of them begging small favours, to shoot a few elephant, to trade their beads and bottles for native copper and ivory. Then there were more of them, and their demands were more insistent, more worrisome. They wanted to preach a strange three-headed god, they wanted to dig holes and search for the yellow metal and the bright stones. Deeply troubled, Lobengula had come to this place in the Matopos, and the Umlimo had warned him that when the sacred bird images flew from the ruins of Great Zimbabwe, then there would be no more peace in the land.
‘The stone falcons were stolen from the sacred places,’ Gandang reminded them, ‘and Lobengula knew then that he could no more resist the white men than his father, Mzilikazi, had been able to.’
Thus the king had chosen the most powerful of all the white petitioners, ‘Lodzi’, the big blue-eyed man who had eaten up the diamond mines and who was the induna of the white queen across the sea. Hoping to make him an ally, Lobengula had entered into a treaty with Lodzi; in exchange for gold coins and guns, he had granted to him a charter to dig for the buried treasures of the earth exclusively in Lobengula’s eastern dominions.
However, Lodzi had sent a great train of wagons with hard fighting men like Selous and Bakela, leading hundreds of young white men armed like soldiers to take possession of the Charter lands. Sorrowfully, Gandang recited the long list of grievances and the breaking of faith, which had culminated in the clatter of Maxim guns, in the destruction of the king’s kraal at Bulawayo, and the flight of Lobengula towards the north.
Finally, he described Lobengula’s death. Broken-hearted and sick, the king had taken poison, and Gandang himself had laid the body in a secret cave overlooking the valley of the Zambezi, and he had placed all the king’s possessions around him, his stool, his head-pillow of ivory, his sleeping-mat and fur kaross, his beerpots and beef-bowls, his guns and his war shield, his battle-axe and stabbing-spear, and at the last the little clay pots of glittering diamonds he had laid at Lobengula’s gout-distorted feet. When all was done, Gandang had walled up the entrance to the cave, and slaughtered the slaves who had done the work. Then he had led the shattered nation back southwards into captivity.
At the last words, Gandang’s hands fell to his sides, his chin sank onto the broad scarred and muscled chest, and a desolate silence descended upon them. At last one of the indunas in the second rank spoke. He was a frail old man with all the teeth missing from his upper jaw. His lower lids drooped away from his watery eyeballs so that the inner flesh showed like pink velvet and his voice was scratchy and breathless.
‘Let us choose another king,’ he began, but Bazo interrupted him.
‘A king of slaves, a king of captives?’ He laughed abruptly, scornfully. ‘There can be no king until there is a nation once again.’
The ancient induna sank back, and gummed his toothless mouth, blinking about him miserably, his mind altering direction in the way of old men. ‘The cattle,’ he murmured, ‘they have taken our cattle.’
The others hummed in angry assent. Cattle were the only true wealth; gold and diamonds were white men’s baubles, but cattle were the foundation of the nation’s welfare.
‘One-Bright-Eye sends unblooded young bucks of our own people to lord it in the kraals—’ complained another. ‘One-Bright-Eye’ was the Matabele name for General Mungo St John, the Chief Native Commissioner of Matabeleland.
‘These Company police are armed with guns, and they show no respect for the custom and the law. They laugh at the indunas and the tribal elders, and they take the young girls into the bushes—’
‘One-Bright-Eye orders all our amadoda, even those of Zanzi blood, respected warriors and the fathers of warriors to labour like lowly amaholi, like dirt-eating slaves, digging his roads.’
The litany of their wrongs, real and fancied, was recited yet again by a succession of angry indunas, while only Somabula and Babiaan and Gandang and Bazo sat aloof.
‘Lodzi has burned our shields and snapped the blades of the stabbing-spears. He has refused our young men the ancient right to raid the Mashona when all the world knows that the Mashona are our dogs to kill or let live as we choose.’
‘One-Bright-Eye has disbanded the impis, and now no man knows who has the right to take a wife, nobody knows which maize field belongs to which village and the people squabble like sickly children over the few scrawny beasts that Lodzi has returned to us.’
‘What must we do?’ cried one, and then another strange and unprecedented thing happened. All of them, even Somabula, looked towards the tall scarred young man they called the Wanderer, and they waited expectantly for no one knew what.
Bazo made a sign with one hand and Tanase stooped out through the entrance of the reed hut. Clad only in the brief leather apron, slim and straight and supple, she carried the roll of sleeping-mat in her arms, and she knelt before Bazo and unrolled the mat on the earth at his feet.
The nearest indunas who could see what was concealed in the roll grunted with excitement. Bazo took it up in both hands and held it high. It caught the light, and now they all gasped. The design of the blade was by King Chaka himself; the metal had been beaten out and polished to burning silver by the skilled smiths of the Rozwi, and the bloodwood shaft had been bound with copper wire and the coarse black hairs from the tail-tuft of a bull elephant.
‘Jee!’ hissed one of the indunas, the deep drawn-out war chant of the fighting impis, and the others took up the cry, swaying slightly to the force of it, their faces lighting with the first ecstasy of the fighting madness.
Gandang put a halt to it. He sprang to his feet and the chant broke off as he made an abrupt gesture.
‘One blade will not arm the nation, one blade will not prevail against the little three-legged guns of Lodzi.’
Bazo rose and stood facing his father.
‘Take it in your hands, Baba,’ he invited, and Gandang shook his head angrily, but he could not take his eyes off the weapon.
‘Feel how the heft of it can make a man of even a slave,’ Bazo insisted quietly, and this time Gandang stretched out his right hand. His palm was bloodless white with tension and his fingers trembled as they closed around the grip.
‘Still it is only one blade,’ he insisted, but he could not resist the feel of the beautiful weapon and he stabbed into the air with it.
‘There are a thousand like this,’ Bazo whispered.
‘Where?’ Somabula barked.
‘Tell us where,’ clamoured the other indunas, but Bazo goaded them.
‘By the time that the first rains fall, there will be five thousand more. At fifty places in the hills the smiths are at work.’
‘Where?’ Somabula repeated. ‘Where are they?’
‘Hidden in the caves of these hills.’
‘Why were we not told?’ Babiaan demanded.
Bazo answered, ‘There would have been those who doubted it could be done,
those who counselled caution and delay, and there was no time for talk.’
Gandang nodded. ‘We all know he is right, defeat has turned us into chattering old women. But now,’ he handed the assegai to the man beside him, ‘feel it!’ he ordered.
‘How will we assemble the impis?’ the man asked, turning the weapon in his hands. ‘They are scattered and broken.’
‘That is the task of each of you. To rebuild the impis, and to make certain that they are ready when the spears are sent out.’
‘How will the spears reach us?’
‘The women will bring them, in bundles of thatching-grass, in rolls of sleeping-mats.’
‘Where will we attack? Will we strike at the heart, at the great kraal the white men have built at GuBulawayo?’
‘No.’ Bazo’s voice rose fiercely. ‘That was the madness which destroyed us before. In our rage we forgot the way of Chaka and Mzilikazi, we attacked into the strength of the enemy, we went in across good shooting ground onto the wagons where the guns waited.’ Bazo broke off, and bowed his head towards the senior indunas. ‘Forgive me, Baba, the puppy should not yap before the old dog barks. I speak out of turn.’
‘You are no puppy, Bazo,’ Somabula growled. ‘Speak on!’
‘We must be the fleas,’ Bazo said quietly. ‘We must hide in the white man’s clothing and sting him in the soft places until we drive him to madness. But when he scratches, we will move on to another soft place.
‘We must lurk in darkness and attack in the dawn, we must wait for him in the bad ground and probe his flanks and his rear.’ Bazo never raised his voice, but all of them listened avidly. ‘Never must we run in against the walls of the laager, and when the three-legged guns begin to laugh like old women, we must drift away like the morning mist at the first rays of the sun.’
‘This is not war,’ protested Babiaan.
‘It is war, Baba,’ Bazo contradicted, ‘the new kind of war, the only kind of war which we can win.’
‘He is right,’ a voice called from the ranks of indunas. ‘That is the way it must be.’