Shaka the Great Page 2

  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.

  PART ONE

  Potsherds & Ostraca

  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 da
s 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.

  And Dingiswayo never forgot all the things the White Man had told him, as they sat around the fire of an evening. Coming from the Cape, the White Man could speak Xhosa, a Nguni language Dingiswayo himself understood, and though the young prince could grasp most of the concepts he raised—trade, empires, wars of conquest—it was their sheer scale that awed him.

  And got him thinking.

  So it was Dingiswayo, not Shaka, who first set about uniting the tribes and clans along the south-east coast of Africa, organizing something approaching a standing army and fighting wars not only to gain territory and cattle, but to secure trade routes with the Portuguese. The Zulu king merely completed what his mentor had started.

  And Shaka wanted to know more, wanted to hear for himself. What else could these creatures from the sea tell him? Problem was, whatever trembling specimens his warriors found amid the seaweed could do little more than weep and grovel.

  Possibly, in the end, they weren’t that different from all the others. Possibly, their claimed provenance aside, they were simply wild beasts like all the rest. For that’s how the Zulus saw things: they themselves were Abantu, human beings, while everyone else was izilwane, wild beasts, savages. But even as Shaka was taming the other beasts around him—those indigenous to the region—these newly found barbarians were poking at the map and wondering about the possibilities of this coast.

  By the 1820s the British Admiralty was desperately seeking employment for the naval officers left idle and on half pay after the Napoleonic Wars. One of the projects embarked upon was a long delayed and much needed scientific survey of the coastline extending from the Cape of Good Hope up to Cape Guardafui north of Portuguese East Africa. Captain William Owen was the one put in charge of the expedition, which included the Leven and the Barracouta.

  The HMS Barracouta left the Cape first, around the middle of 1822. Also tasked with making contact with the tribes beyond Algoa Bay, the furthermost outpost of British civilization on that coast, the ship’s officers discovered something interesting.

  The natives they encountered were a pathetic lot—cunning, treacherous and prone to “drunkenness and gluttony.” However, the Barracouta’s officers soon learned that they were not the “aboriginal inhabitants” of the coastal strip, but were refugees who had fled “the merciless and destructive conquests of a tyrannical monster named Chaka.” These reports, which caused a stir back at the Cape, mark one of the first official mentions of the Zulu king whose name would one day be known around the globe.

  The dispatches were later confirmed by the officers of the HMS Leven. While the ship was at Delagoa Bay, it was learned the Portuguese were trading with a “warlike” tribe to the south. They called this tribe “Vatwas,” but it was likely these were the “Zoolas” the British had already been hearing about.

  And why would the Portuguese risk dealing with such a bloodthirsty bunch? That’s what a few merchants, and at least one out-of-work Navy man, got to thinking after listening to the stories Owen’s expedition brought back to Cape Town. They knew the Portuguese were doing very well out of the gold and ivory coming into Delagoa otherwise why maintain a settlement in such a hellhole? But that the traders should be willing to do business with a “tyrannical monster,” presumably as likely to slaughter them in their sleep as hand over any goods, meant there had to be more gold and more ivory than hitherto suspected.

  Consequently, while Shaka was consolidating his power after defeating Zwide, and wondering what to do about the irksome Thembus hunkered down on his western border, other izilwane, the very ones he wanted to learn more about, were making plans to come and find him. And thus ensure any future arrivals and departures were more organized, and less the result of storms and shattered hulls.

  1

  Enter Mariners, Wet

  July 1823

  The sea is choppy, the sky glowering; the foam stings and the waves do their best to unseat the boat, as if it were a particularly detested jockey.

  Impatience, teeth-grinding, deck-pacing, mouths-to-feed, investors-to-appease impatience, has seen Lieutenant Francis Farewell, founder of the Farewell Trading Company—and sole bloody leader of this bloody expedition, the whole thing having been his idea in the first place, despite what a certain party might claim at a later date—attempt a landing in such inclement conditions.

  The beach they’re aiming for keeps disappearing, tilting and slipping behind waves the color of stone, until the boat rises again like the remnants of breakfast in a burning throat, while the water roars in its rage and the spindrift peppers one’s face like specks of gunpowder. Jakot, their interpreter, along with a matelot who’s never been the same since a tumble from a yard a few years ago, has broken one of the barrels they’ve brought with them, and are using the shakes in a clumsy and futile endeavor to bail water. A
nd the other men pull at the oars; for they don’t need to be told that survival lies in keeping this surfboat under control.

  They’re just coming out of another trough, when Farewell rises to check his bearings. How far to go? How far? He knows they won’t be able to get back off the beach so long as this weather keeps up, but getting there at all will at least mean an end to this constant battering.

  He rises and, just as the oarsmen claw their way to the crest, a gust of wind knocks the boat sideways so that it almost capsizes as it drops down into the next trough. The crew fight to bring the bow around, and it’s only when they hit the next crest that they realize Farewell’s gone. As are Jakot and the sailor who was helping him bail.

  But there’s nothing to be done about that right now. The surfboat’s perched above another near vertical descent, and they have their own lives to think of.

  Down they go, then up again, in a haze of gray and white.

  Down, then up … and the beach seems to leap at them, closer than anyone would’ve dared hope.

  Carried into shallower water by the breakers, they now have to contend with cross-currents. During any landing, waves breaking against a broad behind can cause a boat to turn sideways to the swell, and capsize. Surfboats have pointed sterns to prevent this from happening, but these graybeards are too cantankerous. Just when it seems as if they’re going to make it through the churning water, the boat broaches …