Laband The Eight Zulu Kings

From Shaka to Goodwill Zwelithini
1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-1-86842-839-7
Verlag: Jonathan Ball
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 440 Seiten

In Eight Zulu Kings, well-respected and widely published historian John Laband examines the reigns of the eight Zulu kings from 1816 to the present. Starting with King Shaka, the renowned founder of the Zulu kingdom, he charts the lives of the kings Dingane, Mpande, Cetshwayo, Dinuzulu, Solomon and Cyprian, to today's King Goodwill Zwelithini whose role is little more than ceremonial. In the course of this investigation Laband places the Zulu monarchy in the context of African kingship and tracks and analyses the trajectory of the Zulu kings from independent and powerful pre-colonial African rulers to largely powerless traditionalist figures in post-apartheid South Africa.

JOHN LABAND is the author of several books on the Zulu kingdom, including the seminal Rope of Sand: The Rise and Fall of the Zulu Kingdom in the Nineteenth Century and The Assassination of King Shaka. He is associated with a number of eminent institutions, including the universities of Cambridge, Wilfrid Laurier in Canada, and KwaZulu-Natal and Stellenbosch. He lives in Greyton in the Western Cape.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Laband, John

Leseproben

INTRODUCTION

THE LION

Thirty-five years ago I witnessed a spectacle of potent symbolism. I was among the guests of the reigning Zulu1 monarch, Ingonyama (‘Lion’ in an honorific sense, meaning His Majesty) Goodwill Zwelithini kaBhekuzulu.2 We were gathered on Saturday, 20 August 1983 to attend the official opening of oNdini, the partially restored ikhanda, or military homestead and royal residence, of his great-great-grandfather, King Cetshwayo kaMpande.

In 1873 Cetshwayo had ordered the construction of oNdini, envisioned as his principal ikhanda, in the thorn-bush country of the Mahlabathini plain on the northern banks of the White Mfolozi River, right in the heart of the Zulu kingdom. The ikhanda was an immense, elliptical assemblage of close to 1 400 beehive-shaped thatched huts enclosing a vast parade ground. A palisade constructed of a double row of stout timbers two and a half metres high enclosed the whole complex, which had an outer circumference of some 2 169 metres.3 ONdini was built on a gentle slope allowing for natural drainage down to the Mbilane stream, and the slight elevation of the site exposed it to cooling breezes and presented sweeping views across the level plain towards the ring of hills to the north. Nowadays, the plain in the vicinity of oNdini is criss-crossed with roads, railways and power lines and is thickly cluttered with dwellings. The ugly, sprawling modern town of Ulundi laps about its site ever more densely, and the airport is only five kilometres away to the west. But in 1873 there was little to distract the eye other than grazing herds of royal cattle and a further eight, somewhat smaller amakhanda erected in the vicinity of oNdini. Just southwest across the White Mfolozi eight more amakhanda were clustered in the emaKhosini valley, or the ‘Valley of the Kings’. This was hallowed ground reserved for royal homesteads (imizi) and amakhanda because it was the sacred burial place for Zulu, Ntombela, Phunga, Mageba, Ndaba, Jama and Senzangakhona, the semi-legendary amakhosi (chiefs) of the petty Zulu chiefdom who were the ancestors of King Shaka, the founder of the Zulu kingdom.

The layout of oNdini was identical in almost every particular except its mammoth scale to that of the other amakhanda in the emaKhosini valley and the Mahlabathini plain, as well as a further ten amakhanda positioned across the kingdom as regional centres of royal authority and as the mobilisation points for the age-grade regiments of warriors, or amabutho. At the top of the ikhanda and directly opposite the main gate across the open parade ground was the royal enclosure, or isigodlo, which was divided into two sections of about 50 huts in all. In the central, ‘black’ section were the king’s private sleeping hut and his large council hut. Exceptionally, Cetshwayo had also built a rectangular, four-roomed house of European design where he held audiences. More traditionally, the ‘black’ enclosure also contained the huts of his wives, or amakhosikazi, as well as those of his favoured umndlunkulu, or maids of honour, who had been given to him as tribute. They cooked for and waited on him and the amakhosikazi, and served him as concubines. The two ‘white’ sections on either side accommodated his deceased father King Mpande’s widows and other miscellaneous female relations of the royal house, royal children, those umndlunkulu who had not drawn his fancy, and the izigqila. These last-mentioned were women who had been captured in war or were the wives or daughters of men the king had executed. Not only were they obliged to be at the sexual disposal of men of the royal house, but they also performed all the menial domestic chores in the isigodlo. Their days were filled cultivating the gardens, fetching water, gathering firewood, cooking food and waiting on the women of high status whose clay chamber pots they emptied.

Two enormous izinhlangothi, or wings of huts, three or more rows deep, sprung out from either side of the isigodlo and swept around the great parade ground. There several thousand amabutho (in the sense of warriors or members of age-grade regiments) were quartered when they rotated in and out to serve their king. A number of cattle enclosures were built in the parade ground against the inner palisade of reeds and grasses that fenced off the warriors’ huts. Directly in front of the isigodlo at the top end of the parade ground was the isibaya, the special cattle enclosure sacred to the king. There Cetshwayo and the members of his inner royal council (umkhandlu) would discuss matters of state and he would pass judgment on wrongdoers. It was also the place where he would perform the religious rituals required of the monarch, sacrifice cattle to propitiate the royal amadlozi, or shades of the ancestors, and officiate over the great national ceremonies.

The ikhanda’s name, oNdini, derived from the Zulu word for a rim, as of a bowl, and was an alternative name for the mighty range of the Drakensberg – the beetling eastern escarpment of the high South African central plateau – which the Zulu also called the uKhahlamba, or ‘Barrier of Spears’. The connotations were therefore an assertion of the place’s impenetrability. Unfortunately, this proved to be misleading. When the British invaded the Zulu kingdom in 1879, the final battle of the Anglo-Zulu War was fought on 4 July in the Mahlabathini plain. Once they had routed the Zulu army, British mounted units set all the amakhanda in the plain ablaze as they moved from hut to hut with flaming torches of grass. ONdini itself made an enormous bonfire that smouldered for four days. For the Zulu looking down from the surrounding hills at the great columns of smoke, it was a clear sign that their kingdom had fallen.

The site of oNdini was abandoned, but not forgotten. In 1906 the Mahlabathini plain was thrown open to white occupation,4 and in the course of the 20th century farmers ploughed over much of the remains of the izinhlangothi, the great wings of warrior huts. But agriculture left the isigodlo untouched. There the circular floors of the huts, made of a mixture of the earth from ant-heaps compressed with cow dung, and polished to a blackish dark-green, glossy smoothness, had been baked solid in the conflagration that consumed oNdini. So too had the hearths, circular cavities in the centre of the floors with raised, flattened edges. The burned wooden posts of the huts left holes in the floors indicating where they had stood.

When archaeologists began their painstaking work on the isigodlo area, accurate reconstruction of the circular, domed huts was consequently feasible. In 1981 local people were engaged to exercise their traditional hut-building skills in recreating some three dozen beehive-shaped huts over the remains of the baked floors. Thousands of curved intersecting saplings and sticks were used in the construction of each hut and were tied together with grass where they crossed, rather like compact wickerwork. A neat thatch of long, tough grass covered this framework.

And so it was that we were congregated there on 20 August 1983 to celebrate their work and to wander among the huts of the isigodlo, as King Cetshwayo himself might have done, and to crawl through the low entrance into his very own hut. It was already late in the afternoon, though, before a spine-tingling ceremony was performed in the newly fenced isibaya in front of the isigodlo, where numbers of cattle had been driven into the enclosure.

Cattle were central to traditional Zulu culture and religious ritual. In pre-colonial Zululand they were the prime indicator of wealth in a society that had few other means of accumulating it. Through the custom of ilobolo, when a man married he handed cattle over to his wife’s family to formalise the compact and to compensate them for the loss of the young woman’s labour. The Zulu language contains hundreds of cattle terms by which to identify the distinctive shapes of horns, the presence or absence of a hump, and the numerous different colours and patterns. Favourite cattle had praise-names and were even trained to respond to whistled commands. Iron Age Bantu-speakers migrating southwards through Africa had introduced domestic cattle into southern Africa about two thousand years before, and Nguni cattle, with their spreading horns and multicoloured skins, were the favoured indigenous strain in the Zulu country. Most prized was a beast with a milky-white hide and distinctive dark muzzle, nose, ears and hooves known as inyonikayiphumuli, ‘the bird that never rests’. Before the British conquest in 1879, all cattle born of this colour were the property of the king, but with Cetshwayo’s defeat the British seized his herd of white cattle as booty. A small number survived nevertheless, and in 1983 a viable breeding herd had recently been re-established to take their place in the reconstructed isibaya at oNdini.

It is believed that cattle found in the realm of the amadlozi are white, and this association enhances...