Shaka the Great (28 page)

“Your friend, my nephew, will be pleased to be back, I think.”

The warrior responded with the slow nod of a man who suspects a trader is guiding him to a bargain that will turn out to be such only for the trader, yet finds himself unable to pull himself free from those honeyed words and sweet phrases.

Mnkabayi chuckled like a benign aunt looking benevolently upon the foibles of youth. “But perhaps not so pleased as when he was sent away.”

A strange thing to say, and an odd way of putting it. Why wouldn't Dingane be happier that his “punishment” has ended prematurely?

“I'm not sure I understand, Ma,” said the warrior. “Has the prince got into, well …”

“Has he been unable to keep his pizzle where it belongs, do you mean?” Does the warrior have to ask? Chances are, there are several additional reasons why Dingane would be happy to leave his hosts so soon. “But, no,” said the queen, “that is not what I refer to.”

Then why? Dingane hadn't been able to believe his luck after his interview with Mduli. The ancestors had smiled on him, he told his friend, before whooping with triumph and relief. Making his way to the elder's house, he'd barely seemed able to walk, now he was leaping for joy. The warrior had also been stunned. Expecting the worst, he'd already gathered together supplies so that he and Dingane could flee Mduli's wrath, should the need arise.

Death was the fate that awaited any who had a dalliance with a concubine from the king's harem—with the woman in question joining her lover at the Place Of Execution. Although it was unlikely that Mduli would have countenanced such treatment for a prince, the cantankerous old bullfrog was more than capable of coming up with some punishment almost as bad. Yet, in the end, he had simply decreed that Dingane go and live with the Qwabes for an unspecified length of time.

“Will I be correct in saying my nephew was overjoyed at Mduli's leniency?” asked Mnkabayi.

“Yes, Ma.”

“Did my nephew ever stop to wonder why my uncle was so lenient?”

“No, Ma.”

Ndlela had ceased his prowling and come to stand before them, listening. After a glance at her induna, Mnkabayi asked the young warrior if he was certain of that.

A nod.

“And did my nephew ever wonder how Mduli found out that the young bull had been inside the old bull's kraal?”

“Not really, Ma. He merely assumed one of the other females had reported them.”

A look at Ndlela. “He doesn't know!”

The induna nodded.

“Is that good or bad?” murmured the queen. Then, recollecting the young warrior's presence, she placed a hand on his knee. “You are doubtless confused, so let me make things clear.”

And he must remember she is telling him these things because he is one of Dingane's closest friends.

The thing was, she said, Dingane's dalliance with the girl from his father's harem had been reported to Mduli by Sigujana.

“I suspect he was also infatuated with her. Finding himself spurned in favor of his brother, he decided that, if he couldn't have her, he was going to see to it that Dingane was punished for the very crime he also had contemplated.”

And let the girl suffer, too.

Only he had misjudged the elder's reaction.

“Mduli could not overlook the seriousness of Dingane's crime. He would never have allowed him to escape punishment totally, but he considered Sigujana's betrayal of his brother as an equally serious transgression. This was not the way the heir should act.”

Hence Mduli's leniency, which was also intended as an admonition to Sigujana.

“But there, perhaps, Mduli overestimated Sigujana's sagacity. I do not think he really understood,” said Mnkabayi. “In fact I know he did not understand, and merely felt thwarted.”

This is why Mduli has now fallen from grace, his counsel being ignored by the new king.

“And this is why your friend needs protecting,” said Mnkabayi, squeezing the Induna's leg.

Straightening again, she continued. “That Dingane doesn't even know it was Sigujana who betrayed him …” The queen shrugged. “I do not know whether that makes things simpler or more difficult. What say you?” she asked Ndlela.

“I think,” he said, “the question we should be asking ourselves is how much the king knows.”

“This is so,” murmured Mnkabayi. “What say you?” she asked the young warrior.

Flattered that his opinion was being sought, he nodded his agreement. “It is what the king thinks his brother knows that we need to find out.”

“For that will guide his hand,” added Mnkabayi.

Obviously, if Sigujana believed Dingane knew that he'd betrayed him, he'd view his brother's return with apprehension. Guilt or fear of reprisal might lead him to fabricate a reason to get the Needy One out of the way. Permanently.

“And we are surrounded,” said Mnkabayi. “In fact encircled! We must watch even our allies.” The Zulu nation could not afford a civil war.

The young warrior will do this for his friend, then. Mnkabayi will use her influence to see that he joins the new king's inner circle. “Sigujana is too callow to think he needs advisers. It's playmates and bodyguards he is on the lookout for and you will fulfill both functions, like the other sycophants he has already gathered around him.”

“A question, Ma!” interrupted Ndlela.

“Speak!”

Won't Sigujana suspect the young warrior's motives, since he knows him to be friendly with his brother?

Boozing and fornicating take up her nephew's time these days, says the queen, and if he gives the matter some thought, he'll probably be flattered and regard the warrior's defection as testament to his own charms. “And more's the pity.”

“Ma?”

“Think, young one. If he suspected your motives, that would make your task easier. Let him think you are there on Dingane's behalf and, while he asks you questions, seeking to find how much his brother knows, you will learn how much
he
knows.”

“For sometimes the questions people ask us are as important as the lies we prepare for them,” added Ndlela.

“A valuable lesson, young one. But are you willing to help Dingane in this way?” asked Mnkabayi.

“Yes, Ma.” There was no question of him refusing.

Good, said the queen. There was just one more thing: as a safeguard against Sigujana trying to punish him for being Dingane's friend by treating him as a servant, he will enter the new king's service with the rank of induna. Even Sigujana is not so foolish as to undermine the system of favoritism and patronage such ranks signify. He can afford to scorn Mduli, because the elder has never been popular; but that's as far as he will go when it comes to challenging the status quo.

At the same time, the young man must know this is not simply a matter of contingency. Instead, he is to see the rank as a further sign of the trust being placed in him.

He bowed his head. “I thank you, Ma, and I am your servant, as ever.”

“More than that,” murmured Mnkabayi. “You are more than that. I think I see in you the makings of a warrior whose brave deeds will be told around campfires long after we are all gone.”

History barely remembers Sigujana kaSenzangakhona. He becomes a king and then a murder victim, very often all in the same brief paragraph, with Shaka the carriage return that heralds a new beginning.

Even the circumstances of Sigujana's death are obscure. Since an heir who killed a king ceased to be an heir—and could not then
claim the throne—it's highly unlikely that Shaka himself steered the blade, tightened the garrote or held the royal head under water, as some sources claim. Others maintain that, as soon as he heard Senzangakhona had reneged on his promise to Dingiswayo and chosen Sigujana as his heir, Shaka sent his half-brother Ngwadi, who was Nandi's son, but not Senzangakhona's, to assassinate Sigujana. It's also alleged that Ngwadi's brief was merely to “negotiate” with Sigujana, and that the latter's obstinacy led to a quarrel while they were swimming, whereupon Ngwadi held Sigujana's head under water until the king signaled that he had come to see the validity of the emissary's arguments by dying.

However, it's surely more likely that Shaka would have entrusted the actual task of getting his brother out of the way to someone he knew he could trust unequivocally—a close friend, in other words, for the fog of war and privations shared can forge a loyalty stronger and more enduring than mere blood and the burden of kinship.

As for Sigujana himself, and the kind of man he was—perhaps what's more important is his timing.

When Sigujana came to the throne, the tribe's way of life was already changing. It may have been a quiet erosion not immediately apparent, but change was there all the same. The tree stood, but its strength was illusory, for the termites were hard at work, and had been so for some time.

The land was becoming crowded. Hemmed in, surrounded, unable to expand their territory, the Zulus had reached the point where they could only allow themselves to be assimilated. The People Of The Sky were well on their way to becoming a mere clan—a part of and no long apart from. Not that outright conquest loomed, for things weren't that simple.

Some of their immediate neighbors, like the Buthelezis, would have relished the prospect, but they were fleas caught in the same situation. Attempting a sustained campaign against their old foe would have left them too weak to consolidate any gains they might have made. (Consequently, when conflict did occur, it was kept at
the level of an occasional exchange of insults and spears, with both sides claiming victory at the end of play.)

A larger power like the Ndwandwes, meanwhile, merely saw the Zulus as a means to an end, and as bodies they had to trample over to get at Dingiswayo's Mthetwas.

In other words, even though many of the other Nguni tribes in the region were always going to be bigger, stronger and wealthier, and therefore would always treat the Zulus as vassals to be exploited, no one was actively seeking their extinction. Instead, in a trend that was no longer even noticeable as such, more and more young men and women were marrying into those neighboring tribes. In turn, that discrete grouping of people who regarded themselves purely as Zulus was shrinking.

Land inherited by daughters became the property of the tribe they had married into, while a son who had moved away to stay with his wife's people rarely returned to take possession of any land left to him by his father. You soon realized how much more comfortable life could be if you didn't live in a buffer zone between two of the biggest tribes in the region, whose kings had both sworn to destroy each other. Consequently, you spoke to your mother—and your father's other wives—and traded the family land for cattle. As was customary, the women would in turn divide their own portions of the land among their daughters, who were more and more likely to marry into another tribe …

Would this assimilation have reached its apotheosis during Sigujana's lifetime, had he been allowed to live and rule some fifty summers, say? Perhaps not, but chances are there were those alive, when he took the throne, who would one day have looked up and looked around and realized that even if they had been Zulus once, they were now something else.

Of course, Shaka's coming changed everything. Or perhaps it merely delayed the inevitable. Writing in August 1887, Theophilus Shepstone called the Zulu nation a collection of “more or less autonomous” and “more or less discontented” tribes, “a rope of sand whose only cohesive property was furnished by the presence of the
Zulu ruling family.” Then again, despite the depredations of the armies of Empire and Apartheid and the idiocies of the Cult of Mediocrity that crept in with the new millennium, the People Of The Sky are still with us, ruled by a bloodline unbroken since the days of Malandela, father of Zulu. (For which they have Mpande to thank, but that's a story for—and of—another time.)

And yet again Sigujana has slipped out of the narrative, disappeared from the discourse.

And, again, tonight.

At least, the Induna can't spot him. The new king is lost amid the dancing bodies in the darkness that the fires can't seem to push away, and amidst the dust awoken by stamping feet before. They're outside, but the closeness of everyone—and everything, because even the drums seem to be pressing in—is stultifying. And their abandon—these strong young men, all swagger and muscle and disdain, and their adoring maidens—adds to the crush, like clods of earth falling on you in an open grave in a bad dream (and you're alive and you want to tell them that, but you can't speak, you can't move, and now your mouth is full of wet sand and your arms are already covered). The booze and grass don't help, either. Hard to pick someone out of a seething mass, when your world is seesawing. Fresh air and a place to puke, that's what he needs.

His departure involves some sidling, and a certain amount of circumspection. The king has a habit of making a fuss if he spots one of his playmates endeavoring to leave the party before his royal highness himself has passed out. The ingrate is then dragged before the monarch and, depending on Sigujana's mood, his willingness to allow himself to be egged on by the snide suggestions of those who happen to be at his side, his punishment can range from being forced to drink beer until he throws up, to being sent to pull down Mduli's hut or else terrorize some other old-timer who has annoyed Sigujana.