Shaka the Great (66 page)

Let us recite their names, those who oversaw this slow metamorphosis …

Zulu was succeeded by his son Phunga KaZulu, then came Mageba KaPhunga, then Ndaba, Jama, Senzangakhona …

And they are all buried here, each king's grave marked by a euphorbia tree.

The columns will visit each grave site in turn, where praise singers wait to regale them with tales of the king who is buried there. Then the men will move on while others take their place, in what amounts to a gigantic circular movement that will eventually bring the warriors back to where they started. A pilgrimage that is also a dance, each step measured by the rhythmic tread of marching feet that follow the lead of the praise singers and indunas. Compression and tension: being drawn into the past and then pulled back again. The whole mirroring the moon, the umuzi, the sacred cattlefold in the center of every village, the Inkatha and Shaka's ring at Gqokli Hill.

Ndlela KaSompisi regards the spectacle with distaste. If he could have done so without attracting undue attention, he would have avoided being here. It's not simply a matter of his growing dislike for the King coloring his attitude toward anything involving the King—for he might be, first and foremost, a soldier but that doesn't mean he's not practiced in the art of diplomacy, and adept at hiding his true feelings behind a mask of smug imperturbability. It's those boys … the sight of all those boys …

The concept of a guild or age-set, comprising youths born within the same period, is common among the Nguni peoples. It was Dingiswayo who started employing these groups on the field of battle as distinct units. Shaka simply took the process further, using the amabutho as the basis for a standing army, while at the same time defusing any potential threat such an army might represent to himself.

Before, the local chiefs would be responsible for sending men to serve the king when the need arose. If they were opposed to a campaign the king intended to mount, or were loath to see their own power base eroded, the chiefs would send fewer men than were actually available, claiming that's all they possessed. Even if a chief condescended to dispatch all the men he could manage, they remained loyal primarily to him. They were his men, and more likely to do his bidding than the king's.

By forming his regiments according to age rather than region, Shaka changed all this. Males born within the same four-year period are summoned to Bulawayo from across the kingdom and formed into a new fighting unit, with its own name and unique shield markings. Regional and clan loyalties are thus negated, and loyalty to the regiment itself comes to the fore.

This also enables Shaka to enlist males from conquered nations into his army. Units comprised solely of “foreigners” are notoriously unreliable, and a threat to internal stability if drawn from vassal tribes, but now, integrated according to their age, the boys are split up and mixed with Zulu youths.

While in training or on active service, the regiments are stationed at war kraals sited in areas of strategic importance or political vulnerability. Thrown together, and each of them far from home but of the same age, the young men soon refer to themselves by their regimental rather than their clan names. But traditional Zulu custom threatened this coherence. For once a man married, he was allowed to leave his regiment and return to his clan lands to establish his own homestead. This, of course, brought him back under the sway of the local chief. Shaka's solution was to withhold all permission
for his warriors to marry, while he set about consolidating his own power.

Ndlela fully understands the need for an army that won't melt away, should the enemy prove stronger than expected. But, in his eyes, whatever Shaka may have accomplished there is negated by the very presence of those younger regiments.

They should not be here!

They should not even be thinking of war!

Not allowing his older men to marry is one thing … And look, see! Hasn't he heard Mbopa will announce today that some of the regiments will be allowed to take wives? Shaka merely sent the custom the long way round the mountain to buy himself some time, and then he had it fetched and laid before the feet of his warriors as a reward for their service.

But, when it comes to the youngsters, the King has gone too far! For he has abolished the old Zulu coming-of-age ritual. Not simply moved, withheld or changed, but abolished it! Would he do away with the funeral rites and say that bodies must be simply dumped in the veld? No! That would be like telling his people to stop breathing. Look how he's now twisted the First Fruits to suit himself—but he'd never do away with the ceremony altogether. That would be unthinkable! Yet that's exactly what he's done by abolishing the coming-of-age ritual. The unthinkable.

And no one seems to have noticed, or care. Even Mnkabayi. The import is lost on her. Can't she see this is perhaps the greatest evil that Shaka has perpetrated against the tribe?

Seemingly no one can. If pushed, the sycophants clustered around the King simply mouth Shaka's own words. Service in the King's army is now the one true test of manhood, and nothing else matters!

Can't they see how that's meaningless rhetoric? And dangerous, too! Military service cannot simply be substituted for the old coming-of-age ritual! When those youngsters die in battle, they are not quite men, not quite boys, and therefore they cannot join the ancestors. Instead they're lost in a kind of limbo, each one of them alone, eternal travelers with bloody, torn feet, racked by pain and the knowledge
that they will never make it home, yet forced to keep on walking … to keep on trying.

And, yes, through Mbopa, Shaka will let it be known that he intends to allow some more of his regiments to take wives, after the First Fruits, and the men will thank him, and he will form new amabutho, calling them into being by giving the age-sets their regimental names and the shields by which they'll be identified. And these children will sing his praises, and no one will realize the great harm Shaka is doing the nation.

He has to be stopped!

Ndlela's eyes seek out the group comprising Shaka's brothers: Dingane, Mhlangana, Bakuza, Mpande, Magwaza and the others. Scuffling, fidgeting, seemingly more interested in the food and drink—or cuffing their younger brothers who serve as their udibis—than in the men down in the valley. Unseemly, disrespectful behavior!

Then Ndlela sees the Induna's former udibi approach his master; sees the Induna lead the youngster away from the gathering of dignitaries.

Something's happened.

Ndlela knows that Shaka suspects elements within his own kraal might be plotting against him, and therefore has tasked the Induna and his former udibi—the one they call Mthunzi—and a few other trustworthy men to discover if there is such a plot and, if so, to bring the conspirators before him.

Aware that Mnkabayi will want to know what the udibi is now telling the Induna, Ndlela makes his way over to the two men.

The udibi spots him first and says something to his master, who turns to greet Ndlela.

“What's the matter, Nduna?”

“A death, Master.” Mthunzi has just brought him news that a boy has been killed.

“Murdered?” interrupts Ndlela, the question directed at the udibi.

“It seems so, Master.”

“Aiee!” Ndlela turns to the Induna. “The King has asked you to be on the lookout for such incidents.”

The Induna nods.

“Then go, see what has transpired!” And, since he has already spotted eyes turning their way, Ndlela will mutter something about there having been an accident, if anyone asks him where the Induna and his shadow have gone off to.

“Who knows,” he adds, “I might not be lying. See how our regiments have to be kept separate.” In any large gathering, tempers are likely to flare. “How old was this boy?” he asks. Some fifteen summers old, replies the udibi. Well, there you go, remarks Ndlela—at the risk of sounding callous that is not too young to want to enjoy the Pleasures of the Road or get yourself into trouble in some other way.

“Now go,” he says. “See this matter resolved before any rumors spread too far and wide.”

“You didn't tell him,” observes the udibi, as they jog away.

“No, I didn't,” says the Induna.

“Neither did you …”

“You are right. I didn't mention that either.”

Grass brushing their knees, the singing fading with every pace they take.

“Might I ask why, Master?”

Ndlela's not one of those Shaka has instructed the Induna to report to, but that's not really the reason he held back.

“I'm not sure,” he tells the udibi. Then a grin. “Perhaps I hope it will turn out as Ndlela suggested—mere happenstance.”

“But—”

“I know, I know.”

They've been arriving for several days now. From all the war kraals and villages across the land they come: men, women and children, bringing cattle and other provisions. Only the frontier amabutho are manned, as regiments stream in from the north and south, the east and west. Scarred veterans whose necklaces bear the relics of many battlefields, eager young cadets in age-sets that have yet to be named and turned into regiments by Shaka.

And there's a frenzy of building beyond the capital's outer palisade. The regiments are here in full force, and the areas allotted to them within the city aren't big enough. As a result they'll be billeted in temporary camps in different locations around Bulawayo. Then there are all their families to be accommodated. These additional campsites are positioned between the outer ring formed by the regiments and the city itself.

Almost overnight it's as if the capital doubles in size, expanding outward in concentric circles.

And still they keep coming, bringing with them cattle and dust.

“Speak up! Make sense!”

“I-I am sorry, Nduna,” stammers Jembuluka, the Skin Man, as they stop outside one of the temporary huts set away from the sector specially assigned to Ntokozo's clan—for, even though he is now dead, his family will continue to benefit from his standing for a while longer. “It's just that this—seeing what he did—has affected him badly, and his mother fears he may have been bewitched.”

For this reason Jembuluka is happy to allow the boy to be sequestered here, away from the rest of the family, and watched over by Fasimbas.

“What of the inyangas who have been treating him?” asks the Induna.

“Their muthi has made him less agitated and he is sleeping more, but …” Jembuluka shrugs. It seems Vuyile still spends most of his waking hours staring into space. “And I dare not summon a sangoma, Nduna. For obvious reasons.”

The Induna nods, and points. “That one!”

At the udibi's signal, one of the sentries chases after the man walking away from the hut.

“It is just Gudlo,” says Jembuluka, as the soldier and his captive approach them.

After Vuyile, Gudlo is the next eldest. Dwanile is his mother, while Melekeleli is Vuyile's. He was just visiting his brother, he explains.