The Covenant (82 page)

For example, in the great battle against the Mabuwane he was outraged, even though it was judged that he had been the foremost warrior. What happened was a standard battle, which, in Nxumalo’s opinion, the iziCwe regiment had dominated.

Four hundred of Dingiswayo’s troops marched north in noisy stages, announcing at every stop that they were about to engage the Mabuwane. Two hundred women, children and old men trailed behind, throwing a cloud of dust that could be seen for seven miles. In the meantime, the Mabuwane, who had known for two weeks that a battle was to be fought, had been scouting not the enemy, whose dispositions they always knew, but for a suitable spot on which to fight. One of the major considerations was that on the Mabuwane side at least, and on both sides if at all possible, there be commodious hills from which the audience could watch, and a comfortable and level place on which to place the chief’s chair as he followed the ebb and flow of the battle.

The Mabuwane did their job well, and an ideal battleground was selected, a kind of pleasant amphitheater with exactly the kind of sloping sides the spectators preferred. When the two armies lined up, there were dances, formations, shouted insults and a good deal of foot-stamping. Then from each side four men moved forward, brandishing their shields and shouting fresh insults. The mothers of the opposing warriors were excoriated, the condition of their cattle, the poor quality of their food, and their known history for cowardice.

Each warrior carried three assegais, and at maximum distance each threw one that came so far in such good light that the big shields had ample time to deflect them. Unfortunately, one of the Mabuwane warriors shunted a spear aimed at him right onto the foot of one of his own men. It didn’t pierce the foot, but it did bring blood, whereupon the multitude on Shaka’s side cheered wildly. Nxumalo was especially excited, dancing up and down until Shaka, standing beside him, grasped his arm in a terrible grip. “Stop that! This isn’t warfare.”

Then, from a distance almost as great as the first, a second flight of assegais was released, again with no consequences. At this point it was obligatory for the four warriors on each side to run forward and to throw their last spears from a distance of about twenty-five feet. Again they could be fended off easily.

Now the main bodies of the two armies were required to mingle; however, they did so under carefully understood rules: vast flights of assegais, thrown from far distances so they could be easily deflected, and when both armies were thus disarmed, a fragmentary melee without weapons in which one side pushed a little harder than the other and took a few captives. The observers could readily see which side had won, and when this was determined the other side fled, leaving its cattle to be captured and a few women to be taken home by the victors. Of course, in the scuffling some warriors were injured, and now and then some inept fighter would be killed, but in general the casualties were minimal.

A convenient feature of such a battle was that when it ended, each side could pick up about as many assegais as it had carried at the beginning, but of course they were not the same ones.

Disgraceful! Shaka brooded. This is no way to fight. Imagine! And he kicked his right foot in the air, sending his cowhide sandals in a wide arc: Men fighting in sandals. It slows them down. They can’t maneuver. And it was after this fight that he began running up and down hills barefooted, until his feet were tougher than sandals and his breath inexhaustible. He also required Nxumalo to stand in the sun hour after hour, holding a big shield in his left hand, an assegai in his right.

Forty times, fifty Shaka told Nxumalo, “I am your enemy. You must kill me.” And with a wild leap Shaka sprang forward, bringing the left edge of his shield far to his right. When Nxumalo tried to throw his assegai, as warrors were supposed to do, Shaka suddenly
swept his own shield-edge brutally to the left, hooked Nxumalo’s shield and half-spun him around so that the entire left side of his body stood exposed. With one swift lunge, Shaka thrust his spear at Nxumalo’s heart, halting it inches from the skin.

“That’s the way to kill,” he cried. “In close.”

One afternoon, when he had slain Nxumalo many times, he took his own assegai and in a rage broke the shaft, kicking the halves in the dust. “Spears are not the weapons for a fight. We need stabbers.” And in fury he grabbed Nxumalo’s spear and shattered it, too.

“What’s the matter?” Nxumalo asked.

“So stupid!” Shaka cried, kicking at the spears. “Two armies approach, like this. You throw your first spear. I throw mine. Second spear. Third spear. Then when we have no weapons we rush at each other. It’s madness.”

Retrieving only the metal points of the two spears, he went with Nxumalo to the best iron forger along the river and asked him whether he could combine these two points into one—a massive, heavy, blunt stabbing sword. The artisan said that might be possible, but where would Shaka find a haft heavy enough for such a spear.

“It’s no longer a spear,” Shaka said. “It’s something quite different.” And he worked with all the blacksmiths, trying to find the man who could make the terrible weapon he visualized.

In these days, when the two were still living in mutual exile, Nxumalo noticed several unusual aspects of his friend’s behavior, and once when they talked idly of their possible futures in this alien chiefdom, where warriors were respected but where real warfare was unknown, Nxumalo was goaded into telling Shaka of those obvious curiosities.

“For one thing, you cleanse yourself more than anyone I’ve ever known. Always under the bowl of thrown water.”

“I like to be clean.”

“I think you like to stand naked before the others. To show them that your penis is now big, like theirs.” Shaka frowned, but said nothing. “And with girls, you’re not like the rest of us. You often avoid the pleasures of the road.”

This was a lovely euphemism for one of the most gracious of the local customs. Since among these clans premarital intercourse was severely forbidden, the habit had evolved of “taking the pleasures of the road,” meaning that youngsters were permitted to reach out for a likely love and take her into the bushes for any imaginable kind of
frolic so long as pregnancy did not result. The men in the iziCwe were notorious for their gentle debauches, and none enjoyed them more than Nxumalo, but he had noticed that Shaka was indifferent to this love-play.

“No,” Shaka said reflectively on this particular day, “I am destined to be a king. And it’s perilous for a king to have children. They fight for his throne. When he grows old they kill him.” He was in his mid-twenties when he said this, and so far as Nxumalo could remember—and he knew this moody warrior better than anyone else—Shaka had never once boasted of his sexual exploits as other young men did. Nxumalo suspected that his friend had never lain with a woman, even though he was six foot three, with no fat about his middle, and the target of many eyes.

“When it’s time to marry,” Nxumalo predicted, “watch out! You’ll be the first.”

“No,” Shaka said quietly. “For me no children.”

“We’ll see,” Nxumalo said, whereupon Shaka gripped him by the shoulder: “You say I lie?”

“Oh, no,” Nxumalo replied, brushing his hand away. “But you love women more than any man I’ve ever known. Your mother.”

In a rage so violent that the grass trembled, Shaka leaped up, sought madly for a stone, and would have crushed Nxumalo’s head had not the latter slithered away like a frightened snake.

“Shaka!” he cried from behind a tree. “Put that down!”

For several moments the warrior stood there, gripping the stone till his dark hands showed pale at the knuckles.

As the routine of army life absorbed them, disclosing no alternatives for the years that loomed, Nxumalo saw with some anxiety that his friend was becoming almost suicidal, dreaming hopelessly of goals he could never attain, and he felt that he must help him assuage this corrosive bitterness: “When you said, ‘One day I’ll be chief’—of what? There’s no chance here. There’s no chance of returning to the Langeni.”

“Oh! Wait!” Shaka said with fiery determination. “One day I will return to the Langeni. There are men there I want to see again.” And he began to recite the names of the boys who had tormented him in the pastures: “Nzobo, Mpepha, Mqalane.”

“You want to become chief of the Langeni?”

“Chief of them?” He laughed, and began to stride back and forth. “I want to be king of a real tribe. And with my men to march upon the Langeni. And ask them about their laughter.” Suddenly he changed completely and asked Nxumalo, “Wouldn’t you like to go back and be chief of the Sixolobo?”

“I don’t even remember them.”

“Don’t you want to meet the men who killed your father?”

“I wouldn’t know them. My father broke a rule. He was executed.”

“But if we could take the iziCwe and march into Langeni land one year, then Sixolobo the next …” His big hands had their fingers extended and slowly he brought them together. “There’s only one clan I want to lead,” Shaka said. “The Zulu.”

Nxumalo grew grave: “You must forget the Zulu. They banished you. Your father hasn’t seen you in years, and he has many other sons. What are the Zulu but a tiny flea compared to this clan?”

“But if I were King of the Zulu …” He hesitated, reluctant to share his aspirations. Lamely he concluded: “The Zulu are real men. By the end of the first day they’d understand my dreams.”

In 1815 he revealed his vision of what warfare in his territory was to become. It was an engagement with the Butelezi, and everyone else supposed it was to be an ordinary confrontation, with the two chiefs seated in their chairs as thousands applauded the desultory skirmishing, but when the ground was selected and everyone was in place, a single Butelezi warrior stepped forward with mocking, insolent gestures. From Dingiswayo’s ranks a tall man, lean as lion sinew, dashed barefooted at the enemy, hooked his shield deftly into his opponent’s, twirled him about like a top, and plunged his short, terrible assegai into the heart.

Then, with a wild yell, he bounded toward the front ranks of the Butelezi, a signal for the rest of the iziCwe to swarm upon the amazed enemy and slay them.

Fifty enemy dead. Kraals burned. Nearly a thousand cattle led home in triumph. More than a dozen women captured. There had never before been a battle like this, and there would never again be a battle in the old style.

As a consequence of this stunning victory, Shaka gained Dingiswayo’s favorable attention and was promoted rapidly to regimental commander, a post of honor which he should have held in quiet distinction for the remainder of his life. But such limited achievement
was not what Shaka had in mind, not at all. At night he whispered to Nxumalo, “This Dingiswayo goes to battle as if it were a game. He returns cattle to the vanquished. Leaves them their women.” In the darkness Nxumalo could hear him gritting his teeth. “This isn’t war. This is the quarreling of children.”

“What would you do?”

“I will bring war to the world. Real war.”

In 1816, when Reverend Hilary Saltwood, many miles to the southwest, was teaching the little Madagascan girl Emma the geography of Europe, Shaka’s father, chief of the Zulu, died, and after an obliging assassin had removed the son intended for the succession, Shaka at last seized command of the clan, one of the smallest, with a total population of only thirteen hundred and an army, if all the able-bodied were mustered, of three hundred, plus two hundred novices.

It was a clan of little distinction, smaller than either the Sixolobo or the Langeni; it had no special history, had expanded its lands not at all during the preceding hundred years, and had provided no regional leadership except Shaka’s promotion to command of the iziCwe. Normally the Zulu would have remained of these dimensions, crouched along one of the better reaches of the Umfolozi River.

But when Shaka assumed command, he moved in with an iziCwe regiment to support his takeover, and one of the first things he did was to require that every Zulu soldier throw away his three long-shafted assegais and replace them with one short stabbing weapon. He then increased the height and width of their shields, until a standing man, with knees only slightly bent, could hide his whole body behind two layers of rock-hard cowhide. But in some ways the most important thing he taught was how to dance.

First he appointed a knobkerrie team of six, choosing the tallest, strongest and most brutal men from his new recruits. Brandishing their clubs, they would stand behind him at all future public functions, awaiting his instructions. Then he assembled his Zulu regiment at the edge of a flat piece of ground well covered with three-pronged thorns. When they stood at attention in the moonlight he stepped before them, barefooted as always.

“My warriors,” he said quietly. “Four times I have told you that if you want to be the greatest regiment along the Umfolozi, you have got to fight barefooted. And four times you have returned to your
sandals. Now take them off. Throw them in a pile. And never let me see them again.”

When the recruits stood barefooted before him, he said, in the same low voice, “Now, my warriors, we’re going to dance.” And he led them onto the thorn-studded land and began a slow dance, accompanied by a chant they knew well. “Sing, my warriors!” he cried, and as the rhythms began to throb, he danced upon the projections, which caused him no trouble, for he had made his feet tougher than leather. But for his soldiers those first tentative steps were agony, and some began to falter from a pain greater than they could bear.

Now came Shaka’s first lesson to his Zulu. Watching hawklike, he spotted a man whose legs simply could not force his feet down onto the piercing thorns. “That one!” Shaka cried, pointing at the soldier.

What happened next became invariable. Two of the knobkerrie team grabbed the offender from behind, pinioning him with great force. Another dropped down and grasped his ankles, spreading his legs apart. Reaching around from in back, the burliest of the gang seized the man’s chin, and with a terrible swing of his arms, twisted it halfway around till the face was looking backward. Then an equally powerful man from in front grasped the chin and continued the awful wrenching until the man’s face was again looking forward, having made a complete circle. The face looked the same, but the man was forever altered.