The Covenant (86 page)

By now a set of daring British traders had settled on the coast well to the south of Zululand, and among them was a tough, ingratiating Irish-Englishman named Henry Francis Fynn, a man whose personal courage equaled his brazen ingenuity. He introduced Shaka to Western ways, instructed him regarding the powers of the English king, and doctored his sick followers in the kraals. The extraordinary details of Shaka’s final years might never have been known to the world at large had it not been for the recollections of Fynn, and the colorful journal of an imaginative eighteen-year-old, Nathaniel Isaacs, who had also made his way into the area.

No one will ever know what really went on in the minds of these traders as they observed customs and ancient traditions so utterly alien; their remembered response was clear, though, and in their writings they created the portrait of Shaka, the monster, driven by an unconquerable lust for slaughter:

Confronted by such a horror, Fynn, Isaacs and the other Europeans who joined them were nevertheless to stay in Shaka’s domain up to
four years, unharmed, desperately trying to make money, and conniving constantly to have the British Colonial Office bail them out.

If Fynn and Isaacs were horrified by Shaka’s killings, he was appalled to learn that the British imprisoned their offenders: “Nothing could be more cruel than to keep a man lingering, when one swift blow would free him forever.”

But Fynn was a clever man, seeking any chance to gain the approval of the Zulu ruler, and after studying the man, he came up with a brilliant approach: a promise of liquid which prevented hair from turning gray.

“Yes,” said Fynn, “you rub this magic liquid in your hair, and it never becomes white.”

“Immortality!” Shaka cried, demanding to know what this elixir was called.

“Rowland’s Macassar Oil,” Fynn said.

“Have you any?”

“No, but a year from now, when the trading ship comes in …”

It was a year of anxiety. To all parts of his realm Shaka sent messengers seeking to learn if anyone had Rowland’s Macassar Oil, and his tragic countenance when none was produced alerted Nxumalo to the king’s confused state of mind: “If I could live another twenty years … forty … I could have all the land ever seen under my control. Nxumalo, we must find the oil that prevents a man from growing old.”

“Do you really think there is such a thing?”

“Yes. The white men know of it. That’s why they have guns and horses. The oil!”

When the oil did not arrive and gray hairs multiplied, Shaka had to face the problem of a successor. He was only forty, with death far off, but as he said to Nxumalo, “Look at my mother, how she fades. I don’t want the magic oil for myself. I want it to save her life.”

“She’s old—” Nxumalo started to say, hoping to prepare the king for his mother’s eventual death, but Shaka would hear no such words.

In terrible rage he shouted at his aide, “Go—leave me! You spoke against the Female Elephant! I’ll kill you with my own hands.”

But two days later Nxumalo was summoned back: “Trusted friend, no man can rule forever.” As Shaka uttered these bitter words tears filled his eyes and he sat with his shoulders heaving, finally regaining enough control to add, “If you and I could have another
twenty years, we’d bring order to all the lands. We’d even bring the Xhosa into our fold.” With bitter regret he shook his head, then seemed to discharge his apprehensions: “Nxumalo, you must go north again. Find Mzilikazi.”

“My King, I’ve seen your hatred for this traitor who stole your cattle.”

“It is so, Nxumalo, but you will take ten men and find him. Bring him to me. For if he rules the north and I the south, together we can protect this land from strangers.”

“What strangers?”

“Strangers will always come,” Shaka said.

Nxumalo’s secret mission involved a long trip into land that no Zulu had ever entered, but they were guided toward Mzilikazi by the battered clans who trembled in the wake of the fleeing Kumalo commander, and at the end of a most tiring journey the kraal was located, and in it waited not a regimental commander but a self-proclaimed king.

“King of what?” Nxumalo asked.

“King-of-All-He-Will-See. Is that not enough?”

Nxumalo looked at the eyes still hooded, the face still handsome and delicately brown, but it was the voice that haunted—soft, whispery, extremely gentle, like the man himself: “Why should Shaka invite me, an enemy, to his kraal?”

“Because he needs you. He knows you are the greatest king in the north, as he is in the south.”

“If I stay here, I’m safe. If I go there …” He indicated an assegai in his side.

“No, Shaka needs you.”

“But I hate battle. I want no more of killing.” He spoke with such intensity, in that silken voice, that Nxumalo had to believe him, and at the end of six days’ talking it was apparent that Mzilikazi, in many ways as able a king as Shaka, was not going to combine forces with the Zulu.

“This time, Mzilikazi, no threats from me,” Nxumalo said.

“Friends don’t threaten each other. But because I know that you will listen to my reasoning I have a gift for you. Look!” And when the lion skins decorating his kraal—an indulgence Shaka would never have permitted—were parted, there stood a lissome girl of twenty prepared to go with Nxumalo as a gift.

“Shaka will think that you gave me that present because I did not argue diligently.”

“Shaka knew I would not join the Zulu. He’ll understand the gift,” said Mzilikazi, and while Nxumalo stood next to the attractive girl he studied this strange king, so different from his own. Shaka was tall, iron-hard and lean; Mzilikazi seemed to be getting fat and soft. When Shaka spoke the earth seemed to cringe in obedience, but Mzilikazi smiled much more than he frowned and his voice never rose in anger. Furthermore, Shaka was a brilliant but violent man, somewhat distant even to his friends, while Mzilikazi was frank and open to all, a man who seemed always to do the right thing. He was much too clever to be trapped by the great King of the Zulu, and told Nxumalo, as the latter started south with his fourth bride, Nonsizi, “We shall not meet again, Nxumalo. But I shall always remember you as a man of good heart. Tell Shaka that the conversations are ended. I shall move far from his reach.”

The pudgy king was right; Nxumalo never saw him again, but remembered him often and with the warmest feelings, for he commanded respect. As Nxumalo told his new bride, “I can’t understand it. Mzilikazi started out with his people like a band of brigands on the run. Now he’s forming a kingdom.” Among the clans Mzilikazi’s followers touched in their wild movement they became known as the fugitives—the Matabele—and under that name they would flame through the generations, the tribe that outsmarted Shaka of the Zulu.

When Nxumalo crossed the Umfolozi River in the spring of 1827 he found the Zulu tense and frightened, for the Female Elephant had fallen ill, and her son was dispatching messengers to all parts of the kingdom to see if anyone had found a bottle of Rowland’s Macassar Oil which would darken her hair and prolong her life. A member of Nxumalo’s kraal, seeing the master returning with a new wife, hurried to him with a warning: “Three messengers who returned without the oil have been strangled. If you say you have none, you may be killed. So tell him immediately that you heard of a source at the north.”

“But I didn’t.”

“Nxumalo, if the Female Elephant dies, we’ll be in great trouble.”

“But why should I lie to him? He will soon learn the truth.”

The matter was solved by the grieving king: he did not ask for
Fynn’s magic liquid. What he wanted was news of Mzilikazi. “He has fled,” Nxumalo said bluntly. “He feared you as the king and knew that he could not stand against you in battle.”

“I didn’t want to fight him, Nxumalo. I wanted to enlist him as our ally.”

He had much more to say; with his mother’s illness reminding him of his own mortality, the succession to his throne was uppermost in his plans, but at midafternoon all this was swept aside when a trembling messenger came with the awful news: “The Female Elephant has died.”

“My mother? Dead?”

Shaka withdrew into his hut, and when he walked out an hour later he was in full battle dress. His circle of generals and the nation’s elders watched anxiously, but he betrayed no sign of the titanic grief welling up inside him. For half an hour the great leader rested his head on his tall oxhide shield, keeping his eyes on the ground, where his tears fell in the dust. Finally he looked up, wild-eyed, to utter one piercing scream, as if he had been mortally wounded. That scream would later echo to the farthest reaches of his kingdom.

With Nxumalo and three generals close behind, he went to his mother’s kraal, and when he saw her dead body, with one sweep of his arm he ordered every serving woman to be readied for her final journey: “You could have saved her, but you didn’t.”

When Nxumalo saw that his beloved wife Thetiwe was among those pinioned by the knobkerrie team he shouted, “Mighty King! Do not take my wife.” But Shaka merely looked at him as if he were a stranger.

“They could have saved her,” he mumbled.

“Mercy, Companion-in-the-Battles.”

With a powerful hand Shaka gripped his advisor by the throat: “Your wife cured my mother’s eye. Why could she not cure her now?” And Nxumalo had to stand silent as lovely Thetiwe was dragged away. With nine others she would share Nandi’s grave, but only after all the bones in her body were broken in such a way as to keep her skin intact, since the Female Elephant demanded perfection in her dark place.

Now word flashed along the riverbanks that Shaka’s mother was dead, and almost as if they were being driven by unseen herdsmen, the Zulu came out to mourn. Wailings pierced the air, and lamentations filled the valleys. People threw away their bead adornments and
tore their clothes, and looked askance at anyone whose eyes did not flow with tears. The world was in torment.

All the rest of that day and through the night the wailing continued until the earth itself seemed to be in anguish. Some men stood transfixed, their faces upturned, repeating over and over the shrieking dirges, and others spread dust over themselves, screaming all the while.

At noon next day, 11 October 1827, the awful thing began. It was never known exactly how it started, but one man, crazed by thirst and lack of sleep, seems to have stared at his neighbor and cried, “Look at him. He isn’t weeping,” and in a flash of hands the indifferent one was torn apart.

A man who sneezed was charged with disrespect for the great mother and was slain.

A woman coughed twice and was strangled by her own friends.

The madness spread, and whoever behaved in any conspicuous manner was set upon and killed by the mob. A woman who looked like old Nandi was accused of having stolen her countenance, and she perished. A man moaned his grief, but not loudly enough, and was clubbed.

On and on, throughout all that long afternoon, the grief-stricken citizens wailed their laments and watched their neighbors. Five hundred died near the hut of the Female Elephant. The footpaths were strewn with bodies, and as the late-afternoon sun struck the maddened faces, spies looked to see whether the eyes held tears, and if they did not, the owner was strangled: “He wasn’t weeping for the mother.” Soon a thousand lay dead, then four thousand.

In sheer exhaustion some finally had to sit down, and when they did so, they were slain for lack of veneration. Heat of day caused some to faint from lack of water, and they were stabbed with assegais as they lay. Others wandered to the Umfolozi for a drink, and as they bent to reach it they were stabbed. Two unfortunate old men with weak kidneys had to urinate and were pierced with spears for their irreverence.

Gangs raged through the area, peering into every kraal to see if any had failed to honor the dead woman, and when recalcitrants were found, the huts were set afire and the occupants roasted. A mother suckled her child, whereupon the crowd roared, “She feeds when the great mother lies dead,” and the pair were slain.

Through the day Shaka remained in the royal kraal, unaware of
the killings as he received a file of mourners who tried to console him with chants honoring the Female Elephant. Their bodies trembled with fever; they fell to the ground and tore at the earth; and each expressed an honest grief, for Nandi had indeed been the mother of the nation. Beyond the kraal the hills rang with cries, and toward sunset Shaka rose: “It is finished. The great mother has heard her children.”

When he left the kraal he saw for the first time the extent of the madness, and as he passed over bloodstained earth he muttered, barely coherently, “It is finished.” He ordered two regiments to put an end to the mass killings, but undisciplined bands now rampaged far into the countryside, acting on their own and killing anyone who showed inadequate remorse, even in distant villages where news of Nandi’s death could not have penetrated. “You should have known,” the fanatics cried as they wielded their assegais.

Shaka’s Dark Time the Zulu named these last three months of 1827, and the outside world would never have known the extent of the tragedy had not Henry Francis Fynn been visiting with Shaka on the day Nandi died. He would report seeing seven thousand dead himself, and from the distant countryside he received additional reports.

When the first spasm ended Shaka turned to the normal procedures for national mourning, and Nandi was accorded the full rites given a great chief: “For one year no man may touch a woman, and if any woman appears pregnant, having made love when my mother lay dead, she and the child and her man shall be strangled. From all the herds in this kingdom no milk shall be drunk; it shall be spilled upon the ground. No crops shall be planted. For one year a regiment shall guard her grave, twelve thousand in constant attendance.” Initial hysteria was forcefully channeled into absolute obedience, and now additional people were killed if they drank milk or lay together.