The diviner coughed. This was a bright boy, this Sotopo son of Makubele, grandson of Old Grandmother. He knew that it was all-important how a young manhood-boy behaved himself during the initiation; two years ago one applicant fainted with pain, and although it was discovered that his wound had festered, that was no excuse for fainting, and he was consequently given second status, which would mar him for the rest of his life. That Sotopo should be enough concerned about his brother to offer three assegais and a cow …
‘You bring me the assegais?’ the witch doctor asked.
‘Yes, and my cow.’
‘You’re a strong boy. You’ll be a wise man one day. Leave them with me.’
‘And you will protect my brother?’
‘He will do well.’
‘And you’ll forget that my father slipped in the mud?’
‘I will forget.’
‘Diviner, we thank you. All of us thank you.’ Sotopo told no one of his clandestine visit to the witch doctor, and he was much relieved when he heard rumors from the ritual lodge that Mandiso was conducting himself especially well.
In the days that followed, Sotopo became aware that another resident of the valley was taking an unusual interest in his brother’s progress; it was Xuma, the attractive girl who lived in the kraal at the far end of the valley. She was fifteen, a year older than Sotopo, with a smiling face, supple lips, and an accumulation of ear bangles, beads and ankle charms that made her approach a musical interlude. Sotopo had known Xuma all his life and liked her better than any other girl, even though she was older than he and in some ways stronger, and it pleased him that this lively girl, above all others, had focused her attention on Mandiso.
‘How do they say, about the lodge?’ she asked as she came easily down the path to Sotopo’s kraal.
‘They say well. He’s strong, Xuma.’
‘I know.’
It was permissible, in Xhosa custom, for boys who were not yet men to play at night with girls past puberty, always mindful that there must not be any babies, and Sotopo was aware that Xuma had begun to go into the veld with his brother, even spending nights with him, so he was not surprised that she should now be inquiring after him, and he was pleased. Because he loved his brother, and cherished the long exploring trip they had taken together, he looked forward to the day when Mandiso would be chief of the clan and he the assistant.
His family lived in a collection of huts, seven of them, scattered about the kraal in which the cattle were kept. They were dome-shaped, formed by rows of saplings implanted in a circular pattern, bent inward and bound together, then thickly thatched. The huts were handsome of themselves, and when seen against the rolling hills, formed pleasing patterns.
Xuma, honored to become part of this family, volunteered to help collect thatch for replenishing the huts, and often she went down to the river with her shell knife to cut rushes. Sotopo went with her, to help carry the large, but light, bundles homeward, and on one trip Xuma confided that her father had fallen into trouble with the witch doctor and had been forced to pay him excessive gifts.
‘That’s troublesome,’ Sotopo said, not revealing that he, too, had had a minor confrontation with the powerful diviner.
‘I don’t know what Father did that was wrong,’ Xuma said. ‘He isn’t a man who angers anyone easily, but the witch doctor was most angry.’
It was like that among the Xhosa. As a nation, the tribes were a gentle people, eschewing vast armies for war against their neighbors, but there were clashes with the Hottentots. Some of the conquered little people allied themselves with the Xhosa, intermarrying and occasionally even attaining power within the hierarchy. This interaction with the Hottentots continued through many centuries, and one of the lasting legacies was a unique language: from the Hottentots, the Xhosa borrowed the click sounds, and these distinguished their speech from that of the other southern black tribes.
Although they did not war on the grand scale, no Xhosa warrior ever hesitated to snatch up his assegais if his cattle had to be defended, or if he saw a good chance to capture his neighbor’s. Cattle raiding was the national pastime; success conferred distinction, for cattle were in many ways more important than babies. Everything depended upon them: a man’s reputation derived from the number of cattle he held; the kind of bride a young man could aspire to was determined by how many cattle he could bring as lobola to the girl’s parents; and the good name of a kraal like Sotopo’s sprang almost entirely from the number of cows and oxen and bulls it possessed. The cattle did not have to be good beasts, nor produce copious milk, nor excellent eating meat; there was no merit in having a prepotent bull which threw fine animals. Only numbers counted, which meant that year by year the quality of the great herds deteriorated, with five thousand beasts needed to perform the functions that nine hundred really good animals could have fulfilled.
So although the Xhosa lived without fear of warfare, they lived in dreadful fear of what might happen to their scrawny cattle, and it was the diviner who established and policed the intricate rules for the preservation of the herd. For example, during her entire lifetime no Xhosa woman could ever approach or lay her hand upon the rocks which enclosed the kraal, and if any dared to enter the sacred area, she would be punished. A boy set to tending his family’s cattle as they roamed had better come home with every calf, or his punishment would be savage. There was a time to perform every function connected with cattle, a proper way to handle them. No boy dared milk a cow, and for a girl to do so was a grave offense; of course, in special circumstances, when no adult males were available, a daughter was permitted to milk a cow, but she was forbidden to touch the milk sac itself. Every act of life, it seemed, was circumscribed by rules, and Xuma’s father had broken one of them. He was, as Xuma intimated to Sotopo, in deep trouble.
But this was forgotten as the time approached when the nine manhood-boys in the lodge reached the end of their confinement, and now a sad thing happened: Sotopo, who had been so close to his brother, became aware that henceforth a gulf would exist between them. Sotopo was still a boy; Mandiso was a man, and his allegiance to the eight others who had undergone the ordeal with him would always be much stronger than his friendship for his own brother, who had not, and it was with sorrow that the boy watched the emergence of the man.
The lectures on manhood delivered by the headman and the guardian were now ended. The intricate rituals, the secrets of the tribe had been shared, and the time for burning down the lodge and all its pains was at hand. But first the nine new men must go to the river in sight of the entire community and cleanse themselves of the white clay that had marked them for the past hundred days. In stately procession, naked, with the mark of their circumcision plain for all to see, the new-men marched to the river, immersed themselves, and spent hours trying to clean away the adhesive mud. When they emerged, their bodies, long protected from the sun, were lean and pale. Anointed with butter and red-earth, they glimmered in the unaccustomed light; never again in their lives would they appear so manly, so promising of noble conduct.
Then came the celebration! Dried gourds, their seeds intact, were rattled in fine rhythms. Musical instruments, consisting of a single cord of cured gut tied tight between the ends of a bowed piece of wood, were plucked, the musician keeping one end of the wood between his teeth, and altering the sound by altering the movements of his mouth. Old women held two sticks, beating them together, and young men who had completed their ritual three or four years before dressed themselves in wild costumes of feather, rush and reed, ready to dance till they collapsed in exhaustion.
Before the manhood-boys were free to join the celebration, their guardian lighted a brand, carried it solemnly to the ceremonial lodge and set it ablaze. Now the nine inductees rushed from their place of seclusion for the last time, dressed in gaudy costumes topped by their elongated hats, which they still wore horizontally. Turning their backs to the blazing lodge, they kept their eyes rigidly forward as they walked away, for if they dare
d look back, evil spirits would doom them.
Free of the lodge, they became like wild men as they joined their exultant families and friends, cavorting without rule and leaping into the air as if to challenge the fire-bird himself. Then slowly order began to take over, the clapping of hands assumed a stately rhythm, and all associated with the ceremony leaned forward to see which new-man among the nine would step forward as spokesman for the group.
It was Mandiso, and at this moment of honor Sotopo gave a cry of joy and nodded to the diviner, who did not nod back.
‘Today we are men,’ Mandiso said, and with these words he began the great dance of the Xhosa, keeping his feet planted on the ground but gyrating all parts of his body as if each were a separate entity. He was especially adroit at sending his belly in one direction, his buttocks in another, and at the moment when he did this to perfection, the other eight new-men leaped in the air, tore about the dancing ground and settled into their version of this dance, so that the entire area was filled with wildly twisting bodies, cries, and the rumble of approval.
The feasting lasted two days. At times both the young men and the spectators collapsed in exhaustion, slept in a kind of daze, awakened, drank large draughts of mealie-beer, and with fresh shouting and renewed vigor, resumed the dance. Dust rose from the kraals; soot from the burned shack was scattered joyously; Sotopo, numb with pride because of his brother’s outstanding performance, watched the proceedings from the edge of the crowd and observed how carefully Xuma followed the dancers, never participating herself but applauding quietly whenever Mandiso performed his solos.
When Mandiso returned to the family kraal, the first thing he did was to ask Sotopo’s help in laying out the floor for a new hut; it was not as big as his father’s, nor would it be as tall; it was a hut for two people, not ten.
‘You can attend the ant hills,’ the new-man told his brother, and Sotopo was delighted to be given this honor. Taking a large basket, he circulated among some fifteen large ant hills, scooping up excess earth in which the ants had deposited their larvae, dead bodies and bits of their saliva. This fine, granular earth, when spread in a thick layer and watered down and allowed to bake in the sun, formed a substance harder than most stone, and when polished with cow manure, made the best possible base for a hut. Sotopo, guessing that he was building for Xuma, made a floor that would last a generation.
The young women of the family had to gather the saplings for the walls, but when it came to the thatching, that all-important part, Old Grandmother herself wanted to go down to the fields and cut the grass, and although she was too weak to gather all that would be required, she did deliver the first bundles and then stood noisily directing the design of the lovely, rounded finish.
It was a jewel of a hut, and now Mandiso was eligible to visit Xuma’s parents, but on the eve of doing so, the most disturbing word reached Sotopo via one of his playmates: ‘A sorcerer has placed a curse on Xuma’s father.’ This could be such a fatal impediment to any union of the two families that Sotopo borrowed two of his brother’s best assegais and a goat and went directly to the witch doctor, hailing him from a distance: ‘All-powerful One! May I approach?’
‘Come’ echoed the mournful voice.
‘I seek counsel.’
‘I see that this time you bring only two assegais.’
‘But they are better, All-powerful.’
‘And a cow?’
‘The boy is holding a goat outside.’
‘What is the question?’
‘Will my brother marry Xuma?’
There was a long silence, perhaps five minutes, during which the old man carefully weighed the complex problems raised by this inquiry. Sotopo’s family was one of the most powerful in the valley and could be expected, in the years to come, to provide both leadership and wealth; it would not be wise to affront them. But on the other hand, Xuma’s family had long been troublesome and there was good cause to believe that the last flight of the fire-bird had been evoked by malperformances on the father’s part. Twice the witch doctor had warned the man, and twice the injunctions had been ignored. Now he was under a curse, and it seemed highly improbable that he would ever be allowed to escape from it, for it was the duty of a diviner to police the health of his clan, to remove all forces that might work against central authority, and Xuma’s father was an irritation.
But what to say about this proposed marriage? And the more the old man pondered this difficult question, the angrier he became at this boy Sotopo who had raised it. Why had he dared to come with such an impertinent question? Why had he stepped forth as champion of the girl Xuma, which was clearly his intention in this affair? Damn him. Sotopo, son of Makubele, a boy to be marked for remembrance.
The old man temporized: ‘I suppose that Xuma herself has had no part in her father’s misbehavior. I suppose a marriage could go forward.’
‘Oh, thank you!’ Sotopo cried, but after he had surrendered the two assegais and the goat and had gone running down the footpath, the diviner stared after him, mumbling, ‘Two assegais, not three. A goat, and not one of the best. Damn that boy!’
The wedding ceremonies covered eleven days, and in certain respects they were a triumph for Mandiso, since he got himself a strong, beautiful and darling wife; but in another way they were a disaster, for through her he acquired the enmity of the diviner. As to the wedding itself, there was a good deal of marching back and forth between Mandiso’s kraal and Xuma’s: he had to take a heifer there as proof of his good intentions; she had to bring rushes here as an indication of her willingness to work; he had to go there in his finest ornaments to dance before her family and break two saplings across his knee, thus pledging that he would never beat his wife; she had to come and dance before his cattle kraal to show that she revered the cows and would show them the respect they merited. And through it all, the old witch doctor watched sardonically, aware that no matter what rituals they observed, nothing good could come of this marriage. It was doomed.
But he did not interfere, and even officiated in certain of the hallowed rites, going so far as to protect the new hut against evil. He did this for good reason: he suspected that within a year Mandiso and Xuma would flee the place, after which he could see that one of his nephews gained possession.
To that end, as soon as the young couple moved into the handsome hut, he began asking questions through the community, never directing them at Mandiso, but always at Xuma’s father: ‘Who do you think it was that caused the fire-bird to fly?’ and ‘Have you noticed how the mealies at his kraal have grown bigger than any others? Could he be casting spells?’
Week after week these poisonous suspicions were broadcast, never a substantiated charge, only the nagging questions: ‘Have you seen how Xuma’s cattle become pregnant so quickly? Could her father be weaving a spell there, too?’ The assumption in this question was most effective; that her father was casting a spell over the new hut was problematic, but that he had done so at his own was accepted: ‘He’s bringing this valley into sore trouble.’
During this time Sotopo was preoccupied with the last days of boyhood. Having seen his older brother through the twin ordeals of circumcision and marriage, he returned to those things that gave his own life significance. Beyond the family kraal, at the edge of the river, there was a level place where in the morning the wagtails danced, those delicate little gray-brown birds that bobbed their tail feathers up and down as they paraded. They loved insects, and darted their long bills this way and that, plucking them off dead leaves.
They were the good-omen birds, the ones that made a kraal a place of joy, and Sotopo had always found delight in being with them, he on a log, they on some rock at the edge of the river; he sprawled out on the ground, they dancing back and forth oblivious of him, for they seemed to know that they were protected: ‘No one but a man near death from frenzy would disturb a wagtail, for they bring us love.’
He also felt increasingly attached to Old Grandmother, as if, like Mandiso,
he must soon move away from her influence. He stayed with her about the house, watching as she prepared the dish he liked the most: mealies well pounded in the stump of a tree, then mixed with pumpkin, baked with shreds of antelope meat, and flavored with the herbs which only she knew how to gather.
‘Tell me again,’ she said as she worked. ‘When you ran away from us, you say you met two boys, one brown, one white?’ When her grandson nodded, she asked, ‘You say one spoke like us? The other didn’t? How could that be?’
She had a dozen questions about this meeting; the men in the family had listened to the story, nodded sagely and forgotten the matter, but not Old Grandmother: ‘Tell me again, the brown one was small and old, the white one was young and big. That goes against the rule of nature.’
But when he explained, with increasing detail, for he enjoyed talking with the old woman, she told him what he had heard many times before: ‘I didn’t see it myself, because it happened before I was born. But men like that boy came to our shore once in a house that floated on the waves, but they died like ordinary men.’ It was her opinion that what the white-skinned boy had said was probably true: ‘I think there are other people hiding across the river. I don’t think I’ll ever see them, but you will, Sotopo. When you marry and have your own hut and move to the west …’
At this point she would always stop what she was doing and ask her grandson, ‘Sotopo, who are you going to marry?’ And he would blush beneath his dark skin because he had not yet addressed this problem.
But one day he did ask the question whose answer could reveal the dangers that lay ahead: ‘Old Grandmother, why do you always say that when I take a wife, we’ll move across the river?’
‘Ah-hah!’ she cackled. ‘Now we’re ready to talk.’ And she sat with him and said, ‘Can’t you see that the witch doctor is determined to drive Xuma’s father out of the valley? And that when he goes, Mandiso will surely go with him? And that when Mandiso and Xuma flee, you’ll join them?’