Men of Men

  ‘A man needs that to survive in this land.’

  Robyn shivered suddenly, and hugged her own arms.

  ‘Are you cold?’ Clinton was immediately solicitous.

  ‘No. A grey goose walked over my grave.’

  ‘Let’s go off to bed.’

  ‘A moment longer, Clinton. The night is so beautiful.’

  Clinton put his arm about her shoulders.

  ‘Sometimes I am so happy that it frightens me,’ he said. ‘So much happiness cannot go on for ever.’

  His words seemed to precipitate the thick but formless dread that had hung over Robyn all this day like the pall of smoke above the winter bush fires. It weighed her down with the premonition that something had changed in all their lives.

  ‘May God save us all,’ she whispered.

  ‘Amen to that,’ said Clinton as softly, and took her in out of the night.

  The interior of the thatched hall was domed and darkened, so that the patterns of latticed branches and lovingly knotted bark rope disappeared into the gloom above their heads like the arches of a medieval cathedral.

  The only light was from the small fire on the clay hearth in the centre of the floor. One of the king’s wives threw another handful of dried herbs upon it and oily blue tendrils of smoke twisted upwards towards the unseen roof.

  Across the fire, on a low platform of dried clay covered with a thick mattress of furs, silver-backed jackal and blue monkey, bat-eared fox and spotted civet, sat the king.

  He was a mountainous figure, stark naked, and his skin polished with fat so that he gleamed like an enormous Buddha carved from a solid block of washed anthracite. His head was round as a cannon ball, surmounted by the induna’s ring. His arms were massive, bulging with muscle and fat, but the hands in his lap were strangely dainty, narrow across the pink palms, with long tapered fingers.

  His trunk was thickened, his breasts pendulous. All this was flesh which he had carefully cultivated. The beer pots and beef dishes stood close at hand. The thick millet beer bubbled softly and the cuts of beef each had a thick rind of yellow fat. Every few minutes one of his wives responded to a nod or a small movement of one graceful hand by proffering a dish. Weight and size were the mark of a king. Not for nothing was Lobengula called the Great Black Elephant of Matabeleland.

  His manner was slow, imbued with the vast dignity of his size and rank. Yet his eyes were thoughtful and deeply intelligent, his features despite the burden of fat which blurred them were handsome, lacking outward traits of the hideous cruelties which any Matabele king had to make part of his life.

  ‘My people expect me to be strong and harsh. There are always those who look for the smallest weakness in me – as the young lions watch the black-maned leader of the pride,’ Mzilikazi had explained to his son. ‘See how my chickens follow me to be fed.’ He had pointed with the toy spear of kingship at the high wheel of tiny specks turning slowly in the sky above the hills of Thabas Indunas. ‘When my vultures desert me, I will be as dust.’

  Lobengula, his son, had learned the lesson well – but it had not brutalized him. Indeed, there was a line to his mouth that was almost diffident, and a shadow behind the light of intelligence in his eyes that was hesitant, the confusion of a man tugged at by too many currents and winds – a man caught up by his destiny, and uncertain as to how he could break away from its remorseless toils.

  Lobengula had never expected to take up his father’s spear of kingship. He was never the heir apparent, there had been older brothers from mothers of higher rank and nobler blood.

  He stared now across the fire at the man that squatted there. A magnificent warrior, his body tempered to black steel by long marches and savage warfare, his understanding and compassion expanded by close and intimate daily contact with common men, his courage and loyalty proven to all the world ten thousand times so there could be no doubts, not even in his own midnight watches, which is the time of doubts – and Lobengula found himself longing to rid himself of this fearsome burden of kingship and place it on the other man’s shoulders. He found himself wishing for that quiet and secret cave in the Matopos hills where he had known the only happy days of his life.

  The man opposite him was a half-brother; his blood line, like that of Lobengula himself, reaching back unsullied to the Zanzi of Zululand. He was a prince of the House of Kumalo, wise and brave and untroubled by doubts.

  ‘Such a one should have been king,’ Lobengula thought, and his love for his half-brother choked his throat so that he coughed. He moved one little finger, and a wife held the beer pot to his lips and he swallowed once and then signed for it to be taken away.

  ‘I see you, Gandang.’ His voice was throaty and low, the sadness still in it for he knew that he could not escape that way. He felt like a man on a solitary journey through the forest where the lions are hunting. His recognition released Gandang from his respectful silence. The induna clapped his hands softly and began to recite his half-brother’s ritual praises, and Lobengula’s mind wandered back across the years.

  His earliest memory was of the road, the hard road up from the south – driven by the mounted men dressed all in brown, riding brown ponies. He remembered the popping sound of the guns, which he learned only later to fear, and the smell of gunsmoke, spicy and sour as the wind brought it down to where he clung to his mother, and he remembered the wailing of the women as they mourned the dead.

  He remembered the heat and the dust, trotting naked as a puppy at his mother’s heels. How tall she had seemed, the muscles of her back gleaming with sweat, and Ningi, his sister, in the sling upon her hip, clinging to one of his mother’s fat jostling breasts with mouth and tiny determined fists.

  He remembered toiling up the stony hills with his father’s single wagon rolling and pitching along ahead of them. On it rode Mzilikazi’s senior wife, and her son Nkulumane, three years older than Lobengula and heir apparent to the kingship of the Matabele. They were the only ones who did not walk.

  He remembered how his mother’s back had withered, the beautiful gleaming skin becoming loose and baggy, the ribcage beginning to show through as the famine wasted her substance, and Ningi screaming with hunger as the rich creamy flow from her teats dried up.

  This was where the memory of Saala began; it was mixed up at first with the shouting and singing as a band of raiding Matabele returned to the fleeing column. He had first seen Saala in the firelight, as the warriors slaughtered the captured cattle, and Lobengula could almost still feel the hot grease and the bloody juices of the beef running down his chin and dripping onto his naked chest as they feasted, breaking the long days and months of starvation on cattle taken from the white men, the buni.

  Once his belly was bulging tightly with meat, Lobengula had joined the circle of curious Matabele princelings and princesses who surrounded the captives; but he had stood back from the teasing and jeering and prodding of the other children.

  Saala was the eldest of the two little girls. It was only long afterwards that Lobengula learned that her name was Sarah, but even now he could not pronounce that sound. The Matabele raiding party had surprised a small caravan of Boer wagons, and had killed everybody except these two small white children.

  Her whiteness was the first thing that had struck Lobengula. How white her face was in the firelight, as white as an egret’s wing, and she had not wept as her younger sister wept.

  After that the memories grew stronger, Saala walking ahead of him as the slow column wound through thick thorn forest. Saala taking the infant Ningi from his mother when she slipped and fell with weakness in the black mud of the swamps while the mosquitoes formed a dark whining cloud over them.

  Exactly where Saala’s little sister died, Lobengula could not recall. It might have been in the swamps. They left her small naked white body unburied, and the column marched on.

  At last Lobengula’s own mother fell and could not rise again, and with her last strength handed little Ningi to Saala; then she curled up quietly a
nd died. All the weak ones died like that, and their infants died with them, for no other women would take the orphans, for each of them had her own infants to care for.

  However, Saala strapped little Ningi on her own thin white back in the way that the Matabele carry their babies, then she took Lobengula’s hand in hers and they toiled on after the fleeing nation.

  By now Saala’s clothing had long ago fallen off her thin white body, and she was as the other Matabele girls who had not yet reached puberty, completely naked. She had half forgotten her own language, and spoke only the language of the tribe. The sun had darkened her skin, and the soles of her bare feet had grown a thick covering, hard as rhinoceros skin, so she could march over razor flint and needle thorns.

  Lobengula came to love Saala, transferring everything he had ever felt for his mother to her, and she stole extra food for him and protected him from the bullying of his older brothers – from Nkulumane the cruel one, and from Nkulumane’s mother, who hated all that might one day stand in the way of her son’s claim to the kingship of the Matabele.

  Then the Matabele crossed the Limpopo, the River of Crocodiles, and the land beyond was fair, thick with game and running with sweet rivers. The wandering nation followed Mzilikazi into the magical hills of the Matopos. There on a lonely hilltop the king met the wizard of the Matopos, face to face.

  Mzilikazi saw fire spring up at the Umlimo’s bidding, and he heard the spirits speak from the very air about the Umlimo, a hundred different voices – voice of infant and crone, of man and of beast, the cry of the fish eagle, the snarl of the leopard – and from that day the Umlimo had the reverence and superstitious awe of the king and all his people.

  The Umlimo pointed the way north again, and as the Matabele emerged from the broken hills of the Matopos, they saw spread before them a beautiful land, rich with grass and tall trees.

  ‘This is my land,’ said Mzilikazi, and built his kraal under the Hills of the Indunas.

  However, the Matabele had lost nearly all their cattle and many of the women and children had died on that cruel journey northwards.

  At Thabas Indunas Mzilikazi left his senior wife, mother of Nkulumane, as his regent, and he took five thousand of his finest warriors and went out against the tribes – for women and for cattle.

  He went westwards into the land ruled by great Khama, and there was no word from him. The seasons came and changed, the rains followed the long dryness, the heat followed the frosts, and still there was no word of Mzilikazi.

  Slowly the strict order of Matabele society began to break up, for the regent, Mzilikazi’s senior wife, was unrestrained in her intercourses, and she rutted shamelessly with her lovers.

  Some of the lesser wives followed her example, and then the common people took sexual licence, the youths, unblooded and without the royal permission to go into the women, lay in wait for the young girls on the path to the water-hole, and dragged them giggling into the bushes.

  With the code of morality broken, other vices followed. The remaining cattle – the breeding herds – were slaughtered, and the feasting went on for months. Looseness and drunkenness swept through the nation like a plague, and in the midst of this debauchery, one of the Matabele patrols captured a little yellow Bushman who had wandered in out of the west, and the Bushman had momentous tidings.

  ‘Mzilikazi is dead,’ he told his captors. ‘I have thrust my own fingers into the stab wound in his heart, and watched the hyena wolfing down his flesh and cracking his bones.’

  The senior wife had her guards boil clay pots of water, and pour them over the Bushman until his flesh fell off his bones and he died, which is fitting treatment for one who brings news of the death of a king. Then she called the indunas into council, and urged them to proclaim Nkulumane king in place of his dead father. However, none of the indunas were fools. One whispered to the other, ‘It would take more than a Tswana dog to kill Mzilikazi.’

  While they procrastinated and talked, the senior wife grew wild with impatience and sent for the executioners, determined now that there would be no rival for her son. Saala was playing outside the queen’s hut, moulding little clay oxen and figures of men and women for Ningi. Through the thatched wall she heard the queen giving her orders to the Black Ones. Frantic with terror for the safety of Lobengula, Saala ran to the other royal mothers.

  ‘The Black Ones are coming for the royal sons. You must hide them.’

  Then Saala left little Ningi, now weaned and strong, with one of the royal women who was barren and childless.

  ‘Look after her,’ she whispered, and ran out into the grasslands.

  Lobengula was by now ten years of age, and was tending what remained of the royal herds: the duty of every Matabele boy, the essential service through which he learned the secrets of the veld and the ways of cattle, the nation’s treasure.

  Saala found him bringing in the herd to water. He was naked except for the little flap of leather over his loins, and armed only with two short fighting sticks with which he was expected to drive off any predator and to hold his own in competition with the other herd boys.

  Holding hands again, the Matabele princeling and the little white girl fled, and instinctively they turned southwards, back the way they had come.

  They lived on roots and berries, on the eggs of wild birds and the flesh of the iguana lizards. They competed with the jackals and vultures for the remains of the lion kill – and sometimes they went hungry, but at last they found themselves in the maze of the Matopos Hills where the Black Ones would not follow them. They slept under the single kaross that Saala had brought with her, and the nights crackled with frost so they slept in each other’s arms, clinging together for warmth.

  Early one morning the old man found them thus. He was thin and mad-looking, with strange charms and magical objects about his neck, and the children were terrified of him.

  Saala pushed Lobengula behind her, and with a show of false courage faced the wizard.

  ‘This is Lobengula. Favourite son of Mzilikazi,’ she declared stoutly. ‘Who harms him, harms the king.’

  The old man rolled his mad eyes, and drooled horribly as he grinned with toothless gums. Then suddenly the air was full of the sound of ghost voices – and Saala screamed and Lobengula wailed with terror, and they clung to each other pitifully.

  The wizard led the children, chastened, shivering and weeping, through secret passages and over precipitous trails, deeper and deeper into the hills, until at last they came to the caves which honeycombed the rock.

  Here the old man began the instruction of the boy who would be king. He taught him many of the mysteries, but not how to control the ghost voices, nor how to throw fire by pointing his finger, nor how to see the future in a calabash of mountain water.

  Here in the caves of the Matopos, Lobengula learned the scope and power of the magical order. He learned how the little wizards, the witchdoctors, were spread across the land, performing the small rites, making rain and giving charms for fertility and childbirth, smelling out the evildoers, and sending back their reports to the cave in the Matopos.

  Here the grand wizards, of which the old man was one, worked the great magics, called up the spirits of their ancestors, and looked into the mists of time to see what the future would bring. Above them all was the Umlimo. It was a name only for Lobengula, Umlimo, a name that even after he had lived five years in the cave could still make him shiver and sweat.

  Then when he was sixteen, the mad old wizard took him to the cave of the Umlimo. And the Umlimo was a woman, a beautiful woman.

  What Lobengula saw in the cave of the Umlimo he would never speak about, not even to Saala, but when he came back from the cave there was a sadness in his eyes, and the weight of knowledge seemed to bow his young shoulders.

  There was a furious thunderstorm the night of Lobengula’s return, and the blue lightning clanged upon the anvil of the hills with strokes that tortured their eardrums as they lay together under the kaross. Then it was t
hat the little orphan white girl made the boy into a man, the princeling into a king; and when her term was run she gave him a son who was the colour of the early morning sunlight on the yellow winter grass, and Lobengula knew happiness for the only time in his life.

  In their joy they paid little attention to tidings which the mad old wizard brought to their cave.

  He told them how Mzilikazi, great with plunder, fat with cattle, had come back to Thabas Indunas, arriving suddenly with the blood barely dried on the spears of his impi, and red rage in his heart.

  At Mzilikazi’s nod the Black Ones gathered all those who had acted as if the king were dead. Some they hurled from the cliff of execution, some they pegged down upon the sandbanks of the river where the crocodiles sunned themselves, others they skewered with bamboo spikes through the secret openings of their bodies.

  But when the mother of Nkulumane was led before the king, she wept so and tore her own flesh with her nails while she called on all the spirits of the dead to witness how faithful she had been to Mzilikazi in his absence, how constant had been her belief in his eventual safe return and how during his absence she had guarded the other royal sons from the Black Ones and had even sent Lobengula into the wilderness to save him that Mzilikazi, who at the bottom was only a man, believed her. However, the others died in their hundreds, victims of the king’s wrath, and the nation rejoiced for the king had returned and the good old days were back.

  Through all this Lobengula and Saala and their little yellow son stayed on in the cave of the Matopos and knew happiness.

  Far away in the south below the Limpopo river, a Hottentot elephant hunter stopped to water his horse at the well beside a Boer homestead that stood not far from the battlefield where the Boer horsemen had long ago first defeated Mzilikazi before driving him out of this country.

  ‘I saw a curious thing,’ said the Hottentot to the big, solemn, bearded man who was his host. ‘In the southern hills of Matabeleland, I saw a white woman, full grown and naked. She was shy as a wild buck and ran into the rocky ground where I could not follow her.’