The Sunday News
IN the SiNdebele language there is a saying that, “isifuba sakhe sakhatshwa lidube.” Literally this means he/she was kicked in the chest by a zebra. Figuratively this refers to one who cannot keep secrets. When it is said kalasifuba it means he will not keep secrets. Literally he has no chest. The people who say this seem to think that secrets are kept in one’s chest.
What is the connection between the chest, its being kicked by a zebra and the failure to keep secrets? One possible explanation is that the bigger one’s chest is the more secrets it can contain. When a zebra kicks one’s chest what happens is that the chest cavity is diminished, as a result of the chest walls being pushed inwards. The chest’s storage capacity has been reduced and hence only a few secrets can be stored.
There was time when keeping secrets was a virtue. There were times when this was necessary. Let us take the case of a man who is barren. Close relatives would seek a solution to that unpalatable situation. Every man must have offspring to avoid disgrace and risk being buried with a rat. As a result the man was sent on a long errand so that he would be away from home for quite a while. During his absence a younger brother was asked to be intimate with the wife of the barren man.
The arrangement was a closely guarded secret. The younger brother was expected to zip his mouth. It did not matter how drunk he became, he would keep the secret within his “chest.” The wife of the barren man equally kept the secret under lock and key within her “chest.” The few elders who engineered the arrangement equally kept the secret away from the ears of the “assisted” man. The man who was sent on a deceptive errand was to believe he was responsible for his wife’s pregnancy. This was important to avoid serious conflict between him and his younger brother and also his wife. His ego and sense of worth were preserved.
Indeed the man would not know about the arrangement. The born child shared several genes with the barren “father.” The two belonged to the same blood line. The child belonged to the same ancestors. So all was well with them. The barren man was equally happy.
During the Inxwala ceremony there was a song that was sung and soon erased from the people’s memories. The truth is that it existed in their memories but they were not allowed to sing it again outside of the Inxwala ceremony. The people obliged and indeed no one ever sang it again till the following year during the same ceremony. The song was sung only in the presence of the king-during the ceremony. As a result the song was banished from people’s lips following the disappearance of King Lobengula in 1893.
Later when researchers tried to get the song sung to them they drew a blank. One researcher though managed to squeeze the song out of his grandfather. The researcher had a tape recorder that he used to record the song. He then made a fatal mistake of replaying the song to the old man who thought he was singing the song in strict confidence. The old man was extremely disappointed and angered. The erring man is said to have died soon thereafter. The story did reinforce the ban on the song and drove fear into the hearts of Ndebele researchers and like-minded people.
We narrate this story to illustrate how secrets were preserved and the attendant reasons for doing so. This we are doing against the background of the unclear circumstances surrounding the fate of King Lobengula. Surely there were people who knew what happened to the king. Given the nature of Ndebele society then such a secret would have been kept under lock and key. One way of ensuring that a secret is kept is to eliminate all those privy to the secret. This too is possible. Later there would be stories, call them secrets in the public domain, claiming the king took some people with him across the mighty Zambezi River. The story mentions one MaDumane who was his wife. There is a problem with this story.
As we know the Ndebele ensured the perpetuation of their cultural identity by manipulating the marriage institution. Nguni young men were discouraged from marrying amahole women. Some strong stigma was attached to the flouting of the practice. So, why would King Lobengula marry this MaDumane woman? Was the woman perhaps some kind of traditional doctor who was meant to help in ensuring the safe passage of the king? Certainly we do know that non-Nguni persons were made use of in the spiritual and medical spheres.
Did the king and his advisers think the queens were going to be an encumbrance to his migration to King Mphezeni’s country? It does seem the better known queens were all accounted for. They all came back and initially settled across the Shangani River where Sivalo Mahlangu was in charge of them – just as it had been his duty to do so before the collapse of the state.
Later some of the queens settled at Nkosikazi together with the senior queen, Lozikeyi Dlodlo. They would in due course scatter to various parts of the country. Some of them got married to the chiefs. One follower of this column asks why the chiefs in particular married the royal queens when they knew the king was across the Zambezi River at King Mphezeni’s country? Were they so certain the king would not come back unless they knew the king was dead and they were therefore safe?
Who constituted the party that the king travelled with when key chiefs such as Mtshane Khumalo came back? Other than Magwegwe Fuyane there are no other known prominent chiefs who did not return home. So the reader of the column thinks the Mphezeni story is no more than a figment of the imagination. The king, he thinks, died or was killed inside Zimbabwe. In order not to have the whites seek out for his remains there had to be coined a decoy in the form of flight to King Mphezeni’s country.
What we do know for certain is that there were Ndebele soldiers who remained close to the Zambezi River for close to three years. When they returned in 1896 after Imfazo II(1896) one of them found his wife having remarried. What were these men guarding or doing? Were they guarding over the royal remains or they wanted to make sure the king had safe passage to Mphezeni’s country?
The follower of this column further argues that the Ndebele soldiers, after wiping out the Allan Wilson party, got some of their victims’ items of clothing to show them to the king as proof of their victory over the enemy. This is possible given that there is a similar incident when the Ndebele were in present-day Limpopo Province. As from 1836 the Ndebele were engaged in battles with the Afrikaners/Boers who had moved out of the Cape Province to avoid British rule.
One of the regiments that engaged in battle with the Afrikaners/Boers was amaTshetshe under the command of Sifo Masuku who married Batayi, King Mzilikazi’s eldest daughter. They managed to repel Boer attacks to a point where they captured an ox wagon from them. In order to prove their victory to King Mzilikazi amaTshetshe men took the ox wagon canopy/roof to the king. The canopy or roof is known as uphahla in SiNdebele. From that point on amaTshetshe became known as abathwali bophahla, the carriers of a roof (in reference to the roof of the ox wagon that they captured). To this day amaTshetshe pride themselves as abathwali bophahla and yet many of them do not know the origin of the accolade. Many think it is a reference to a hut roof.
Following the Pupu routing of the Allan Wilson Patrol the Ndebele soldiers would have collected guns and rifles together with the items of clothing belonging to the deceased white soldiers. In a normal situation many of them would have earned themselves many praises and would have had fat oxen, amadabulambiza, slaughtered at the royal capital in their honour. The tips of the horns of slaughtered beasts would have emblazoned chests of such men as evidence of their bravery and victory.
