The Angels Weep (9 page)

In the base of the cliff, the low wide opening of a cavern
snarled at them like a toothless mouth. Neither of them spoke for
many minutes as they stared across at the sacred cave, but the
memories came crowding back upon both of them. In that cavern
Tanase had undergone the frightful indoctrination and initiation
which had transformed her into the Umlimo, and on the rocky floor
she had suffered the cruel abuse that had stripped her of her
powers, and made her an ordinary woman once more.

Now in that cavern another being presided in Tanase’s
place as spiritual head of the nation, for the powers of the
Umlimo never die, but are passed on from one initiate to another,
as they had been from forgotten times when the ancients had built
the great stone ruins of the Zimbabwe.

‘Are you ready?’ Bazo asked at last.

‘I am ready, lord,’ she replied, and they started
down towards the village. But before they reached it, they were
met by a weird procession of creatures, some of them barely
recognizable as human, for they crawled on all fours and whined
and yapped like animals. There were ancient withered crones with
empty dugs flapping against their bellies, pretty little girls
with pubescent breast-buds and blank unsmiling faces, old men
with deformed limbs who dragged themselves in the dust, and slim
mincing youths with well-formed muscular bodies and mad eyes that
rolled back into their skulls, all of them decked with the
gruesome paraphernalia of the necromancer and wizard, bladders of
lion and crocodile, skin of python and bird, skulls and teeth of
ape, of man, and of beast. They ringed Bazo and Tanase, prancing
and mewling and leering, until Bazo felt his skin itching with
the insects of loathing and he lifted his son high on his
shoulder away from their touching, prying hands.

Tanase was unperturbed, for this fantastic throng had once
been her own retinue, and she stood expressionless as one of the
horrible witches crawled to her and slobbered and frothed over
her bare feet. Dancing and chanting, the guardians of the Umlimo
led the two wanderers into the village, and then disappeared,
slipping away into the thatched huts.

However, they were not alone. In the centre of the village
stood a
setenghi
, an airy open-sided hut of white mopani
poles, and a roof of neat thatch. In the shade of the
setenghi
there were men waiting, but these were entirely
different from the strange throng which had met them at the
entrance of the village.

Each of these men sat upon a low carved stool. Though some of
them were grossly fat and others skinny and stooped, they were
all of them surrounded by an almost palpable air of dignity and
authority. Though some were white-headed with snowy woollen
beards and deeply wrinkled faces and others were in the prime of
their life and powers, they all of them wore upon their heads the
simple black headring of gum and clay.

Here assembled in the secret valley of the Umlimo were what
was left of the leaders of the Matabele nation, men who had once
stood at the head of the fighting impis as they formed the
bull-formation of encircling horns and crushing chest. Some of
them, the eldest, remembered the exodus from the south driven by
the mounted Boer horsemen; they had fought as young men under
great Mzilikazi himself and still wore with pride the tassels of
honour which he had awarded to them.

All of them had sat upon the councils of King Lobengula, son
of great Mzilikazi, and had been on the Hills of the Indunas that
fateful day when the king had stood before the assembled
regiments and had faced eastward, the direction from which the
column of wagons and white soldiers was entering Matabeleland.
They had shouted the royal salute ‘Bayete!’ as
Lobengula poised his great swollen body on gout-distorted legs
and then defiantly hurled the toy spear of kingship at the
invaders who were still out of sight beyond the blue horizon.
These were the indunas who had led their fighting men past the
king in review singing his praises and the battle hymns of the
regiments, saluting Lobengula for the last time, and then going
out to where the Maxim guns waited for them behind the
wagon-sides and plaited thorn bush walls of the white men’s
laager.

In the midst of this distinguished assembly sat three men
– the three surviving sons of Mzilikazi, the noblest and
most revered of all the indunas. Somabula, on the left, was the
eldest, victor of a hundred fierce battles, the warrior for whom
the lovely Somabula forests had been named. On the right was
Babiaan, wise and brave. The honourable scars laced his torso and
limbs. However, it was the man in the centre who rose from his
ornately carved stool of wild ebony and came out into the
sunlight.

‘Gandang, my father, I see you and my heart
sings,’ cried Bazo.

‘I see you, my son,’ said Gandang, his handsome
face made almost beautiful by the joy that lit it, and when Bazo
knelt before him, he touched his head in blessing, and then
raised him up with his own hand.

‘Baba!’ Tanase clapped her hands respectfully
before her face, and when Gandang nodded his acknowledgement, she
withdrew quietly to the nearest hut, where she could listen from
behind the thin reed wall.

It was not for a woman to attend the high councils of the
nation. In the time of the kings, a lesser woman would have been
speared to death for daring to approach an
indaba
such as
this. Tanase, however, was the one that had once been the Umlimo,
and she was still the mouth-piece of the chosen one. Besides
which, the world was changing, the kings had passed, the old
customs were dying with them, and this woman wielded more power
than any but the highest of the assembled indunas. Nevertheless,
she made the gesture of retiring to the closed hut, so as not to
offend the memory of the old ways.

Gandang clapped his hands and the slaves brought a stool and a
baked clay beerpot to Bazo. Bazo refreshed himself with a long
draught of the thick tart bubbling gruel and then he greeted his
fellow indunas in strict order of their seniority, beginning with
Somabula and going slowly down the ranks; and while he did so he
found himself mourning their pitiful shrunken numbers, only
twenty-six of them were left.

‘Kamuza, my cousin.’ He looked across at the
twenty-sixth and most junior of the indunas. ‘My sweetest
friend, I see you.’

Then Bazo did something that was without precedent, he came to
his feet and looked over their heads, and went on with the formal
greetings.

‘I greet you, Manonda, the brave!’ he cried.
‘I see you hanging on the branch of the mkusi tree. Dead by
your own hand, choosing death rather than to live as a slave of
white men.’

The assembled indunas glanced over their own shoulders,
following the direction of Bazo’s gaze with expressions of
superstitious awe.

‘Is that you, Ntabene? In life they called you the
Mountain, and like a mountain you fell on the banks of the
Shangani. I greet you, brave spirit.’

The assembled indunas understood then. Bazo was calling the
roll of honour, and they took up the greeting in a deep
growl.

‘
Sakubona
, Ntabene.’

‘I see you, Tambo. The waters of the Bembesi crossing
ran red with your blood.’

‘
Sakubona
, Tambo,’ growled the indunas of
Kumalo.

Bazo threw aside his cloak and began to dance. It was a
swaying sensuous dance and the sweat sprang to gloss his skin and
the gunshot wounds glowed upon his chest like dark jewels. Each
time he called the name of one of the missing indunas, he lifted
his right knee until it touched his chest, and then brought his
bare foot down with a crash upon the hard earth, and the assembly
echoed the hero’s name.

At last Bazo sank down upon his stool, and the silence was
fraught with a kind of warlike ecstasy. Slowly all their heads
turned until they were looking at Somabula, the eldest, the most
senior. The old induna rose and faced them, and then, because
this was an
indaba
of the most weighty consequences, he
began to recite the history of the Matabele nation. Though they
had all heard it a thousand times since their infancy, the
indunas leaned forward avidly. There was no written word, no
archives to store this history, it must be remembered verbatim to
be passed on to their children, and their children’s
children.

The story began in Zululand a thousand miles to the south,
with the young warrior Mzilikazi defying the mad tyrant Chaka,
and fleeing northwards with his single impi from the Zulu might.
It followed his wanderings, his battles with the forces that
Chaka sent to pursue him, his victories over the little tribes
which stood in Mzilikazi’s path. It related how he took the
young men of the conquered tribes into his impis and gave the
young women as wives to his warriors. It recorded the growth of
Mzilikazi from a fugitive and rebel, to, first, a little
chieftain, then to a great war chief, and at last to a mighty
king.

Somabula related faithfully the terrible
M’fecane
, the destruction of a million souls as
Mzilikazi laid waste to the land between the Orange river and the
Limpopo. Then he went on to tell of the coming of the white men,
and the new method of waging war. He conjured up the squadrons of
sturdy little ponies with bearded men upon their backs, galloping
into gunshot range, then wheeling away to reload before the
amadoda
could carry the blade to them. He retold how the
impis had first met the rolling fortresses, the squares of wagons
lashed together with trek chains, the thorn branches woven into
the spokes of the wheels and into every gap in the wooden
barricade, and how the ranks of Matabele had broken and perished
upon those walls of wood and thorn.

His voice sank mournfully as he told of the exodus northwards,
driven by the grim bearded men on horseback. He recalled how the
weaklings and the infants had died on that tragic trek, and then
Somabula’s voice rose joyfully as he described the crossing
of the Limpopo and the Shashi rivers and the discovery of this
beautiful bountiful land beyond.

By then Somabula’s voice was strained and hoarse, and he
sank down onto his stool and drank from the beerpot while
Babiaan, his half-brother, rose to describe the great days, the
subjugation of the surrounding tribes, the multiplication of the
Matabele cattle-herds until they darkened the sweet golden
grasslands, the ascension of Lobengula, ‘the one who drives
like the wind’, to the kingship, the fierce raids when the
impis swept hundreds of miles beyond the borders, bringing home
the plunder and the slaves, that made the Matabele great. He
reminded them how the regiments, plumed and befurred, carrying
their great colour-matched war shields had paraded before the
king like the endless flow of the Zambezi river; how the maidens
danced at the Festival of First Fruits, bare-breasted and
anointed with shiny red clay, bedecked with wild flowers and
beads. He described the secret showing of the treasure, when
Lobengula’s wives smeared his vast body with thick fat and
then stuck the diamonds to it, diamonds stolen by the young bucks
from the great pit that the white men had dug far to the
south.

Listening to the telling of it, the indunas remembered vividly
how the uncut stones had glowed on the king’s gross body
like a coat of precious mail, or like the armoured scales of some
wondrous mythical reptilian monster. In those days how great had
been the king, how uncountable his herds, how fierce and warlike
the young men and how beautiful the girls – and they nodded
and exclaimed in approbation.

Then Babiaan sank down and Gandang rose from his stool. He was
tall and powerful, a warrior in the late noon of his powers, his
nobility unquestioned, his courage tested and proven a hundred
times, and as he took up the tale, his voice was deep and
resonant.

He told how the white men had come up from the south. To begin
with there were only one or two of them begging small favours, to
shoot a few elephant, to trade their beads and bottles for native
copper and ivory. Then there were more of them, and their demands
were more insistent, more worrisome. They wanted to preach a
strange three-headed god, they wanted to dig holes and search for
the yellow metal and the bright stones. Deeply troubled,
Lobengula had come to this place in the Matopos, and the Umlimo
had warned him that when the sacred bird images flew from the
ruins of Great Zimbabwe, then there would be no more peace in the
land.

‘The stone falcons were stolen from the sacred
places,’ Gandang reminded them, ‘and Lobengula knew
then that he could no more resist the white men than his father,
Mzilikazi, had been able to.’

Thus the king had chosen the most powerful of all the white
petitioners, ‘Lodzi’, the big blue-eyed man who had
eaten up the diamond mines and who was the induna of the white
queen across the sea. Hoping to make him an ally, Lobengula had
entered into a treaty with Lodzi; in exchange for gold coins and
guns, he had granted to him a charter to dig for the buried
treasures of the earth exclusively in Lobengula’s eastern
dominions.

However, Lodzi had sent a great train of wagons with hard
fighting men like Selous and Bakela, leading hundreds of young
white men armed like soldiers to take possession of the Charter
lands. Sorrowfully, Gandang recited the long list of grievances
and the breaking of faith, which had culminated in the clatter of
Maxim guns, in the destruction of the king’s kraal at
Bulawayo, and the flight of Lobengula towards the north.

Finally, he described Lobengula’s death. Broken-hearted
and sick, the king had taken poison, and Gandang himself had laid
the body in a secret cave overlooking the valley of the Zambezi,
and he had placed all the king’s possessions around him,
his stool, his head-pillow of ivory, his sleeping-mat and fur
kaross, his beerpots and beef-bowls, his guns and his war shield,
his battle-axe and stabbing-spear, and at the last the little
clay pots of glittering diamonds he had laid at Lobengula’s
gout-distorted feet. When all was done, Gandang had walled up the
entrance to the cave, and slaughtered the slaves who had done the
work. Then he had led the shattered nation back southwards into
captivity.