The Covenant (87 page)

At the end of three awful months those closest to Shaka convinced him that the nation he had worked so diligently to construct was imperiled by these excesses, and he terminated all prohibitions except the one against pregnancy, for he could never comprehend the need for sex. At a vast ceremony ending the Dark Time, herdsmen were ordered to bring their beasts, one hundred thousand in all; their bellowing would be the final salute to the Female Elephant. When they were assembled, Shaka demanded that forty of the finest calves be brought for sacrifice, and as the little creatures stood before him, their gall bladders were ripped out and they were left to die. “Weep!
Weep!” he shouted. “Let even animals know what sorrow is.” Then he bowed his head as the contents of the forty gall bladders were poured over him, purifying him at last of the evil forces that had hastened the death of his mother.

The diviners and witch doctors, seeing a chance to reestablish their authority, seized upon Nandi’s death as a way to chasten the king: “We know what caused her death, Mighty Lion. A cat walked past her hut.”

Shaka listened avidly as the diviners revealed what dark spells had been cast by women who owned cats, and when the indictment was complete he roared, “Let all with cats be found!” And when these women were assembled, including one of Nxumalo’s wives, he screamed at them, demanding to know the poisons they had disseminated through their cats. When the terrified and bewildered women, three hundred and twenty-six of them, could make no sensible reply, he ordered them slain, and they were.

One morning Shaka took Nxumalo aside, seeking to recapture the friendship he knew he needed: “I’m sorry, trusted guide, that Thetiwe and the other died. It was necessary.” When Nxumalo nodded, acknowledging the king’s power, Shaka pointed out: “I gave you the women. I had a right to take them away.” Again Nxumalo assented, and Shaka said, “I wanted the world to see how much a son could love his mother.”

And that speech was the beginning of the final tragedy, for when the king endeavored to assure Nxumalo that all was again well between them, the latter thought not of his words but of a gentler king far to the north with whom sanctuary might be found. Shaka noticed his lack of response, and his dissatisfaction with the one man who might have saved him was launched.

Ironically, Shaka decided to cast Nxumalo aside at the precise moment when he was needed most, for the Zulu were beginning to see that the welfare of their recently established nation depended upon a man subject to irrational behavior; they also saw that since he had no sons, he had no direct heirs, and that if he died in one of his paroxysms, the kingdom would be adrift.

Unlucky chance also worked against him, for if the Female Elephant had pushed him to glory, another woman of equal determination was now ready to destroy him. Mkabayi, his father’s sister—whose name meant Wild Cat, an ominous portent—had nursed a smoldering resentment against Shaka from the moment he usurped the Zulu
leadership, and now, seeing the disarray of the kingdom, she infected two of Shaka’s half brothers with her poison. Dingane and Mhlangana began to meet secretly with her, and after a few tentative discussions, realized that they must enlist the support of some military leader. The fact that Nxumalo had lost two wives—killed by Shaka’s orders—made him a likely candidate.

The brothers had to approach him with caution, for if he betrayed a single intimation, Shaka would kill them all. So Dingane, a clever, conniving man, asked, “Nxumalo, has it ever occurred to you that the king might be mad?”

He had been expecting just such an opening from someone, but he, too, had to be cautious, not knowing the true temper of the brothers. “You saw him at the punishment of the Langeni,” he said. “He forgot who I was.”

“Advise us straight. If anything happened to the king—his biliousness, I mean—would the iziCwe run violent?”

“My men love their king.”

“Were … two of your wives … slain?”

He did not like the devious way Dingane asked his questions, so once more he was evasive: “Shaka gave me three women. He said he had a right to take two of them back.”

The brothers were satisfied that Nxumalo wanted to join them but was fending them off, so Dingane said bluntly, “You must know you’re to be smelled-out at the next gathering.” Nxumalo only looked at him, unbelieving, so Dingane whispered, “One witch-seeker said to me, ‘That Nxumalo, two wives dead. It must be an omen.’ Your bamboo skewers are being hardened. Before this year is out, you’ll hang screaming in the tree.”

Nxumalo properly interpreted this as a suggestion that he take up arms against the king, but even though his allegiance to Shaka the man had begun to erode, his tradition of obedience to the concept of kingship remained, and he could not at this first meeting abandon it, so with great daring, well aware that the brothers might feel they must kill him to preserve their secret, he said, “Dingane, I know what you’re plotting. And I understand. My heart is broken by what Shaka has done to me, and I hate his madness. But I’m his general and I can’t …”

It was a fearful moment, with lives in balance, but the brothers had to risk it, for to succeed in their conspiracy, they must have this general: “Would you be able to forget that we have spoken to you?”

“As a soldier I cannot act against my king, but I know he is destroying the nation. I will remain silent.”

When he left, the brothers smiled, for they were certain that Shaka would do some additional outrageous thing that would alienate even Nxumalo. The king was marked for murder.

Shaka sensed that the dynamics of the situation required him to keep his army on the move, so he advanced into new territories, well to the south toward the Xhosa, and for the first time his regiments gained only a modified success; he executed more warriors than ever before for cowardice. He allowed his regiments no rest, but sent them feverishly to new lands in the north, and again they encountered disaster.

“Where’s Nxumalo?” the king cried in anguish one afternoon.

“He’s with his regiment,” a knobkerrie said, not wanting to irritate Shaka further by reminding him that he had ordered Nxumalo to be confined.

“Never here when I need him. And Fynn fails to bring me the magic oil.” He almost whimpered. “So much work remains, I must not die.”

And the executioners wailed, “Deathless-Stomper-of-the-Rhinoceros, Fearless-Slayer-of-the-Leopard, you will never die.”

“What is death?” the tormented king asked. “And before you answer that, what is life?”

Four attendants who were accustomed to nod gravely at everything he said were suddenly seized by the knobkerrie gang, and two were stood to the left of the king, two to the right. “Kill those,” Shaka said, and the two on the left were slain. “They are death,” the king said, “and these are life. Tell me—what is the difference?” And he kept this grim tableau in place for three hours, staring and pondering.

Then with a leap high into the air he roared, “Fetch me the women who were pregnant before my edict,” and more than a hundred women in all stages of pregnancy were dragged before him. With sharp knives he began to slice open their bellies to see for himself how life progressed, and as he continued his studies with the later women, the first ones lay dying in a corner.

When word of this hideous experiment flashed through the kraals, disseminated by men whose wives had been taken, Dingane
exulted: “Now we’ll have Nxumalo with us!” And he took his brother to the kraal where Nxumalo was being held and told him, “Shaka has taken Nonsizi. He’s going to cut her apart.”

“What!” Like a bull elephant crashing through trees, Nxumalo burst out of the kraal to save the lovely girl Mzilikazi had given him, and when he ran in maddened circles, Dingane said, “Over there!” pointing to Shaka’s kraal.

Nxumalo arrived in time to see the knobkerrie men pulling the hundred and sixth woman to Shaka’s table, and it was as Dingane had warned—Nonsizi of the Matabele. “Shaka—she is my wife!” he cried, but with an impatient shake of his head the king indicated that his helpers were to remove this interruption.

“Shaka!” Nxumalo repeated. “That’s Nonsizi, my wife.”

In a kind of stupor, the king looked up, failed to recognize his general, and said, “She cannot be your wife. All women belong to me.” And while Nxumalo was pinioned, the king dissected Nonsizi, then hurried to the last three women, crying, “Now I will know. I won’t need the hair oil!”

In that awful scream-filled moment any vestige of allegiance or obedience vanished, and as soon as Nxumalo could break away, he sought the brothers and said, “Shaka must be killed.”

“We knew you’d join us,” the king’s brothers said, and they took him to their aunt, Mkabayi the Wild Cat, who said grimly, “We must strike the tyrant now.” And it was her force of character, allied with Nxumalo’s, that sealed the king’s fate.

Had the plotting been left to Dingane, Shaka might have escaped, for when that shifty fellow realized that he might actually have to stab the king, he began to vacillate, until one night Nxumalo grabbed him by the strands about his neck and whispered, “We shall kill him together—the three of us. He must be removed.” Forever obedient, he was now obedient to the needs of the Zulu.

But he had still to face two extreme tests, in one of which lay a bitter irony. In a kraal near his, in which the king kept some four hundred of his wives, there was a girl named Thandi, who had served briefly in a women’s regiment before the king selected her to be his wife. Once during a lull in maneuvers Nxumalo had encountered her while she was resting beside the Umfolozi, and they had invited each other to enjoy the pleasures of the road, and several times after that Thandi had contrived to be in the vicinity of the iziCwe, and on two
different nights they had run a terrible risk by making real love, with the possibility that she might become pregnant.

He found her so delightful, so fresh in her attitudes, that he had started accumulating cattle to pay her lobola, when the king abruptly chose her for his own. True to his custom, Shaka rarely came near her; once during their years of marriage he had spent part of an evening talking with her, boasting of his prowess in battle, but even though she had listened attentively and said several times, “How brave you must have been,” she never saw him again. That brief encounter was supposed to suffice for the fifty remaining years she would spend in the royal kraal.

Now, through the agency of servants, she let Nxumalo know that she would brave any death if he were willing to run with her to find some home less pitiful, and one night while Nxumalo was brooding upon this matter, it occurred to him that one of the worst things his king had done was this imprisonment of so many beautiful girls, thus keeping them in fruitless bondage till their years were wasted, and he decided that if with the others he must kill the king, he would at the same time put his life in triple jeopardy by stealing one of the king’s wives. In great secrecy he drafted plans, and felt as if life were starting anew when Thandi came boldly to the kraal fence to smile at him, indicating her assent.

Next day came the severest test, for the king abruptly summoned him, and as Nxumalo entered the royal kraal, came toward him with tears in his eyes, and confessed: “Oh, Nxumalo! In my madness I thought of sending the witch-seekers after you, but now I see that you’re my only friend. I need you.”

Before Nxumalo could reply, the king led him to a cool spot and shared a gourd of beer. Then, taking Nxumalo’s two hands in his, he said, “My brothers are plotting against me.”

“Not likely.”

“Oh, but they are. I dreamed I was dead. It’s Dingane. I see him whispering. Mark my words, he’s not a trustful man.”

“He’s of royal blood. He’s your brother.”

“But can I trust him?” And without awaiting a reply, Shaka sighed. “I am cursed. I have no son. No one to trust. I’m growing old, and still the magic oil fails to arrive.”

Nxumalo could feel no sympathy for this slayer of women, and a response too dangerous to utter leaped to his mind: Shaka, you could
have had a score of sons. Nine years ago, if you had accepted Thetiwe instead of throwing her at me, you could have had six sons.

Again Shaka gripped Nxumalo’s hands. “You’re the one honest man in this nation. Promise me you’ll watch over me.”

With a lingering pity Nxumalo looked at the stricken man, this violent giant whose leadership had been corrupted by madness, and as he tried to formulate words that would allow him to depart, the king cried with deep remorse, “Oh, Nxumalo, it was wrong of me to kill your wives. Forgive me, old friend. I killed them all, and learned nothing.”

“You are forgiven,” Nxumalo said grimly, and with a deep bow he left the royal kraal, marched, ostensibly, back to his own, then slipped away to join the Wild Cat, who was instructing her nephews for the kill. “Shaka knows your intentions!” he cried. “He will kill you soon.”

Dingane, although of royal blood, was no Shaka. He lacked courage, and, as the king had said, he could not be trusted. “What shall we do?”

“Slay him now.”

“Now?” Dingane asked, looking at his brother.

“Now,” Nxumalo repeated.

They would strike at dusk—all three of them—when the king was more or less detached from his knobkerrie guards. “I’ll fetch my assegai,” Nxumalo said, and as he went toward his kraal he realized that Dingane had modified the plan so that only he, Nxumalo, would be seen by anyone watching. This meant that when the tumult erupted, he as a commoner could be thrown to the maddened crowd. “We’ll have none of that, Dingane,” he muttered, and he diverted his course to the wives’ kraal, where Thandi was waiting for his signal, and he told her that within the hour she must try to escape, prepared to flee north.

He then went back and told his remaining wife, “Be ready to leave at dusk.” She did not ask why or where, for, like the others, she had deduced that he was soon to be impaled. His survival was hers, and to be saved she must trust him.

As the sun started its descent on 22 September 1828, the three untrusting conspirators met casually, checked one another to be sure the stabbing assegais were ready, then walked like supplicants with a petition for their king and brother.