In 1837, Piet Retief left the Cape Colony as the leader of a thousand ox wagons, heading north towards the Drakensberg Mountains, with a view to creating his new Canaan. Piet had sent out scouts to the Zulu King, Dingane: the lands to the east were reported to be very fertile and Dingane was agreeable to a meeting.
When Retief reached the Drakensberg Mountains, which bordered Zululand, most of the party stayed behind at a place they named Kerkenberg – Church Mountain – in acknowledgement of the huge standing rocks that suggested to them the nave of a church. This landscape below and the promise of boundless space it appeared to offer inspired his sixteen-year-old daughter, Debora Jacoba Johanna: on his fifty-seventh birthday she painted her father’s name under a huge, overhanging rock. To this day it is visible, protected by a glass-fronted case, fixed there by people who believed that the Afrikaner heritage should be remembered.
Piet and a few of his men set out a few weeks later and rode east towards Dingane’s kraal, uMgungundlovu, to meet the King. They wanted to ask Dingane to grant them land to settle. Instead of agreeing to the land grant, Dingane asked Piet to recover cattle stolen from him by the chief of the Tlokwa, Sekonyela. It was clearly a test: if Piet, using his miraculous guns and horses, returned his cattle, Dingane would sign the treaty the Boers had drawn up.
Piet and his men were astonished by the extent of the King’s huts, the isigodlo. It was built according to the traditional layout of a Zulu royal kraal. In the middle of the isigodlo there was a huge empty space, the ikhanda, which was a parade ground. All along the perimeter of the ikhanda were the huts of the regiments, the barracks known as the uhlangoti.
As tradition specified, the royal complex was on a rise at the southern side of the complex facing the main entrance. The King, his wives and female attendants numbered five hundred, and the warriors at least another thousand. Every year at the ceremony of the first fruits, umkhosi wokweshwama, girls would parade and the king would choose new wives. In this way he was renewing the fertility of the land and the cattle and by choosing new wives the King became the symbol of this fertility.
The huts were beehive-shaped and each one was beautifully and intricately woven of thatching grass tied into the frame. The entrance of the huts was very low so that everyone had to stoop to enter. On each side of Dingane’s hut, which was much bigger than the others, there were special quarters for his women and girls. The King’s food and milk could only be handled by men, the inzinceku. It was a ritual of great importance, even something of a cult.
It occurs to me that these cattle played the same sort of totemic role as the Queen’s horses. Years ago I took my daughter, Lucinda, to the Royal Mews behind Buckingham Palace. At that time Lucinda was having riding lessons. There was a distinct sense of cultic practice surrounding these gleaming and well-fed horses in their sumptuous stables, as if by keeping their coats glossy, their hooves oiled and shod, their manes cut evenly, their hay nets and fresh water abundantly available, a god was being propitiated.
Every morning the inzinceku milked the cows and carried the milk in gourds, their arms outstretched in front of them, to symbolise the avoidance of filth. Every morning these men poured milk straight into the King’s mouth. They were privileged: where all other men had to crawl if they were approaching the King, the inzinceku could walk upright. And it was into this world – utterly alien, highly ritualised and casually brutal – that my ancestor stumbled, an innocent abroad.
Sekonyela had driven Dingane’s cattle onto an inaccessible mountain; from the heights his men had rolled large rocks down on Dingane’s warriors when they tried to recover the cattle. They were unable to dislodge these stubborn people. Guns were required. Piet agreed to take on the task. He returned to his camp near the Tugela River and soon set out again to find the stolen cattle. He was eager to acquire the fertile land that lay beneath him, a paradise of savannah, low, dense acacia woodland and wild rivers. The rivers tumbled down the escarpment in waterfalls which in turn fell into deep, turbulent pools, ringed by maidenhair ferns and shaded by huge yellow-wood trees in which vervet monkeys and baboons exchanged insults and threats. Lower down, the rivers levelled out, and here hippos carried on their noisy, crotchety lives and crocodiles were waiting in their limited but lethal fashion. All around there were antelope, elephants and lions. The lions and hyena often took cattle.
The Tlokwa were almost suicidal in their brave determination to resist and Retief’s men shot and killed a number of them on the heights before they agreed to give up the stolen cattle, but not before a woman jumped with her children from the heights, shouting, ‘I will not be killed by thunder, but I will kill myself.’ Nobody knows whether she had met other white men and their guns.
On horseback, Retief and his men herded the errant cattle towards Dingane’s country. At this season the landscape below was lush; Piet saw that livestock and crops would certainly thrive down there. He was sure that God had guided him to this promised land with a purpose. God had, in his omniscience, earmarked it for his favourite son.
A week later, on their tough, stocky, salted horses – immune to horse sickness – Piet and all his retinue were descending to uMgungundlovu with the richly patterned Nguni cattle stolen from Dingane. They proceeded slowly but remorselessly down the escarpment. The youngest boys – the voorlopers – herded the Nguni cattle and led the trek oxen, still attached to the wagons, and they held the oxen back to keep the wagons from running out of control. These boys were most probably Hottentots who had left the Cape with their parents who were in turn following their Boer masters. Who knows if they had a choice? The orders for the emigrating Boers specified that each family should provide ten Hottentots as well as oxen, foodstuffs, including rusks and dried meat, wagons, salt, kettles, household servants and a certain amount of money. This last demand may have been difficult for my ancestor, as he had recently been imprisoned for debt in the Cape Colony. The demand that each emigrating family should provide ten Hottentots suggests to me that they were still slaves, in Boer eyes anyway.
For the steep descent, the wheels on the wagons were locked by wooden brake-blocks, which began to smoke with the friction. The wood used was a soft wood, bush willow, for its grip and because it did not become as hot as other, hardwood, species, which quickly overheated, causing the iron rims of the ox-wagon wheels to expand and fall off. Wild peach wood was used to make the wheels. On their journey from the Cape, scores of wagon wheels were repaired and refitted.
Down below, some miles below, the thin smoke of the Zulu fires rose listlessly into the air. The Zulu indunas who had accompanied Retief to take back the cattle shouted the good news to their people below; their voices seemed to hang in the still air and from below other voices floated up to them. Many ran, overjoyed, to greet the return of the King’s beautiful, sacred cattle and their restoration at the centre of Zulu life.
Behind the wagons, two huge black eagles – ukhozi – soared over the mountains, high above the promised land. Before he set out for the wilderness, ‘New Eden’ was the name Retief suggested for their enterprise.
I picture it all: a twelve-year-old boy, William Wood, is holding his grey pony’s bridle as he observes the wagons coming closer. He is trying to count them. His horse is on edge; it has heard, long before William, the whinnies of other, unknown horses. William has an urgent message for the Boers, who are coming slowly but inexorably closer, streaming smoothly towards him. He is reminded of his mother’s treacle cakes, which he misses. From a distance the wagons look like a river, but now individual wagons and oxen and horses are detaching themselves to become distinct entities, and the cracking of the whip, the bellows of the oxen and the shouts of the voorlopers waft down to William in the valley. He can even see the white bonnets of the women riding on the front of the wagons, perhaps a little nervous as they catch a glimpse of their New Eden.
When they finally reach the ford of the Nzolo River, which marks the way to the gently undulating lands surrounding the King’s kraal, the Boers halt. One man rides towards William and waves his hat in his direction. William guesses that this is Piet Retief and raises his hat in return; he is not sure what else he can do. This man, who is on a sturdy bay horse, approaches William. He is striking, about fifty-five years old, with a black beard and blue eyes. On his head is a leather hat stained with mutton fat and dust. Over his shoulder is a leather pouch.
At first he speaks to the boy in Dutch:
‘What are you doing here? What is your name? Are you the missionary’s son? Do you speak Dutch?’
William says that he doesn’t understand; he speaks English, but he says in mitigation that he also knows some Zulu.
The man on the horse asks the questions again in English and young Will tells the man on the horse his name and how he comes to be living here with the Reverend Francis Owen, a missionary. The man on the horse says that he is Piet Retief, and he is the leader of the emigrating Boers from the Cape Colony.
William asks him, ‘What does “emigrating” mean, sir?’
‘It means we have left our own country to live in another.’
‘Because, young William, we was discontented with the situation there.’
‘Why were you discontented?’
‘Our land, William, was taken over by the English.’
‘I am English, sir.’
Retief laughs. He has a high, girlish laugh, all the more unexpected for rising out of a pitch-black beard.
‘I won’t hold you personally responsible, young William. Now tell me, where will I find the great King Dingane?’
William tells him that the King’s kraal is just over the next hill, less than a mile away. Piet Retief asks him where he should make camp.
‘Sir, if you make camp under the milk trees, beneath the Reverend Owen’s hut, where I live, you will find water and grazing. Do not cross the river near his kraal before you have permission from the King.’
‘First we must outspan the oxen so that they can drink and graze, and then we will go and see the great King. We have a present for him.’
‘You have the King’s cattle.’
‘Yes, these cattle. We are bringing seven hundred head back to the King.’
Retief looks back to the wagons and gestures towards the cattle mottling the rich veld. They have spread out for hundreds of yards. Each animal’s colouring is different; the Zulus recognise these patterns and have names for them; they call their markings speckled eggs or pebbles or stones on a dry riverbed; another is called the shrike, because its black-and-white marking reminds them of this bird, the fiscal shrike. Their descriptions are thousands of years old. The Zulus love their cattle. They also depend on them for meat and milk and hides; one hand, they say, washes the other. The kraal, the sibaya, is the centre of their lives. There are four cattle enclosures within the sibaya. The King and his people live in close proximity to their beloved cattle. The ceremonial royal cattle are black. No other cattle may mate with the royal cattle.
Retief has the gaze of a prophet; in the tradition of prophets his eyes see only what he wants to see, even things that are not visible. He appears to be looking at the horizon through his blue eyes. In his mind he perhaps sees his birthplace, the town of Wagenmakersvallei – Wagon Makers’ Valley – resurrected here in this paradise. The English had renamed his home town Wellington, to honour the great hero.
‘William.’
‘Yes, sir?’
‘You are a fine boy. You will meet my own son, Cornelis, who has thirteen years. He is here with me. You will be his friend.’
Retief points back towards the wagons, as if William needs to understand that his son is there, driving the cattle.
‘Please call me Oom Piet – in the English language, Uncle Piet.’
King Dingane has also offered some young boys as companions for William. Oom Piet, his adoptive uncle, goes back to the wagons, his horse at a fast and comfortable triple, the favoured gait of the Boers.
William watches Retief riding off. He wishes he had been able to tell Retief what he had heard, that Dingane intended to murder him and all his men, women, children and servants. He has no opportunity to tell Mr Retief that Dingane sent a message, which said that he, the Reverend Francis Owen and his wife, and the other white woman, Jane Williams, a servant, would be safe. Despite this guarantee, William is frightened. In fact the guarantee of safety makes him particularly uneasy because it confirms that the Boers will not be spared. He wants to ride away on his horse, Snowy, to the coast and to his mother and father, but Dingane is mercurial and unpredictable and any show of weakness will almost certainly get him killed. If he tried to escape, the impis would follow him all the way to the coast if necessary. He must never give the impression to Dingane that he is frightened, because that will lead to certain death, as if by fearing death you are encouraging it.
He vaults onto Snowy, who is highly nervous and sweating heavily; they canter off in the direction of the mission. The mission is really no more than a large hut, although the Reverend Owen and his wife have made a garden and have given the place a kind of English cottage appearance. They have grown beans up a tepee-shaped arbour of sticks. They have tried to entice African honey-bees into a hive woven out of grass. For all that, there is an aura of neglect, as though their hearts have gone out of it. They have a cat, which intrigues the Zulus, who wonder what sort of medicine it is used for. The cat, Melbourne, travelled all the way from England with the Owens. It has learned how to kill snakes and so far has never been bitten. But it can only be a matter of time before a puff adder or a mamba gets him. Horses and cattle are often bitten when grazing and most of them die. This is an unforgiving land.
The Reverend Francis Owen and his wife have also been watching the cattle stream down from the escarpment, sticking close to their hut, and this probably gives them a false sense of security. Owen’s time in Zululand is more or less up; Dingane allowed him to preach once but he could not see the point of any of it and in particular he rejected the notion of sin and hell-fire. Who would sign up for that? This was Owen’s one and only sermon.
William leaves Snowy with one of the servants and goes in to speak to Owen. The Reverend is talking to his wife. They look up, a little flustered, and smile unconvincingly, as people do when they are caught in private conversation. William sees that they are not suited to this life in the middle of nowhere.
‘Ah, Will, did you talk with Mr Retief?’
‘I did, sir. He has gone to make camp.’
‘I saw them. There are at least eighty of them. Did you speak to their leader?’
‘He was busy with the wagons and the stolen cattle, and only wanted to know where he should outspan.’
William knows that the Reverend Owen is deeply disturbed. These Boers – strange, brave people who have descended on them – are in terrible danger. And so is his small household. At the best of times, Dingane will kill anyone on a whim and if Owen tells the Boers that Dingane is planning to kill them, which he and William believe the King is intending, Dingane will know that it was he, Owen, who warned them and then he and his family will be swept up in the inevitable horror.
Half a mile from the huge royal kraal and facing the Reverend Owen’s hut is the killing ground, KwaMatiwane. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of people who have crossed Dingane have been killed and eviscerated there. Random killing appals the Reverend Owen: he doesn’t believe that the view from his home is suitable for a man of the cloth. The basics of Christianity have not taken hold here, and Owen wonders if they ever will. He is certainly not going to wait to find out. Since he was allowed to deliver his only sermon, Owen has not made a single convert. Now he is faced with an appallingly stark dilemma; if he warns the Boers, he and his household will almost certainly be killed; if he doesn’t, the Boers will be killed. It is an ethical dilemma of the sort that professional philosophers like to wrestle with. Owen has searched his Bible for a precedent he can follow, and failed.
The question is stark: are the lives of his family more valuable than the lives of a hundred Boers and another hundred women, children and servants?
Owen is wracked.
Dingane receives Retief and invites him and his men to a ceremony in the kraal in a few days, to thank him for the return of the cattle. To celebrate, Retief’s men gallop around on their horses firing their guns, perhaps showing off their power, unless it is nothing more than an ill-judged celebration of the return of the cattle. There is a delay; William hears whispers that Dingane is summoning his regiments from outlying villages. Two days later Retief and his men are asked to come to the kraal, and to leave their guns outside: it would not be appropriate to bear arms at a celebration in the presence of the King. The guns are stacked at the entrance of the kraal. The Boers are seated in the vast open space at the centre of the kraal, the isibaya esikhulu. There will be feasting and three traditional dances from Dingane’s warriors. Dingane has seated Retief near him. The warriors are armed only with their short knobkerries, isagilai, which are something like a shillelagh and are used for ceremonial dances. The Boers look on, amused, but perhaps also with rising apprehension, as the Zulus stamp and leap and shout and advance ever closer to the Boers, so that the earth beneath them seems to shudder. Suddenly, on a signal from Dingane, more than a thousand warriors of the amabutho, the King’s own regiments, stream into the kraal. Dingane stands up: ‘Bulalani abathakathi,’ he calls out – ‘Kill the wizards’. The warriors surround the seventy or eighty Boers, and club them with their sticks. One of these is Cornelis Retief, aged thirteen, who is now never to meet William Wood. Some of the Boers fight back with pocket knives, killing three or four Zulus, but they are soon overwhelmed. The warriors drag the Boers eight hundred yards from the royal kraal to KwaMatiwane, the place of killing, where the warriors finish off the living with their clubs. Zulu oral accounts relate that Retief was the last to be killed, so that he would be obliged to watch the agony of the massacre. I sometimes think of young Cornelis and I try to imagine how his father felt watching his son’s death. I am related to Cornelis too.
Piet’s heart is removed and taken to Dingane before being buried under the path leading to the kraal, a practice designed to keep the spirits of the dead at bay. The warriors jog some distance on towards the camp where the women, children and servants are waiting for the men to return; they are helpless as they hear the impis coming closer. The noise made by a Zulu impi running to battle is terrifying and said to be like the sound of waves on a beach. It is produced by the agitation of the porcupine-quill anklets all the warriors wear. The women, children and servants are killed. In all, one hundred and fifty Boers and their retainers die. The bodies of the women and children and servants too are dragged to the hill, KwaMatiwane, the place of killing, and left there for the lions and the hyenas and the smaller scavengers like jackals and bat-eared foxes and, in the daytime, vultures.
The Reverend Francis Owen and his household, including William Wood, watch in horror and fear. William has not told Owen that he has spoken to two of the Boers and warned them of the danger they are in. He has been unable to keep the secret. The men chose not to believe his warning; Dingane, they said, was a fine fellow.
Two years later William described the massacre in a written account. His father was on the expedition sent a few months after the massacre to punish Dingane. This expedition was routed and William’s father was one of those killed. William records his father’s death in a very matter-of-fact way. There is no eulogy and no expression of emotion. I wonder if he was traumatised. I think of my daughter and her troubled mind.
The vultures and the hyenas are busy on the killing fields for many days. At night the hyenas squabble over the bodies, whooping and screaming in their disturbed fashion. Lions also arrive to feast on the bodies. As dawn breaks, the male lions roar in turn, a sound that indicates that they are going to lie up in the shade, sated. Their roars broadcast a threat to interlopers, a threat which carries right up to the slopes of the high mountains. With daylight, the vultures – great hooded birds – circle once more before falling clumsily on the remains of the Boers, ripping and tearing at the flesh with their huge beaks, which are shaped like bill-hooks.
Soon after the massacre, Dingane spoke to Richard Hulley, a trader and translator: ‘I see that every white man is an enemy to the black, and every black man an enemy to the white. They do not love each other and never will.’
In his last meeting with Owen, Dingane asked the very nervous missionary, ‘Do you not see that I have done a good thing in killing my enemies in one stroke?’
Soon, Owen and his household are given permission to leave uMgungundlovu, although William waits some days, feigning nonchalance in case the King should think he is in an unseemly hurry to get away to Port Natal.
Owen admits in his diary that he went along with the King:
Two of the Boers paid me a visit this morning, and breakfasted, only two hours before they were called into another world. When I asked them what they thought of Dingaan, they said, ‘He was good,’ so unsuspicious were they of his intentions. To Dingaan’s message this morning I sent as guarded a reply as I could; knowing that it would be both foolish and dangerous to accuse him, at such a season, of perfidy and cruelty. However, as his message to me was kind and well-intended, showing a regard to my feelings, as well as to my safety, I judged it prudent and proper to thank him for it.
Later Hulley wrote:
It appears clear from Mr Owen’s evidence that, rightly or wrongly, Dingaan thought the Boers intended to kill him, and that he meant to anticipate their plot by killing them.
Owen wrote up his every day’s happenings. But what does not appear in his diary is any guilt for dooming the Boers to be ‘called to another world’.
It is clear to me that Dingane believed that the piece of paper he had signed two days before the massacre was a ruse to steal his land. Under Zulu custom, the land belongs for ever to God and not even a king has the right to give it to others. When I read that Dingane shouted to his waiting warriors, ‘Bulalani abathakathi’ – ‘Kill the wizards’ – I wondered what, exactly, he meant. I remembered from my first – and only – year at Oxford that Wittgenstein said, ‘Language sets everyone the same traps; it is an immense network of easily accessible wrong turnings.’ And I discovered that the term ‘abathakathi’ indicates not sorcerers or wizards in general, but those whose intentions are always malign. I have learned that there are terms in Zulu for black and white wizards, a concept similar to white and black witches in Europe. In fact I remembered a painting by Cranach the Elder that depicts witches on horseback. So Dingane’s sight of galloping horsemen firing guns, led by Piet Retief, may have suggested frightening supernatural powers.
Retief – cloaked in righteousness, blessed by God, free of his creditors – had undoubtedly arrived in this land in order to take it. And despite the fact that he was still just about living on the cusp of prehistory, Dingane understood what was in store for his people. His conversation with Hulley confirms it, and the subsequent history of South Africa bears witness to the fact that whites seldom observed the treaties they had made.
In December Dingane sent his warriors against another group of trekkers, who were led by Andries Wilhelmus Jacobus Pretorius. Dingane’s warriors attacked the circle of wagons on the banks of what came to be called Blood River. It is said that, without a single Boer being killed, three thousand Zulus died that day. The Boers saw it as a sign from God that they had his approval for their biblical journey into the wilderness. And I think it established the idea of necessary violence that the Boers adopted wherever they went.
On 29 January 1840, a combined force of disaffected warriors and followers of Mpande, Dingane’s half-brother, along with English irregulars from the coast and Pretorius’s Boers, defeated Dingane’s warriors. In a rage, Dingane had his general, Ndlela ka Sompisi, executed. But soon after, the King was driven into the forests, and was assassinated at Hlatikulu. For the Boers, victory was complete, but I wonder at what cost to subsequent history.
The kingdom of Zululand still exists, but in reality it was finally crushed by the British in the Zulu Wars of 1879. Both sides suffered appalling casualties. Yet the allure of the Zulus as the warrior nation persists.
One of the most moving plays I have ever seen was the Zulu Macbeth, Umabatha, staged in Johannesburg. When the Zulu warriors bounded onto the huge stage, the audience began to cheer and ululate; it was clear that the actors and the audience understood with a passion that this was also the history of Zulu regicide and violence; Duncan was Dingane. At that time the Zulus were holding out against the first free elections and Johannesburg was tense. I was there as an official observer. There had been a huge explosion near the Town Hall, which killed nine people. I had the sense of being in a war zone, in part thrilling, in part terrifying. At the time it seemed to me to be one of those experiences which change you for ever.