In this historical novel a fictional love story weaves itself into the true history of the assassination of Hamilton Hope, a British magistrate in the 19th-century Cape Colony, and the exile of members of my family under the leadership of Mhlontlo ka Matiwane from Qumbu to Lesotho, and later to Herschel on the Cape Colony side of the Lesotho border. I am grateful first to my grandfather, Charles Gxumekelane (A! Zenzile) Mda, who was born in 1880 and was a baby when the War of Hope broke out, and whose father, Feyiya, was a member of one of the Houses of Matiwane. Feyiya and his family were part of that migration from Qumbu to Lesotho with Mhlontlo. I am grateful for the stories he used to tell us, his grandchildren, about our origin. I am also grateful to the late Robert Mda of the Lesotho Mdas, who used to cross the Telle River to his Cousin Charles’ homestead in Qoboshane when I was a little boy. He never ran out of stories about the exploits of Mhlontlo – much embellished and full of magic; for instance, he could turn the white man’s bullets into water. I was amazed when I was researching this novel to find a lot of consistencies (among minor inconsistencies) in Charles’ and Robert’s oral histories and the stories that other praise poets of amaMpondomise from different parts of the Eastern Cape, as the region is now called, tell about the origins of amaMpondomise from Sibiside of abaMbo right up to the change of fortunes as a result of the killing of Hamilton Hope. The most detailed of these narratives was left for posterity by the late Mdukiswa Tyabashe who lived at Cuthbert’s Location and used to be King Lutshoto’s praise poet, and whose oral history was one of those collected by Harold Scheub and published in The Tongue is Fire: South African Storytellers and Apartheid (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1990). I am grateful to Harold Scheub for this collection. Of course, I did not only depend on the oral tradition for my sources. Historical record, both primary and secondary sources, was crucial. Joe H. Majija of Mthatha, a descendant of one of the junior Houses of Mhlontlo, directed me to a lot of archival documents from the trove he used in his self-published booklet, Dark Clouds at Sulenkama. Here I must thank Wonga Qina, a Grahamstown teacher, who helped me track down Mr Majija and also took me to libraries and archives in Grahamstown. Ken Heath of Kingwilliamstown was a relative of William Charles Henman, one of the two white men killed with Hope. I thank him for the information he provided. I rediscovered Mhlontlo as a high school student in Lesotho in Sesotho praise poetry, ‘Lithoko tsa Lerotholi’, in historian Mosebi Damane’s Marath’a Lilepe (Morija: Morija Sesuto Book Depot, 1960). The Basotho called him ’Mamalo. I was proud that I, a refugee boy, had a great-grandfather who featured in the praise poetry of Lesotho kings. Other materials that were useful were: Clifton Crais, ‘The Death of Hope’ in The Politics of Evil: Magic, State Power and the Political Imagination in South Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and J.S. Kotze, ‘Counter-Insurgency in the Cape Colony, 1872–1882’ in Scientia Militaria: South African Journal of Military Studies Vol. 31, No. 2 (2003) http://scientiamilitaria.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/152.
I hardly ever thank the two lovely women in my writing life: Pam Thornley, my long-time editor, and Isobel Dixon, my agent. It is high time I did so.
All the research for Little Suns was done, the initial chapters were written and the plan for the whole novel was executed during my sojourn as Artist-in-Residence at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS), Wallenberg Research Centre at Stellenbosch University, Marais Street, Stellenbosch, 7600, South Africa.