The family of the old chief Matshana kaMondisa in Zululand quarrelled bitterly at the end of the nineteenth century. Their disagreements upset his amaSithole followers and his hallowed homestead, known as Sigedhleni.1 It once accommodated sacred war rituals of the umXhapho regiment, which annihilated the white enemy at the Battle of Isandlwana in January 1879.2 After the Anglo-Zulu War, Sigedhleni continued to serve as the amaSithole capital on the north side of the Thukela River in Nkandla division.3 By 1903, rumours were circulating that ‘ukuxabana noyise’, a ‘rift with father’ in the Mondisa lineage, had prompted a legal showdown. Such acrimony exposed the opportunities and perils of migrant labour in Zululand, a territory incorporated by the Natal Colony two decades after British troops finally defeated the Zulu kingdom in July 1879.
The contexts
The ‘rift with father’ stemmed from mutual antagonism between Matshana, a polygamist, and his son Ugudhla, the only boy born to Nomvimbi, an Indhlunkulu (Great hut) wife. She exercised influence in Sigedhleni by preparing her daughters to wed Zulu nobility, sealing alliances between her husband’s lineage and this renowned dynasty of Africa. Nomvimbi also promoted the ambitions of her son, welcoming Ugudhla’s wife and enlarging his herd with cattle bride-wealth, ilobolo, which she received for her nubile daughters. As a newlywed residing at home, Ugudhla wrangled with Matshana over property and the nuptial prospects of Nomvimbi’s daughters. The younger contender felt entitled to decide family matters because his earnings from the Transvaal mines had saved his mother and her household from hardship.4 Ugudhla had acquired his wealth through South Africa’s burgeoning capitalist order. His income symbolised a different route to traditional power, a path of mobility taken by young men who embraced opportunities afforded the ‘migrant kings’ of Zululand.5
The outward movement of itinerant labourers disrupted domestic dynamics but it did not signal the collapse of homesteads. Since Iron Age settlement, the homestead represented a portable model of family reproduction and subsistence production, even after fratricidal successions in the Zulu kingdom spurred entire chieftaincies to relocate.6 Homesteads endured because they adapted to momentous change, particularly when foreign newcomers implemented heavy taxes and compulsory isibhalo (public work) demands. By the late nineteenth century, family patriarchs handled different political externalities, as well. They no longer paid homage and tribute (ukukhonza) to the autonomous house of Shaka. Instead, they paid deference and taxes (ukuthela) to the intrusive government of Somsewu – the Zulu name for the Secretary for Native Affairs (SNA), Theophilus Shepstone.7
Household relationships evolved, too, with life cycles in continual motion. While in the past, juniors, such as Ugudhla, attained seniority gradually through ageing or abruptly through ceremony, an emerging economic process came to modify social advancement. Industrial wage work, as opposed to Zulu regimental service, offered a means to higher rank through individual initiative.8 As the breadwinner, Ugudhla paid his mother’s debts, particularly her hut tax. He fulfilled an obligation recognised by magistrates as a senior patriarchal prerogative. In 1903, the Natal colony doubled the hut tax on homesteads occupying Crown land, compelling fathers in southern Zululand to borrow from ruthless moneylenders.9 Ugudhla had obtained cash, too, but he was in a better position, arguably, to manage his finances. His line of credit extended to wage employment, rather than a loan shark. When flushed with income, Ugudhla elevated his position through traditional custom (for example, cattle acquisitions) and colonial procedure (for example, tax payments), without having to rely on his father.
Thus money also widened the ‘rift with father’, as Ugudhla and other migrants pocketed earnings previously set aside for a ‘common purse’ controlled by male elders.10 The junior men spent such withheld income on cattle (ilobolo) and emergency provisions. In addition, they used savings to pay for the hut tax in order to collect a receipt in their own name, much like Ugudhla, showing they were government-registered patriarchs without a ‘kraal’ or homestead. ‘The ease with which a refractory son could himself become a kraal head’ impressed one magistrate across the Thukela River from Sigedhleni. He wrote that ‘emancipation was hedged around with restrictions, but in practice all that was necessary was to ask to have a separate Hut Tax receipt’.11
Prior to the ‘rift with father’, Matshana had grown weary of assertive migrants, if not their wages. Their money had kept some of his amaSithole followers from starvation, after a string of droughts, locust swarms and rinderpest decimated agriculture in the 1890s. During such deprivation, labour migrancy became the lifeline of homesteads. Young men such as Ugudhla literally represented ‘the Gardens that fed’.12 Even Matshana’s cohorts, similarly worn down by scarcity, recognised that as
famine threatened us … we were saved by our sons. They earned the money which we have paid the Government Taxes … (ever since our cattle died off with rinderpest and robbed us of the only other means of acquiring money by the sale of cattle). And it was their hard earned money that enabled us to buy … overseas foodstuffs, [which] we would not have deigned to touch in former years, to keep ourselves, our wives and families alive.13
The parties
The Sigedhleni feud seemed destined for high drama. It revolved around a legendary protagonist: Matshana, scion of ‘great Jobe’ (Shaka’s ally) and confidant to Zulu kings Mpande and Cetshwayo.14 Matshana would be named the star defendant in Ugudhla kaMatshana kaMondisa v Matshana kaMondisa, Chief of the Sitole Tribe. The original suit, filed in 1903, challenged Matshana’s illustrious reputation as a hereditary authority with the ability to deliver resources and security to his people, particularly the ‘flesh and blood’ of his own homestead. Ugudhla initiated the case and paid the court fees. The legal proceedings dragged into 1905, concerning amaSithole followers and Natal judges.15
Before being called to testify, Matshana had to contemplate again the consequences of white enforcers scrutinising his judgement. In 1858, he barely eluded mortal injury when John Shepstone attempted to arrest him for the murder of a man variously identified as Sidhlatiya, Sigatiya or Sikadiya. Then, young Matshana was a fugitive chief. He moved with an entourage of defenders armed with spears, shields and bevelled clubs, the latter known as amawisa or knobkerries, which doubled as ornamental staffs and lethal weapons. Shepstone commanded a band of gunslingers on horseback, many of them mobilised by amaHlubi chief, Langalibalele, in northern Natal. Among other things, they compelled Africans to build colonial infrastructure, a system of labour recruitment derisively dubbed isibhalo by those who hated its arduous burdens, meagre wages and mandatory service. Isibhalo merited its pejorative label because a white overseer registered in writing, ukubhala, names of people caught in the dragnet of exploitation.16
This effort to apprehend Matshana had involved John Shepstone, brother of SNA Theophilus Shepstone, cornering and shooting the suspect, as if hunting game. A bullet grazed the chief as he ran into the bush. However, the mounted gunslingers slaughtered Matshana’s bodyguards. Two dozen people died at the scene.17 Without hesitation, the colony ‘outlawed Matyana [Matshana], deposed him from his chieftainship … and broke up the tribe’, according to David Welsh’s pioneering analysis of the episode in The Roots of Segregation: Native Policy in Natal (1845–1910).18
Decades hence, accounts of this brutal attack and violent displacement circulated in colony, kingdom and beyond. Two isiZulu-speaking clergymen, Natal Bishop John Colenso and Reverend Canon Tönneson, investigated the 1858 incident and published their findings of John Shepstone’s perfidious treatment of Matshana.19 Their widely disseminated History of the Matshana Enquiry, printed in 1875 and emblazoned only with Colenso’s name, alarmed imperialists (among them, Lord Carnarvon, Garnet Wolseley and Henry Bulwer) who hoped to forge a ‘civilised’ confederation of colonies and republics in southern Africa.20 Wolseley and Bulwer worried that the image of a just British Empire would be besmirched by this 282-page investigation. As a consequence, they sought a statement from the amaSithole chief absolving the SNA of deadly duplicity in 1858. Matshana’s pardon was urgently desired. London had promoted John Shepstone to Acting SNA in Natal, whilst his brother held the office of Administrator of newly annexed British Transvaal. When visiting officials approached Matshana, nearby Zulu regiments sounded a war ‘cry’, perhaps that of the umXhapho. Shielded by Cetshwayo, Matshana declined to co-operate with white authorities gathering evidence to try Langalibalele, the amaHlubi chief, who had failed to register the firearms his migrant followers bought at the Kimberley diamond fields.21 When threatened with punishment by the SNA, Langalibalele, his sons and their cohorts galloped into mountainous Lesotho. A colonial force pursued, crushed the Hlubi resistance in a Drakensberg skirmish and arraigned the rebel chief.22 With this in mind, the irony of Matshana’s refusal to participate in the legal flaying of his former aggressor, Langalibalele, could not have been more obvious.
Thirty years later, Mpande’s royal attendant, Magidigidi kaNobede, recalled another version of the bloody Shepstone-Matshana encounter. Magidigidi described the indictment against Matshana who was charged with ‘kill[ing] a man of his own tribe’. In 1857, the deceased’s ‘wife had reported the death, so the authorities decided to see the spot where the man was killed’. Magidigidi believed the inspection masked another plot. What Matshana learned from this decision also prepared him for colonial treachery: John Shepstone’s brother planned to redistribute the resources of non-compliant chiefs to African authorities who obeyed SNA decrees. In particular, Theophilus Shepstone schemed to give ‘land at the Lenge, viz. that occupied by Matshana kaMondisa’ to his own headman/induna, Ngoza kaLudbana.23 Historian Thomas McClendon’s definitive examinations of Theophilus Shepstone’s career clarify the ways in which the colony ‘“read” its [African] subjects through the personal relationships formed between Shepstone’ and his personal advisers, such as Ngoza. Advancing the idea of James Scott’s Seeing Like a State, McClendon argues that the Department of Native Affairs made legible what Natal settlers thought incomprehensible – namely, the complex customary world of homestead and chieftaincy – thereby ceding ‘considerable power into the hands of [Shepstone’s] … African interlocutors’.24 From Magidigidi’s perspective, the gambit to capture Matshana served the same end, paying off the SNA’s sycophant. Rather than surrender, Matshana crossed the Thukela River with amaSithole refugees, driving livestock with him. During the exodus, he disguised himself by ‘chang[ing] his loin-cover for another’.25
Matshana’s downfall and flight inspired another popular tale. It appeared in a British magazine that introduced English-speaking audiences to a renowned Zulu writer, as Hlonipha Mokoena shows in her important book, Magema Fuze: The Making of a Kholwa Intellectual.26 In 1879 MacMillan’s featured the commentary of Magema Magwaza Fuze, Bishop Colenso’s catechist and muse. ‘It was said,’ Fuze lamented, ‘that it was he [Matshana] who sent his people to kill Sigatiya; and that talk, in fact, drove Matshana away from Natal, and he fled to Zululand.’ Referring to the commotion instigated by Colenso’s Matshana Enquiry and the trial of Langalibalele, Fuze said: ‘After many years the truth was brought to light … that Matshana never sent men to kill Sigatiya; and so Matshana was ruined for nothing at all, and his people were killed for nothing at all.’27
All versions agree: Matshana’s survival saga concluded with his escape to the Zulu kingdom, where he re-established a sanctuary, perhaps the most remarkable feat of his remarkable life. To reach asylum, he first dodged assassination that triggered a mass execution. Next, he restored his rule after the traumatic seizure of amaSithole territory. Under Mpande and Cetshwayo, Matshana would enjoy royal respect for his fierce opposition to white encroachment, particularly the diamond discoveries that lured African migrant labourers to Kimberley. This mineral revolution threatened to drain Zulu manpower from the kingdom’s fields, pastures and military.28 Living beyond colonial jurisdiction also enabled Matshana to avoid the matter of Sigatiya (Sidhlatiya), the homicide victim whose wife contacted Natal authorities. Before he died, Sidhlatiya had been accused of using umthakathi – an evildoer or ‘witch’ – to unleash malevolent dissonance. In other words Sidhlatiya was probably overheard belittling the inexperience of the amaSithole chief, which made this dissenter a dangerous enemy of the Mondisa lineage. Such mutinous behaviour happened to coincide with the suspicious slaying of Matshana’s uncle, who advised the fledgling regent and whose death would be opportunely blamed on Sidhlatiya, the alleged witch.
The umthakathi (witch) was said to spawn devastation through sinister acts. One tactic of umthakathi involved conjuring poisonous medicines that brought bewildering misfortune. Harm could be delivered by undetectable toxic ‘pollution’ called umnyama, which incapacitated victims. Real or imagined, umnyama was a harbinger of fatal ‘witchcraft’. Some umthakathi could pinpoint umnyama to decimate a political mentor, thereby gaining ascendancy, ukuthonya, over a chief once protected by the victim. In the nineteenth century, Zulu chiefs confronting hazards of war and succession envisaged ukuthonya as the gravest threat to their survival.29 In Sidhlatiya, the amaSithole leadership probably identified a source of unruly wickedness and resolved to stop it.
A half-century later, the amaSithole chief would confront another peril: his own son Ugudhla, an adversarial migrant worker who used the Natal courts as a vehicle to gain ascendancy, to the detriment of his father’s authority.
The laws
It is not surprising that Matshana perceived peril in wage labour and colonial law. They comprised a wearying juggernaut. Labour recruiters, authorised by magistrates, were gutting southern Zululand of young men. Nkandla was especially hard hit, with chiefs lamenting the lost contributions of their able-bodied sons.30 At this time, migrants demonstrated preference for a single destination, the Transvaal.31 They departed to gold fields and related industries around Johannesburg, sometimes vanishing altogether into city slums.
Desertion left ‘the female and feeble’ vulnerable, as they waited in homesteads for remunerations, but ‘in a great many cases [they were] forgotten’.32 Yet the many migrants who returned to wed, such as Ugudhla, were eager to ‘build their own homestead’, ukwakha umuzi. This idiom captured a man’s aspirations to begin a family by enlarging his herd with the acquisition of one breeding bull (inkunzi), a figure of Zulu masculine potency (see Figure 5.2).33 Cattle converted to bridewealth improved a traditional husband’s prospects for attaining prestige and prosperity through polygamy. Even as bovine reproduction remained a time-honoured way of growing the homestead, ukwakha umuzi depended on fresh sources of wealth, namely migrant earnings, to buy other valuable household objects, such as blankets, which ‘warmed’ the sleeping mats of a married couple. Among other things, bedding could represent the promise of children; when a husband departed for migrant labour, his mats and blankets could be stored in a hanging rack called an isibaxa, with carved illustrations of his homestead. Isibaxa defines the forked pole supporting or scaffolding a hut roof. Thus, in metaphorical terms, ‘baxa’ refers to a domestic pillar, both real and symbolic, which builds the homestead, ukwakha umuzi.
Yet what truly upheld and advanced ukwakha umuzi were legal strategies. Indeed, the wooden isibaxa could not offer the benefits of a court petition, which convinced a magistrate to grant wage earners recognition as husbands, whose obligations providing for a wife superseded all other filial obligations. A favourite ploy entailed evoking an ambiguous clause in the Natal Code of Native Law, granting married sons ‘emancipation’ from their fathers.34
Figure 5.1
Zulu migrants in leisure and performance modes on the mines of the Rand.
Photographer unrecorded
Mineworkers
1905
Courtesy of Museum Africa, Johannesburg
The Code adopted Theophilus Shepstone’s conception of ‘native customary law’, which reflected his personal understanding of how indigenous ritual could be merged with British statute. Simply put, the Code reinforced homestead hierarchies, subordinating women and youths to male elders. Shepstone and his magistrates adhered to this patriarchal arrangement when implementing legal guidelines for African plaintiffs, defendants, suspects and witnesses. The Code also gave the government the right to punish many transgressions, but offered the homestead patriarch one avenue through which to address his legal problems: colonial adjudication according to the Department of Native Affairs. Indeed, Shepstone manipulated customary law to mimic what he perceived as the modes of rule instituted by ‘chiefs themselves’.35 Carolyn Hamilton compares Shepstone’s practice of managing the ‘natives’ to a modern-day method actor transported back in time to colonial Natal. In fluent Zulu, he deftly dramatises benevolent despotism by performing in whiteface the role of Shaka, omnipotent judge whose arbitrary decisions rarely led to capital punishment.36 Shepstone’s power play, as Hamilton, McClendon and Mahmood Mamdani emphasise in different ways, animated the theatre of British indirect rule in Africa.37
By the 1890s, chiefly authority was collapsing under the Code’s impinging dictates. Matshana and his counterparts were politically weakened by their inability to punish factional conflict; the magistrate did so. Moreover, they were ordered to collect damages in the aftermath of communal violence and to hand reparations to the colony.38 In addition, the Code altered the lives of boys and young men who worked for the homestead. It granted the governor unilateral rights to compel chiefs to muster male youths into isibhalo brigades. With compulsory obligations and pittance wages, isibhalo laid the foundation for the system of labour migrancy underpinning capitalist development. Isibhalo brigades constructed transportation networks during the last third of the nineteenth century, a turning point for Natal. Its dominion status was progressing towards independence, with a cabinet accountable to parliamentarians elected by white men with property. In 1893, the imperial decision to grant local voters responsible government further enhanced settlers’ autonomy, without hindering their prospects. They were now integrated into South African and global trade due in large measure to isibhalo, which built railways to the Transvaal and Cape mines. These tracks transported workers, as well as lucrative agricultural and industrial exports from inland destinations to Durban harbour. Furthermore, a web of wagon roads connected rural towns outside Pietermaritzburg to surrounding commercial dairy and beef enterprises. The isibhalo brigade created these routes, receiving little in return, for the benefit of enriched settlers.39
Figure 5.2
Imagining ukwakha umuzi: man, wife, and bull (inkunzi), three sources of reproductive power. The separation of bodies on this rack could also symbolise the divided or suspended state of a household, after the migrant worker departs for wage labour and defers his homestead activities for another time.
Tivenyanga Qwabe
KwaZulu-Natal
Isibaxa (mat rack)
1950s
86 × 62 × 14 cm
Wood, poker work side panels
Standard Bank African Art Collection (Wits Art Museum)
In enforcing isibhalo and other labour regulations of the Code, the Natal colony sought first to forge ‘a civilized commercial society’ on the backs of lowpaid African men and, second, to profit from their disbursement of hard-earned ‘money in wives and cattle’.40 To advance this aim, the SNA endorsed a bill in 1869 to alter the terms of African marriage. The legislation imposed a £5 cost for every nuptial union and £1 charge for each divorce registered by magistrates. Soon after its passage, government coffers, which funded public works, swelled with revenue. Most important, the 1869 law made homestead patriarchs acutely aware of how the concerns of money and colonialism were gaining ascendancy over them.
Since the middle of the nineteenth century, Natal society detested practices of polygamy, calling them ‘crimes against humanity which have to be put down’.41 Jeremy Martens elaborates: ‘prominent colonists’ condemned ‘the barbaric slavery of polygamy’, presuming it compelled, in settler Thomas Pipson’s words, the polygamous ‘black man either … to work the girls and women whom he breeds or buys’ or minimally labour ‘a few months for the white man’, all to earn enough to purchase more ‘wives and cattle’. 42 The 1869 law attacked this main beneficiary of plural marriage by fixing ilobolo on a sliding scale, with a 10 cattle limit for commoners; headmen could demand up to 15 head and most chiefs could receive 20 head. Such caps on liberated the single black man, SNA Shepstone boasted, ‘from the mere property competition of the rich old polygamist’.43 Homestead heads immediately complained. One patriarch protested the end of the ‘long experience’ of the ‘Zulu plan’, which conferred on fathers ‘control over the marriages of … children’ and their ‘cattle (lobola)’.44 Indeed, daughters were once inaccessible to young suitors when men of Matshana’s distinction could command a large bride-wealth.45 Homestead heads could delay the marriage of a daughter until they found a suitor with sufficient hereditary rank and accumulated cattle.46 But with the new bride-wealth regulations in place, Zulu patriarchs sarcastically thanked the SNA for dousing them with youthful marriages that diminished their prestige. Into the early twentieth century, the Zulu name for the 1869 law carried a subtle sting, Umbidhli or ‘Shepstone’s immense downpour’.47
Figure 5.3
Photographer unrecorded
Portrait of Theophilus Shepstone (1817–1893), Secretary for Native Affairs, steward of the Natal Code of Native Law and enforcer of the 1869 marriage legislation known as ‘Shepstone’s downpour’ 1879
Campbell Collections, University of Kwa-Zulu Natal
‘Shepstone’s downpour’ whetted the ambitions of single suitors such as Ugudhla. He told Matshana, ‘I obtained my cattle I lobolad with [presented as bridewealth] by working … I do not consider that any cattle earned in this manner belong to my father, or that he had any say over them.’ Simply put, Ugudhla could compete for wives without waiting to receive his patriarch’s consent and wealth.48 Brides learned, as well, that a wage earner could convert his salary into bride-wealth. Thus, their outright refusal to wed a chosen husband was not considered a permanent hindrance to their nuptial future. This is why one Zulu headman denounced the SNA for the permission he granted ‘girls to choose their husbands … [and] select young men’. Such ‘liberty’, in turn, emboldened mothers who ‘followe[d] their sons when they are married’. The result was that an ‘old man is left with no one to attend him’.49 Such rejection may have loomed over Matshana as he faced his day in a court governed by colonial law.
The cases
Ugudhla’s case against his father reveals how some itinerant labourers determined to embrace the marriage law and the validation it gave junior men with means. When he sued Matshana, Ugudhla had already exploited the limits on bride-wealth to press his objective, ukwakha umuzi, building up his homestead. As a wouldbe patriarch with money for litigation, the plaintiff also intended to assert himself as the migrant king of his lineage, by manoeuvring his ‘infirm’ father before white judges, summoned to appraise the defendant’s failing fitness to rule over territory and homestead. In June 1903, three justices oversaw the initial hearing of Ugudhla v Matshana in the Native High Court at Eshowe. The panel hoped to reconcile the parties by encouraging plaintiff and defendant to resolve their grievances, but stopped short of ‘taking any further evidence’, noting that ‘nothing will soften the Chief’s heart against his son’. Ugudhla had confided to the justices: ‘I tried to make it up with my father but he refused.’ When Nkandla Magistrate Foxon received the verdict of the Native High Court, he remarked to the SNA that government did what it ‘could for the boy, but of no avail, and there is no doubt that the Plaintiff did in a manner interfere with what his father had done … and no good … can come of allowing the Plaintiff to remain in the Ward of Chief Matshana’.
Whatever sympathy Foxon may have had for Ugudhla’s plight and pluck, the magistrate’s duty was to adhere to the Code’s principal injunction: protect the senior patriarch from family subversion. Equally notable was the confidence expressed by colonial powers delivering the decision in Ugudhla v Matshana. In their eyes, dotage and history had defanged Matshana, the former rebel chief, Zulu stalwart and wanted criminal; his fearsome notoriety was but a memory after the destruction of the Zulu kingdom and imposition of the Code. The Nkandla magistrate read aloud the Native High Court’s punishment: ‘It is ordered that the Plaintiff forthwith remove his kraal from the Ward of the Chief Matshana kaMondisa.’ In addition, Ugudhla was ‘to pay costs’.50 Shortly thereafter, the plaintiff’s hut burned to the ground. Though it was torched by a mob, nobody was charged.
Two years later Ugudhla v Matshana would rise again from the ashes. Once more, the plaintiff drew on his migrant savings, this time to lodge an expensive civil appeal. In June 1905, the Nkandla magistrate and his clerk convened a second hearing. They did not call witnesses to their office, but arranged the proceeding at Sigedhleni, the amaSithole chief’s home court. There, a huge crowd had congregated. Matshana was in attendance, along with his wives, children, 20 headmen and the plaintiff. At such legal venues, the government entitled senior men to carry one ornamental staff, usually the iwisa, but only if the top knob was half the size of a man’s fist (see Figure 5.5).51
Figure 5.4
Artist unrecorded
Zulu, KwaZulu-Natal
Ornamental staffs with top knobs, amawisa, typically carried by senior men at public gatherings
c. Nineteenth century
Carved wood
87.2 × 2.85 cm (longest staff)
Wits Art Musuem
To be sure, policemen could challenge this entitlement through a degrading practice, requiring the iwisa-bearer to measure the wooden protuberance in his mouth cavity. Young, unmarried men were forbidden from having or displaying iwisa, a combat weapon like the fighting stick (induku), at public gatherings organised by colonial authorities. Officialdom long feared that these so-called man-slayers posed a ‘savage threat’ to ‘civilisation’ in South Africa.52 By 1900, the right to attend court and the privilege to carry iwisa symbolised one demeaning paradox of white rule in Natal: government-supported Zulu patriarchy invariably dovetailed with government-sanctioned Zulu emasculation.
In this paradoxical order, Ugudhla began his testimony, with a plea to the presiding legal authorities:
I now wish to complain that in addition to expelling me my father has also disinherited me. It has always been my father’s custom to utilize the lobola cattle received for the eldest daughter, by giving the cattle to the eldest son, and his mother of that particular daughter, no matter to what section they were affiliated.
Ugudhla explained his position in the ancestral homestead: ‘I belong to the Indhlunkulu Section,’ he said, evoking the praise name of his father’s great hut. The plaintiff then affirmed his own royal connections: ‘I am the only son by my mother Nomvimbi, who had two daughters named Nganani and Luputshana, the former married [Zulu prince] Sibepu, and am I to receive nothing from their marriages, nor is my mother to receive nothing?’ Next followed an account of his accomplishments as a dutiful migrant worker who fulfilled his patriarchal obligations: ‘Have I not paid for my mother’s [annual] taxes’, a debt picked up by the homestead head, ‘and found food etc. for her’? Ugudhla concluded:
If even my father expels me, I consider I am entitled to the same Inheritance as his other ordinary sons, as I have done no wrong … Yes I repeat to you my father, that I now ask you the cattle that are due to me and my mother, from the marriages of my sisters.
Perhaps more than any other statement this mention of Luputshana excited Matshana’s ire. He interrupted Ugudhla to reprimand his son for urging his sisters to flee their father after they had been betrothed to polygamists. Thereafter, the Nkandla magistrate permitted the defendant to continue with his testimony. ‘I have asked the Magistrate to come and personally hear my words,’ Matshana said. ‘I do not wish to die and leave my words from my own mouth to be left unsaid, as Ugudhlu [sic], my son, who has caused me trouble all these years is bound to cause trouble again after my death, if I do not speak now.’ Matshana was then allowed to cross-examine the plaintiff: ‘Am I to be dictated to by you? … I see fit to give you what cattle I like … You cannot wait until I die?’ Matshana accused Ugudhla of inciting ‘my [daughters] Nondhlala, Mpoboza, and Lupusthana [sic] … to run away’, in an attempt ‘to thwart and upset my arrangements for the[ir] marriage’. Above all, Matshana was affronted by his son’s inflammatory language:
I heard you with my own ears … you were talking to them in a hut adjoining mine … You said you only feared death, and that you lacked a long rope to take you to the heavens … Was it not you who asked the girls in the presence of my Induna Nojuka Nombembe … what ‘Manyala’ ([moral] filth) [had] they [accepted] … when you knew I had ordered them [to wed].
The civil appeal had enabled Matshana to turn the table on the plaintiff. Instead of playing defence, the amaSithole chief seized the occasion to amplify his plan for succession. He reaffirmed the domestic pecking order of his homestead, according to the royal prestige of his senior wives (amakhosikazi). Ugudhla’s mother Nomvimbi was conspicuously absent from this account. Court evidence suggests she may have fallen out with her husband because she accepted her son’s effort to pay her hut tax directly to the Nkandla magistrate. Ugudhla proclaimed the right to do so, though it was his father’s prerogative to present this money. Perhaps Nomvimbi had been rebuked by her husband for failing to position Luputshana in the homestead of a suitor chosen by her father. Whatever the slight or motivation, Matshana only acknowledged ‘my first Nkosigazi was Bekiwe, the daughter of [Zulu king] Mpande, but as she Bungukad and went mad, I have appointed the daughter of Ziwetu kaMpande’, a child of the Zulu king, ‘named Uxuluzu as my Inkosigazi’. Matshana added a condition: ‘failing her, her sister Sifisi’ would produce the inkosana (male heir) of the Mondisa lineage and subsequent amaSithole chief. The defendant then repeated: ‘It is from these that my Inkosana is to be taken, and no other’, with one proviso: ‘If I still at any future date desire to marry one of [Zulu king] Cetshwayo’s daughters, she is to take precedence of all the others, and my heir will be appointed from her.’ It was customary that before advanced age prevented polygamous fathers, they nominated their successor, usually the first-born son, in an effort to avoid strife between their children with different mothers.53 The defendant told Ugudhla that he was just a contemptuous ‘ordinary son’, with no chance of assuming the chieftaincy or enjoying material consideration from his father.
The verdict
The case concluded with a proclamation by the defendant. The attending colonial officials listened to Matshana’s declaration: ‘To you Ugudhla, I leave nothing, I disown you.’ This sentence carried a caveat for those in the Mondisa lineage. Matshana warned: ‘If at any time any one … treats me in the manner Ugudhla has done, I shall … disown you.’ After brief deliberations, the Nkandla magistrate endorsed the father’s penalty and made it the verdict of the court. By July 1905, the plaintiff would be exiled from the amaSithole chieftaincy, for good.54
While Matshana intoned from the past, Ugudhla spoke to the future. The plaintiff’s public ostracism did little to avert other migrant kings from the capitalist road to traditional power. Their ascendant influence would continue into the twentieth century. Settlers opining in the pages of the Natal Mercury supported it, reminding ‘the native … to pay his share of … the administration of the Colony, and … become more of a consumer than ever’.55 So, too, did Africans reporting in the Zulu newspaper Ilanga lase Natal. They directed ‘natives … [to] go in for the work which produces the best wages and would make them prosperous’.56 Ugudhla may have been excluded from Sigedhleni, but the economic process fuelling his dreams was just taking off, for good.
Notes
1. Many Zulu names and identities in this chapter reflect the late nineteenth-century orthography used in the primary sources.
2. The umXhapho formed in the early 1860s during King Mpande’s reign: Testimony of Mabaso and Nduwana, 15 December 1900, The James Stuart Archive vol 1 (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1976), 231– 232, hereafter The James Stuart Archive is abbreviated JSA, followed by the volume number; Testimony of Mahungane, 8 November 1897, JSA vol 2, 147–148. The umXhapho was also called uMpunga; the two regiments were fused by the 1870s. In 1879, umXhapho soldiers also fought British forces at Gingindlovu and Wombane, as well as Ulundi, where Cetshwayo’s national army was decisively defeated: Testimony of Mtshapi, 6 April 1918, JSA vol 3, 72.
3. Matshana’s chieftaincy extended from Nkandla’s Qudeni region into Nquthu division.
4. An official record of this legal showdown, including court testimony, can be found in An Application by Plaintiff, against the Order of his Chief and Father, to Leave His Kraal and Ward, Civil Record of the Magistrate in Native Cases, Nkandhla Division, Ugudhla vs Matshana Mondisa, Enclosure 1, 54/1903; Secretary for Native Affairs (SNA) Minute Papers, 26 June 1905, SNA 1741/05, SNA Minute Papers (1/SNA) 1/1/323, Pietermartizburg Archives Repository (PAR), South Africa.
5. The phrase ‘migrant king’ denoted a junior man who performed wage labour away from home and used earnings to elevate his patriarchal status by buying cattle and marrying for the first time, usually whilst maintaining residence in his ancestral household.
6. For more on homestead resilience and adaptability from the Iron Age onwards, see T Maggs, ‘The Iron Age Farming Communities’, in Natal and Zululand: From the Earliest Times to 1910; A New History, ed. A Duminy and B Guest (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1989), 35–40; G Whitelaw, ‘A Brief Archaeology of Precolonial Farming in KwaZulu-Natal’, in Zulu Identities: Being Zulu, Past and Present, ed. B Carton, J Laband and J Sithole (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 47–61.
7. For the Xhosa-inflected Zulu origins of Somsewu’s name, see T McClendon, White Chief, Black Lords: Shepstone and the Colonial State in Natal, South Africa 1845–1878 (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2010), 27. For origins of Somsewu ‘in the Basutu language’, see ‘Notes Relating to Theophilus Shepstone and the Shepstone Family’, 15 April 1910, Appendix 3, JSA vol 5, 389.
8. In the Zulu kingdom, achieving heroic exploits as an individual warrior on the battlefield was a major way to attain material reward and social advancement (before labour migrancy); see Testimony of Mbovu, 7 February 1904, JSA vol 3, 28; Testimony of Dinya, JSA vol 1, 102; Testimony of Mkehlengane, JSA vol 3, 211, 214.
9. B Carton, Blood from Your Children: The Colonial Origins of Generational Conflict (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 2000), 69.
10. Report SNA, August 1900, 23, 1/SNA 1/1/290, PAR. See also: Report Magistrate Krantzkop, 1901, B34, Departmental Reports Natal 1899–1901, Natal Colonial Publications (1/ NCP), 8/2/1; Statement Chiefs, Headmen and Homestead Heads, Umlazi, Min Assistant Magistrate Umlazi to Under SNA, 25 October 1905, 2, 1/SNA 1/1/328; Testimony of Chief Mqolobeni, 14 February 1907, Evidence Native Affairs Commission 1906–7, 1/NCP 8/3/76, PAR, 767; Testimony of Headman Tshwetshwe, 13 April 1907, Evidence Native Affairs Commission 1906–7, 1/NCP 8/3/76, PAR, 855.
11. Testimony of Magistrate C Jackson, Weenen, 4 February 1907, Evidence Native Affairs Commission 1906–7, 316, 1/NCP 8/3/76.
12. Statement Chiefs, Headmen, Official Witnesses, and Kraalheads, 9 October 1905, 2–3, 1/SNA 1/1/328.
13. Ibid.
14. King Shaka’s ally Jobe was amaSithole chief and father of Matshana kaMondisa: Testimony of Lunguza kaMpukane, 11 March 1909, JSA vol 1, 301; ‘Tribe of Abatembu’, Enclosure 1, Lieutenant-Governor Scott’s Despatch 12, 26 February 1864, in Annals of Natal, 1495–1845 vol 1, ed. J Bird (Cape Town: Struik, 1965), 144. Matshana’s ancestor Jobe was not the father (also named Jobe) of amaMthethwa paramount chief Dingiswayo: Testimony Nhlekele kaMakana, 2 June 1907, JSA vol 5, 128. After 1858, Matshana maintained especially close ties with the independent Zulu royal house: Letter JW Colenso, Bishopstowe, to Sir Henry Bulwer, Pietermaritzburg, 21 December 1877, Enclosure 2, 111, War and Colonial Department, Colonial Office: Africa, Confidential 141–147, 149, Public Record Office (PRO), Kew, London, United Kingdom; J Colenso, History of the Matshana Enquiry: With a Report of the Evidence as Taken Down by the Bishop of Natal and the Rev. Canon Tönneson (1876), Howard Pim Library, University of Fort Hare, Alice, South Africa. I thank M Lotter for finding the Matshana Enquiry in Pim Library as an original version of this document, printed in 1875, had gone missing from the Pietermaritzburg Archives Repository.
15. Civil Record of the Magistrate in Native Cases Nkandhla Division, Ugudhla vs Matshana Mondisa; Enclosure 1, 54/1903; SNA Minute Paper, 26 June 1905, SNA 1741/05, 1/ SNA 1/1/323, PAR.
16. For more on isibhalo, see J Lambert, Betrayed Trust: Africans and the State in Colonial Natal (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1995), 30–35.
17. Colenso, Matshana Enquiry.
18. D Welsh, The Roots of Segregation: Native Policy in Natal (1845–1910) (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1971), 122; Lambert, Betrayed Trust, 31. John Shepstone’s role in the Matshana ‘affair’ is pithily discussed in ‘Notes Relating to Theophilus Shepstone and the Shepstone Family’, 15 April 1910, Appendix 3, 389; more than a half-century later, John Shepstone was loathe to elaborate on his 1858 encounter during his 28 March 1912 interview with a Natal doyen of native affairs, James Stuart: JSA vol 5, 307.
19. Colenso, Matshana Enquiry.
20. Letter JW Colenso, Bishopstowe, to Sir Henry Bulwer, Pietermaritzburg, 21 December 1877; Letter Sir Henry Bulwer, Pietermaritzburg, to Lord Bishop Colenso, Bishopstowe, 26 December 1877; Enclosure 2, 111(ie III); War and Colonial Department, Colonial Office: Africa, Confidential 141–147, 149, PRO. ‘Civilised’ British confederation of colonies and republics in southern Africa: R Cope, Ploughshare of War: The Origins of the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1999), 2–3, 46–66, 170–171.
21. B Guest, ‘Colonists, Confederation and Constitutional Change’, in Natal and Zululand, ed. A Duminy and B Guest, 151–154.
22. R Morrell, J Wright and S Meintjies, ‘Colonialism and the Establishment of White Domination, 1840–1890’, in Political Economy and Identities in KwaZulu-Natal: Historical and Social Perspectives, ed. R Morrell (Durban: Indicator Press, 1996), 48–49; N Etherington, ‘Why Langalibalele Ran Away’, Journal of Natal and Zulu History 1 (1978), 4–24.
23. Testimony of Magidigidi, 7 May 1905, JSA vol 2, 87.
24. T McClendon, ‘Coercion and Conversation: African Voices in the Making of Customary Law’, in The Culture of Power in Southern Africa: Essays on State Formation and the Political Imagination, ed. C Crais (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2003), 51. The authoritative study of Shepstone’s SNA career is McClendon’s White Chief, Black Lords, which draws on the theoretical approach of J Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
25. Testimony of Magidigidi, 7 May 1905, JSA vol 2, 87.
26. H Mokoena, Magema Fuze: The Making of a Kholwa Intellectual (Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2011).
27. M Mgwaza, ‘A Visit to King Ketshwayo’, MacMillan’s Magazine XXXVII (1879), 428.
28. J Guy, ‘The British Invasion of Zululand: Some Thoughts for the Centenary Year’, Reality: A Journal of Liberal and Radical Opinion 2.1 (1979), 7–8; J Guy, The Destruction of the Zulu Kingdom (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1979), 17–18.
29. K Flint, Healing Traditions: African Medicine, Cultural Exchange, and Competition in South Africa, 1820–1948 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2008), 81–89. Umnyama as a malevolent force upsetting patriarchal order: Mpatshana and Nsuze, 30 May 1912, JSA vol 3, 323; H Ngubane, Body and Mind in Zulu Medicine (New York: Academic Press, 1977), 77–99; B Carton, ‘“We Are Made Quiet by This Annihilation”: Historicizing Concepts of Bodily Pollution and Dangerous Sexuality in South Africa’, International Journal of African Historical Studies 39. 1 (2006), 85–99. Matshana may have learned from his father how to rid the amaSithole chieftaincy of ruinous enemies. Jobe had executed umthakathi in an effort to remove dangerous malefactors who were said to be weakening his political power: Testimony Lunguza kaMpukane, 14 March 1909, JSA vol 1, 313.
30. In 1903, the Nkandla magistrate calculated 50 per cent more women in his division: Report Magistrate Nkandhla, 73, Natal Departmental Reports 1903, 1/NCP 8/2/3. In 1904, the Mapumulo and Kranskop magistrates estimated the same ratio: Report Magistrate Mapumulo, 6; Report Magistrate Krantzkop, 33; Natal Departmental Reports 1904, 1/NCP 8/2/5.
31. Report under SNA, 20 July 1906, iii, Natal Departmental Reports 1905, 1/NCP 8/2/6. At the turn of the twentieth century, migrant movement towards Durban and Pietermaritzburg had gained considerable momentum. In 1901, for example, 22 000 Africans lived in Durban and Pietermaritzburg; by 1904, the total number had risen to 33 000: Population Statistics, Statistical Yearbook Natal 1901, 13, 1/NCP 7/3/8.
32. Annual Report, Magistrate of Weenen, 1893–1894, B5, Natal Departmental Reports 1893–1894, 1/NCP 7/4/1; Min Magistrate Lower Tugela, 8 January 1895, LTD 910/94, 1/ Stanger (SGR) 4/1/5.
33. The bull, or inkunzi symbolism, in the formation of Zulu masculinities, with reference to socialising male prowess and perceptions of fecundity: B Carton and R Morrell, ‘Ways of Seeing and Playing: Zulu Stickfighting, Bodies and Race in South Africa’, in Beyond C.L.R. James: Shifting Boundaries of Race and Ethnicity in Sport, ed. J Nauright, A Cobley and D Wiggins (Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press, forthcoming 2014).
34. Annexure A and Annexure C, Magistrate’s Notes, 1 July 1897, Deyi v. Mbuzikazi, SNA Minute Paper 1962/1897, 1/ SNA 1/1/278.
35. McClendon, ‘Coercion’, 56.
36. C Hamilton, Terrific Majesty: The Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical Invention (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 73–128.
37. McClendon, White Chief; M Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 67–71, 91– 92; Hamilton, Terrific Majesty, 72–110.
38. The Code also assigned the Native High Court jurisdiction to fine anyone who undermined the legitimacy of a chief: Minutes of Interviews with Native Chiefs, 1914–1925, 1, Miscellaneous 1914, 1/SNA I/9/4. This source discusses early 1890s legal practices of chiefs and divisional magistrates.
39. Welsh, Roots, 169, 288. For African accounts of isibhalo, see Testimony of Chief Tshutshutshu, 13 April 1907, Evidence Native Affairs Commission 1906–7, 1/NCP 8/3/76, PAR, 852; Testimony of Chief Hlangabeza, 13 April 1907, Evidence Native Affairs Commission 1906–7, 1/NCP 8/3/76, PAR, 853. Responsible government gave preference to settler agriculture. Between 1894 and 1903, huge tracts of Crown land were allocated for white cultivation: Statistical Summary, Natal Statistical Yearbook 1904, 3, 1/NCP 7/3/11; Natal Agricultural Department Annual Report, Natal Departmental Reports 1902, 1/NCP 8/2/2. By the early 1900s, colonists comprised 10 per cent of the total population. Half of this minority, around 4 000 people, owned two-third of Natal’s 12 million acres: Annual Director’s Report, Natal Agricultural Department, 3, 41, Natal Department Reports 1902, 1/NCP 8/2/2; Population Statistics, Natal Blue Book 1901, 13, 1/NCP 7/3/8; Report Secretary Minister of Agriculture, June 1906, 8, Natal Departmental Reports 1906, 1/NCP 8/2/7.
40. J Martens, ‘Enlightenment Theories of Civilisation and Savagery in British Natal: The Colonial Origins of the (Zulu) African Barbarism Myth’, in Zulu Identities, ed. B Carton, J Laband and J Sithole, 129.
41. Report Natal Native Commission 1881–2, 12, 1/NCP 8/3/19.
42. Martens, ‘Enlightenment Theories’, 129.
43. Ibid., 128. A study of the 1869 marriage law and its effects: B Carton, ‘“The New Generation … Jeer at Me, Saying We Are All Equal Now”: Impotent African Patriarchs, Unruly African Sons in Colonial South Africa’, in The Politics of Age and Gerontocracy in Africa: Ethnographies of the Past & Memories of the Present, ed. M Aguilar (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1998), 31–64.
44. Testimony of Kumalo, 16 December 1900, JSA vol 1, 237.
45. Testimony of Ndukwana, 15 July 1900, JSA vol 4, 267–268; Report Natal Native Commission 1881–2, 13, 1/NCP 8/3/19; Testimony of Induna Class, 30 January 1882, Evidence Natal Native Commission 1881(–2), 1/NCP 8/3/20, 333; Testimony of Umnini, 15 February 1882, 193, Evidence Natal Native Commission 1881(–2), 1/NCP 8/3/20.
46. Testimony of Mbovu, 7 February 1904, JSA vol 1, 28; Testimony of Sibindi, 11 April 1907, Evidence Natal Native Affairs Commission 1906–7, 846, 1/NCP 8/3/76.
47. ‘Shepstone Downpour: The Paying of Bride-Price’, 4–5, uBaxoxelele: Incwadi ye zindabaza Bantu bakwa Zulu, naba se Natala, etc., File 79, James Stuart Papers, Killie Campbell Library, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa; AT Bryant, A Zulu-English Dictionary (Pietermaritzburg: P Davis & Sons, 1905), 35.
48. Testimony of Umnini, 15 February 1882, Evidence Natal Native Commission 1881(–2), 193, 1/NCP 8/3/20. See also Testimony of SO Samuelson, Under SNA, 18 October 1906, 7; Testimony of Chief Sibindi, 11 April 1907, 844; Testimony of Chief Zimema, 3 June 1907, 892; Evidence Native Affairs Commission 1906–7, 1/NCP 8/3/76.
49. Testimony of Joko, 1 February 1882; Testimony of Chief Domba, 31 January 1882; 354–356; Evidence Natal Native Commission 1881(–2), 1/NCP 8/3/20.
50. An application by Plaintiff against the order of his Chief and father, to leave his kraal and Ward, Civil Record of the Magistrate in Native Cases, Nkandhla Division, Ugudhla vs Matshana Mondisa, 29 June 1903, Enclosure 1, 54/1903, SNA Minute Paper, 26 June 1905, SNA 1741/05, 1/SNA 1/1/323.
51. On ornamental and combat amawisa and Zulu labour migrancy, see F Rankin-Smith, ‘Beauty in the Hard Journey: Defining Trends in Twentieth-Century Zulu Art’, in Zulu Identities, ed. B Carton, J Laband and J Sithole, 410–411.
52. B Carton and R Morrell, ‘Zulu Masculinities, Warrior Culture and Stick Fighting: Reassessing Male Violence and Virtue in South Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies 38.1 (2012), 46–47.
53. Homestead heads anointed a younger son when older sons failed to comport themselves. The heir typically inherited his patriarch’s privileges and property.
54. Testimony of Sigedhleni Kraal of Chief Matshana Mondisa, Nkandhla, 10 June 1905, 3–6; Native High Court Civil Appeals in Matter Ugudhla vs Matshana Mondisa; Min. Magistrate Nkandhla, 26 June 1905; 1/SNA 1/1/323.
55. Natal Mercury, 25 September 1909.
56. Ilanga lase Natal, 21 September 1909.