You white men have encircled us; but perhaps the day may come when you will allow us to pass through your country, and remind those nobody’s people that the Zulus are still on the face of the earth.
Anon., after the Battle of Ulundi (1879)
For many miles this morning I was pedalling through dorpless mountain territory, parallel to the Swazi border. Beyond the high wire frontier fence, only a few yards away, ragged Swazi emerged from tin-roofed shacks and thatched huts – alerted by their bicycle-allergic dogs – to stare at me. Behind the dwellings lay golden-brown hilly land, too rough and dry to be cultivable, rising soon to meet low brown round mountains, their straggly indigenous forests much depleted by firewood-seekers.
Halfway to Pongola I crossed the provincial border, marked by a population explosion: more ‘surplus people’ overcrowding steep slopes and deep valleys. Here my welcome was warm; children came rushing down to the road, waving and smiling and shouting greetings. On several long uphill walks barefooted groups escorted me, full of chat and local gossip. One small boy pointed to a large new bungalow and identified it as the home of a taxi tycoon who owns eight kombis. ‘Eight!’ the child repeated, in awed tones. At present the local hens are dying of Newcastle disease, their loss no mere misfortune but a tragedy amidst such desperate poverty. Last year I heard about this disease when it started in an enormous battery-hen ‘factory’ near Pietermaritzburg.
One 12-year-old girl wondered, ‘Why don’t you ask people of your own sort to give you help with transport?’ (An interesting turn of phrase: ‘people of your own sort’.) The children then struggled to come to terms with a concept both novel and absurd: that Mama prefers to cycle, chooses to cycle … ‘In your homeland are no vehicles?’ suggested one little girl with the brown-tinged hair of the malnourished.
In local schools the smallest classes have forty-five to fifty pupils, the largest eighty-five to ninety. School hours are 7.15 a.m. to 3.45 p.m., with two short breaks and an hour for lunch. ‘We work hard,’ said a 10-year-old boy. ‘We all want to get to the university.’
‘To study what?’ I asked, correctly guessing the answer: ‘To be a lawyer.’
‘But many days,’ said an older girl, ‘teachers don’t come to us. They go away doing other jobs, they say the government doesn’t give them enough money.’
Hereabouts the adults were no less relaxed and thrice I was invited into huts (stone and wattle walls, thatched) and offered maize-beer or herbal tea or home-distilled pineapple spirit – reputedly good for the digestion but with an aroma like stale urine. It shames me to remember that last year I became irrationally anti-Zulu in reaction to these blacks being the favourites of so many whites.
Throughout the forenoon – this being the last day of a long holiday weekend – Vaalies were streaming home from the coast, many vehicles towing large boats with comic names: Waves Galore, Dad’s Delight, Rough Riders, Sun of Jamaica, Hearty Folk Here, Going for the Big One. All were travelling in convoy, four or five together. Coming upon one lot picnicking – their side-arms conspicuous – I paused to converse. Even now they consider Zululand a ‘high-risk zone’. And maybe it is, when the ostentatiously rich are driving through a region without health care, easy access to water, sewerage, electricity or land enough to feed the population. But I suspect they are merely being paranoid.
Abruptly the weather changed. Low black clouds created an eclipse-like twilight and a cold gusty crosswind blew choking, blinding, stinging dust from eroded mountainsides and precipitous paths. When the wind became a gale, carrying occasional spatters of large raindrops, my juvenile escort deserted; blacks are unstoical about getting wet. Luckily the clouds hesitated for an hour before delivering their deluge and by then Pongola was near, a dismal dorplet surrounded by cane-farms.
Pongola’s hotel was built in British colonial style; its rooms lead off deep verandahs overlooking wide lawns, ornamental ponds, tall palms and a gay variety of flowering shrubs. Now the owner is black and – I was informed in Piet Retief – whites boycott the place because of its ‘filth’. I can detect no filth and my room supplies the usual modest comforts. But the young Zulu woman receptionist was almost insolently unhelpful, doubtless aware of the boycott.
Finding the ladies bar closed (until 5 p.m.) I intruded on the windowless public bar. Its high unsteady metal stools seem to have been designed to torture customers, old sardine tins serve as ashtrays and a lone twenty-five-watt bulb illuminates the dingy scene. Four male Zulus, drinking cane-spirit, stared at me blankly. The one female – a teenage prostitute, her complexion ruined by skin-lighteners – tittered when I ordered a pint of draught. Looking baffled, the barman suggested that I should retreat to my room, ring the bell and order a drink from the waiter – in short, behave like a madam. But I still resent South Africa’s compulsion to segregate. Stubbornly I held my ground, unfolded the map, pretended to study it, then asked advice about tomorrow’s route – an ice-breaking device that usually works. Here, it didn’t.
At last, the tall, handsome, slightly greying man on my left addressed me. ‘Your room number is what?’ he asked. When I feigned not to remember he guffawed and said, ‘OK, I’ll find! I like you in bed.’ The prostitute tittered again, unable to take seriously, as a rival, this aged odd bod.
Then the man on my right, sporting a dense beard and a de Klerk election badge, leaned towards me and tapped FW’s chubby face. ‘You like this man? This good man, fighting Mandela for our Chief, our Gatsha Buthelezi.’ When I had cravenly expressed my devotion to Mr de Klerk, silence fell again. Punctually at 5 p.m. I moved on to the ‘ladies’.
There the Afrikaner barmaid – small and thin, a blonde haggard 43-year-old – had given me her life story within ten minutes. Married at 19; husband beat her up; divorced at 26; daughter gone to the bad (‘ran off with a Coloured’); son a SAPS officer who divorced last year and is now on sick leave with a nervous breakdown.
As we brooded over Fate’s unfairness four other customers arrived, three local cane-farmers and an Afrikaner truck driver already slightly drunk, very depressed and also in autobiographical mode. Slowly his tale of woe reached its climax: six months ago his second wife (by then we had heard all about the first ‘bitch’) absconded with their two small children. ‘I miss my kids, I want them back but I can’t find them!’ Piteously he looked at the barmaid whose bulging pale blue eyes filled with tears. As their hands met on the counter I tactfully transferred my attention to the farmers.
Their talk was all of sugar prices and rugby. Something in the Pongola air prompted me to avoid the new South Africa but I did seek their views on world affairs. As conversational gambits go, this was not a great success. They mistook all of Ireland for a province of the UK, didn’t know where Rwanda is and had never heard of Bosnia.
One young giant had shoulders like a bulldozer, curly yellow hair and a coppery tan. He offered me a lift to Nongoma tomorrow. ‘If you go on your bike you’ll be hacked to death – slowly. There’s big trouble these days around the King’s palace.’ My declining to be protected upset his companions. One said, ‘We’ve trouble enough here without more bad publicity. We’re trying to put Pongola on the tourist map, we don’t need foreigners getting killed. It was in all the papers last year when a Swiss woman on a bike got murdered.’
I promised to work hard at not being killed and said goodnight. As I write, the deluge continues. Having crossed so much thirsty land since leaving Jo’burg, the sound and sight and smell of rain give me an odd feeling of personal physical gratification.
At dawn the air was moist and cool; high dove-grey clouds covered the sky, tinted pink and primrose to the east. Overnight the wind had swept the streets, decorating petrol pumps with shreds of plastic bags, piling sodden litter against the walls of the KFC takeaway and the new Plaza shopping-mall.
After a gradual fifteen-mile climb, through sugar-cane and rough pasture, the end of the tarred road marked my re-entry into kwaZulu. From here a bone-shaking track ran level across unpopulated acacia savannah, then climbed into bare mountains. Soon I dismounted; on a surface so ravaged, walking is faster than pedalling. I met only three vehicles over today’s fifty miles.
Where the track curved around the base of a sheer precipice something bizarre appeared on a distant clifftop: a gleaming white edifice. My binoculars revealed an architectural mongrel, a cross between the Regent’s Park mosque, a modern Irish Catholic church and an environmentally friendly German factory. It took me a few moments to diagnose King Goodwill Zwelithini’s main palace – he has several others. Amidst such wild uninhabited country, it was quite a shock suddenly to come upon this symptom of royal lunacy.
Twenty minutes later I was being suspiciously scrutinized by the two police on sentry duty at the palace entrance. Cheerfully I greeted them, sullenly they scowled. I averted my gaze from the building and quickened my pace. On this high plateau hovels cluster densely around the King’s extravaganza and beyond sight of the sentries I paused to talk to three friendly elders, sitting on low stools outside a kraal. They are very proud of the palace – had I taken photographs to show to people overseas? No, I said – the sentries seemed hostile.
One man stood up and beckoned me. ‘Come, I will talk to these police, they are fools – they are like an ancestral curse on our land!’
‘But I don’t have a camera,’ I lied.
My would-be liaison-officer – tall and thin, his ragged blanket detracting nothing from his dignity – frowned and looked puzzled. ‘You are a tourist without a camera? No camera, no vehicle? You are poor?’ The question was rhetorical; obviously I am poor.
Another man, looking at Chris’s panniers, asked, ‘You have goods to sell? You are trading? You have medicines?’
‘No, that is my luggage – books, clothes, a tent.’
The third man stood up, hurried to his hut and returned with a wodge of maize dumpling in a plastic bag. ‘For your food tonight,’ he said. ‘I think you will be hungry.’
Not long before I had eaten my fill of nuts, a luxury food in the villages. Thanking my benefactor profusely, I secured the dumpling in a pannier and shook hands all round.
This plateau overlooks a wide, long, shallow valley, its countless kraals holding round thatched huts or oblong tin-roofed hovels. A few cattle and many goats browsed on meagre scrub. Near the track stood the newish bungalows of the local quislings now intent on obstructing GNU’s reforms.
Nuts have their limitations and the elder’s donation of carbohydrate was appreciated an hour later, after I had pushed Chris up another few hills. From my boulder-seat was visible a vast turbulence of smooth or rugged mountains, dusky blue under a pale grey sky. In this heartland of the Zulu kingdom there once roamed herds of thousands of cattle, inexorably impoverishing the soil as both human and animal populations increased throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Already, European influences were seeping in from Delgao Bay (now Maputo) not far to the north-east. The first whites to disrupt this region were neither Voortrekkers nor English colonizers but Portuguese traders who introduced the gun to the Zulu and other tribes, then encouraged them to compete for access to the new power-enhancing commerce in slaves and ivory.
As I continued the gradients became even more severe and the surface so rough that Chris felt like a recalcitrant pack-animal who has to be dragged along. Nongoma appeared an hour before we reached it, standing high above a complex of deep narrow valleys, their floors packed with huts, bungalows and shacks. From a distance, Nongoma resembles a Basilicatan hill-town.
The teacher who accompanied me over the last lap had been walking since dawn to have his ulcer treated in the three-storey Benedictine Hospital, once run by Catholic missionary nuns but long since taken over by the State. My companion, though obviously exhausted, remained cheerful. ‘Tomorrow I’ll feel better,’ he assured himself. ‘This is a good hospital.’ Later, I heard otherwise. Before we parted, I asked the way to the hotel. ‘Hotel? Here is no hotel, you must go to the police – up there.’
The steepness of this final hill required me to walk on tip-toe, leaning far forward. On my right was a new suburb of neat, pastel-painted prefab bungalows set in tiny gardens. Here live government employees whose housing subsidies and other perks partly explain Buthelezi’s popularity.
Nongoma covers the slopes and flat summit of a high, wedge-shaped mountain commanding an awesome expanse of Zululand – austere beauty extending for scores of miles in every direction. The KZP District Headquarters, surprisingly unguarded, dominates the summit. I entered the forecourt as an importantly uniformed but thuggish-looking senior officer was driving out. He stopped, listened impatiently, then brusquely dismissed me. ‘This is not South Africa, we have no lodgings here.’ (In the old South Africa the SAP were obliged to provide shelter for stranded white travellers.) He accelerated onto the main road without stopping and almost struck a woman carrying a baby on her back and a sack on her head. As she gazed after the long sleek car, her expression conveyed hate mingled with fear.
Slowly I pedalled past a row of shoddy shops, attracting many stares but no smiles – until a kindly young man approached to ask, ‘Are you lost?’
‘Not lost, but without shelter. Can I rent a room here?’
‘A room, to sleep in? You are tired? Mr Ford maybe can help you, no other white person lives in this town. He owns the big store and a big house.’
‘It doesn’t have to be a white person,’ said I, a trifle irritably.
The young man looked away. ‘We black people, we have no nice spaces for white people.’ He indicated a long steep hill, tarred but pot-holed. ‘Down there, on the big street, you can find Mr Ford.’
I sped past a small police-post, a cinema and yet another new Plaza shopping-mall. Mr Ford’s cavernous emporium sells blankets and biscuits, ladies’ underwear and insecticides, toothpaste and builders’ materials, leather belts and saucepans, plastic toys and tinned milk. Inexplicably, four heavily armed soldiers were guarding its entrance and a small but excited crowd had gathered nearby.
Behind the counter stood a fat friendly Zulu woman who explained, ‘You must wait a little, Mr Ford is still with the King.’
I blinked and repeated, ‘With the King?’
‘Yes, but soon they’ll be finished their talking.’
I leaned Chris against the counter and sat on a pile of blankets conveniently to hand – or to bum. There was tension in the air. I noted the soldiers’ alertness: faces taut, eyes darting, rifles at the ready. This was no boring routine job.
Meanwhile customers were wandering in and out: women comparing the prices of knickers, men looking for six-inch nails or purple paint, children buying one sweet each. In between customers the staff questioned me, wonderingly. Then we were joined by a member of the royal entourage, dressed like a City gent and carrying a mega-briefcase, gold-embossed. We discussed the weather. This year, there is a ‘bumper sugar crop’. Yet the farmers cannot quickly recover from four years of drought. And some cattle-farmers lost so many animals they will never recover. Just now, in kwaZulu/Natal, one doesn’t discuss the political climate with those who are creating it.
Eventually a counter-flap was lifted and His Majesty emerged from some back room. Noticing a foreigner on the premises, he nodded regally in my direction, then sat into a small, dusty, non-regal motor car – followed by two soldiers – and was driven off to his palace. When he appeared on the street the crowd stood still and was silent, devotion shining in their eyes.
Mr Ford – an octogenarian with a pasty, sagging, bad-tempered face – was unhelpful. ‘You must go on to Ulundi, to the Holiday Inn. Here we’ve nowhere for tourists. My home is full of these people’ – he indicated his staff – ‘and their families and friends. Every room is packed with them. I’ve only one room left for myself. They just squat on my property, they won’t leave unless I give more wages. How can I? What profits can I make with all these blacks embezzling money to build themselves supermarkets?’ He glared at me, his eyes red-rimmed and angry, as though I were an embezzling black. Then he gestured towards Chris and added, ‘You’d better hurry, to get to Ulundi before dark.’ (Ulundi is fifty miles away and sunset was two hours away.)
At the small Nongoma police station my luck turned. No, I couldn’t camp on the grassy space in front – ‘too dangerous’ – but when the day’s work was done an office floor would be available.
Despite the KZP’s evil reputation, Nongoma’s underworked officers seem to have a good relationship with the locals. As I relaxed on the stoep several passers-by sauntered in to investigate me. A group of secondary-school pupils sought to improve their execrable English – ‘We has teached English into six years with teachers so bad! This teachers know nothing!’ And one rheumaticky elder, wearing a threadbare army greatcoat, sat on the bench beside me to bare his political soul – a refreshing deviation from the norm.
A few weeks ago the annual Shaka Day celebrations were boycotted by the Zulu Royal House in retaliation for the stoning of the King’s Enyokeni palace, while President Mandela was visiting, by an IFP gang. (My companion pointed out that to call these gangs ‘impis’, as journalists often do, is to dishonour the Zulu military tradition.) Then the IFP Deputy Secretary-General delivered two head of cattle to the King, on Buthelezi’s behalf, as ‘a self-imposed penalty’. Here the elder’s voice quavered with indignation. This was an insult, a most grievous insult. Only the King – not Buthelezi, a mere subject however blue-blooded – should decide on the penalty for any offence committed against the Royal House. Therefore an affronted Royal House rejected the cattle. It is inappropriate to laugh at the apparent pettiness of Zulu squabbles; these can be life-and-death matters.
My companion could remember Zwelithini versus Buthelezi dissension twenty and thirty years ago, when the Nats were using the young King as a pawn. They planned to make him ruler of an ‘independent’ Zulu homeland, which idea greatly appealed to him. But Buthelezi, his uncle and self-appointed ‘Prime Minister’, was determined to spoil the overall Grand Apartheid design by keeping this most populous province within the Republic of South Africa. Thus the Zulu never became legally ‘surplus people’, deprived of their South African citizenship. And the King’s political ambitions were easily atrophied by Uncle’s threat drastically to reduce his stipend if he continued to make trouble. According to my informant, those ambitions have only recently been revived by blandishments ‘from outside our place’. (Code for the ANC.)
The King was aged 22 when installed as the eighth Zulu monarch in 1971. He makes an ideal pawn, being not very bright and fond of money. By European standards the Zulu monarchy is very new. Yet its power enabled King Zwelithini’s canny relatives – the Royal House – to legitimize Buthelezi’s rule over kwaZulu as an autocratic Chief Minister. That remained his status from 1976 until he became GNU’s Minister for Home Affairs.
At sunset my companion rose stiffly, leaning on his stick, and pulled a woolly cap from his coat pocket. ‘Our big Zulu weakness is faction fighting,’ he pronounced sombrely. ‘You know why Chief Zwide of the Ndwandwe chose this hilltop as his Great Place? He chose it because it stood between the lands of two factions, the uSuthu and the Mandlakazi. But his peace-keeping failed. In 1888 the uSuthu burned Nongoma and the British Colonial Police moved in and built Fort Ivuna, where that Plaza place is now. The contractor’s bulldozers uncovered the fort and we should have kept it for tourists. People came from Ulundi to protect it – then what? When nobody watched the contractors destroyed it! How could I watch? I’m an old man, I can’t spend all my time on a building-site!’
Later the commander joined me and said, ‘You have been honoured! You were talking to Chief M—, a wise and clever man. But he’s not IFP so he gets none of the perks.’
If the KZP has many more officers like this commander, there is hope for it yet. He has a conscience much troubled by the conduct of his Nat-corrupted colleagues. ‘Also it concerns me that our people have been so upset by this feuding between the King and Chief Buthelezi. They want to be loyal to both, that is their tradition. How can they understand what’s going on in Pretoria or Cape Town? They are fearful because their traditions seem at risk. Then fear makes anger and anger makes bloodshed. Ours is an unhappy province. I look out over the rest of the country and feel envy.’
Anywhere else in Africa the commander’s equivalent would have invited me to his own home for the night. When will South Africa have healed sufficiently for such gestures to be psychologically possible?
This is being written in a bleak little office with a concrete floor, unpainted breeze-block walls and a door that doesn’t shut properly. I’m sitting at a long rickety table laden with bulging files marked STRICKLY CONFEDNSIAL (sic). What a wealth of raw material, if only one hadn’t been nicely brought up!
For much of the way to Ulundi Nongoma remained visible, sometimes hidden by a nearer mountain, then reappearing – white against a cloudless sky – seeming to float above the earth. Rural slums alternated with undulating savannah or desolately beautiful hills haunted (in my imagination) by the ghosts of the wildlife that once roamed these ranges.
From the early sixteenth to the early nineteenth century all of this area – the Eastern Transvaal, kwaZulu/Natal, Swaziland – was quite densely populated by the Northern Nguni, who include the Zulu. Fertile soil and a benign climate (on the whole: there were always periods of drought) allowed the development of many well-organized chiefdoms and subchiefdoms, their wealth measured in cattle, each family responsible for growing its own food. But by 1800 overpopulation had set the scene for a series of conflicts that culminated in Shaka’s manic wars which left much of the Free State and Transvaal temporarily unpopulated at the time of the Voortrekkers’ arrival.
My map, of old South Africa provenance, marks Ulundi as a village though it is the capital of kwaZulu. Seen from a distance, scattered over the Mahlabathini valley, its recent expansion is obvious: white dots represent thousands of new houses. This valley – the centre of Shaka’s kingdom – is overlooked by the aloof heights of Mthonjaneni, traversed by the White Mfolozi river and bounded on the south-west by the escarpment of the distant Babanango plateau.
Now Ulundi is the Inkatha/Buthelezi stronghold and it seems white strangers are assumed to be ANC spies. The first person I met was faintly alarming; he stopped his Merc to shout across the road, ‘Where do you come from? Why are you here?’ He wore a silk shirt, a Rolex watch, several gold rings and an expensive after-shave lotion too liberally applied.
Standing by the car window I explained myself honestly.
‘So – you’re looking for problems here? You want to make trouble for us overseas? We have no trouble in kwaZulu, except what the ANC makes. That’s our only problem. Any ANC person coming here interfering will be dead in two hours. Two hours maximum – right? You go and tell that in your book – it’s fact!’
The provincial murder rate gives substance to this rhetoric and I could easily imagine my interrogator organizing the killing of an ANC supporter and boasting about it afterwards, perhaps to a policeman friend. I watched him drive on, then turn into the car park beside the ‘legislative complex’. Evidently he is a kwaZulu lawmaker. Poor kwaZulu!
In Piet Relief I removed a long ANC election sticker from Chris’s crossbar and, while doing so, accused myself of being melodramatic. Today that precaution seems justified.
Ulundi feels unlike either a town or a city. In the small commercial centre it apes a dorp, with its harshly coloured shopping-malls and transnational offices, most as yet unoccupied. Some entrepreneur has recently built a covered market opposite the only hotel, the Holiday Inn. But the local hawkers (cheerful rural folk, warmly welcoming) cannot afford to rent stalls and continue to spread their wares on dusty patches of wasteland while cattle and goats wander through the enormous empty market. Unrestrained livestock are Ulundi’s most agreeable feature; all developers had to guarantee animal freedom of movement when doing a deal with the villagers who previously dwelt here. Entering the bank, I was followed by a kid (four-legged) with whom I had already established a meaningful relationship in the Spar supermarket. Both staff and customers took our relationship for granted; when I tried to imagine reactions to his presence in Florida’s branch of the same bank my imagination failed me.
The Holiday Inn’s park-like grounds are protected by a wide cattle-grid of awkward design, suggesting that walkers and cyclists are not expected. However, the young woman receptionist proved sympathetic. She condoned my wheeling Chris into the plushly carpeted foyer – ‘Yes, take care!’ – then noted my reaction to the list of tariffs and offered to ring the Ondini tourist camp. But, unusually, every hut is booked for tonight. Painfully I parted from R214 and took Chris to my room between tall palms where thousands of weavers are noisily nesting. For that outrageous sum (breakfast extra) the Holiday Inn offers no more than your average dorp hotel.
Back in the almost empty foyer, I wondered why its dazzling white walls display only blown-up photographs of King Zwelithini and Chief Buthelezi in tribal dress: would pictorial competition constitute lèse-majesté? On one side of a long back-to-back zebra-skin sofa (typical Holiday Inn furniture) sat a quartet of white corporate-types playing with the electronic tools of their trade and loudly conversing in corp-speak. Morbidly fascinated, I eavesdropped.
It seems Durban is experiencing a project-driven development renaissance that was kick-started by public-sector commitment, but there is a need to relook at potential linear development opportunities along the northern beaches. And all role players must be up and running by December to create spin-offs into the private sector. An international convention centre is being planned and Durban must prioritize this to ensure hotel-bed occupancy on a twelve-month cycle.
Inwardly I wept for the new South Africa. An international convention centre being built within a few miles of Durban’s myriad homeless … These international conventions have become an integral part of the UN/EU/World Bank/IMF (etc.) flight from reality. Instead of taking action about urgent problems, you ‘read papers’ and simultaneously give your partner and several of your staff a free luxury holiday. So the conventions become part of the problem, soothing consciences (where such exist) while circulating resources among the Haves.
Corp-speak scares me. As the language of those who wield the only power that seems to count in the 1990s, it reveals their disconnectedness from the needs of the mass of humankind – their victims. ‘When words lose their meaning,’ said Confucius, ‘people lose their freedom.’
This year R4 million is being spent on luring tourists to kwaZulu/Natal and in the bar I studied a stack of newly published tourist literature – glossy magazines, no mere brochures. Evidently, political correctness now requires some grotesque distortions of history. The official British and Afrikaner versions have been equally tendentious but in the new South Africa why not attempt ‘transparent’ history? This buzz-word is now used in every context, as though there were something discomfiting or naive about the word ‘honesty’. But I must stop. My present environment has put me in a cranky mood.
For once I slept badly – perhaps those R214 were bothering my subconscious. On the concrete floor of Nongoma’s police station I slept soundly.
This morning’s weather was Irish summery: warm gentle rain. Going walkabout, I soon passed the KZP Headquarters, its innocuous appearance belying its reputation. Within those walls were identified many Third Force hit-squad targets. Associated in many people’s minds with the Third Force were some who now hold top jobs, including Chief Buthelezi himself, then also Minister for Police; Prince Gideon Zulu, now kwaZulu/Natal’s Minister for Justice; Celani Mtetwa, rumoured to be a professional smuggler of AK-47s from Mozambique and now kwaZulu/Natal’s Minister for Safety and Security; Captain Leonard Langeni, Commander of the kwaZulu Legislative Assembly guard; Zakhele Khumalo,* Buthelezi’s ‘personal assistant’; Lindiwe Mbuyaze, the IFP Women’s Brigade Deputy Chairwoman, now a National Assembly MP, and Major-General Sipho Mathe, now Acting Commissioner of the KZP, who has just been advised by GNU’s Minister of Safety and Security that he faces suspension for ‘alleged involvement in hit-squad activities’.
A government commission is now investigating those activities and late last Friday evening death threats were received by a couple due soon to give evidence. They sought KZP protection and were driven to Newark police station in a plain van. En route a following car, driving without lights, overtook them and ten shots were fired into the van. Luckily the couple escaped – this time. The commission has since promised to set up a witness-protection unit; without it, no one can expect non-suicidal witnesses to come forward.
At noon I took off for Ondini, some four miles away. The tarred road ends at Ulundi’s airport and nearby stands a squat stone monument, its metal dome sporting a cross by way of maintaining that cherished European military fiction – ‘God was on our side’. This marks the site of the Battle of Ulundi (4 July 1879), one of the British Army’s least glorious victories.
Now this battlefield is covered by the shacks of the destitute, spread over hilly expanses of unproductive veld. Yet two miles away R281 million have been spent on Buthelezi’s pet prestige project, the ‘legislative and administrative complex’.
Why do Africans, all over the continent, allow themselves to be victimized by a tiny minority? Why should these Zulus have to live in such misery when money is available to improve their lot? According to the tourist literature, ‘Huge development potential remains untapped in Ulundi, with only 23 of 461 business sites developed.’ But what would the development of those sites do for the poor, apart from providing temporary work at slave wages? And not much of that, since construction firms make bigger bucks faster by using machinery.
Near the tourist camp stands King Zwelithini’s latest palace, built for his fifth (or is it sixth?) wife; traditionally each must have her own Royal Residence. This one is a sprawling characterless ‘suburban’ house, its garden still rubble-strewn. A young woman, carrying a crate of cheeping chicks on her head, stopped beside me. ‘You like this palace?’ she asked eagerly. ‘Is a pretty palace?’
‘Very pretty,’ I agreed – then added subversively, ‘but it cost much money, too much money when you have no money.’
The young woman was not subvertible. She laughed and boasted, ‘Our King has much money!’
Ondini’s ancient acacia, woods conceal authentic-looking Zulu huts ‘with modern catering and ablution facilities’ which provide ‘tourist accommodation within the precincts of King Cetshwayo’s Royal Residence’. A tetchy receptionist said my booking for tonight had been a mistake, no hut is free. Then a young man suggested my talking to Mr Barry Marshall, Director of the kwaZulu Monument Council, who lives within these Royal Precincts. He could be found in the restaurant hut, entertaining colleagues from all over the province. To avoid gate-crashing on a luncheon party I lurked in the acacia until spotted by one guest, whereupon the rest welcomed me with a warmth that made my lurking seem silly. Suddenly I was surrounded by archaeologists, anthropologists, sociologists, historians, librarians – a very pleasant culture shock.
When his guests had dispersed Barry took me on a dual journey: through the acacia to King Cetshwayo’s kraal, back in time to the Battle of Ulundi. There is no longer, he said, any dispute about the origins of the six-month Anglo-Zulu War. Although Cetshwayo was threatening neither the British to the south nor the Boers to the west ‘a conflict was engineered which had to lead to war’. The British aim was a militarily emasculated Zululand which could never destabilize their planned confederation of white-settled southern African states. Six times prior to the invasion of Zululand, and eighteen times during the war, King Cetshwayo dispatched messengers to negotiate with the British. Some were delayed by a series of tricks, some were given a list of demands blatantly impossible to fulfil, some were insultingly imprisoned. Then, on 4 July 1879, revenge was taken for Isandlwana by the mass-slaughter of Cetshwayo’s warriors. Shell and rocket fire and Martini bullets opposed assegais and shields. The impis did have 800 or so Martini rifles captured at Isandlwana, but for lack of training in how to use them these were more ornamental than lethal. The British lost ten men and three officers killed; sixty-nine men were wounded. The official estimate of Zulu killed was ‘not less than 1,500’. Captain Shepstone admitted that the pursuit of the fleeing Zulu ‘had become butchery, rather, at last’. Another officer (Buller?) reckoned that his pursuing irregular cavalry killed at least 450. The regular cavalry claimed 150 ‘kills’.
Some retreating warriors attempted to set fire to their amakhanda (Zulu military homesteads) but the day was windless and they failed. Then the British did the job for them, burning eight amakhanda on the plain of Mahlabathini, including Ondini, the royal homestead, which smouldered for four days. On 28 August Cetshwayo was captured and eventually imprisoned in Cape Town’s Castle. Sir Garnet Wolseley’s ‘pacification’ of Zululand was complete and on 1 September the chiefs formally accepted his settlement. It abolished the independent kingdom, reducing it to thirteen fragments whose chiefs would in future be nominated by the British. Subsequently, the relentless exploitation of Natalian farmworkers gave rise to various embryonic political movements, some with militant tendencies. But most chiefs remained loyal to the whites.
‘Cetshwayo was a great leader,’ said Barry, ‘no way resembling the tyrant in our history books. Of all the Zulu kings he was the most loved. When we thought about honouring his memory, rebuilding his homestead seemed the best way.’
I tend to shy away from such re-creations but Ondini is different; under Barry’s knowledgeable and sensitive direction its ghosts have not been exorcized. The plan of the original amakhanda, built in 1872 and covering some three acres, has been precisely followed. Excavations revealed many earthen hut floors – preserved, through baking, by the fire – and in every detail the high, wide, skilfully woven beehive huts replicate the originals. Sections of the outer fencing were also discovered and those charred branches, incorporated into the restored fence, give one quite an eerie feeling. A wooden watchtower, by the main entrance gap, overlooks the battlefield. On a nearby slope a herd of pure white Nguni cattle – the colour favoured by Zulu kings – usually grazes but has now been drought-driven to Natal.
I’m glad I’ve seen Ondini now. Its ‘potential’ is being discussed by tourist-hungry officials and probably not even Barry will be able to defend his beloved site – so moving in the simplicity and reverence of its restoration – from becoming an electronic theme park with fast-food outlets among the acacia.
Tonight I’m staying with Maggie and Barry in their thatched cottage, built fourteen years ago by local labour using only local materials. Maggie has persuaded me (it wasn’t difficult) to stay on tomorrow. She wants to show me the Legislative Assembly building to which she has privileged access, having worked as Chief Buthelezi’s translator for nine years.
The Marshalls speak fluent Zulu and are very much ‘of Zululand’. It is impossible to imagine them happily based in Cape Town, Jo’burg or Port Elizabeth. South Africa is like that: its various regions put their own stamps on the white natives.
Ulundi’s aspiration to became the capital of the new province of kwaZulu/Natal arouses angry ridicule among all white and Indian (and many black) Natalians. A booklet produced by the kwaZulu Heritage Foundation claims that ‘Ulundi has all the infrastructure necessary to qualify it as a seat of government. The Legislative Assembly offers seating capacity for 760, a sophisticated public address system for each MP, catering facilities, and modern parliamentary library facilities for members’ use. Well-appointed accommodation is available for MPs, also fully-furnished Ministerial dwellings. A further 1,256 departmental houses/flats are presently occupied by more junior officials. Subsidized private housing consists of 1,370 units.’
What do all these officials actually do? Since they obviously have no interest in the welfare of the majority, how do they while away their time?
Outside the Assembly, Maggie and I paused to gaze up dutifully at King Shaka’s statue on its massive marble plinth. Despite his spear and shield, and his tribal warrior’s ensemble, he looks oddly European. His body-language is wrong, suggesting some defiant Nordic hero.
Ulundi’s white elephant would look at home in Brussels, as an EU extravagance. Inside, one wanders through a circular vastness of artificially lit wasted space – lavishly carpeted, furnished with groups of deep armchairs, decorated along one wall by many yards of a kitschy tapestry depicting the conquest and gradual Westernization of Zululand. To get anywhere one must go round and round and round, seemingly for miles, or up and up and up in state-of-the-art lifts. Briefly we sat just inside the main portal to the windowless parliament chamber, its mock-daylight derived from countless spotlights set in the gold-painted ceiling. Opposite us, suspended above the former Chief Minister’s dais, hung an ornate gilded metal representation of the kwaZulu coat of arms. This, and the kwaZulu mace, depressed me. Such imitations of the Mother of Parliaments speak of a people conquered spiritually as well as territorially, their notion of ‘progress’ the adoption of the external symbols of their conqueror’s culture – symbols arcane and ancient and incomprehensible, rooted in a past as unlike the Zulu’s as you could get.
Earlier, Maggie had remarked on unusual activity around the complex: many cars arriving, many security officers scuttling about, many serious-looking, briefcase-laden amakhosi (chiefs) greeting each other on the forecourt. These were the Iso leSizwe (Eye of the Nation), a new association of members of the former kwaZulu government, gathering for an indaba (consultation) with Chief Buthelezi. Officially its purpose was a State Secret but in Ulundi there are few such; although little is admitted, almost everything is known. Soon we heard that today’s indaba was summoned to secure the chiefs’ support for the establishment of a new provincial House of Traditional Leaders, an innovation unlikely to incur their disapproval. Both the ANC and the King oppose this Assembly. It is designed to boost the IFP by securing the loyalty of stipend-conscious chiefs who might otherwise desert to the ANC, the party certain to control the national purse-strings for the foreseeable future.
Out of 360 Zulu amakhosi, 292 attended this indaba. We watched them filing into the parliament chamber, all soberly attired, Western-style, like any gathering of European politicians. Many were grey-haired, most had an air of authority and gravitas – whether chiefs of a community of 15,000 or 500. What do they really make of Ulundi’s white elephant? Do they all feel good because this Assembly has ‘the most modern facilities in southern Africa’?
When Buthelezi arrived Maggie and I (the only whites present) had to leave, together with a few other commoners – local journalists and elected representatives of the people. Traditional Zulu indabas must be held in camera, or so Buthelezi says. Historians deny this.
When an Inkatha spokesman insisted recently that ‘Chiefs were created by God’, the riposte came swiftly from Mike Sutcliffe of the ANC: ‘The only God who creates chiefs in kwaZulu is Buthelezi.’ Yet the IFP leader’s power has dwindled since the elections; his party received only 10 per cent of the national vote. And now it lacks its former paramilitary strength, based on Third Force training and arming.
At dawn the sky hung low and grey and soon I was not only rain-soaked but mud-covered; Chris lacks mudguards. One of kwaZulu’s finest views remained invisible during a tough climb out of the valley and on the cloud-wrapped pass cars needed their headlamps. In wet weather Chris’s brakes are unreliable and twice on the long descent I found myself unable to slow down approaching sharp bends.
Perversely, the sun came out as we ascended steeply to Melmoth, once a ‘white’ town but at noon the centre was crowded with not very friendly blacks. In a small Greek takeaway (from which I took away a nauseating fish-cake) the owner commended Melmoth’s peacefulness. ‘We don’t have many murders, all the blacks are IFP and the ANC leave us alone. Even last year we didn’t have many murders. Everyone is for Buthelezi. They want him to stop fooling around with this new government and come back to lead kwaZulu/Natal.’
‘And do you want that?’
The Greek shrugged. ‘I want whatever keeps us peaceful. South African politics is not my business. I came here twenty years ago to make an honest living – not to get into trouble!’
Rottweilers and Dobermanns protested at my passing through the jacaranda-shaded residential area where many gates bear large bilingual (and surely superfluous?) notices: BEWARE DOGS BITE/QAPHELA IZINJA ZI YALUMA. Here, spruce pink-tiled bungalows stand in gardens all aglow with purple, orange and crimson shrubs.
In the Indian-owned Melmoth Inn I’m paying R90 for a small, stale-smelling room with a kloof-like bed, no table, chair or towel and a badly cracked hand-basin yielding only cold water. But my fellow-guests provided compensation: three generations of a lively Indian family, from Durban.
The grandparents are Nat supporters, but the young couple – Harry and Sita, their son and daughter-in-law, both attorneys – are optimistic ANC activists. The grandchildren, aged 6 and 2, confined their comments to our meal, an inferior curry.
Most Indians seem to feel a need to emphasize their South African identity. Said Harry, ‘You must understand, though we’re a small bit of the mosaic we’re disproportionately important. It’s annoying that outsiders often see us as not quite South African.’
‘But it’s understandable,’ said Sita. ‘Our culture is so visibly Asian.’
Harry continued, ‘By now we’re more like Afrikaners than English. They’re decoupled from Europe, we’re decoupled from India.’
When the temperature dropped dramatically at sunset Grandma asked Sita to fetch her overcoat and slipped it over a shimmering sari. Sita herself was wearing designer jeans and an expensive flame-red sweater. The elders were drinking tea while Harry and Sita shared a bottle of wine.
Looking ahead, Sita predicted, ‘Our community will see big changes, now we’re all constitutionally equal. Indian kids may feel it’s less important to seem different. Before, we had to prove something – that we weren’t like blacks, could build our own schools and temples and mosques, generally fend for ourselves. And all that in spite of so much hostility from all sides.’
Harry, bouncing his son on his knee, agreed. But the elders looked uneasy.
Sita went on, ‘Everywhere old rules are going. No way will our kids accept nineteenth-century customs brought from India – why should they? We’ll keep our temples and festivals and all the fun bits – I hope. Otherwise we’ll see our kids doing their own thing.’
Harry smiled at her lovingly and agreed again.
Grandad cleared his throat, hesitated, then wondered, ‘Will our young people be happier without rules and customs? See how it is already with this new government – no decency left! Everything to be legal – gambling, abortion, prostitution, filthy magazines, shameful shops you couldn’t walk past with your wife and daughter … Don’t young people still need protection?’
It seemed this conversation was covering old contentious ground. Anyway it was my bedtime. We exchanged addresses and said goodnight.
I had planned to remain in the cool uplands, but at Barry’s luncheon party invitations to Eshowe and Mtunzini proved irresistible. As there are not many roads hereabouts, this deviation means a return to Melmoth next week.
Not far from Melmoth I was back in kwaZulu which like the former Bop is all bits and pieces. Its borders were based, roughly, on the ‘reserves’ delimited after the Anglo-Zulu War. The road runs level while crossing a long narrow saddle overlooking deep green valleys on either side. All around, mountains are piled against the sky: lavender ranges in the distance, their flanks creased with gullies, their crests wavy lines traced against pale blueness. On the nearer slopes stand wattle coppices between groups of beautifully thatched huts, some washed white or blue, others natural red-mud. Here is no rural slum; each compound – scrutinized through my binoculars – was litter-free and meticulously swept.
Beyond a mighty mountain-wall of bare rock I was freewheeling for miles to flat fertile greenness bounded by low hills to the south-east. At 9 a.m., down on this plain, the humid heat felt suffocating.
Approaching Eshowe on its hilltop, numerous gracious residences affirm white Natal’s legendary wealth. By the roadside, a high narrow ugly sign shows the borough’s coat of arms, upheld by a Zulu warrior and a British redcoat, and welcomes visitors in three languages. (There is an affinity between the public monuments and state-sponsored décor of South Africa’s apartheid regime and Eastern Europe’s Communist regimes.) The warrior and the redcoat remind us that Eshowe grew out of a permanent garrison stationed here after the Anglo-Zulu War. In 1881 my hostess’s great-grandfather, Alfred Adam, opened his Camp Store and became Eshowe’s pioneer entrepreneur. Rapidly the store expanded and remained in the family until 1983 when it was sold to the OK supermarket chain. However, Jenny still owns ‘a few farms’.
By 10 a.m. I had found Jenny’s split-level, open-plan house, designed by an architect brother-in-law, shaded by mature trees, overlooking colourful rockeries. In the cool stone-flagged kitchen I drank pot after pot of sweat-replacing tea while we considered ‘the future’. In Eshowe, despite continuing political violence, it looks secure enough. Industry flourishes and the average income of its 10,000 or so whites, Indians and Coloureds is well above the provincial average. (Black incomes were not mentioned.) No one disputes this town’s claim to be ‘the Flower of Natal’ and its ‘tourist potential’ is obvious at a glance. Most people do not share my objection to a subtropical climate and Eshowe has the unique advantage of being built around the ancient, indigenous Dlinza Forest. We drove through this nature reserve on the way to the Zululand Historical Museum.
Today (Sunday) the museum is closed but Jenny, most fittingly, is the curator. The building itself is an exhibit: Fort Nongqai, built in 1883 to house the first Zululand Native Police, Sir Melmoth Osborn’s personal guard. We spent all afternoon within those sturdy whitewashed walls. Among the more conspicuous exhibits is a wheelchair made for King Mpande and presented to him as a sweetener by the Norwegian Lutheran Bishop Schreuder. In 1859 the King duly invited the Norwegians to open a mission station, Eshowe’s first white settlement. Twenty years later the ten-week Siege of Eshowe confined Colonel Pearson and his troops to the area around the kwaMondi Mission Station.
Tomorrow I descend to Mtunzini to spend a night in the Tradewinds Hotel as guest of the owner, Alan Veitch, chairman of the Mtunzini Publicity Association. I have also been invited to stay with Albert van Jaarsveld, son of Professor F. A. van Jaarsveld, he who once was tarred and feathered by the AWB. Albert lectures at the University of Zululand (UZ) and, though we talked only briefly at Ondini, I recognized a kindred spirit.
Nothing less than Albert’s invitation could have lured me to this ‘delightful protected coastal resort offering a wide array of leisurely [sic] activities’. The houses are so spaced out that Mtunzini seems like a well-tended forested park in which a privileged few live behind high hedges of variegated shrubs. In the near distance sparkles the Indian Ocean, beyond lagoons and mangrove swamps and a plantation of rare raffia palms. The supermarket and bottle-store beside the hotel are inconspicuous – a rare attribute of commercial premises in South Africa – as are the police station and prison, the library and municipal offices. Mtunzini’s tranquillity is remarkable – there is no through-road – and its property prices are among the highest in South Africa. The only industry is an unobtrusive newish prawn-farm where I watched a Filipino ‘trainer’ showing Zulu youths how to separate baby fish from the almost invisible baby prawns caught in a nearby lagoon. Most residents are retired tycoons, or men with top jobs in Richard’s Bay some twenty miles up the coast. This is South Africa’s ‘biggest industrial growth point’; its population has recently increased tenfold – to 35,000 – and its harbour boasts of being ‘the world’s largest coal export facility’.
I arrived at 8.15, after a pre-dawn start to avoid the coastal heat, and found that Alan had planned my day: a visit to the raffia palm plantation and a motor-tour of the new Conservation Park run by the Natal Parks Board on territory for many years used as ‘a recreation area’. The conservation officer who drove me around – a young Afrikaner woman – didn’t share my concern at the fact that speedboats are still allowed on certain stretches of the lagoon and have driven away all the crocs and much of the birdlife. Also, four-wheel-drive vehicles still have access to some beaches where turtles lay their eggs. It seems the Parks Board is reluctant to anger whites by completely banning their ‘recreations’.
The Tradewinds’ cosy bar is also Mtunzini’s ‘village pub’ where the regulars’ dogs are greeted by name. At sunset Alan introduced me to half a dozen ‘regulars’ including Edward, a plump Richard’s Bay managing director untroubled by the new South Africa. ‘The ANC aren’t fools, they’ve accepted socialism never works. So I say let’s forgive and forget, it’s their future behaviour counts. I’ve the same admiration for Thatcher and Mandela – shrewd leaders, both. People grumble about affirmative action but that’s only a short-term problem, while enough blacks are being educated and trained. I always hated apartheid – we didn’t need it, it was the Afrikaners needed it.’
Then an ‘irregular’ replaced Edward beside me, a tall Afrikaner wearing a long blond ponytail and a shaggy beard, quite a usual combination among hardliners. Having ordered his brandy and Coke he borrowed my cigarette-lighter without acknowledging my presence, then made a thing of counting his change. ‘Have to watch you fellows,’ he shouted to Luke, the barman. ‘Half of you can’t count and the other half cheat.’ (Luke is a handsome young Zulu: tall, slender, intelligent, his English fluent.)
I turned to stare at this abomination – was he drunk? No, it didn’t seem so. Again he addressed Luke, while sprawling across the bar. ‘Why are you fellows so fuckin’ lazy? Why don’t you get off your fat arses and do some work? Why should we do all the work and pay all the taxes? Can’t you answer? Can’t you speak English for fuck’s sake?’
By now Alan and Edward had gone. I looked at my fellow-drinkers – was no one going to intervene? Then I looked at Luke. He appeared to be unruffled, he was half-sitting on his high stool considering the Afrikaner with a slight pitying smile. I caught his eye and the smile became a wide reassuring grin. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘Some people have problems – especially now.’
The Afrikaner seemed to notice me for the first time. ‘Hey! You fancy this guy? Wanna be his sugar-mummy?’
I picked up my beer and moved to the far end of the bar where elderly Mrs Holroyd, much bejewelled, patted my hand. ‘Take no notice, dear – Afrikaners are like that! Crude, I call it.’
Ponytail was still baiting Luke. ‘But,’ I said, ‘shouldn’t someone be taking notice? By any standards this is intolerable.’
Mrs Holroyd chuckled. ‘My dear, you’re in South Africa! Our Luke doesn’t mind – you can see he doesn’t mind. He’s a darling boy!’
In 1960 the University of Zululand (UZ) was founded as a ‘bush college’ at the foot of the gentle green Ngoye Hills, then a remote undeveloped area served by a dirt track, UZ has since become a startlingly ‘contemporary’ agglomeration of ostentatious buildings a mere fifteen minutes’ drive, on the N2 toll road, from Richard’s Bay. There black graduates are now in great demand but, Albert explained, UZ lacks adequate equipment, texts, teachers. Its generous private-sector funding is insufficiently monitored. In the early 1980s a Vice-Chancellor visited Britain, was dazzled by the new library at some red-brick university and insisted on having a copy. The result cost R16 billion and is the academic equivalent of Buthelezi’s Legislative Assembly. Since its opening in 1987 its shelves have remained three-quarters bare. The UZ’s Bureau for Development and Public Relations notes that: ‘If instructional quality is to be maintained, a minimum of 750,000 more volumes must be added to the current collection. Private funding will be needed to augment library holdings …’
Walking to the arts department, Albert and I had to negotiate high stacks of building materials – jerry-building requires much remedial work – and the groups of students toing and froing, in an unpurposeful way, ignored us. At present, whites in general and Albert in particular are not too popular; Albert’s problem is his non-PC insistence on maintaining standards.
On this campus you can hear, with the psychic ear, the clash of cultures. For most of these youngsters there are no links between their family and university lives. Many come from bookless homes; very likely one or both parents are illiterate; a degree is seen as an economic rather than an intellectual benefit. The minority who thrive on exposure to Western academe can eventually compete with the best in their field anywhere in the world. For the rest there is only more mental confusion, more spiritual fracturing, while they are being introduced to a ‘free market’ South Africa that will in practice continue to downgrade ‘African-ness’ while being fulsome about black culture on appropriate occasions. Yet without this pseudo-academic processing there can be no affirmative action above the manual-worker level – or so I’m often told.
This year UZ has 1,107 staff, academic and otherwise. Fifteen years ago the academics were more than 80 per cent white, mainly Afrikaners; now they are 51 per cent black. Of the 6,608 registered students (one-quarter Zulu) some 75 per cent qualify for ‘private sector’ scholarships and most – handicapped by poor schooling – take a year or two longer than average to graduate. At present the annual fee, including board and lodging, is R 12,256 (approximately £2,450) and by October of last year (1993) student debts totalled R17 million. This has become a major problem for what are now known as ‘the historically black universities’. Their previous tendency was to make allowances, not to insist on ‘fees first, tuition after’. However, in the new South Africa most universities are using debt collectors and withholding exam results and degrees until fees have been paid.
In May 1993 the appointment of Professor R. M. Dlamini as Rector and Vice-Chancellor of UZ was seen as ‘undemocratic’ and provoked three weeks of demos and boycotts. A self-selected advisory committee of graduates, staff and students drew up a shortlist of more suitable – in their view – candidates. When this was ignored the students demanded the postponement of exams to allow them to make up for time lost during the boycotts. And when the Senate refused a postponement much university property was trashed (the in-word for vandalized) and most students boycotted the exams.
Last year the South African Students’ Congress (SASCO) announced that it was organizing ‘a national campaign for the transformation of all universities’, black, white or Coloured. The present Councils, it argued, must be replaced by ‘credible transformation forums, a quota system for admissions to ensure that universities were representative of South African society and an end to the exclusion of students on financial grounds’. This campaign is understandable; until recently the Broederbond ran all black universities and many of the staff were dumb Afrikaners who could never have held down a job in a white university. However, SASCO’s transformation forums are likely to toss students from the frying-pan of Broederbond domination into the fire of black community pressures – coming from people with no comprehension of academic traditions, standards, requirements.
On our way back to Mtunzini we called on Walter in his handsome rambling home, built a century ago when the family cane-plantation was established and surrounded by indigenous trees. Here blue-headed lizards scamper across the lawn, weaver-birds create their usual impression of rush-hour frenzy and campus tensions seem very far away.
Formerly Walter was a journalist based in Jo’burg; six years ago he inherited the family farm – 180 hectares. (Is ‘farm’ the right word here? Cane cultivation requires no annual ploughing and sowing; having been cut, the canes simply grow again like grass, given adequate rain.) Locally Walter is seen as a softie who pays his workers above-average wages: R10.50 a day during the eight-month year, but at certain seasons this can go up to R24, including overtime and piecework. Many cane-cutters come from Lesotho, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, Mozambique – even Zambia – and cane-farmers ask no questions about their papers; local blacks do not rush to work for less than £2 a day. Walter thinks it unlikely that a cost-effective machine will ever be invented to cut cane on Natal’s precipitous slopes. Long after the rest of South Africa’s commercial farming has been mechanized, cane-cutting remains labour-intensive.
This year, because of the drought, no sugar was exported and over 100,000 tons had to be imported. Yet the industry is adapting fast to the new South Africa. It has set up a fund to provide loans (repayable within six years) to 15,000 blacks and Indians, for whom 30,000 hectares of new canefields will be made available. Walter’s neighbours are not unanimously in favour of this project, minimal though it is. ‘But,’ said he, ‘they’ll soon adjust, they’ll soon realize such sharing actually increases their own security. Now 100,000 or so of their fellow-citizens – including the families – will have less reason to feel resentful. Those fellow-citizens do have land rights and they know it. That’s what rattles some whites – most white farmers. In the end everyone happily accepted blacks having voting rights but land rights are something else.’
Albert’s large self-designed house, on the western edge of Mtunzini, overlooks from a height the raffia plantation and the low blue hills beyond. When his friend Ronnie had joined us we took our beers up to the flat roof and leaned on the parapet as the sun declined into a mass of rose-gold cloud. By chance I mentioned Stoffberg and found that Albert, having come upon numerous long-neglected documents, wrote his thesis on the white settlement of that area. Contrary to ‘official’ history, the Boers did forcibly dispossess the Ndebele who had been inhabiting the region for generations. The invaders were openly supported by Swazi chiefs, for their own domestic political reasons, and furtively supported by the British as part of their ‘secure Natal’ strategy.
Albert is among the half-dozen genuinely non-racist whites I have met in South Africa – is it a coincidence that most have been Afrikaner? Looking ahead, he takes everyone’s needs and fears into account, sympathetically yet detachedly. The future, he believes, cannot thrive on a pretence that the past is irrelevant, to be disregarded as one disregards a nightmare at breakfast time. He said, ‘No South African of any colour can wipe their personal slate clean and claim, “All is well now, we’re going to work together in harmony for a prosperous future.” Each of us has to look bravely at what is written on our own slate and not try to wipe it off before coming to terms with it.’
At 4.45 a.m. I crept out of Albert’s house by the back door, feeling deservedly below par after beers beyond counting and only four hours’ sleep. But an early start was essential: the N1 from the Mtunzini turn-off to Gingindlovu is dangerously narrow for the amount of two-way industrial traffic spawned by Richard’s Bay. Incidentally, this stretch of road was last year listed as among the three most hazardous, for white travellers, in all of South Africa.
A full moon was setting above the long line of hills to the west – a huge disc of molten gold. There was no darkness; as the moon slid below the colourless bulk of the hills a red glow spread upwards from the Indian Ocean.
On 2 April 1879, at the opening of the Anglo-Zulu War, the village of Gingindlovu was burned out by the invading British troops – who inevitably referred to this battle site as ‘Gin, Gin I love you!’ Here begins the long climb to Eshowe during which, for the first time in South Africa, I was the target of an act of aggression – albeit a minor one. Several youths threw large stones at me and one blemished Chris’s crossbar; had it struck my head I would have graded the incident not minor. I pedalled on without any change of pace, ignoring the youths; an apparent attempt to ‘escape’ might have stimulated them to pursue a frightened Whitey.
Having passed yet another monument to men who fell ‘For Queen and Country, in the Conquest of Zululand’, I was between steep cane-covered slopes, crossed by vermilion pathways, the separating kloofs full of tangled vegetation. Dismounting to walk the severest gradient, I marvelled at the endurance of the British troops who marched up these hills in the sweltering midsummer humidity to relieve besieged Eshowe. Their uniforms were brutally unsuitable: thick, tightly buttoned red jackets, thick white trousers, heavy boots and ridiculous shakos – cylindrical stovepipe hats, peaked and plumed. Worst of all was the stock, a high stiff leather collar; all were cut to one size and alterations forbidden, whatever the length of a man’s neck. These were described as ‘implements of torture’ – many sweating necks were completely skinned. Sometimes the men’s loads could be left in camp or transported by wagon but too often this was not practical. On the ascent to Eshowe each man carried his musket, bayonet, leather ammunition pouch, a small barrel of drinking water, a large square knapsack for personal possessions and a greatcoat which was the maddest item of all. How much more of the world could Britain have conquered with sensibly dressed soldiers?
By 8.45 I was in the basement of Zululand Tyres, having Chris’s brakes fixed – never have I known a bicycle suffer from so many ailments. Then to Michelle’s home in a new ‘mixed’ suburb where the back gardens run down to Dogs’ Delight, a muddy stream at the bottom of a long grassy slope. On the opposite forested slope, monkeys bend the tree tops.
This afternoon I walked to the Teacher Training College (TTC), Michelle’s workplace, where a staff braai was to conclude a stressful meeting about the latest crisis. (In the new South Africa, on the educational scene, people seem to move from crisis to crisis with little routine activity in between.) The college is now being overwhelmed by demands for admission that ignore all financial and physical constraints. A new residential block has recently been built and is visible from the road, therefore extra space is assumed to be available. But it isn’t. Already 230 students have been admitted though there are adequate (more or less) resources for only 180. At first ‘crisis’ seemed too strong a word for this situation. Then I heard about the Registrar of Nongoma TTC: since my visit he has been shot dead for refusing to admit 200 more students than his college could accommodate. And last month, in Mokopane College of Education, a youth was killed in a fierce battle between student teachers and a crowd of young men whose applications had been rejected. Soon after, SAPS had to rescue these same students when Mokopane residents stormed the campus, accusing them of having deprived ‘locals’ of their ‘rightful’ places.
Thousands of youngsters with a desperate longing for third-level education see a teaching qualification as a substitute for a degree though they may have no interest in teaching. Some 20 per cent of newly qualified teachers never enter a classroom – or want to – yet at present one-third of black teachers are unqualified.
The extremist Azanian Students’ Movement (ASM) is now threatening white teachers in black schools: ‘If necessary we will use physical force to remove those who won’t resign to make way for unemployed black teachers.’ But would the parents or pupils like to see white teachers replaced by blacks? Most certainly they would not.
The correcting of skewed perceptions about university degrees needs to begin now in primary schools. In Europe no one feels obliged to pretend that all citizens are equal, intellectually, but one of apartheid’s after-effects is a reluctance to point out that most blacks, like most whites, are not university material. (Unless they go to some American college where they can get a degree in Floral Arrangement or Rabbit Breeding.) A nervous subservience to PC muzzles those who should be making that statement, loudly and clearly. Yes, everyone should have access to equally good schooling. Then comes the time when demanding exams, honestly marked, determine who goes on to university.
As all this was being discussed a small shiver went through me – while clouds of braai smoke drifted over the green lawn and through the branches of the hazily blue jacarandas and people fetched beer from ice-boxes in vehicle boots. Below the calm surface of white Eshowe I sensed tensions not acknowledged – perhaps not even inwardly recognized since tensions forming part of daily life are often dealt with by being ignored. A group such as the ASM may be dismissed as ‘extremist’ but everyone knows they could be dangerous. Small shivers are allowable in a country where violence does not shock enough, and cheap guns proliferate, and the police cannot be trusted.
Acknowledged tensions have their sources within the college. Last term a young man was expelled for attempting to rape a fellow-student at knife-point. He is now taking the black principal to court for infringing his right to education; and he doesn’t lack supporters, among both his contemporaries and the black staff. There is, as one white lecturer dryly remarked, ‘an incomplete awareness of the need for discipline’.
Another flashpoint concerns the right of pregnant students to continue studying; several have been intimidated off campus because the spectacle of a big-bellied woman is ‘indecent’. (What echo of missionary influence do we have here?) The white staff unanimously uphold this right. Most blacks – staff and male students – insist the women must leave: permanently if unmarried, until after their delivery if married. No one suggests penalizing unmarried fathers though a few staff members and many students are boastful about their illegitimate progeny.
During our braai the race groups – numerically about equal – rarely merged.
While breakfasting outside, watching the monkeys do likewise, Michelle and I debated the inherent conflict between a Bill of Rights guaranteeing equality for all and a Constitution guaranteeing respect for customary law, which permits polygamy. A multicultural society cannot have it both ways; something has to be sacrificed. Hardline traditionalists argue that the Bill of Rights is a new-fangled Western concept (true enough) and its adoption by GNU a surrender to cultural imperialism. Others point out how recent, and not yet complete, is the West’s acceptance of gender equality – so why should all South Africans be expected to accept it instantly at the stroke of a legislative pen?
Like other optimistic liberals I’ve met, Michelle believes the ANC’s passionate long-term commitment to women’s rights will prevail. Legal equality must be a cornerstone of the new state, even if at present it makes no impression in some areas. By publicly upholding the ideal, GNU will gradually erode the traditionalists. And Constitutional lawyers will have the power to identify equality as a ‘sovereign’ value – of extraordinary, immeasurable importance (emotional as well as legal) in this post-apartheid society. They could then require customary family law to be reviewed and made compatible with gender equality, a consummation devoutly to be wished.
The whitening of South Africa – the Western lifestyle long since outwardly adopted or aspired to by the majority – is real enough to make this country seem unlike anywhere else in Africa. Yet its superficiality often disconcerts. This morning, when I talked to three classes of trainee teachers, they asked many apparently naive questions – reminders that apartheid denied most blacks any opportunity to comprehend the whites’ world as a whole, apart from participating in it as consumers of fast food, fashion and popular entertainment.
After lunch I visited Saul, a 34-year-old Ndebele maths teacher, in his empty classroom. It was empty because the students had taken off to organize a demo. Much of the present turmoil in the historically black universities can be traced back, in Saul’s view, to the white staffs’ failure ever to become involved in student life and concerns: ‘Those Afrikaners didn’t have to exert themselves in their Broederbond sinecures.’ A criticism often heard, from academics both black and white.
Saul graduated from UZ with distinction, then declined a bursary to do postgraduate work in Germany. ‘We could see the new South Africa coming and our kids most urgently need good maths teachers. Last year, only 30 per cent of blacks took maths for matric.’
Saul grew up in a northern Transvaal village, the nearest school an hour’s walk away on a veld path. His father worked in the Messina mine, his mother ‘did women’s work and trained six kids how to behave. Back from school we’d our chores to do, depending on age and strength. This stereotype of lazy kaffirs – how can people be lazy who have to build and maintain their own homes, grow and cook their own food, collect fuel and fetch water, tend animals far away in the bush? But the hard work didn’t matter, we had so much love and stability. We kids loved each other and our mother most of all. And she loved us, worked seven days a week for us – but was she strict! The punishments came hard and fast when we deserved them. That’s what’s missing now, respect for elders and for authority – and I know it’s the same overseas, I’ve read about it. Except here among the poor it’s gone to extremes. The township kids know no discipline with working mothers away all day – or away all the time, living in a backyard, seeing their kids maybe once a month. What’s the future for babies being born into that sort of social chaos? And what sort of role models is the new South Africa giving youngsters? “Miss South Africa”! Is that the best we can offer them? Did you see her on TV at Sun City draped over the bonnet of her BMW wearing a gown costing six months of a miner’s wages! Then we got her “social caring”, visiting handicapped kids and opening bush-clinics – like she was a princess! That’s messing our kids’ minds up even more, making her the “successful black” to be imitated.’
Saul is chip-free, completely at ease with himself as an Ndebele. He said, ‘There’s nothing wrong with tribalism, though now it’s used like a dirty word. I’m proud to think of myself as an Ndebele, I don’t want to lose my traditions in a big stew of people called “South Africans”, I like to keep my own flavour. But politically I support our new united Republic and want to work for it – that’s why I wouldn’t go to Germany.’
Reconciliation, as preached by President Mandela, Saul described as ‘a necessary game of “Let’s pretend” – for this generation it can only be a pretence.’ The general lack of black vengefulness he attributed less to ubuntu – while acknowledging its contribution – than to an apartheid-generated sense of impotence and dependence. His analysis of what apartheid has done to both blacks and whites was devastating; even at this stage of my journey, some of his words moved me almost to tears. We became so soul-matey that at sunset we found ourselves locked in and Saul had to climb through a lavatory window to find the askari with the key.
Today I paid the price for yesterday’s injudicious over-taxing of The Arm. When an elderly woman, unable to lift a heavy load from ground to head, sought my assistance I hesitated – then did my best because a refusal to help could be misconstrued. As a result, cycling uphill was impossible this morning and it took me five hours to cover the thirty miles back to Melmoth where I’m staying with Pat and Barry Schmidt. Pat lectures at Eshowe’s TTC, Barry is a farmer whose great-grandfather was for fifty years a colonial administrator in Natal, both are relaxed about the new South Africa. Their small bungalow – high on a steep hill – is in a state of mild disrepair and agreeable untidiness and is book-filled. (In South Africa a matter for italics, as I’ve noted previously.) The cat is also an intellectual; he helps himself to milk, from a narrow jug on the tea-tray, by skilfully inserting a paw, soaking it – then delicately withdrawing it.
A cool, windless, overcast morning: ideal weather for my long tough climb onto the Babanango plateau, first seen from afar as I arrived in Ulundi. At times, from the edge of the plateau, I was overlooking that vast expanse of broken terrain across which King Cetshwayo’s impis – all 20,000 of them – moved silently and swiftly towards the British encampment at Isandlwana. How would it feel, I asked myself, to cycle through South Africa unhaunted by the past? One would be much more responsive to the beauty of the landscape, in a region like this, if not tormented by a vision of all those commercially forested hills being grazed by Zulu herds. Yet no country is now as it was a century or two ago; everywhere time remoulds.
Babanango surely merits an entry in the Guinness Book of Records for possessing the world’s tiniest public library: – some ten feet by six, built entirely of corrugated iron and standing alone and forlorn in the middle of a large field. It opens, I was told, ‘not often’.
Babanango occupies a slight hollow on the plateau and retains the character of a frontier settlement: a few stores, an agricultural machinery depot, a police station and Stan’s Pub Hotel. At one of these stores King Solomon ka Dinuzulu (1892–1933) bought the material for his first wife’s wedding gown. (Her name was Christina, she was the first of many.) Since the end of the seventeenth century this district has been a sacred place, the main burial site for chiefs of the Zulu Royal House; it is still of profound significance to the Zulu people.
For the past fortnight I’ve been hearing about Stan’s Pub – ‘The most famous pub in South Africa! Don’t miss it! It’s something else!’ Indeed it is. Flimsy bras and frilly panties, lewdly inscribed, are draped over the bottles behind the bar. On the counter, rubber monkeys copulate at the touch of a button. When cigarettes are lit from within a monk’s mouth, his penis pops pinkly out from the folds of his black robe – and so on. This is locker-room humour of the more ingenious sort but I’m of the wrong sex and perhaps the wrong generation to appreciate it fully. Alas! the legendary Stan was away in Durban for the weekend but his son Jeremy welcomed me warmly – the drums had told him I was on the way.
Yesterday it rained all day with a gloomy gentleness that might have made me feel homesick were I prone to that disease. Therefore six long letters are ready for posting in Pietermaritzburg.
This morning the dawn air was deliciously chilly – energizing. At road level banks of pale grey cloud shifted and paused, merged and separated, on their drifting way across Babanango’s bleak, wide, moorlike uplands. The sunrise fused these into a thick frustrating fog, obscuring the splendid lonely expanses lying far below on my right. As the descent began the sky turned milky blue and the dispersing clouds revealed hills all around – close-packed, their flanks green-gold, their rock-crests silver.
A small sign pointed left to Isandlwana, invisible from the main road. A rough track climbs the intervening ridge, skirting a spread-out colony of shacks – and then I was overlooking the battlefield, still a few miles away. Isandlwana has been so often sketched and photographed that to gaze upon the original is like first seeing some famous building – the Taj Mahal, the Kremlin, St Peter’s. ‘Isandlwana’ means ‘cow’s stomach’ in Zulu. To my non-cattle-obsessed eyes this solitary outcrop of rock, some 250 feet high and perhaps 300 yards long, more closely resembles a colossal boot. It dominates the surrounding flatness, a red-brown plain encircled in the near distance by those long low ridges which concealed Cetshwayo’s impis until it was too late …
Soon Isandlwana village came into view at the western edge of the plain, a traditional village inhabited by Zulus whose ancestors have been living here since long before 1879. Barry Marshall had arranged for me to stay with its only white residents, the site’s guardians. Leaving Chris in the Taylors’ little bungalow I continued on foot to the battlefield.
There are malevolent plans to ‘develop’ this tourist attraction but as yet it remains undefiled. Sitting high on a boulder-strewn ridge, facing Isandlwana, I compared a photograph taken in May 1879 with the scene before me. Only one change is discernible: the abandoned British Army wagons then dotting the plain have been replaced by many little mounds of whitewashed stones marking nameless British graves, and by a few inconspicuous regimental monuments honouring the victims of (directly) Cetshwayo’s impis and (indirectly) an individual’s blundering. Even without human intervention most landscapes change over time: trees fall or take root, collapsing banks alter river courses, landslides reshape the contours of mountains. But here the harsh aridity of the terrain resists change.
On 22 January 1879 20,000 warriors, armed with assegais, took the invading British by surprise and killed 858 whites, including 52 officers, and 471 of their black allies (mostly Natal ‘natives’). The Zulu losses were hard to calculate but certainly exceeded a thousand; before being overwhelmed, the redcoats had used their last bullet. Isandlwana brought down Disraeli’s government. So many casualties (including 52 officers!) could not be tolerated.
The main monument, of mottled red-brown marble, matches the local soil. It bears a quintessentially Victorian inscription, making the best of a bad job.
ISANDLWANA
Not Theirs To Save The Day
But Where They Stood,
Falling To Dye The Earth
With Brave Men’s Blood
For England’s Sake And Duty
– Be Their Name Sacred
Among Us – Neither
Praise Nor Blame
Add To Their Epitaph –
But Let It Be Simple As That Which
Marked Thermopylae.
Tell It In England Those
That Pass Us By,
Here, Faithful To Their Charge,
Her Soldiers Lie.
What did they know of Thermopylae, those wretched troopers who were – most of them – soldiers not for England’s sake but for the sake of the Queen’s shilling? ‘Neither praise nor blame …’ But the only person to blame was not killed. The Commander-in-Chief, Lieutenant-General Lord Chelmsford – described by General Sir Garnet Wolseley as ‘that poor noodle’ – was away on an irrelevant skirmish of his own from which he returned to Isandlwana in a bad mood because his ‘bag’ was ‘only’ eighty Zulus killed. The 1,379 corpses awaiting him had died as a result of his own myopic arrogance.
For the bereaved families, was it comforting to be told their sons, brothers, husbands had been ‘faithful to their charge’? Perhaps it was. In our own day this kind of conditioning continues, this cynical romanticizing of war – ‘to dye the earth with brave men’s blood’ and so on. Although the language has been altered to suit changing sensibilities, the technique is the same when leaders deem it expedient to make ‘our boys’ look like heroes. Yet the same boys, if jobless, frustrated and socially disruptive, are referred to by the same leaders as ‘young thugs’.
Slowly I climbed Isandlwana – the hot sun was tempered by a strong cool breeze – and from the highest point watched a line of head-loaded women following the old wagon-trail to another village of round thatched huts. Strangely, Isandlwana is now a tranquil place. Some benign exorcist has banished all traces of violence, terror and hatred, leaving only a melancholy spirit hovering over the silent plain – a neutral spirit, mourning for all.
* In 1995 Khumalo was brought to trial for the mass-murder of thirteen ANC supporters.