CONTENTS
About the Book
About the Author
Maps:
Southern Africa in 1879
Zululand and Natal in 1879
The Isandhlwana Campaign
The Battle of Isandhlwana
The Defense of Rorke’s Drift
a. The Mission Station
b. The Hospital
The Battle of Hlobane
Dedication
Title Page
Introduction by Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi
Foreword
Foreword to the New Edition
PART ONE
Prologue
The Bantu
The Rise of the Zulu Nation
Port Natal
Dingane
Mpande
PART TWO
Confederation
The Coming of the War
Preparations
Invasion
Isandhlwana
The Defense of Rorke’s Drift
The Flanking Columns
Aftermath
The Left Flank Column
The Second Invasion
The Prince Imperial
Ulundi
The Captains and the Kings Depart
Epilogue: The Ruin of Zululand
Picture Section
Notes of Zulu Orthography
Sources
Bibliography
Index
Copyright
Donald R. Morris was born in 1924 and grew up in New York City. In 1948 he graduated from the US Naval Academy at Annapolis. After serving on several destroyers, he went on to Naval Intelligence School and Russian language training and was detailed to the CIA in 1956. He remained with the CIA and continued in the Naval Reserve until 1972, when he retired as a Lieutenant Commander. He earned two battle stars in Korea and holds the Navy Commendation medal. His 17 years with the CIA were spent almost entirely in Soviet counter-espionage operations. He was stationed for lengthy periods in Berlin, Paris, Kinshasa (Zaire) and Vietnam.
For many years Donald Morris was also a foreign affairs columnist for the Houston Post. In 1989 he formed the Trident Syndicate and published a weekly newsletter on current events and foreign affairs. He died in 2002.
In 1879, armed only with their spears, their rawhide shields, and their incredible courage, the Zulus challenged the might of Victorian England and, initially, inflicted on the British the worst defeat a modern army has ever suffered at the hands of men without guns. This is the definitive account of the rise of the Zulu nation under the great ruler Shaka and its fall under Cetshwayo. The story is studded with tales of drama and heroism: the Battle of Isandhlwana, where the Zulu army wiped out the major British column; and Rorke’s Drift, where a handful of British troops beat off thousands of Zulu warriors and won eleven Victoria Crosses.
ANONYMOUS. Manuscript account by unidentified officer of Vause’s Troop, Natal Native Horse. (Campbell Library.)
BICKLEY, J., Bandsman, lst/24th. Manuscript account. (24th Museum. Brecon.)
BRACKENBURY, HENRY. Letter to Arthur Harness. (Margaret Stewart Roberts, great-niece of Arthur Harness.)
BRICKHILL, JAMES. Manuscript account. (24th Museum, Brecon.)
BROMHEAD, GONVILLE. Letter to family, private information. (Lt. Col. Sir Benjamin Bromhead, great-nephew of Gonville Bromhead.)
BULWER, HENRY. Assorted dispatches. (Public Records Office.)
CAMBRIDGE, H. R. H. Duke of. Letters to Lord Chelmsford. (Chelmsford Papers.)
CHELMSFORD, GENERAL LORD. Assorted letters and papers, private information. (Chelmsford Papers and family members.)
CLARKE, W. J., Natal Mounted Police. Manuscript autobiography. (Campbell Library.)
COLENSO, JOHN WILLIAM. Colenso Papers. (Campbell Library.)
CREALOCK, JOHN NORTH. Letters to Arthur Harness. (Margaret Stewart Roberts.)
DURNFORD, ANTHONY WILLIAM. Private information. (Muriel Durnford, great-niece of Anthony Durnford.)
DURNFORD, EDWARD C. L. Letters to John William Colenso. (Colenso Papers.)
FIELDING, JOHN W. (true name of John Williams). Documents and private information. (Denis J. Pratley, grandson of John Fielding.)
FRERE, BARTLE. Assorted dispatches. (Public Records Office.)
HARFORD, HENRY C. Journal. (Campbell Library.)
HARNESS, ARTHUR. Collected letters, 1878–79. (Margaret Stewart Roberts.)
HEAD; R. (true name of private at Rorke’s Drift, enlistment name unknown). Letter from Rorke’s Drift. (24th Museum, Brecon.)
HICKS, WILLIAM (mounted volunteer, unit unknown). Letter. (Campbell Library.)
HITCH, FREDERICK. Private information. (Mrs. W. Oxford, daughter of Frederick Hitch.)
“J.M.” (unidentified mounted volunteer, unit unknown). Manuscript account. (Campbell Library.)
LUGG, HARRY. Letters and family information. (H. C. Lugg, son of Harry Lugg.)
NAPOLEON, LOUIS, Prince Imperial. Private information. (Dr. George Campbell.)
PARSONS, CHARLES S. B. Letter to Arthur Harness. (Margaret Stewart Roberts.)
SCHEVEGMAN, W. R. Natal Hussars. Manuscript account. (Campbell Library.)
STUART, JAMES. Assorted items from the Stuart Papers. (Campbell Library.)
SYMONDS, WILLIAM PENN, 1st/24th. Manuscript account. (24th Museum, Brecon.)
SYMONS, J. P., Natal Carbineers. Manuscript account. (Campbell Library.)
WEATHERLY, LOUISE. Manuscript account, letter to Charles W. Thesiger. (Mr. Justice Gerald Thesiger.)
WERNER, A. Manuscript memorial of Harriette Colenso. (Campbell Library.)
WILLIAMS, J., Private #139, lst/24th. Manuscript account. (24th Museum, Brecon.)
WILSON, E., Bandsman, lst/24th. Manuscript account. (24th Museum, Brecon.)
WYNNE, WARREN R. C. Journal and private information. (Charles M. Wynne, son.)
(i) Natal
The Natal Witness (founded 1845 by D. D. Buchanan).
The Times of Natal (originally The Courier, edited by R. Ridley).
The Natal Mercury (founded 1852, by John Robinson and R. Vause).
(ii) United Kingdom
The Daily Telegraph.
The Evening Standard.
The Graphic.
The Guardian.
The Illustrated London News.
The London Gazette.
The London Times.
(iii) Specific Articles
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FOR FIVE FULL generations the infant Boer race oozed eastward along the southern rim of the continent. Some 12,000 families were thinly sprinkled over the 500 miles stretching out from Capetown; they developed customs and usages of their own, and the High Dutch with which they had started picked up new words and was stripped of much of its grammatical complexity. The thin edge of the tide moved on apace. There were always Boers who could not abide even the weak trammels of their own political structures—men who felt hemmed in if they had neighbors within twenty miles. There were always younger sons in search of land—always one farm flung out beyond the rest that for a few months would be the edge of settlement until it in turn was leapfrogged. By the 1750’s there were farms at Algoa Bay, by the 1770’s the frontier had turned and started to follow the long smooth coastal curve to the north. Then, in the valley of the Great Fish River, the process was abruptly halted.
The frontier had passed through the ephemeral Bushmen, it had detribalized and absorbed the Hottentots. The Boers were vaguely aware of the existence of a third division of the Negro race—tall, well-formed specimens who dribbled south in small hunting parties from some reservoir in the limitless north. They were known generically as Kaffirs and they were obviously superior to the Hottentots. Their attitude toward Bushmen approximated that of the Boers themselves, but little else was known about them or the lands from which they came. Now, on the Great Fish River, the foremost Boers collided with the Kaffir reservoir itself. Beyond lay native settlements and grazing lands that came down almost to the river.
There was a year or two of cautious contact, and there were a few daring Boers who crossed the river and settled beyond, but the frontier itself had stopped. The borderlands filled, and the pressure from behind mounted, and the unending clashes over cattle increased. Then there was a concerted heave or two, and the truth finally dawned. The Kaffirs were themselves the fringes of a tide. Even if they had been willing to recede—and they exhibited infinitely greater resistance to pressure than the Hottentots—they could not move. The free land had run out, and Africa was no longer endless.
The meeting was one of great mutual surprise, since neither side had ever before encountered anything quite like the other. The Kaffirs had seen few white men, and most of those had been shipwrecked mariners hardly likely to give an impression of strength. Boer opinions of natives were based on Bushmen and Hottentots, both of whom had existed only in disorganized fragments for over fifty years. The contact now was between two well-organized societies both of which were based on cattle and both of which required ever-broadening lands in order to survive.
The collision stopped both groups in their tracks and led to immediate friction. There was to be a “Kaffir problem” for the next century and more, and the solution to the land problem was only reached in the creation of a social problem which cankers southern Africa to this day.
It is worth looking closely at these Kaffirs, and what lay behind them, for directly and indirectly they have determined the history of the entire African continent south of the Sahara. It will, however, be hard to bring them into an exact focus, because they defy precise classifications. They can be broken down by blood, by language, by social and political organizations and by custom; but such breakdowns lead only to imprecise and overlapping boundaries which are, moreover, in a state of flux. Even modern terminology changes, and the term “Kaffir” itself has become one of opprobrium—on a par with “nigger”—but because all 50,000,000 people originally embraced by the term speak one of a family of over 200 related languages, they are generally known as the Bantu, a philological word coined in the course of the nineteenth century. It comes from abaNtu, meaning “people,” and is the plural of the word “man”—umuNtu. These languages vary enormously, and mutually unintelligible dialects run into the hundreds, but over wide areas they shade almost imperceptibly one into the next, so that most groups can communicate with their immediate neighbors. All of them retain certain grammatical features which point to a common origin at the dawn of human speech, and it has even been possible to reconstruct an Ur-Bantu.
The Bantu are magnificent physical specimens. Their natural diet embraces meat and dairy products, fruits, cereals and vegetables. They live in the open and are a cleanly people, although not all of their ideas of sanitation would meet with favor in a Western civilization. Warfare has played a sufficient part in their heritage for a process of natural selection to weed out the physically unfit, and blood admixtures here and there have varied the blue-black basic stock to a bewildering array of shades and features.
No one knows from whence the Bantu came, and by the time modern man turned a scientific scrutiny on the problem a century ago, the layers of evidence were irrevocably tangled. Halfway between settled farmers and nomadic herders, they probably entered Africa with their cattle from the Fertile Crescent something over 10,000 years ago, and because their civilization was based on cattle, they could go wherever their herds could graze. Their roots were never very deep, and if their few possessions could be packed and ready to move on an hour’s notice, their crops might hold them back for a season or so.
They seem to have passed up the Nile Valley and disappeared into the Sudan before the quickening of civilization in the Eastern Mediterranean. Then they were lost for some thousands of years. Once past the Saharan latitudes and pointed south and west, they had the continent to themselves, and only the ubiquitous Bushmen and the Hottentots, who may have passed along the same road themselves, lay ahead. They were not very closely related to the peoples of the African Horn, but they passed through their fringes, and their languages and social structures retain faint Semitic influences from the Arab world. They filtered into East Africa; they populated Central Africa and the reaches of the western coast, and always they worked to the south, driven by vague pressures probably of their own making and connected with cattle.
They traveled in family groups, at the pace of the cattle, which is the pace of all folk movements in Africa, and they moved whenever the pressure exceeded their low level of toleration. The moves were never farther than necessity dictated, and were controlled by rivers and mountains and pastures, so that their progress was slow and confused. Offshoots eddied and swirled and doubled back, and all over Africa the tiny seedlings they sloughed off in the course of the centuries rooted and grew apart in language, culture and even physical characteristics from the purer strain that continued the advance.
By the fourteenth century they were south of the Zambesi in numbers, and somewhere in the Rhodesias they seem to have paused long enough to experiment with political structures. Stopped by the Kalahari wastelands, they expanded to the west, pinching the Hottentots against the Atlantic and propelling a wave of them down the coast, where Diaz found them. Then they abandoned whatever they had been about and slanted off to the southeast. By the sixteenth century a large subdivision was inhabiting what is today the Transvaal. This was the Nguni family, consisting of several hundred small clans, all speaking a common language. Groups of these clans mixed with Venda-Karanga strains from the north and new subdivisions developed, whose language and customs began to grow apart. The new groups mixed again with the pure Nguni strain, and elements of all these brachiations presently filtered down into the pleasant coastal strip that lay between the Drakensberg Mountains and the Indian Ocean a hundred miles beyond. This movement was general and rapid, for the coastal strip was occupied only by the Bushmen, and the lure of uncrowded, well-watered grazing brought the Bantu tumbling down through the mountain passes. Once on the rolling plains below, they settled in the river valleys, jostling for position, blurring ethnic lines and spawning still fresh groups.
Three of these Nguni groups, the Mtetwa, the Lala and the Debe, settled in what is today Natal, while the Tonga clans moved off to the north and the Xhosa and Ntungwa groups spread out to the south. The Xhosa, pushed on by fresh clans still entering the coastal strip from the north, moved farthest south of all, until they too found the grazing and the water they sought in the valley of the Great Fish River.
It was, in fact, the last free movement, and therein lies the Bantu tragedy. History had offered them a continent, and had given them 10,000 years to fill it, and they had dallied a little too long. When Van Riebeeck landed at the Cape in 1652, the nearest Bantu were 500 miles to the north and 1,000 miles to the west, and in this generous toehold the newcomers flourished, so that when the two civilizations finally met in the 1770’s, the Bantu encountered not an artificial colonial outpost but a full-fledged vigorous folk, rooted and growing, with a vested interest in its hinterlands. Because they did not know they were in a race, with a continent for a prize, the Bantu lost it. The hare, in the twinkling of a century, had outstripped the tortoise.
It is these eastern Nguni groups, from the Xhosa on the Great Fish River to the Tonga groups on the Pongola River at the northern end of the coastal strip, who have played the largest role in the history of southern Africa, and their culture is sufficiently homogeneous to permit a final focus. Each of these ethnic groupings was composed of aggregates of clans, and each clan in turn was composed of from five to fifty or more families, all of whom claimed descent from a common, and usually prominent, ancestor. The clans were ruled by hereditary chieftains, and were both small and numerous; the 800 or so in Natal alone ranged from a few hundred souls through an average of one or two thousand up to a few giants that verged on 10,000 people. Each clan was a distinct political entity, and while he was aware of other gradations, it was primarily as a clansman that the Nguni Bantu lived and fought and died.
Since the clans varied in size, and individual chieftains of course varied enormously in their capabilities and personalities, the political scene was constantly shifting. Strong chieftains tended to kill off possible successors, and weak chieftains invited usurpers, and most reigns were short. If a chieftain was strong, his neighbors were usually weak, and he might indeed be regarded as a paramount chieftain and tend to absorb his neighbors, and so come to rule a tribe; and if the process was continued, something very like a nation might be seen. Such amalgamations, however, were rarely cemented with anything stronger than a paramount chieftain’s personality, and with his death the structure would collapse and assume a new form.
The incessant regroupings led to a cultural homogeneity, reinforced by a common geographical setting, and insured continuity by the practice of exogamy, which forced the men to seek wives from neighboring clans and thus prevented inbreeding. The wives, in moving from clan to clan, served as cultural carriers, passing on to their children the customs and mores of their childhood homes. The tendency toward cultural homogeneity among the coastal groups, however, was limited by the natural barrier of the Drakensberg Range, and a linguistic barrier existed between all of the coastal groups and the Sutu-Nguni Bantu who had remained on the inland plateaus.
Exogamy, however, produced an occasional quirk. The Bushmen, as usual, had been displaced, and those that were not exterminated took refuge in the Drakensberg Range. From their rocky fastnesses they struck back at the coastal clans, and when the clans went after them, they killed the men and kidnapped the women. These Sabines passed on to three or four Nguni groups the weird phenomenon of the Bushmen tongue clicks and such customs as amputating the last joint of the little finger, mute evidence of forgotten genocide.
By the middle of the eighteenth century the coastal strip had filled, and almost all the clans belonging to the original groups had come down through the mountain passes; only the Sutu-Ngunis were left inland. The coastal groups were isolated geographically, and because the area was limited by the Boers to the south, a subtle shift in the political patterns began. The clans had always been able to ease the tensions of proximity by movement; they were now nestled cheek by jowl in an area where movement was cramped and possible only at the expense of a neighboring clan, and the tensions began to rise. The entire political structure of Bantu civilization had been predicated on free movement, and the structure now proved inadequate.
The tensions rose slowly at first, and the old order was able to prevail for a while because the clans were not only political entities but were also economically self-sufficient. Although the clan was the basic political unit, it was not the lowest economic unit; this was the kraal, each of which was inhabited by a single family. The kraal was thus economically self-sufficient but not capable of political independence, and it is in the kraal that we can finally focus on the microcosm of Bantu civilization.
It is difficult to consider any one facet of Bantu civilization, however—even such an ultimate facet as the family—without at once being forced to consider other facets, for in very few civilizations do the same basic values so permeate the entire structure. The shape and arrangement of the Bantu kraal, for example, make little sense without foreknowledge of the Bantu family structure, and neither kraal nor family makes any sense unless one is aware of the overriding importance of cattle. It might, in fact, be best to start with the cattle, for all the Bantu world was nothing but a gigantic mechanism for the care of the herds.
They were small scrubby beasts, long-horned, and of every conceivable color. Something was known of selective breeding, but it was not extensively applied, and a beast in itself was so valuable that comparative conformation or milk yield hardly mattered. When a kraal had amassed cattle beyond any dreams of avarice, it might breed herds true to color, and this was almost the only form of ostentation known to the wealthy. With a quinary system of numeration that made counting high numbers hopelessly complicated (ninety-nine, for example, was “tens five and four, and five and four”), a herdsman could describe with great accuracy each animal in a herd running into the thousands, and would notice at once when one was missing. Ears were notched for identification, horns trained into fanciful shapes, and patches of hide were tied up with cords in a form of scarification. There were hundreds of words to deal with color variations alone. Some beasts were trained to be ridden, some to be raced for sport, and one or two clans developed special herds trained to charge as an adjunct to warfare. The greatest of the Bantu monarchs found no finer pleasure in life than in having his herds driven past him by the hour for his inspection.
Milk curds—amaSi—were the diet staple, and so much a foundation of the family unit that this food alone could not be offered to strangers—although hospitality was widely practiced. A man who had eaten the amaSi of a kraal stood forever afterward in a special relationship to that family. Although women performed all of the endless round of household chores and carried the entire burden of agricultural pursuits, they were not permitted to care for cattle. This was the province of the male, from herding to milking. Women, in fact, were not permitted to enter the cattle pens of strange kraals and were only allowed in their own under special circumstances; when menstruating, their shadow alone sufficed to endanger the cattle.
Goats and sheep were also kept, but served mainly as lower denominations of the only form of currency. Each kraal also practiced a form of diversification: portions of the main herd could be let to other kraals, paying for their care from the natural increase. This was especially common with royal herds, which were usually much too large to be supported in the vicinity of a single kraal. Each kraal in a clan, therefore, might tend a portion of the chieftain’s herd, as well as that from other kraals, so that a complex network of cattle bound the kraals of a clan together, and served to adjust such matters as taxes, fines and loans.
The Bantu families that tended these herds were tightly knit polygamous units. The wives were purchased with cattle, but the exchange was not an outright sale. If the wife for any reason returned to her parents, the purchase price—lobola—had to be refunded. (Wives proving barren, however, were simply replaced with a sister.) Missionaries were to wage a hot fight against what they regarded as sinful polygamy and the sale of human beings, but the practice was not a form of slavery. The Bantu wife had a surprising degree of status; her price gave her a definite economic value, and daughters were always welcome to parents who depended on the lobola to support their old age.
Lobola made marriage a serious business and contributed to the stability of the family unit. A man could not take a wife until he had demonstrated his responsibility and general efficiency by the acquisition of cattle, and even a single beast represented a sizable investment. Survival as a bachelor was unthinkable—no man would deign to produce or prepare any form of food except meat and milk—and it might take years of labor tending herds before the lobola was in hand. The practice, in modified form, exists to this day, and it could never have been uprooted without destroying the entire Bantu social fabric.
Most men had three or four wives, chieftains might have twenty or more, and one or two paramount chieftains maintained harems that ran into the hundreds. Since the first wives were usually purchased before a man had achieved any particular economic status, the Great Wife, chosen for dynastic reasons, was never the first one. It was also necessary to cleanse oneself of impurities on common wives before mating with a Great Wife. Great Wives were expensive, and wars had resulted when a clan thought the lobola offered for their chieftain’s daughter was insultingly low.
The kraals which housed these families were of identical configuration, usually facing east on sloping ground near water, fuel and grazing. A circular cattle pen lay at the center, surrounded by a low barrier of woven branches and grass, with a single gate, barred at night by heavy poles. This area, in which the herd was enclosed at night and to which it was returned for the noonday milking, had a great ceremonial significance. The ancestral spirits were thought to cluster around it, and here all ritual was performed. The kraal’s winter grain reserve was stored beneath it in deep clay-lined pits, and the area served as a meeting place, a parade ground and a court of justice. Calves were penned in a special enclosure at the upper end, and in royal kraals a tree or two might be left standing, beneath which the chieftain held his court.
The huts, one for each adult woman and her minor children, were set in order around the pen, and a stout circular outer barrier, which might have thorns woven into it, surrounded the huts. The Great Wife—the inKozikasi—dwelt in the central hut at the far end from the gate, behind the calves’ enclosure. The hut of the first wife was placed to her left, and that of a substitute Great Wife to her right, thus dividing the kraal into an inKhohlwa side ruled by the first wife and an inGqadi side ruled by the substitute Great Wife, both under the supervision of the Great Wife herself. Chieftains maintaining harems placed such women in a special section known as the isiGodlo near the hut of the Great Wife. The paterfamilias took his meals in the Great Wife’s hut but slept where his fancy led him. Additional wives, grown sons and daughters, and various retainers had huts descending toward the gate. Chieftains’ kraals were usually military establishments; they were considerably larger than normal kraals (although of similar configuration) and contained numbers of additional huts housing batches of unmarried warriors.
The huts were hive-shaped structures, light frameworks of woven saplings to which grass thatching was applied. The center of the roof was supported by a pole, and the only access was a single low door through which one scrambled on hands and knees. The floor was a polished surface of clay and cowdung, ground to a lustrous green, and cooking was done in earthen pots over an open fire on a low hearth. Everybody slept on grass mats, rolled during the day and hung from the walls on wooden hooks which also held the family’s other possessions. Goats and sheep might also be given shelter.
The huts were rainproof, warm in winter and cool in summer. They were cheap and durable, and could be erected in a few hours. (An entire kraal, in fact, could be erected in two or three days.) The huts, however, had a number of disadvantages. The walls were usually alive with cockroaches, and because the door, which was barred at night, was the only opening, the interiors were always dark and choked with smoke. The structure was also highly inflammable, and on the open plains frequently struck by lightning.
The kraals varied only in diameter. A poor man with two wives and a handful of goats might live in a kraal barely twenty yards across, and a paramount chieftain with scores of wives and thousands of soldiers might rule an establishment well over a mile in diameter; and if the paramount chieftain’s hut was larger, so that a whole cluster of poles had to be used to support the roof, he still had to scramble in and out on his hands and knees, and the royal eyes watered just as badly from the smoke. He also, undoubtedly, had many more cockroaches.
The children born into this society had to adjust to a bewildering series of relationships. In addition to learning the relationship of their own kraal to neighboring kraals and to the chief kraal of the clan, they had to learn where their clan stood in relationship to other clans. They then had to cope with complex family ties. Each child possessed a mother and father, but his father’s other wives counted as mothers too, and his father’s brothers also counted as fathers. He might easily have a “father” younger than he was, and in any event his father’s eldest brother would loom considerably larger on his horizon than his real father. He saw little enough of his real father at first, because he would be nursed for three or four years, and his father would not sleep with his mother again until he was weaned. He would at least have an exclusive claim on his mother until he was five years old or so, and thus was in no danger of being pushed out of the nest by his siblings.
Female relatives of his father carried more weight than male relatives of his mother, and he had a separate terminology for elder and younger brothers and a simpler one for sisters, and all of these siblings might be full or half. The relationships verged on chaos when they dealt with cousins—there were scores of Zulu words to deal with a phenomenon that English dismisses with a single noun. And cutting across all considerations of age and sex and blood were the social gradations inherent in the three sections of the kraal—the Great Wife’s, the Right and the Left.
His religious life began during his mother’s pregnancy, a time of especial concern, since almost every act she performed and every object she touched might affect her child. She had to avoid crossing the tracks of certain animals and had to abstain from all manner of special foods, lest her child take on such unpleasant characteristics as long ears or blue eyes. Her husband, on the other hand, went out of his way to partake of these foods, and also had to avoid water, as he was particularly vulnerable to drowning.
The birth, attended by the old women of the kraal, might take place in various huts, depending on the mother’s social status, but boy or girl, it was a joyous event unless it resulted in a deformed child or twins. Defective children and all but one of multiple births were suffocated at once by an earthen clod stuffed into the mouth, and the survivor of a multiple birth enjoyed a peculiar status. He was neither lucky nor unlucky, but he was certainly different. He had to have ashes put on his head after each haircut, he was never counted when a family was enumerated, and when he married there would be no dancing at his wedding. On the other hand, he could foretell weather and would be especially brave in battle.
The first year or so of infancy was marked by a series of strengthening ceremonies which carried off more infants than disease did. Babies were smoked in fires, buried up to the neck in holes and abandoned for short periods, and had reeds thrust up their rectums and twirled till the blood flowed, all in the name of hygiene.
The early years of childhood were passed in the kraal with an extraordinary degree of freedom. Discipline was firm but never severe, and play consisted of simple games and tentative excursions into the adult world. Toddlers tried to help with the milking, and little girls balancing miniature pots on their heads helped their mothers draw water from the streams. (The pot-balancing led to a graceful walk but almost universal lordosis among the women.) At five or six, children would be set to tending younger siblings.
At six or seven, the boys took up herding duties, starting with sheep and goats in the immediate vicinity of the kraal. With other boys their own age they formed an iNtanga which would move through life together. Every few years the iNtanga that was about ten years old would have its ears pierced in a mass ceremony that marked the advent of responsibility. Thereafter each boy was regarded as fit to help herd the kraal’s cattle on the open pasture land.
The herdboys took the cattle out at dawn and stayed till dusk, returning only for the noonday milking. They played games with clay pebbles representing their fathers’ cattle, they wrestled, fenced with sticks, and hunted small game with toy assegais. They fought herders from other kraals for the choice grazing, and they grew to a strong, confident manhood in the open among their peers.
INtanga ears were pierced together, but the puberty ceremony was individual, for each boy after his first nocturnal emission. On the morning after this event the boy would arise long before dawn, drive the kraal cattle far out into the veld by himself, and attempt to hide them. The entire kraal would search for him, and the harder he was to find, the greater the success predicted for his future life. When finally located, he was brought back with the cattle and isolated while a feast and a ceremony were prepared in his honor. His father gave him his first adult assegai, and all his old clothing (which wasn’t much) was burned or given to his younger brothers. His father gave him a new umuTsha, a slit skin loin covering, which he added to his umNcedo. This was a light box made from leaves of the wild banana, which covered only the end of his prepuce, and had up to now constituted his customary garb. He also got a new name, which had to be used by all younger than he.
Circumcision was once universally practiced, and, over wide areas, for females as well, but the custom inexplicably died out in a single generation among the Nguni of the northern coastal strip. There were, however, various ceremonies practiced by all the clans, so that the Bantu all moved through life by stages, each set off from the other by appropriate ritual. At some point, all the clans imparted mass instruction in sexual matters. Moral standards were severe, but based not so much on the prevention of illicit intercourse as on avoiding the birth of children out of wedlock. Sexual play among preadolescents, therefore, was open and permitted, and was only hedged with proper behavior standards in the dangerous period between puberty and marriage. Even then, however, a form of external intercourse known as ukuHlobonga was permitted under certain circumstances, and the technique was passed on to adolescents.
After most of the boys in an iNtanga had passed through the puberty ceremony, a leader would be appointed from the next highest age group. The kraals in a particular area of a clan’s territory were under the supervision of an inDuna, who thus served as a district administrator and was responsible to the clan chieftain. The inDuna appointed the iNtanga leaders, collected taxes, settled disputes, and in time of war served as a military leader for the forces in his district.
ukuButhwa.