Shaka the Great (13 page)

He also refuses to relieve himself in front of anyone, and hates it when others don't show him the same consideration—especially if shit is involved. When he was younger, it was one of the few occasions when this strapping young prince could be counted upon to resort to violence.

Shit.

Should he be surprised, though? Why
wouldn't
he step in shit? That's where they want him, after all, the jackals!

And since this
is
the time of the Dog Fucking moon, let him be fucked, as well!

Only, he won't make it easy for them.

So?

So Dingane runs.

And he still can't leave it alone. As inappropriate and ill-advised as it might be, right here and now, he can't resist another sip from the pot of resentment he regards as part of his inheritance.

Born sometime in the late 1790s, the son of Senzangakhona's sixth wife Mpikase, Dingane grew up in the royal kraal at EsiKlebeni. The marks of Zulu nobility—the broad shoulders, strong thighs and heavy buttocks—were already evident by the time he was twelve. Two years later, he was as tall as most of the men serving his father. His size and strength meant he could afford to act a little more independently than his siblings; no one was going to challenge him if he became illtempered or if he neglected his chores. And as a child he had run from others because he preferred his own company, and he had run from his chores, because they bored him in a way they didn't bore the others—those mindless, mundane tasks seem to sap him and drain him, so that avoiding them became a form of self-defense. As a teenager he regularly ran from angry fathers, but then, when he was in his early twenties, the habitual runner was caught—with a girl from his father's seraglio, which was an offense
punishable by death. Fortunately for Dingane, Senzangakhona himself was ill at the time, so it was Mduli he had to face. Muttering something about a son following in his father's footsteps, the elder had merely sent Dingane off to live with the Qwabes.

It was a banishment that, initially at least, also involved a fair amount of running. Mduli had huffily reassured Dingane he wouldn't tell Senzangakhona what had happened, but Dingane, with his low opinion of other people, couldn't be sure Mduli wouldn't break his promise, and therefore felt the need to put as much distance between himself and EsiKlebeni as possible.

Mpande accompanied him, and thus Dingane learned the benefit of having a baggage carrier some time before Shaka insisted that senior herdboys accompany his troops as their udibis, carrying water and extra weapons and foraging for food.

That would come later, though. First there was more running to do.

Dingane hadn't been living at the Qwabe royal kraal for more than six months when he received word that his father had died, and Sigujana had been installed as king. Ndlela had brought him the news, and had a few other things to tell him. A week after Ndlela departed, the prince embarked on his journey home. As instructed, he maintained a leisurely pace, much to Mpande's relief and the bliss of several maidens at intervening villages, where the two brothers would often stay for several days.

Consequently, he and Mpande were still a few sleeps away from the capital when they learned that Sigujana was dead and Shaka had claimed the throne.

He's put several ridges between him and the madness swirling back there when he finally stops to rest. Mist lies across the veld and his sweat is cold on his shoulders. What
is
happening back there? Not for the first time this night, his lips flicker into a wry grin: he could be dead already and just not know it. The order issued, all that remains is the …

… he drops to his haunches …

… execution.

Something is moving nearby. A careful pressing of grass and sand that stop the moment he went into a crouch.

Dingane considers issuing a challenge, then decides against it. Without any form of weapon, he's as vulnerable as a baby.

With a quiet sigh, he rises to his feet. He may not be armed, and feels like a bull about to be slaughtered, but he will not die on his knees.

Spreading his hands, his raises his arms to shoulder height and turns around slowly on the path.

If there is someone out there, let them see that the Needy One is ready.

Let them see I do not care.

He turns slowly, then waits, his back toward Bulawayo.

He breathes in. Slowly scanning the gray mist that surrounds him like a fallen cloud.

When he moves off again, it's simply because he's getting cold and not because he's decided he was imagining things.

He can understand why, in the early days, his warnings were ignored, seen merely as expressions of jealousy. There were times, when the kingdom was growing and the herds increasing, that he told himself he had misinterpreted the signs. But then came Nandi's death …

It was as if she had been a sangoma even more powerful than Nobela, able to beguile the whole nation, and her death had released them from the spell. Suddenly they could see Shaka for what he was. Even the King's inner circle no longer had any words to explain, justify … or hide.

And it was as if Shaka wanted to see everyone else join his mother on the Great Journey. They weren't sacrifices, all those put to death for failing to display sufficient grief; nor was it about reminding the ancestors of her greatness. It was as if all those who
still lived were an insult, an affront.
How dare they breathe when she cannot! How dare they eat and drink and fuck while she lies curled up in a hole! If she couldn't live, then neither could they!

And it was Shaka … in the end it was Shaka who did what all of his enemies had tried and failed to do so many times. He massed his legions and invaded the kingdom. Only these invaders were the dark legions of an army of terror. The spies, tale-tellers and gossips, the spiteful and the malicious, the disgruntled and the jealous, suddenly all found favor and a sympathetic ear from a king whose distaste for their kind was well known. They were the horns: sneaking around, creeping up, nudging—guiding the prey back toward the powerful chest. The King's slayers, their ranks suddenly swollen—they were the chest, smashing and destroying.

The Way of the Bull, indeed! This was a blood-red, demonpossessed monster come to grind the Zulu people into the dirt.

And it was all Shaka's doing!

Look at what he did to Mbopa! Just when you thought his actions couldn't get more depraved, or more spiteful, aiee! The royal brothers had trembled, and slept with their spears, thinking Shaka might use this as an opportunity to thin their ranks. But see where Shaka's madness had led him: to the kraal of one of his most loyal servants! Instead of coming for those he had to know he could never trust, he pointed his Slayers in Mbopa's direction!

And then it was over. (And in the process Shaka proved to Dingane that one thing about him hadn't changed—his ability to surprise the Needy One.)

It was as if Shaka had merely been ill with a fever—because that's how sudden his recovery was. Granted, the fever lasted a long time and hurt others more than it hurt the man thrashing about on his sleeping mat, but that doesn't make the analogy any less apt. Especially when you consider how there eventually came that crucial phase, that sweaty night when things got worse, and you knew something had to happen. Death was at last reaching out and the illness would be over by dawn, with the patient left either eating dirt or finally rid of the fever.

Things had got worse, with ever more insane laws. There was that nonsense with the Umkhokha, which has already entered the realms of myth. There was what happened with Mbopa … But then there came the dawn. Shaka sat up and tottered out of his hut, and it was soon clear that something—the rage, the fever, call it what you will—had left him.

There were still relapses, however, when the King disappeared into his hut for days on end and no one dared disturb him, or dark times when his every utterance condemned some unfortunate to death. But these became less and less frequent, and the insane laws were repealed. And the nation rejoiced.

But Dingane can't help but feel Mnkabayi is right.

He hopes he's wrong, but it seems to him that the terrible fever was merely the birth pains of something infinitely worse.

And you're still acting as if there's something you can do to change things. But the leopard is already in the kraal, it no longer matters whether you're right or wrong.

He stops, with his hands on his hips, breathing heavily. His brooding thoughts have carried him far, helping him ignore his aching muscles.

He needs to make for higher ground, to get out of this mist.

Instinct tells him to head over to his right … and, a few meters from the path, he's soon moving up a slope.

He increases his pace, taking long steps with his thigh muscles bulging.

Get to high ground and rest, work out where he is when dawn comes …

Rocks everywhere.

He just manages to avoid twisting his left ankle. Hunched forward, he begins to pick his way between the stones. The big boulders give you something to rest against; it's the small, loose rocks hidden in the grass that you've got to watch out for.

The incline steepens. Must be getting close to the summit.

He looks up. Straightens.

He's even closer to the summit than he realized—and there's someone standing there.

Dingane's about to speak, urge the other man to get it over with, when the grayness thins, parts … and he laughs instead.

This is too good! Oh, there has been a truly cunning mind at work here!

For see who has emerged from the elephant-gray mist to stand there peering down at him!

See who they have sent to kill him!

It is his old friend, the Induna.

The word
umKhosi
is derived from the noun
inkosi
, meaning chief or king, and the ceremony itself, aptly described by one commentator as “The King's Mass,” was a prolonged celebration of the concept of
ubukhosi
—the spiritual power and presence of the king. Its main purpose was to secure the blessing of the ancestral spirits on the new harvest—and by implication on the wealth and power of the kingdom in the coming year … The
umKhosi
was the only time, outside major military expeditions, that the army was regularly brought together in its entirety, and the rituals demonstrate like nothing else the overlap between the army's military and civilian roles, and its function as the mobilised manpower of the nation gathered to pay homage to the king and all he represented.