The Angels Weep (19 page)

They came up over a low rise, and involuntarily stopped and
drew closer together, not even laying down their bundles, so
complete was their horrified fascination at what lay ahead of
them. Once it had been the great regimental kraal of the Inyati
impi which Gandang commanded. Then, by the decree of the Native
Commissioner at Bulawayo, the impi had been disbanded and
scattered. The kraal had been destroyed by fire. However, when
the women had last seen it, new growth of grass had begun to
cover the scars, but now it had been stripped away by the locust
swarms and the circular black banks of ash lay exposed once
again. They invoked memories of a past grandeur, and the new
kraal built to house Gandang and his close family was tiny and
insignificant in comparison.

It lay a mile down the bank of the Inyati river, and the
pasture in between was destroyed. The spring rains had not yet
filled the river and the sandbanks were silvery white, the
polished water-worn boulders glittered like reptile scales in the
sunlight. The new kraal itself seemed deserted, and the
cattle-pens were empty.

‘They have taken the cattle again,’ said Ruth, the
handsome young woman who stood beside Juba. She was not yet
twenty years of age, and although she had already worn the
headdress of the married woman for two seasons, she had not yet
conceived. It was the secret terror that she was barren that had
driven her to convert to Christianity – three gods as
omnipotent as the ones which Juba had described to her would
certainly not allow one of their own to remain childless. She had
been baptized by Nomusa almost a full moon previously, and her
name had been changed by her new gods and Nomusa from Kampu to
Ruth. Now she was most anxious to rejoin her husband, one of
Gandang’s nephews, and to put to the test the efficacy of
her new religion.

‘No,’ Juba told her shortly. ‘Gandang will
have sent the herds eastwards to find new pasture.’

‘The
amadoda
– where are the
men?’

‘Perhaps they have gone with the cattle.’

‘That is work for boys, not men.’

Juba snorted. ‘Since One-Bright-Eye has taken their
shields, our men are merely
mujiba
.’

The
mujiba
were the herdboys, not yet initiated into
their fighting regiments, and Juba’s companions were shamed
by the truth of her words. It was true that their men had been
disarmed, and that the cattle and slave raids which had been the
main activity and diversion of the
amadoda
had been
forbidden. At least their own husbands were blooded warriors,
they had washed their spears in the blood of Wilson’s
troopers on the banks of the Shangani river in the one beautiful
killing, the one small Matabele victory of that war, but what
would become of the younger men, now that a whole way of life had
been denied them? Would they ever be able to win on the
battlefield the right to go in to the women, and take a wife? Or
would the customs and laws under which they had lived all their
lives fall into disregard and disuse? And if they did, then what
would become of the nation?

‘The women are still here,’ Juba pointed out the
rows of workers in the brown denuded cornfields. They swayed in
rhythm to the swing of the hoes.

‘They are replanting the fields,’ Ruth said.

‘It is too late,’ Juba muttered, ‘there will
be no harvest to celebrate at the dance of the first fruits this
season.’ Then she roused herself. ‘Let us go
down.’

At one of the shallow pools between the sandbanks, they laid
aside their headloads and shed their aprons. In the cool green
water they washed away the sweat and dust of the road. Ruth found
a buffalo creeper that had escaped the locusts and she picked
yellow flowers to twine into headpieces for all of them.

The women in the fields saw them as they came up the bank and
ran shrieking with delight to greet them, jostling each other in
their eagerness to make obeisance to Juba.

‘
Mamewethu
‘, they called her, as they bowed
and clapped their hands in deep respect. They took her load from
her and two of her grandchildren came forward shyly to hold each
of her hands. Then, singing the songs of welcome, the little
procession filed up to the kraal.

Not all the men had left. Gandang sat under the bare branches
of the wild fig tree on his carved stool of chiefship and Juba
hurried to kneel before him.

He smiled down at her fondly, nodding comfortably at her
protestations of duty and devotion. Then as an extraordinary mark
of his feeling for her, he lifted her with his own hand and
seated her on the mat which one of his junior wives spread before
him. He waited while she refreshed herself from the big clay
beerpot that another wife knelt to hand her.

Then he waved the women and children away, and alone at last
the two of them leaned their heads together and talked like the
beloved companions that they were.

‘Nomusa is well?’ Gandang asked. He did not share
Juba’s deep love for the woman doctor at Khami Mission, in
fact he viewed with deep suspicion this alien religion that his
senior wife had adopted. It was Gandang’s impi that had
caught Wilson’s little patrol on the banks of the Shangani
river during the war and slain them to a man. Amongst the
corpses, stripped naked by his warriors so that the shocking
mulberry-coloured assegai wounds in their white flesh were
exposed, had lain the body of the woman missionary’s first
husband. There could never be love where there had been blood.
However, Gandang respected the white woman. He had known her as
long as he had known Juba, and he had watched her unflagging
efforts to champion and protect the Matabele people. She had been
friend and adviser to the old King Lobengula, and she had brought
comfort to thousands of sick and dying Matabele, so now his
concern was genuine. ‘Has she thrown aside the evil spirits
that she brought upon herself by drinking the girl’s
blood?’

It was inevitable that the accounts of Robyn’s
experiment with the transference of malaria would become garbled
and take on the aura of witchcraft.

‘She did not drink the girl’s blood.’ Juba
tried to explain that the taking of blood had been for the good
of the Matabele nation, but because she did not understand it
completely herself, her explanation was unconvincing. She saw the
doubt in Gandang’s eyes, and she abandoned the effort.

‘Bazo, the Axe?’ she asked instead. ‘Where
is he?’ Her first-born son was also her favourite.

‘In the hills with all the other young men,’
Gandang answered.

The Matopos Hills were always the refuge of the Matabele in
time of danger and trouble, and Juba leaned forward anxiously to
ask, ‘There has been trouble?’

Gandang shrugged in reply. ‘In these times there is
always trouble.’

‘From whence does it come?’

‘One-Bright-Eye sent word with his
kanka
–
with his jackals – that we must provide two hundred young
men to work on the new gold mine in the south that belongs to
Henshaw, the Hawk.’

‘You did not send the men?’

‘I told his
kanka
.’ The derogatory name for
the Company native police likened them to the little scavengers
that followed the lion for the scraps, and expressed the hatred
that the Matabele felt for these traitors. ‘I told them
that the white men had deprived me of my shield and assegai and
my honour as an induna, therefore I had lost the right to command
my young men to dig the white men’s holes for them or to
build their roads.’

‘And now One-Bright-Eye comes?’

Juba spoke with resignation. She knew all the moves that must
be made: the command, the definance, the confrontation. She had
watched it all before, and now she was sick of men’s pride
and men’s wars and the death and maiming and suffering.

‘Yes,’ Gandang agreed. ‘Not all the
kanka
are traitors and one has sent word that
One-Bright-Eye is on the road, with fifty men – and so the
young men have gone into the hills.’

‘But you stay here to meet him?’ Juba asked.
‘Unarmed and alone, you wait for One-Bright-Eye and fifty
armed men?’

‘I have never run from any man,’ Gandang said
simply, ‘never in my life.’

And Juba felt her pride and her love choke her as she looked
into the stern handsome face, and noticed as if for the first
time the hoar-frost sparkling on the dark cap of his hair above
the headring.

‘Gandang, my lord, the old times have passed. Things
change. The sons of Lobengula work as house-boys in the kraal of
Lodzi far away in the south beside the great water. The impis are
scattered, and there is a new and gentle god in the land, the god
Jesus. Everything has changed, and we must change with
it.’

Gandang was silent a long time, staring out across the river
as though he had not heard her speak. Then he sighed and took a
little red snuff from the buckhorn that hung on a thong around
his neck. He sneezed and wiped his eyes, and looked at her.

‘Your body is part of my body,’ he said.
‘Your first-born son is my son. If I do not trust you, then
I cannot trust myself. So I tell you, that the old times will
come again.’

‘What is this, Lord?’ Juba asked. ‘What
strange words are these?’

‘The words of the Umlimo. She has called forth an
oracle. The nation will be free and great again—’

‘The Umlimo sent the impis onto the guns at Shangani and
Bembesi,’ Juba whispered bitterly. ‘The Umlimo
preaches war and death and pestilence. There is a new god now.
The god Jesus of peace.’

‘Peace?’ Gandang asked bitterly. ‘If that is
the word of this god, then the white men do not listen very well
to their own. Ask the Zulu of the peace they found at Ulundi, ask
the shade of Lobengula of the peace they brought with them to
Matabeleland.’

Juba could not reply, for again she had not fully understood
when Nomusa explained, and she bowed her head in resignation.
After a while, when Gandang was certain that she had accepted
what he had said, he went on:

‘The oracle of the Umlimo is in three parts – and
already the first has come to pass. The darkness at noon, the
wings of the locust, and the trees bare of leaves in the
springtime. It is happening and we must look to our
steel.’

‘The white men have broken the assegais.’

‘In the hills there has been a new birthing of
steel.’ Involuntarily Gandang lowered his voice to a
whisper. ‘The forges of the Rozwi smiths burn day and night
and the molten iron runs copiously as the waters of the
Zambezi.’

Juba stared at him. ‘Who has done this?’

‘Bazo, your own son.’

‘The wounds of the guns are still fresh and bright upon
his body.’

‘But he is an induna of Kumalo,’ Gandang whispered
proudly, ‘and he is a man.’

‘One man,’ Juba replied. ‘One man only,
where are the impis?’

‘Preparing in secret, in the wild places, re-learning
the skills and arts which they have not yet forgotten.’

‘Gandang, my lord, I feel my heart beginning to break
again, I feel my tears gathering like the rainstorms of summer.
Must there always be war?’

‘You are a daughter of Matabele, of pure Zanzi blood
from the south. Your father’s father followed Mzilikazi,
your father spilled his blood for him, as your own son did for
Lobengula – do you have to ask that question?’

She was silent, knowing how futile it was to argue with him
when there was that glitter in his eyes. When the fighting
madness was in him, there was no room for reason.

‘Juba, my little Dove, there will be work for you when
the prophecy of the Umlimo comes to full term.’

‘Lord?’ she asked.

‘The women must carry the blades. They will be bound up
in rolls of sleeping-mats and in bundles of thatching-grass, and
carried on the heads of the women to where the impis are
waiting.’

‘Lord.’ Her voice was neutral, and she dropped her
eyes from his hard glittering gaze.

‘The white men and their
kanka
will not suspect
the women, they will let them pass freely upon the road,’
Gandang went on. ‘You are the mother of the nation now that
the king’s wives are dead and scattered. It will be your
duty to assemble the young women, to train them in their duty,
and to see them place the steel in the hands of the warriors at
the time that the Umlimo has foreseen, the time when the hornless
cattle are eaten up by the cross.’

Juba was reluctant to reply, afraid to conjure up his wrath.
He had to demand her answer.

‘You have heard my word, woman, and you know your duty
to your husband and your people.’

Then only Juba lifted her head and looked deeply into his dark
fierce eyes.

‘Forgive me, Lord. This time I cannot obey you. I cannot
help to bring fresh sorrow upon the land. I cannot bear to hear
again the wails of the widows and orphans. You must find another
to carry the bloody steel.’

She had expected his anger. She could have weathered that, as
she had a hundred times before, but she saw in his eyes something
that had never been there before. It was contempt, and she did
not know how she could bear it. When Gandang stood up without
another word and stalked away towards the river, she wanted to
run after him and throw herself at his feet, but then she
remembered the words of Nomusa.

‘He is a gentle God, but the way He sets for us is hard
beyond the telling of it.’

And Juba found that she could not move. She was trapped
between two worlds and two duties, and she felt as though it was
tearing her soul down the middle.

J
uba sat alone
under the bare wild fig tree the rest of the day. She sat with
her arms folded across her great glossy breasts, and she rocked
herself silently, as though the movement might comfort her as it
would a fretful child, but there was no surcease in either
movement or thought, so it was with relief that at last she
looked up and saw her two attendants kneeling before her. She did
not know how long they had been there. She had not even heard
them come up, so rapt had she been in her sorrow and
confusion.