The Covenant: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  So Shaka moved everyone back, ordering the guards to let Nxumalo have his uniform, and as the naked commander stood with his leather skirt in his hand, he whispered to the chief, reminding him of that afternoon when they sat upon the grass and Nxumalo had assured him that one day he would have a penis of normal size.

  Shaka put the fingertips of his left hand over his eyes and bowed his head. ‘Are you Nxumalo of the iziCwe?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Dark spirits are on this field,’ Shaka mumbled, and with a great strangling cry he demanded that the diviners conduct a smelling-out to identify the men in this gathering who housed these spirits, and the wild ones with snake skeletons dangling about their necks, dried gall bladders in their hair and black wildebeest tails in their hands ran helter-skelter among the Zulu, sniffing and listening and finally touching with their switching tails those who had brought evil upon the chief. As soon as a victim was designated, the knobkerrie men killed him.

  Toward midnight, as Shaka sat drinking beer with Nxumalo, he began to feel pity for the impaled men. ‘It would be too cruel to leave them hanging through the night,’ he said, and he directed his people to gather huge mounds of grass and sticks to pile under the dangling men. ‘See,’ he cried to his victims, ‘I no longer hold bitterness against you.’ And he lit the grass so that the men might die quickly and escape the terrible agonies that would otherwise have come with the morning, when the hot sun began to shine upon them.

  As a gesture of conciliation Shaka absorbed the Langeni regiments into his growing army, launching a policy that would result in a powerful force. When Dingiswayo, to whom he still owed nominal allegiance, died in battle with a northern tribe, the entire iziCwe contingent marched over to the Zulu, and Shaka said, ‘Nxumalo, my truest friend, from this day you eat with the iziCwe.’ This thrilling announcement had nothing to do with the manner in which the new general of the regiments would take his meals; it referred to the terrifying battle cry that would soon echo through the land whenever a Zulu warrior killed an enemy: ‘I have eaten!’

  In every direction Shaka lashed out with devastating speed, devouring small clans, and one morning he cried brusquely, ‘Today we destroy the Ngwane,’ and within a few hours the regiments had crossed the Umfolozi River and were dashing north to the kraals of a tribe which had given repeated trouble. Without signals or warning, other than the cries of astonished herd boys who saw the amazing army approaching, the Zulu took battle position, body-arms-head, and fell upon the community.

  The Ngwane, like all subsidiary tribes in this region, were stalwart men and they did not propose to lose their cattle easily, for they supposed this to be another cattle raid in which two or three men might get hurt. So they quickly formed into their rude battle formations, with their throwing assegais at the ready. They saw the body of Shaka’s army, and it looked much like any traditional raiding party, but as they moved forward to engage it, they suddenly discovered that the wings were widespread, like the horns of some enraged buffalo, so that wherever they turned they confronted swift-running Zulu.

  ‘They’ll take all our cattle!’ the Ngwane commander shouted, but it was not cows that the Zulu sought this time. With terrifying force they fell upon the Ngwane, stabbing and killing, and when the latter bravely tried to regroup and fight in earnest, from out of nowhere sprang the iziCwe, their brutal assegais slashing like the knives that slaughtered oxen for the sacrifice.

  Under this tremendous onslaught the Ngwane defenses crumbled, and those warriors who were spared the Zulu cry ‘I have eaten!’ scattered and kept on running. In their flight from terror they would become outlaws, seeking in the blood of others vengeance for their own crushing defeat. The kraals from which they fled were now in ashes, their herds driven off, their boys dragooned into Zulu regiments and their women distributed among the Zulu kraals.

  The old people were ‘helped along to the other place,’ their slayers killing them with joy, for the Zulu saw nothing cruel in shortening the days of any who were aged or infirm. But when this savage battle was over, the Ngwane had ceased to exist as a clan.

  Their extinction had been made possible by the disciplined performance of the iziCwe, and when the regiments returned to the Zulu kraals, Shaka praised the men and told them, to the envy of the other warriors, ‘You may now enjoy the pleasures of the road.’

  Shaka had introduced his own variation of that sexual custom: no warrior could marry until his chief gave him permission, and this was usually delayed until the soldiers were in their mid-thirties and growing too old for the crack regiments. Then, in a grand ceremony, they were permitted to search the woods for a combination of vine, gut and gum, from which they made a wide headband, woven into the hair when moist and worn for the rest of life as proof of marriage.

  But since it was illogical to expect grown men, and the bravest warriors at that, to remain continent till they donned their headbands, the soldiers were granted the ‘pleasures’ after any battle.

  So Nxumalo’s warriors fanned out through the community, looking for young women, and the girls, long wondering about husbands and lovers, eagerly allowed themselves to be found. For three long days the men reveled in the glades, loving the women with passion born on the battlefield, yet practicing an almost savage restraint because they knew the fearful penalty they must pay if they got the women pregnant.

  Nxumalo, no less excited about the fraternizing reward than his men, had gone seeking his pleasure of the road at a kraal whose daughter he had been noticing for some time. He was now a powerfully organized man who had been in the forefront of seven battles; he had a right to assume, therefore, that one of these years he would win permission to take a wife, but he knew that in Shaka’s regime, sex was utilized as the ultimate weapon of control.

  So he was determined to excel in battle so that he could go to Thetiwe to ask her to be his wife. Thetiwe, sixteen years old and the daughter of a neighboring chieftain, a girl of lovely demeanor and flashing eyes, had expected the iziCwe to perform well, which meant of course that its commander would come calling. So she waited alone, and when night fell she heard his steps.

  ‘How was the battle?’ she asked as he led her into a scattered wood beside the river.

  ‘They are no more, the Ngwane.’

  ‘They were a troublesome people.’

  ‘No more.’

  They spent three exciting days together, and often they talked of how soon Shaka might allow them to marry. Nxumalo, better aware than most of Shaka’s intentions, was not overly hopeful: ‘Consider the situation. More than anything else, Shaka wants to build the Zulu into the commanding nation, of which he will be king. To achieve this, constant warfare is necessary. And in battle he must have one regiment he can rely on. It’ll always be the iziCwe. And I shall be fighting at its head until I’m fifty.’

  ‘Oh, no!’ Pressing her small hands against her face, she pondered the empty years till Nxumalo could claim her, and with great sadness, asked, ‘Doesn’t he know that his men should marry?’

  ‘Thetiwe,’ he replied gravely, ‘you must never let anyone hear you ask such a question.’

  ‘But why not?’

  ‘Because Shaka is different. He doesn’t think of families. He thinks only of armies and the glory to come.’ He paused, wondering if he dare discuss this matter honestly with an untested girl of sixteen, but his passion for her was so intense that he felt he must. ‘How many wives does the chief have now?’

  ‘In the various kraals, sixty … I think.’

  ‘Are any of them pregnant?’

  ‘Oh, no!’

  ‘But the last chief. Shaka’s father. Were his wives usually pregnant?’

  ‘He had scores of children.’

  ‘The difference is that Shaka never sleeps with his wives. You know what he calls them? “My beloved sisters.” Always he calls them his sisters. You see, he fears women for two reasons. He wants no children, especially no sons.’

  ‘Why not? You want sons, do
n’t you?’

  ‘I do. I would quit the army now …’ He dropped that dangerous topic and continued speaking of his chief: ‘And the other reason he fears women … it goes back to when he was a boy. The others teased him. Told him he could never have babies. They laughed at him constantly and said no wife would ever want him.’

  ‘Now he has sixty wives,’ Thetiwe said, ‘and they’ll probably put twenty of the captured Ngwane girls aside for him.’

  ‘But you mustn’t speak of this to anyone,’ Nxumalo warned, aware of what might happen to her and to him if Shaka suspected them of irreverence.

  She laughed. ‘I’ve known everything you’ve said. What do you think the women in the kraals joke about when no one can spy on them? That Shaka keeps his beloved sisters aside till a real man comes along to claim them.’

  ‘Thetiwe! Never speak of that.’ And having observed the wrath of Shaka, the lovers were afraid even to think such thoughts, let alone voice them.

  Shaka had now absorbed four troublesome tribes, ‘embracing them in my arms,’ as he said. In his utilization of the body-arms-head tactic he had become incredibly deft. Sometimes he sent one of his flanks far out and thinly spaced, their broad shields with the edges forward and thus nearly invisible. Hidden in the grasses behind lurked a second group. As his army advanced, the opposing general spotted the undermanned flank and wheeled his principal force against it, but when the enemy was committed, Shaka flashed a signal, whereupon the front line of Zulu whipped their shields front forward, while the hidden men leaped into position, showing the full width of their shields also. In an instant, what had been a line of stragglers became a solid phalanx looming two or three times larger than it actually was. Often this struck such terror that the enemy soldiers who had been marching confidently to engage an outnumbered foe fled in panic, disrupting the lines behind and inviting the massive body of the Zulu army to overwhelm them.

  Zulu messengers, in reporting victories, gave details in rigorous order: so many cattle taken for the chief’s pastures, so many boys for his regiments, so many girls for his kraals. The watchmen of the women selected twenty or thirty of the choicest maidens and turned the others over to the clan, and though Shaka appeared to pay little attention to his wives, any male caught lurking about the women’s compound was instantly strangled, and if the girl to whom he had been making advances could be identified, she, too, was slain.

  Nxumalo, obedient to each rule Shaka promulgated, spent whatever time was legally allowed with Thetiwe, and told her many things: ‘Shaka is the greatest man who ever lived. A genius like no other. I’ve known four chiefs, and beside him, they were boys. It’s in his plans for our nation that he excels. All tribes combined into one. From the rivers on the north to the rivers on the south. One family, one king.’ He paused as he said this, then added, ‘Shaka, King of the Zulu.’

  ‘But you said he almost impaled you.’

  ‘It was the evil spirits, not Shaka himself. They came and blinded him, but as soon as I told him who I was and his eyes opened, he spared me.’

  ‘But didn’t you often tell me that when the tribes were united, there’d be no more war?’

  It was the kind of probing question that Thetiwe often asked him. But he knew there must be an answer: ‘It’s like this. We’re still faced by many tribes that we must defeat. This will go on for some years, but one day there will be peace. Shaka has said so.’

  The king’s next actions belied this, for he authorized the formation of two new regiments. The first was composed only of girls Thetiwe’s age, and because of her impeccable lineage and her bright intelligence, she was made vice-commander of this new regiment. The girls were not intended for battle; they were kept to the rear, performing services such as cooking, the mending of weapons and the nursing of the wounded, and quickly they learned the basic rule of Shaka’s battle plan: ‘If a Zulu is wounded, speak to him. If he can understand what you’re saying, mend him. If he can’t, call the guards.’ When the girls did summon the knobkerrie men, the latter studied the case briefly, then usually took the wounded man’s assegai and plunged it into his heart, for as Shaka said, ‘If he can’t walk, he can’t fight.’ And this the nurses understood.

  The second new regiment was of quite a different character. It was almost laughable to look at, a collection of older men halt of leg and bad of eye. It was inconceivable that they could move with the alacrity demanded of Shaka’s regiments, but gradually the king’s strategy became evident: ‘These men are to receive half-rations. They’re to be worked constantly, and the sooner they die off, the better the Zulu nation will be.’

  Now everyone, except the child-bearing women, was in a regiment and the nation was at last efficiently organized. Nxumalo liked the certainty this provided, the orderly progression through life with no chance for accidental deviation: a boy was born; he tended cattle; at eleven he was assigned a place in the cadets, a kind of pre-regiment that performed tasks for the king; at fourteen he joined the youth’s regiment, carrying water and food to men in battle; at nineteen he could, if he were fortunate, become a member of some renowned regiment like the iziCwe. For the next quarter of a century he would live in barracks in an orderly way, traveling to far parts of the nation where enemies existed; and if he proved obedient, the time would eventually come when he could marry; he would have a brief, happy life with his wife and children, and then pass on to the old men’s battalion, where he would die decently without prolonged imbecility. It was the way life should be managed, Nxumalo thought, for it helped men avoid erratic behavior and produced a disciplined, happy nation.

  Nxumalo also appreciated the advantage that came from having the young girls collected into their own regiment: at the conclusion of some harsh battle, when the warriors were exhausted, these girls would be sent to the proper area, and for three or four days the victors could sport with them and thus avoid the burden of returning long distances to the kraals, where girls would have to be searched for. In later days Nxumalo was astounded by an additional simplicity the king’s strategy permitted: once when the amaWombe regiment had performed especially well, Shaka rewarded it brilliantly. He marched the entire force to the parade ground, then summoned one of the girls’ regiments and announced: ‘The men may marry the women.’ And by nightfall the pairings had been made and six hundred new families were launched without interrupting army procedures.

  By 1823 Shaka had consolidated the major portion of his nation, bringing into carefully defined order what had previously been a mass of contending chiefdoms. He was an excellent administrator, offering positions of considerable importance to any gifted members of defeated tribes, and recalling his own unhappy days as an alien among the Langeni, he made the newcomers totally welcome, so that within a few months they began to forget that they had ever been anything but Zulu.

  Nxumalo saw that iron rule was necessary if such a patchwork of clans was ever to become a unified kingdom; brutal punishments were accepted, for in the black tribes the chief served as father of the people, and what displeased him displeased his children, who became almost eager for retribution. Shaka started his reign in accordance with tradition; his rule was no more bloody than that of his predecessors, but as his authority widened he was tempted, like all burgeoning tyrants, to make his whim the law of the land.

  In this he was encouraged by a curious personal motivation: he looked with scorn at all diviners and witch doctors, for although he knew they were necessary, he also knew they were a sorry lot. But the more he denigrated them, the more he was tempted to usurp their power; he became his own diviner, and those about him lived in terror. A nod when he was speaking, a belch, an injudicious fart, and Shaka would point to the offender, signaling his knobkerrie team to strangle that one.

  But never in the early days was he a senseless tyrant; he gave the Zulu an able, generous government. He was especially careful to ensure that his people had reliable water supplies, stable sources of food, and his care of cattle would never be exce
lled. His personal herds numbered about twenty thousand, and he expressed his love for them in various ways. As a Zulu, he cherished cattle above any other possession, for he knew that a man’s stature depended on the number of cattle he had been able to accumulate and that a nation’s welfare was determined by the care with which it protected its animals.

  His herds were so large that he was able to segregate them by color, which had not only an esthetic result but also a very practical one, because the cowhide shields of various regiments could be differentiated. The iziCwe, for example, carried only white shields with black fittings. Others had black, a choice color, or brown or red, the red finding little favor, for it was thought to be unlucky.

  He was most careful with the animals intended for sacrifice, for upon them depended the spiritual safety of his kingdom, as well as his own. He never felt more secure than when he attended a ritual slaughter, stripped naked and washed himself in the still-warm chyme of a freshly slain bull. This thick liquid, the contents of the animal’s stomach at the completion of the digestive process, was life-giving, and to feel one’s self cleansed by it was an assurance of immortality.

  Even more important, however, was the precious little sac, about as big as a child’s fist, which fastened to the dead animal’s liver. This was the gall bladder, in which rested the bitter fluid that symbolized life: it was acrid, like the taste of death, yet the bladder in which it lived was shaped exactly like the womb from which life sprang. Also, mysteriously, it resembled the beehive hut in which man lived, and the grave in which he ultimately rested, so that the whole of life was encompassed in this magical appendage. Once its bitter contents had been sprinkled to consecrate, it was dried into a thin leather, inflated and worn in the matted hair of witch-seekers.

  He was extremely loving with his mother, turning over to her the supervision of the kraals in which he kept his wives, and it was because of her attentiveness that he became aware of Thetiwe, vice-commander of one of his women’s regiments.