The Covenant: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  Now, through the agency of servants, she let Nxumalo know that she would brave any death if he were willing to run with her to find some home less pitiful, and one night while Nxumalo was brooding upon this matter, it occurred to him that one of the worst things his king had done was this imprisonment of so many beautiful girls, thus keeping them in fruitless bondage till their years were wasted, and he decided that if with the others he must kill the king, he would at the same time put his life in triple jeopardy by stealing one of the king’s wives. In great secrecy he drafted plans, and felt as if life were starting anew when Thandi came boldly to the kraal fence to smile at him, indicating her assent.

  Next day came the severest test, for the king abruptly summoned him, and as Nxumalo entered the royal kraal, came toward him with tears in his eyes, and confessed: ‘Oh, Nxumalo! In my madness I thought of sending the witch-seekers after you, but now I see that you’re my only friend. I need you.’

  Before Nxumalo could reply, the king led him to a cool spot and shared a gourd of beer. Then, taking Nxumalo’s two hands in his, he said, ‘My brothers are plotting against me.’

  ‘Not likely.’

  ‘Oh, but they are. I dreamed I was dead. It’s Dingane. I see him whispering. Mark my words, he’s not a trustful man.’

  ‘He’s of royal blood. He’s your brother.’

  ‘But can I trust him?’ And without awaiting a reply, Shaka sighed. ‘I am cursed. I have no son. No one to trust. I’m growing old, and still the magic oil fails to arrive.’

  Nxumalo could feel no sympathy for this slayer of women, and a response too dangerous to utter leaped to his mind: Shaka, you could have had a score of sons. Nine years ago, if you had accepted Thetiwe instead of throwing her at me, you could have had six sons.

  Again Shaka gripped Nxumalo’s hands. ‘You’re the one honest man in this nation. Promise me you’ll watch over me.’

  With a lingering pity Nxumalo looked at the stricken man, this violent giant whose leadership had been corrupted by madness, and as he tried to formulate words that would allow him to depart, the king cried with deep remorse, ‘Oh, Nxumalo, it was wrong of me to kill your wives. Forgive me, old friend. I killed them all, and learned nothing.’

  ‘You are forgiven,’ Nxumalo said grimly, and with a deep bow he left the royal kraal, marched, ostensibly, back to his own, then slipped away to join the Wild Cat, who was instructing her nephews for the kill. ‘Shaka knows your intentions!’ he cried. ‘He will kill you soon.’

  Dingane, although of royal blood, was no Shaka. He lacked courage, and, as the king had said, he could not be trusted. ‘What shall we do?’

  ‘Slay him now.’

  ‘Now?’ Dingane asked, looking at his brother.

  ‘Now,’ Nxumalo repeated.

  They would strike at dusk—all three of them—when the king was more or less detached from his knobkerrie guards. ‘I’ll fetch my assegai,’ Nxumalo said, and as he went toward his kraal he realized that Dingane had modified the plan so that only he, Nxumalo, would be seen by anyone watching. This meant that when the tumult erupted, he as a commoner could be thrown to the maddened crowd. ‘We’ll have none of that, Dingane,’ he muttered, and he diverted his course to the wives’ kraal, where Thandi was waiting for his signal, and he told her that within the hour she must try to escape, prepared to flee north.

  He then went back and told his remaining wife, ‘Be ready to leave at dusk.’ She did not ask why or where, for, like the others, she had deduced that he was soon to be impaled. His survival was hers, and to be saved she must trust him.

  As the sun started its descent on 22 September 1828, the three untrusting conspirators met casually, checked one another to be sure the stabbing assegais were ready, then walked like supplicants with a petition for their king and brother.

  ‘Mhlangana, what do you seek?’

  The answer, a lunging assegai under the heart.

  ‘Dingane! From you I expected treachery …’

  Another leaping assegai.

  And then Nxumalo, trusted advisor, driving his assegai deep into Shaka’s side.

  ‘Mother! Mother!’ the great king cried. Clutching at air, he tried to steady himself, went dizzy, and stumbled to his knees. ‘Nandi!’ he wept. ‘My father’s children have come to kill me.’ But when he saw the blood come spouting from his wounds he lost all strength and toppled forward, crying, ‘Mother!’ for love of whom he had erected a mighty kingdom.

  In the mad confusion following the assassination, Nxumalo, accompanied by one wife, the gift of Shaka, and the lovely Thandi, scrambled across the Umfolozi River and headed northwest. They hoped to overtake their friend Mzilikazi, rumored to be building a new sanctuary there for his fugitive Matabele.

  With them they had four children, two by Thetiwe, the first wife, and two by number two, who had died because she owned a cat. They had with them a small herd of cattle, some cooking utensils, and not much else. Four other fugitives joined them, and this complement of eleven were prepared to live or die as accidents and hard work determined.

  By the end of the first week they had become a resolute band, skilled in improvising the weapons and tools needed for the endless journeys ahead. They traveled slowly, stopping at likely refuges, and they foraged brilliantly. Thandi, the youngest, was especially good at thievery from kraals they passed, and kept the family in a reasonable supply of food.

  They ate everything, killing such animals as they could and gathering berries and roots like grubbing creatures in a forest. At the end of the first month they were a tight, dangerous group of travelers, and when one of the men caught himself a wife from a small village, they became twelve.

  Like thousands of homeless blacks in this period, they had but two ideas, to escape what they knew and to grasp at anything that would enable them to exist. Nxumalo hoped to overtake Mzilikazi and take service in some capacity with a king who promised in almost every respect to be superior to Shaka. ‘Not as handsome,’ he told his wives, ‘and not as brave in battle, but in everything else a notable king.’

  From time to time the little family stopped at some kraal, risking the dangers involved, and by so doing they discovered that Mzilikazi had moved far to the west, so they set out in serious pursuit.

  And then they learned the meaning of the word Mfecane—the crushing, the sad migrations, for they came upon an area, fifteen miles wide and stretching endlessly, in which every living thing had been destroyed. There were no kraals, no walls, no cattle, no animals, and certainly no human beings. Few armies in history had created such total desolation, and if Nxumalo and his family had not brought food with them, they would have perished.

  As it was, they began to see signs indicating that hundreds of people had been slain, their bodies left to rot; for mile after mile there would be strands of human bones. Nxumalo thought: Even the worst destruction wreaked by Shaka could not compare with such desolation. And he began to wonder what kind of all-consuming monster had wrought this ravishment.

  It was half a year before he found out. With an instinct for preservation, he led his family back to the east, and after a hurried march, went beyond the swath of total destruction; here in the wooded area where streams ran, only the kraals had been destroyed, not the land itself, and one afternoon they came upon the first surviving humans. They were a family of three living in trees, for they had no weapons to defend themselves against the numerous wild animals that prowled their vicinity at night. They were so wasted they could hardly speak, but they did utter one word that perplexed the travelers: ‘Mzilikazi.’

  ‘Who was pursuing him?’ Nxumalo asked.

  ‘No one. He was pursuing us.’

  ‘Mzilikazi?’

  ‘A monster. A life-eating monster.’

  ‘Feed them,’ Thandi said. ‘Don’t question them when they’re starving.’

  So Nxumalo’s men caught antelope for the wretched ones; they ate like beasts, the boy gulping the raw meat while he protected his portion by cove
ring it with arms and legs. When the family slowly returned to human condition Thandi allowed Nxumalo to query them again, and he said, ‘Surely Mzilikazi did not do this.’

  ‘He slaughtered everything—trees, dogs, lions, even water lilies.’

  ‘But why?’ Nxumalo asked, unable to comprehend what he was hearing.

  ‘He summoned our group of kraals … told us he wanted our cattle. We refused … and he started the killing.’

  ‘But why slay everyone?’

  ‘We didn’t want to join his army. When we ran away he didn’t even send his soldiers after us. They didn’t care. They had enough to do killing those at hand.’

  ‘But what was his purpose?’

  ‘No purpose. We weren’t useful to his moving army. In his rear we might cause trouble.’

  ‘Where was he marching?’

  ‘He didn’t know, his soldiers said—they were just marching.’

  After long consultation with the men in his group, and also with his wives, it was agreed that the family should be allowed to join them; the man could help with the hunting and the boy could prove useful later on, but when the enlarged group had been on the road three days, the new man died. Nxumalo assumed that one of his own men had killed him, for immediately the wife was taken into that man’s care, without much protest from her.

  When they had traveled as a unit for several weeks, they came upon the ultimate horror. They had been traversing mile after mile of total desolation—fifteen kraals without a sign of life, not even a guinea hen—when they came upon a small group of people living in a half-destroyed hut, and after a cursory inspection Thandi came to Nxumalo, trembling: ‘They have been eating one another.’

  The miserable clan was so desperate that they had resorted to cannibalism, and each wondered when the next would die, and at whose hand.

  For these people there was no hope. Nxumalo would have nothing to do with them—they were untouchable. And he was about to leave them to their misery when Thandi said, ‘We must stay and make them some weapons so they can kill animals. And our men must bring back some antelope to give them fair food.’

  So at her insistence the group halted, and the men did go hunting, and after a while the cannibals, fourteen of them, began to fill out from their eating of antelope, and with their spears they now had a chance of fending for themselves. But despite Thandi’s pleading, Nxumalo would not permit this group to join his, and when the family moved north the former cannibals stood at the edge of their desolate village, looking after them with strange expressions.

  After a long time the signs of destruction diminished, and then stopped. Mzilikazi’s armies had moved sharply westward, and for this Nxumalo was grateful, for it meant that he could now proceed northward without running the risk of overtaking the dreadful devastators or being caught in one of their chance sweeps to the rear. Of course, even this new land contained no people, for Mzilikazi had slain them all—hundreds upon hundreds—but there had been no general devastation, and the wild animals had returned.

  Finally, after more than a year of this wandering, with two additional children being born to Nxumalo’s wives and two to the other women, they came to a chain of low hills that looked much like the lovelier parts of Zululand, except that rivers did not flow through them. There were small streams, and Nxumalo began to think that beside one of them he might stop and build his kraal, and then one day as he came out of a valley he saw a pair of hills shaped like a woman’s breasts, and they seemd a symbol of all the joys of the past and his dreams for the future: the deep love he had borne Thetiwe, his first wife; the tenderness he felt for his second, killed because of her cat; the passion he had known with Nonsizi of the Matabele; and the delight found in his two surviving wives, who had accepted the hardships of this journey without complaint. His six children were prospering and the men who had joined him in the flight had made themselves indispensable. The family deserved a halting place; it was with hope that he ascended the pass between the two hills, and when he reached the high point he looked down upon a lake and saw beside it the marked grave of the Hottentot Dikkop, buried there sixty years before by that wanderer Adriaan van Doorn.

  ‘This has been the living place of men,’ Nxumalo said, and with joy he led his people down the hill to take possession.

  The Mfecane that raged through southeast Africa in the early decades of the nineteenth century produced excesses which went far in determining the development of an immense area.

  The rampaging of the two kings, Shaka of the Zulu and Mzilikazi of the Matabele, set in motion sweeping forces which caused the death within a short period of time of huge numbers of people; chronicles unfavorable to blacks estimate two million dead within a decade, but considering the probable population of the area in those years, this seems grotesquely high. Whatever the loss, and it must have been more than a million, it was irremediable and accounted in part for the relatively weak defenses the surviving blacks would put up within a few short years when white men, armed with guns, began invading their territory. Starvation, cannibalism and death followed the devastation of the armies, while roving bands of renegades made orderly life impossible. Entire clans, which had known peaceful and productive histories, were eliminated.

  The principal contributor to this desolation was not Shaka, whose victories tended to be military in the old sense, with understandable loss of life, but Mzilikazi, who invented the scorched-earth policy and applied it remorselessly. Why he slaughtered so incessantly cannot be explained. Nothing in his visible personality indicated that he would follow such a hideous course, and there seems to have been no military necessity for it. He killed, perhaps, because he sought to protect his small band, and the surest way to do so was to eliminate any potential opposition. Young men and male children became targets lest when they matured they seek revenge against the Matabele.

  The widespread slaughter did not seem to alter Mzilikazi personally. His manners did not become rough, nor did he raise his voice or display anger. The young English clergyman who came out to Golan Mission in 1829 to replace Hilary Saltwood stayed there briefly, then, like his predecessor, felt obligated to move into the more dangerous northern territories, where he became a permanent friend to Mzilikazi; of him he wrote admiringly after the Mfecane had run itself out:

  The king is a likable man of only medium height, fat and jolly, with a countenance so serene that it seems never to have known vigorous events or dangers. He speaks always in a low voice, is considerate of everyone, and has proved himself most eager to cooperate with white men. He told me himself that he wanted missionaries to come into his domain because he felt that at heart he had always been a Christian, even though as a boy he could have known nothing of our religion. Indeed, he gave me for our mission one of the finest pieces of land in his capital city and sent his own soldiers to help me build it. Detractors have tried to warn me that I must be on guard, because Mzilikazi’s soft ways hide a cruel heart, but I cannot believe this. He has known battle, certainly, but in it, so far as I can learn, has always conducted himself with propriety, and I consider him the finest man I have met in Africa, whether Englishman, Boer or Kaffir.

  It must not be supposed that Mzilikazi and Shaka were personally responsible for all the Mfecane deaths. In many instances they merely set in motion vast dislocations of people whose ultimate exterminations of minor tribes occurred at distances far from Zululand. If ever the domino theory of inter-tribe and inter-nation response to stimulus functioned, it was during the Mfecane. A few hundred Zulu started to expand in all directions, and when they moved south they disturbed the Qwabe, who themselves moved farther south to disrupt the Tembu, who moved on to dislocate the Tuli, who encroached upon the Pondo, who pressured the Fingo, who impinged upon the secure and long-established Xhosa. At that moment in history the land-hungry trekboers were beginning to encroach upon territory which the Xhosa had long used as pasture; and caught between two grinding stones, the Xhosa sought relief by attacking kraals like Tjaart
van Doorn’s, whose owners brought pressure on Cape Town, which caused questions to be asked in London. Similar chains of dominoes collapsed in other directions as tribes moving outward dispossessed their neighbors of ancestral lands.

  That Shaka slew hundreds with merciless ferocity is historical fact. That the Mfecane set in motion by Shaka and Mzilikazi caused the death of multitudes is also fact. But the behavior of these kings must be judged against the excesses which others, sometimes better educated and Christian, had perpetrated along the shores of the Indian Ocean. In 1502, when Vasco da Gama, the enshrined hero of Portugal, was angered by the officials of Calicut, he slaughtered a shipload of thirty-eight inoffensive Indian fishermen, dismembered their bodies, packed heads, arms and legs into a boat and sent it drifting ashore with the suggestion that the ruler ‘boil the lot into a curry hash.’

  The results of the Mfecane were by no means all negative. When it ended, vast areas which had formerly known only petty anarchy were organized. The superior culture of the Zulu replaced less-dynamic old traditions. Those who survived developed an enthusiasm they had not known before and a trust in their own capacities. In widely separated regions, deep loyalities were generated upon which important nation-states could be erected.

  For example, the Sotho, who were never attacked by Shaka, consolidated a mountain kingdom first known as Basutoland and then Lesotho. The Swazi anchored themselves in a defendable redoubt, where they built their nation of Swaziland. One tribe, under terrible pressure from both Shaka and Mzilikazi, fled north into Moçambique, and helped form the basis of a state that would attain its freedom in 1975.

  Even in that year the lasting effect of the Mfecane could not be determined, since the vast movement was still having its repercussions, but perhaps the principal result was the forging of the Zulu nation under Shaka, who took a small tribe with only three hundred real soldiers and about two hundred apprentices and within a decade expanded it with such demonic force that it conquered a significant part of a continent. In area the Zulu kingdom magnified itself a thousand times; in population, two thousand; but in significance and moral power, more like a million.