Broken River Tent

by Mphuthumi Ntabeni

  “Are you coming, Ndlovu?” called Zwelinzima when he noticed Phila wasn’t following. He was about to enter the house.

  “I’ll finish my smoke and be with you now-now.” Phila perched on the stone kraal and trained his eyes on the mountain clouds he couldn’t get enough of.

  Maqoma’s tone was indignant. ‘Even war has rules, which the honourable never betray. Before then I had regarded the British with honour. No more after that. Where they are most dangerous is in giving a semblance of legality to their fraud. Hence you could sleep in your house and the following morning they would bring a magistrate’s paper saying that the land beneath your house had been given to the British colony – against your wishes. All of a sudden you are the illegal one, invading your own land!

  ‘Anyway, as I was saying. I instructed my men to move on cat feet. Our forces were like ghosts. We would attack and then vanish into thin air. The forests and mountains concealed us well. Our men climbed trees like monkeys, the enemy passing right under our noses without seeing us. Others of my men buried themselves for days in holes in the ground, not moving even when ants started gouging their eye sockets. When they ran their knees touched their chins – not even cheetahs could catch them. It was easy for us to go without food for days, something the colonial forces could not manage. They were at our mercy on these mountain fastnesses.

  ‘Somerset and Fordyce undertook two-pronged sporadic assaults without any progress against us. Morale is the major part of winning a war. Your first battle is won in frustrating and discouraging the morale of your enemy. And nothing works to instil fear in a soldier like not knowing from where the enemy is coming, or when. Sowing fear and confusion is your first weapon against an enemy.

  ‘I remember the day like it was yesterday. Fordyce’s party came from the direction of the Kroomie plains. His party, made up of about one thousand men, was a mixture of KhoiKhoi, Mfengu, Highlanders, mounted burghers and artillery crewmen. Somerset’s party, made up of a similar number, had a lesser mixture of men and an alarming addition of three field guns. He came from the east, where Fuller’s Hoek is. I secured most of the Kat River rebels at the forest plains for surprise attacks. Another force, mostly amaNgqika, remained on the Waterkloof. This force was composed of a few of my trusted fire-armed warriors, no more than eight hundred, so as to facilitate swift attack and speedy retreat without suffering huge casualties. Other chiefs went to the Amathole region to start another war with the colonial government.

  ‘We deliberately stayed off the seat of their government in Rhini, wishing to first finish with forts and farms before closing, in unison, the circle to Rhini. I had learnt my lesson well from Nxele.

  ‘At Waterkloof, before you reach the summit, we had the natural fortress of the kloofs. Concealed everywhere, even on open nek areas, the colonial forces discovered too late masses of our armed men. When Somerset and Fordyce came it was in the wee hours of the morning. Fordyce’s column began its arduous climb near Hermanus Hill into Woodcutter’s Path. Encumbered by their artillery and the ox-wagons of the commissariat on rugged, stony terrain, it became impossible for them to move except on foot and horseback. You should see how impassable this region becomes when it rains, especially if you want to move towards the fastness. When their train was in motion, it crawled. At the ascent points you could see the desperate whipping of their animals. At some stage they could not move any further as the road became impassable. The two parties by then were completely out of contact with each other. Fordyce had marched his men up to the root garden where the nek of the hill begins to turn. He deployed his guns halfway through the climax, passing our concealed warriors in the bush. They placed themselves halfway to the summit, having run themselves into a dead end like yourselves. Anyone who knows the area is aware that though the path is clear at the bottom it leads to an impasse. I had prepared a firing line against them from the plateau across.

  ‘I instructed our concealed warriors not to appear until we started firing our guns from the summit, when the brigade had positioned itself as an easy target on the impasse. We rained fire on the from behind rocks, screened by rocks and bushes. From their blind rear, my concealed warriors appeared, scattering their marching lines. The colonial forces dashed on towards the cliffs, sometimes firing at each other. Half the time their troops could not perceive where our fire came from. They were as exposed as a baboon’s behind. All the soldiers could see were puffs of white smoke below and above, to their left, and the only place they could run to led to murderous declivities. When we ran out of ammunition we dislodged rocks and boulders, which went tumbling down into their ranks like missiles.

  ‘By mid-morning the enemy committed the rest of the army, led by Fordyce, in trying to root us out of the ambush points of the forested kloofs. Their artillery advanced towards the nek, veering off to the right, not seeing us to their front because they were then moving along a hollow centre of our trap. Fordyce must have guessed the danger they were being swallowed into because he started running down onto the exposed nek, waving his hat and bellowing something. None could hear him above the din of musketry and cannon shot. In the commotion he was caught by a shot from one of our KhoiKhoi marksmen who was perched in a tree. We later learnt the bullet passed through his chest. Some of his men tried to retrieve him, raising his body away from the scorching heat. We doubled the rain of fire; musketry reverberated far around the deep kloofs in double force. Never had I seen so many men dying for a lost cause.

  ‘Eventually, they managed to carry Fordyce up the hill, where they placed him under a tree. Our men started charging in wild hurrahs along the mountain ridges and deep valleys when we noticed someone else had assumed command. We knew Fordyce must be dead, and thus the morale of their army down. I was extremely pleased with this, my first high ranking officer, although I would have preferred it be Harry, Governor of the Cape Colony at that time. But you would never find those voluble cowards in the thick of the battle; they knew how to preserve their skins.

  ‘When they began to call the squad of Fordyce to storm back it gave me an idea. I took forty of my men, whom I knew to be agile as ermines, to belt the enemy’s position. As a result, by the time the enemy tried to turn back across the open nek they were in our direct firing line again. We rained crossfire on them. Caught up in fire from all directions, even from the one they had come from, where my forty men and I were ensconced, they dispersed in disarray. Some even deliberately took their chances and tried to scale the cliffs rather than face our fire. We doubled over on the fallen ones who tried to regain their feet as they lay with mangled limbs on the blood-dyed grass, waving rifles with white handkerchiefs tied to them to signal surrender. As far as I was concerned, the rules of war no longer applied to the Brits.’

  Phila entered the house at the same time as the children were joining the adults at the court where food was served. Everything was communal: four dishes – red kernel cobs, wild spinach, pumpkin stiffened with mealie-meal and boiled wild boar leg. Zwelinzima started describing to Phila how he’d caught the boar three days before when his wife asked for a moment of silence for the young girl to say grace.

  “Unfortunately, it’s getting harder to get boars on the hunt these days, to say nothing of impala,” Zwelinzima continued after the prayer. “Most are kept on commercial farms, which in turn are only accessible to tourists because of the exorbitant prices for visiting these farms. Game farms have become the bane of our traditional living, although other people are grateful for them because, although not many, they provide jobs.”

  As the head of the house Zwelinzima invited the visitors to dig in first. The children were dished their portions of everything before they excused themselves and went to their hut. Phila, who sat on the ground hugging his knees, was amused to see Matswane sitting uneasily on the cow-dung-smeared floor, compared to the lady of the house who bunched her smock dress underneath her. With her black crepe doek she looked very dignified. They all ate in silence, Phila taking a portion of every
thing while Matswane dished herself only the vegetables.

  Zwelinzima took up their earlier conversation after the meal. “These things you ask after, Ndlovu, are a hard memory because they involve wars. And wars not only make exiles of people, they –”

  “Let’s take our cue, Nosuthu,” said Zwelinzima’s wife. “I know from experience that war talks are a polite way of chasing us out of the room. They can talk about it until the cows come home. But ask them about their own hearts, baba yinkukhu esikwe umlomo.” She gathered the dishes together as she spoke. “What’s on a man’s heart, even if you can live with him for three decades, you can never know for sure. One day he just disappears, saying he wants to ‘find himself’. Like our neighbour last year. Meantime women have no such privilege. They have to think about the children they brought into the world …”

  “Come, my sister, let’s go do dishes,” Matswane echoed. “Once you get this one of mine talking about Maqoma he goes on a spiel.” She turned to Phila and said, “Try not to drink too much. Remember we’ve an early start tomorrow.”

  “We grew up to these stories of valour, Ndlovu.” Zwelinzima relit his pipe. The smell of rum and maple tobacco filled the room in no time. “We know the grave enemies of Jong’Umsobomvu. This is the reason to this day dogs are named Somerset in our villages. That was the man Maqoma taught a lesson in these mountains. I can show you tomorrow where his unit expired trying to roar out a rescue for Fordyce’s men. These things are enhanced in the telling, but the wooded invisibility of the forest made for their graves. Many of the bones of British soldiers are strewn here, hence you find their relatives still coming here to find closure. We take them around. It becomes awkward sometimes, because both our forefathers killed each other in these hills, and now we, the seeds of their loins, stand in confused grief, not sure what exactly to say to one another. All we can do is direct them to grave plates, or lead them to the cliffs where most of those soldiers hauled themselves up, taking chances with the natural order of things rather than face a stabbing assegai.”

  The two men talked, drinking and smoking, into the night, with an intimate frankness of people who had known each other all their lives, like brothers. When he started feeling the rustle of too much alcohol, Phila excused himself to go to bed around two in the morning. He found Matswane already asleep in the hut they had been allocated as their sleeping quarters. The door bellowed on the hinges like a house that had not been opened in a while. Inside the hut had a musty-sour smell with the permanent coolness of a thatch roof. He could not properly see Matswane but guided by her soft snoring he made his way to the bed, where he joined her without taking off his clothes. He found that he could not fall asleep, the bed was jumping with fleas also, which made him wonder if the dogs used it sometimes.

  ‘After Fordyce fell,’ Maqoma spoke, ‘the war bent badly for the British and dissatisfaction spread among their soldiers. We drove them into a headlong retreat. Most fell from the edges of the precipices. Some tried to rescue others, resulting in their own deaths. I could see on the top of the hill that one of their grenadiers was deliberating coming in support of their comrades, but demurred in the end. It would have been suicide. We had pinned them in an impossible position on every side of the nek. By the time another of their column arrived to relieve them I had already ordered all my men to concentrate on Somerset’s column.

  ‘Under our fire Somerset retreated and his men abandoned their position. Late afternoon they turned back and retired to bivouac where their artillery was on the open Kroomie heights. In my estimation they had lost almost half of the men they’d climbed up with.’

  ‘They put the number at far fewer than that in their writing, eighteen, I think,’ said Phila.

  ‘Of course they would. Where have you ever seen them write honestly about their losses?’

  ‘Indeed. It would run counter to the narrative of a mighty British empire. Although some of their historians are beginning to be honest about these things now.’

  ‘They tried to resume their operations the following morning, but to no avail. We watched all their movements with extreme vigilance. At night we raided their camps, took their oxen and provisions. In less than three days they were a spent force, with nothing to eat. Other regiments came to make another attempt at regaining our stronghold, surrounding the kloofs, to their detriment. This time the bulk of fighting fell on the Mfengu division. This action was short. We cut them off one by one. Torrential rain favoured our tactics, making it easier for us to roll boulders down on them. They again retreated and spent soaking nights in the Kroomie camp. We observed that most of them were rapidly losing heart. They made fires to keep themselves warm, which made them sitting ducks. Someone must have warned them because when we returned the next night for target shooting against the fires, we were met by an enveloping cocoon of darkness in their camp. We managed to slay their night patrols but were not daring enough to attack the camp. We thought it wise to fight them under our natural fortresses.

  ‘Some of our men spent the night digging the buried bodies of our enemy, cutting their hearts out to steal their strength. I told them to leave the mutilated bodies outside the graves so as to dent the morale of the enemy. Morning brought no change to the wet weather. Even from afar we could see that the morale of the enemy had by then hit rock bottom. They gave up the struggle and made for Fort Beaufort. So ended another of their fruitless forays into Intab’Enzima.

  ‘For his part, I heard, Somerset blamed the dead Fordyce for attacking too early, before he could be assured of support at the point of convergence. He said there were hordes of kaffirs in that mountain. I laughed later when the news reached me. For one thing, Fordyce was the braver of the two; and we certainly didn’t have hordes of kaffir warriors on that mountain, as they falsely reported. As I said, at most we were just eight hundred plus. I subsequently left to organise our resistance in the fastness of the Amathole mountains. But when the Kat River rebels capitulated on their riots, the colonial forces were able to expunge our fastness at Intab’Enzima. Botha, the leader of Khoi rebels then, fled, but eventually came back to slit his own throat rather than fall prisoner to the barbarous British forces who were calling for his head. Most of us had moved on in any case. To me Intab’Enzima was about showing my strength to Smith. He never commanded anything where I was, not unless sitting on one’s arse in some office is being in command of war. I later learnt that it was in their nature to lay thick colours on things when they narrate. They immediately recalled him in humiliation back to their land after that battle. I went back to the mountain fastness when I heard the new Governor was brought, George Cathcart. Not because I wanted to continue with the war – we were also a spent force and needed to plough the fields before winter came – I just wanted to get better terms of peace and my land back. It was not to be. The new Governor was not just a man of cruel manners, but treacherous also. You could not rely on anything he said. He was gone within a year, but not before doing irreparable damage to our nation. The tragic consequences were ripened by the stupidity of the likes of Mlanjeni before being crowned in tragedy by a young girl by the name of Nongqawuse. But more about that later.

  ‘In fights with the colonial force the crucial lesson was to avoid open spaces, which favoured their firing power. It became our method of operation, whenever we attacked them, to lead our subjects to a densely forested mountain, and from there launch sporadic ambushes. We ambushed them in their churches, in their hooded wagons, in their ploughing fields; almost everywhere they were not expecting us. We learnt to move fast, in stealth, through dense forests like the black mamba. Our ears and eyes became honed, alert to the slightest foreign noise or movement in the forest. Their clothing encumbered them even when they dared to follow our paths in the forest, and their bodies did not do well when exposed for too long to the sun; and they easily smarted from the whips of thorn bushes. Their armour made them conspicuous. They glittered against early and evening sunrays, broadcasting their location to us. The
inaccessible mountains provided natural protection for us from their battery. Thick tree trunks hemmed them in and prevented them from making any kind of formation or being able to plot any formal course of battle. On many occasions they ended up raking their own patrols with fire. We were everywhere yet tenuous as the morning mist, disappearing immediately when it got hot. Dense bush provided excellent cover for us, allowing us to surprise them at close range, making our assegais more effective than their guns. They deserted almost all their military posts and farms and flocked together at their capital eRhini to organise their defence.

  ‘I noticed that whenever our fire rained, and our assegais made havoc in white army lines, most of them crawled wounded behind rock shelters and forgot their valour. They’d fall into great panic and flee in disorder, thinking of nothing except the shelter of the fort. When we pursued them, some rode their horses so hard that many of their poor beasts were killed by sheer exhaustion. Once you gave the red devils no room for tactics, and forced them to fight with sheer trial of personal strength, bravery and war skill, they broke and fled like fawns. Bravery was not their strongest virtue, that’s why they hid under artillery; but they were skilled at adopting cunning tactics like – what did you call it? the scorched earth policy – burning our planted fields.

  ‘They used Mfengu and KhoiKhoi regiments as cannon fodder, assigning the difficult task to them of acting as an advance guard to penetrate our strongholds. These regiments were supposed to make the first contact with us and lure us into open fields. This deliberately kept the white army out of the stress of the battlefield. The Mfengus were tractable because they were hungry wanderers fleeing Shaka’s Imfecane. We taunted the whites for this cowardice, and the Mfengu and KhoiKhoi for their foolishness. When the KhoiKhoi woke to what was going on, they became intransigent against colonial orders and subsequently spent their wartime hunting game, or remaining to shoot at their own colonial allies whenever the fire heated up. The KhoiKhoi gave us signs of where the redcoats were by volley fire. We paid them in kind whenever we caught some of them by sparing their lives.