Broken River Tent

by Mphuthumi Ntabeni

  Something forceful moved through Phila, burning like coal on his lips. He fought the flicker of panic when he sensed this might be the last time he spoke as a free man, or even alive, in front of an audience. When he spoke his voice was not his own.

  “Let it never be said,” he began, pausing as the packed courtroom gasped audibly. “Let it never be said that words were extinguished in my mouth when the need arose.” Some people slapped their hands over their mouths in disbelief. They never expected a kaffir to address a white man’s court of law with such familiarity, let alone with anger in his voice and fire in his eyes.

  “I, sir, will try to invite you into the assembly under my skull, even if it costs me my life.

  “I have cherished the idea of a free society, of universal justice, fighting against both white and black domination. All my life I’ve been against the notion of power serving only the needs of the strong, and condemning the weak and the poor.

  “I’ve lived my life hard as an axe and kind as the rain. There’s nothing I will be sorry to leave behind here when I depart. You fertilise your language with hypocrisy and call it civilisation. I’ve often found many savages under the cloth of your civilisation. You tell me that we were free to choose, yet we’re not allowed to choose against the choices your government makes for us. Let your words be your judge.

  “The only freedom we ever had, since the white man came to our land, was that of submission, perdition or resistance. I chose resistance! I chose to face the fire of your cannons knowing very well it would bring me to perdition or complete freedom.

  “I grew up before the pestilence of white people coming to our land. Then our land was out-gloried only by the stars. There was an implausibility of wildebeest and a dazzle of zebras everywhere. Hardly fifty full cycles since you came all these have disappeared from our land. And you insist yours are civilised ways, though you are not able to coexist with anything, not with animals or people who don’t look like you, without wishing to exterminate them.

  “My memory might be slightly dimmed by time; it is now old as the hills. But, though memory decays, I remember in my youth roaming freely on our land without fear of white people’s papers, guns and cannons. That is etched on my mind and will not be extinguished until I gain it again. It seems now it has brought me to my early grave.

  “Strange you should call stony non-arable land ‘protectorates’. I’ll never accept your protection even if it bought me five lives in your robe-wearing, sheep-eating days. You may think in your mind that this will end here, with my silence and permanent exile, but it shall not.

  “The spirit of the Xhosa people is indomitable, incorrigible and independent. It will rise again, perhaps not in my lifetime, which you’re determined to shorten, but, like a flooding river on its way to the sea, it will rise. The Xhosa people can never be bondsmen forever. It is against their nature. We’re more than proud people. We’re the native spirit of this land. Without us this land loses its soul, and with us in bondage the land is in shackles.

  “Do what your pink mind prefers with me, but know you shall never silence me. The spirit of Phalo, passing through these veins, will be reborn in every black man’s heart. Will you close the wombs of our women? Unless you can manage that you’re fighting a losing battle. I shall rise again, this time more powerful and multitudinous, because I shall live in each and every black person you murder by your unjust laws; every black person that inhabits this land. And then this land will erupt. The plots you cut by cunning among yourselves shall go back to the rightful owners of the land. The houses you build shall be the inheritance of the children of this land. Our bones you whiten shall fertilise the roe that will rise against your injustices.”

  There was a move from the side of the courtroom, soldiers lining up. Phila stopped them with a look of daggers.

  “You have poisoned our atmosphere with the spirit of greed and harsh opportunism – what you call enterprise. But this is not the last you will hear from the house of Phalo. Isolate or kill me all you want, but it shall be significant when I’m laid underground …”

  The redcoats came to shackle them and take them back to prison before he could finish.

  Pitchforked from sleep by the announcement from the guide of their arrival on Robben Island, Phila felt nauseous and disorientated. As he stepped onto the dock he found that he was trembling.

  The wind had lost its teeth. A hushed holding-in of things enveloped the island.

  Tourists moved ahead eagerly and gathered around the guide who was narrating a bowdlerised historical version of the island. It filled him with a desire to let out a scream, in Baldwinian manner. Phila held back from the tourist crowd, adjusting the weight of history on his back. Then he lost them to go beyond the quarries where he had learnt the native chiefs’ graves were situated. He found he was still not alone. Generations of freedom fighters marched through the dreaming fields of his mind as he walked the quarry fields of the island, where the likes of Mandela had toiled during their prison stay. A whisper came to his ear as he changed his saunter into a canter:

  I, Maqoma, the cacodemon. I, Makhanda, the numinous. I, Moturu, the patient crocodile. I, Harry the Strandloper. I, Malagasy, the slippery leopard; I, Autshumato, the glue of the San; I, Langalibalele, the thick-skinned rhino; I, Mandela, Sisulu, Sobukwe. I, Phila Sobanzi.

  Endnote

  MAQOMA WAS ARRESTED IN 1857 and taken to prison in Grahamstown with his wife and a toddler son. He was charged with inciting the murder of a minor chief, Fusani, who was accused of being a colonial spy. The trial was by court-martial in Fort Hare. Maqoma was, naturally, found guilty of counselling and advising the ‘eating up’ of Fusani. This was contrived into a capital offence, and so death was the sentence. Governor George Grey commuted the sentence to twenty years of hard labour on Robben Island. Maqoma was subsequently relieved of hard labour in consideration of his age – he was over sixty. The rest of the Xhosa chiefs followed him to Robben Island in a similar fashion. The idea was to break the Xhosa tribal system.

  On 19 December 1857 Maqoma was put on board a ship at Port Elizabeth to be transported to Cape Town. His wife and toddler son were with him, as were two other Tembu chiefs who had been found guilty of supposedly robbing white farms. Huge crowds of white people and newspaper reporters congregated on the docks in PE to watch the famous Maqoma, the “cacodemon”, being taken to jail. He kept quiet and paid no attention to the commotion, unlike the other chiefs who were still protesting their innocence. One reporter commented that, “His dark eyes hadn’t lost their frightening deep stare.” Wearing chains “heavy enough for a ship’s cable”, eating apricots and smoking his pipe, Maqoma leaned over the side of the steamer. He sat calmly, indifferent to it all, in tune with the insouciance of the hills and the lassitude of the sea. It would seem most of what was happening to his life then inhabited only the fringes of his soul. His real life was no longer there, even though his physical body was still shackled. The journalists interpreted this as a sign of madness and contempt for the rules of common sense. They said he had a madman’s stare. It could just as easily have been interpreted as the mystical stare of the religious.

  Maqoma was released from Robben Island in 1869. He went back to the Eastern Cape and quietly settled on his beloved land at the foot of the Waterkloof mountains, in the valleys belted by the Kat River. He joined his son Tini, who owned land and farmed with grains in the area, his production even surpassing that of the white farmers. Tini was educated by Anglican missionaries at Zonnebloem College in Cape Town. He was never allowed to visit his father on Robben Island.

  In 1871 a detachment of the Cape Mounted Rifles, Maqoma’s sworn enemies, surrounded the farm, evicted Maqoma and his family and accompanied him to King Williams Town, where he was “to stand trial for his crimes”. When no trial was forthcoming, he returned to establish himself and his family in the Waterkloof area. On 27 November 1871, he was again rounded up by soldiers for “trespassing’” and imprisoned in Ngqengqe
(Fort Beaufort). Without any specific charge or trial, the magistrate there simply ordered him to be incarcerated on Robben Island. Along with a few chiefs and brigands for human company, he was deposited among the ruins of the huts he and the others had occupied the first time they were held on the island. There was no longer the opportunity to pursue the subsistence farming they had before.

  He subsequently died on 7 September 1873 and was buried without any ceremony in an unmarked grave, in the same way as many of the others incarcerated on Robben Island. There’s no way of telling for sure if the bones that were exhumed and reburied on Ntaba kaNdoda were his.

  Perhaps it doesn’t matter in the bigger scheme of things, except that Xhosas are particular about the remains of their kings and loved ones. Hence that wound on top of King Hintsa’s severed head still festers in the Xhosa national psyche. By their own doing, the face of Maqoma hounded the British for more than the hundred years they were at war with the Xhosas.

  Those who visited Maqoma in his final years overwhelmingly recount how he had fallen silent, refusing to speak with anyone and hardly eating anything. This book is intended to lend him a voice again, before we all meet in the greater silence.

  Acknowledgements

  I OFFER MY GRATITUDE TO THE AFRICAN continent, her land, her resilient people, the rivers and the sea, whose reverberations brings us news from the ancient of times.

  None can write about the frontier history in South Africa without coming across Noel Mostert’s seminal work Frontiers: The Epic of South Africa’s Creation and the Tragedy of the Xhosa People. Scholars like Jeff Peires and Jeff Opland are indispensable pathfinders on the written history of amaXhosa. But the book that first sparked my interest was Maqoma: The Legend of a Great Xhosa Warrior by Timothy J Stapleton – I’m glad it has been reissued by Amava Books.

  The numerous journals of missionaries and soldiers of the time greatly assisted me, especially with nuances of the era. S.E.K. Mqhayi, both his literary and journalistic writings, was a companion who helped me with the tone of Xhosa oral history and storytelling. He is my companion still. I have also spent many fireside chats with numerous Xhosa elders in the Eastern Cape, especially where Jong’Umsobomvu lived.

  I cannot name all of the people by name here, but all their words, somehow, form the bloodstream of this book. In two lifetimes I can never repay the debt I owe to all of them. I hope, in us, the spirit of our ancestors raises the horn of Africa.

  I would like to thank also my family who bore the brunt of my neglect while I was obsessing over this book; my wife, Helen, in particular for covering for my failures in raising our kids. I hope one day we will all find it worth the sacrifice and effort.