A potted history of Transkei’s royalty

Afew days after Bhaca king Madzikane II Thandisizwe Diko was linked to irregular procurement of Covid-19 personal protective equipment (PPE) by the Gauteng provincial government, a friend sent me a text asking how many kings there are in the former Transkei homeland.

As a Xhosa-speaking South African, I am used to this question from friends and acquaintances, who are confused about the number of kingdoms and chiefdoms in the area. Before I gave my friend a long historical answer, I first dealt with the Diko kingship, though as far as I was aware the Bhaca were historically a chiefdom, not a kingdom.

That Diko, husband of presidential spokesperson Khusela Diko, was not a king

but a chief was later confirmed by the Eastern Cape department of co-operative governance & traditional affairs and some members of the Bhaca royal family, who issued a statement saying the tribe had not had a king since the death of King Ncapayi in 1846.

When my parents relocated from Cape Town to the former Transkei in 1978, the region had four recognised kingdoms and a number of chiefdoms, such as the Bomvana, Bhaca, Mpondomise and Hlubi. The four kingdoms were the Xhosa, Thembu, Mpondo Qawukeni (eastern Mpondos), and Mpondo Nyandeni (western Mpondos).

There was also a group of people known as Mbo, an immigrant tribe that fled KwaZulu-Natal during the Mfecane wars between 1815 and 1840 and settled among the Xhosa, Thembu and Mpondo. The Mbo who settled among the Xhosa in 1818 in Gcuwa (Butterworth) to seek protection from King Hintsa ended up assuming the identity of the Mfengu.

Like the Mfengu, the Hlubi and Bhaca are immigrant tribes from KwaZulu-Natal, which also crossed the Mtamvuna River to settle in the former Transkei, the present-day eastern part of the Eastern Cape. Over time, through intermarrying and mingling, all the tribes in the former Transkei ended up speaking Xhosa, which is today spoken by about 8.2-million people in SA.

During the period that my parents settled in Transkei, the area was ruled by eastern Mpondo king Botha Sigcau, who was the homeland’s first prime minister. He was rumoured to have written the constitution of Transkei with his deputy, Kaiser Daliwonga Matanzima, an attorney and Thembu chief.

When Sigcau died in 1979 he was succeeded by Matanzima as leader of Transkei. Though a chief, Matanzima was promoted to paramount chief of the western Thembus by the apartheid government. Matanzima would later have a fallout with Thembu King Sabata Dalindyebo, resulting in the monarch fleeing to Zambia in 1980, where he joined the ANC.

The royal houses of the Thembus and Mpondos dominated politics in Transkei and rulers of the homeland came exclusively from these families. Matanzima’s younger brother, George, and Sigcau’s daughter, Stella, occupied senior positions in government.

This remained the case until 1987, when the government was toppled in a bloodless coup by Transkei Defence Force general Bantu Holomisa, the son of a Bomvana chief. Holomisa held power until Transkei was reunified with SA after the 1994 democratic elections.

That Mthatha, capital of the Thembus, was chosen as the capital of Transkei illustrated their immense political influence and dominance in the homeland. The once-powerful Xhosa, led by King Xolilizwe Sigcawu, had a politically weak and marginalised royal house. After the Xhosa were crushed by the British in the ninth frontier war in 1878, their royal house was uprooted from Butterworth and forced to retreat to Gatyana (Willowvale).

In terms of influence, the Xhosa were also upstaged by the Mfengu, who controlled Butterworth, which developed into an industrial town, thanks to the apartheid industrial decentralisation policy and investment from countries such as Taiwan, Germany and Italy.

Unconfirmed folklore has it that Butterworth was chosen as the industrial hub of Transkei because it was occupied by the Mfengu, who had a reputation for being adept in business and commerce. The Mfengu were mostly educated Wesleyan Christians (Methodist Church), who had no king or recognised tribal chief of their own. Their Western orientation and education enabled them to form the backbone of Transkei’s civil service, along with educated Thembus and Mpondos.

So you had a political and economic set-up where the Thembus and Mpondos ran the homeland from Mthatha and Mfengu business people ran the show in Butterworth.

The Thembus and Mfengu rose to prominence because they were the allies of the British during the 1878 frontier war, in which the Xhosa were defeated in skirmishes in Centane and Butterworth.

The Mfengu and Thembus had another thing in common: children from prominent families were sent to Healdtown missionary school near Fort Beaufort and Fort Hare University in Alice. These towns were also dominated by the Mfengu, who had relocated to the area from Butterworth from about 1835.

The Xhosas’ participation in Transkei’s economic and political affairs was hampered by the fact that they tended to be less educated. This was at least in part because they had blocked Wesleyan missionaries from providing education in their villages during the British colonisation of the Eastern Cape in the 1800s.

It is therefore not surprising that when SA transitioned from apartheid to democracy, prominent families from the better educated Thembus and Mfengu were ideally positioned to form part of the country’s political elite.

That is why SA’s first black president was Nelson Mandela, a lawyer and Thembu chief, who was followed by Thabo Mbeki, an educated Mfengu economist.

OVER TIME THROUGH INTERMARRYING AND MINGLING, ALL THE TRIBES IN THE FORMER TRANSKEI ENDED UP SPEAKING XHOSA