Bongani Madondo
What exactly is a Zulu?
But who are my people? — Nat Nakasa
You Hide That You Hate Me and I Hide That I Know.
— Philip Gourevitch, Penguin Random House
I
I WATCHED in horror with a North American friend — a filmmaker with a portfolio of apocalyptic films under his arm — as parts of KwaZulu-Natal and then the rest of SA went up in smoke. Almost.
The cost of that “winter revolution”? A measly R50bn, some say. And images of infants thrown from burning apartment blocks. No country since the invention of camera technology has matched SA for documentary grief and tragic theatricality.
Click!
A premier is beating the bejesus out of a “looter” on air.
Mshayazafe! Some sing songs of despair.
Click!
A bunch of Indian vigilantes are shooting at Zulus, or “defending our communities”.
Click!
Scores of Zulu “impis” are marching in the darkness on the edges of town. Shadows move menacingly on highways, eyes red with want, lust and hate, we are told, on a mission to ransack and set malls and residential buildings on fire.
Ah, but that photo faded to black.
This, too, is my story.
Our story.
We are all implicated in this.
My past — and, I’m afraid, my children’s future narrative — is stitched deep in the seams of that land.
Home. Our land.
MY FAMILY’S umbilical cord is buried in the depths of the earth of that geo-cultural idea called KwaZulu, on the Zulu Kingdom side, not the Colony of Natal.
To this day, seeds of the family are sprinkled onto that land.
Unknown cousins and nieces, grandmothers and fathers twice removed, uncles we will never meet — unknown to us, the expat wing of the family, at least — are all over that province: Msinga, Glencoe, Nkandla .
My mother, Nomvula, was raised by the Mnyandus and attended a prestigious school in Inanda, was it Ohlange?
One of our great-grandfathers is exulted in family lore as “one of the founders” of the original Black Mambazo.
Wild as the connection might be, it was always a matter of pride when family members made mention of the legendary bones man Nobhiyana. It was he who famously gave King Shaka the heave-ho when the monarch rounded up the nation’s traditional healers, aiming to expose their chicanery.
Our imagined or fictional affinity to him affirmed our claim to the “idea” of Zuluness.
II
BACK IN Hammanskraal, north of Pretoria, we grew up with framed portraits of all the Zulu kings on our family walls, and charcoal-on-paper lithographs of historical battles.
We ran our fingers through the imaginary mohair blanket of Zuluness, as if to feel its soft, fur-thery pleasures. We clasped tight to our chests dreams of Zuluness we knew nothing about but heard all the time rolling off family elders’ tongues, in the way that pious Catholics grip rosaries in moments of doubt.
We romanticised it. Fetishised it. And ultimately yearned for the fetish. Like loving backwards.
We spent most of our social time revolving around, and wrestling with, Zuluness: the idea. Running towards and running away from.
We detested its existential stranglehold over us, the intangible thing around our necks. There was, and still exists, an uneasy bond between the family and the metafictions of Zuluness.
In big cities, strangers who had just been informed of our family name would shower us with tall stories of their friendship with Alexandra jazz man Scorpion Madondo. But the only Madondo we knew in Alexandra was mkhulu Johannes.
How could we forget him?
He was decked out in straight-cut velvet suits and bank-breaking brogues. He called Kwa-Madala Hostel home, and always spent his annual leave in KwaZulu.
And every time they detected the colour of distance in our eyes, the same eager strangers would somersault and grow rapturous in song and praise, saying that we, unlike so and so, were “the true redearth Zulus”.
We never paused to ponder: is our ancestral earth truly red? Are we truly what Noni Jabavu, in relation to her Cape Colony people, called the “Ochre
People”? If so, how did the earth inherit all that red? Was it from the blood spilt in those wars depicted in kitsch battlefield sketches on our family walls, growing up?
Arriving in Johannesburg in the early 1990s, the first thing I wanted to be was a bona fide Zulu. To achieve that I found myself chasing a girl all the way to her Natal University dormitory, where I learnt to memorise streets names in the university town.
In those days no other city in the country — at least that I had been in — had vernacular street names. Umbilo Road, Isipingo, Umgeni, “u” this, “i” that. Lilting.
I delighted in the musicality of the language, marvelled at the “true Africanity” of the space. Got sucked into the joy of what a truly Asiatic/IndoAfrican cultural and spiritual bond portended: the “Union”, were it to be allowed its flourish, knots and all. It all felt like my own private fairy tale. My Alec in Zululand.
For once, I forgot about 1949.
I waved off, or attempted to, the story of the “scoundrel” — maybe he’d be labelled a “looter” today; maybe this writer would be fulminating from the high perch of his Twitter account: “Arrest the criminal!” — George Madondo.
Ol’ George was accused of stealing from an Indian shopkeeper, a stone’s throw from the Juma Masjid mosque on Grey Street, Durban. Cornered, Madondo threw a series of punches, putting the shop’s assistants on their backs, before tumbling out onto the pavement, entangled in a bear hug with the shopkeeper.
And, on that sweltering January 13 1949, lighting up a calamity his pea-brain couldn’t possibly have foretold: the 1949 riots.
The Zulu-Indian riots spread from the bowels of the city to as far away as Cato Manor, where Zulus and Indians lived alongside one another, if admittedly with lingering rancour caused by the higher rentals Zulus felt Indians were extorting from them. When they ended, the riots had claimed 187 lives, with thousands injured on both sides, the majority of them Africans.
But by the mid-1990s, my spirits had been soothed by an Indo-Zulu Peace Summit initiated by that prophet in a sari Fatima Meer, among others. Of course, the “olive bridge” was inadequate. Nothing is ever adequate in South Africa. But it was all the city could muster, then. The “convergence” between the two, at least at a conversational level, was rendered profound by its inadequacy.
III
TWENTY-FIVE years later, I’ve “developed” out of all that which psychically rendered me unfulfilled, or as unqualified to be Zulu.
Back in my expatriate village the family still performed ukuphahla traditional ceremonies in our improvised isiZulu.
Growing up in the urban mélange of Hammanskraal — where Sotho speakers and young Venda boys and girls freely brushed up against Shangaan neighbours and “Bushies”, and we were all undesirable matebeles in Mangope’s heaven of Bophuthatswana — everyone without exception wanted to be Zulu.
The attraction was, and still is, inexplicable. It rippled beyond the fact of isiZulu being the lingua franca of just about all major cities in the republic.
On the path to subjective Black identity — and I am speaking of the decades formative to my growth, the 1970s and ’80s — irony stalked us ceaselessly, because contemporary Zuluness, untethered to geography, was as associated with backwardness as it was with sophistication.
It was the raging fire that scorched your pants’ knees in winter, but which you could not live without. Such is the grand metaphor upon which dominant perceptions of Zulu identity are hardwired. Growing up, I derived pride from carrying a Zulu name, and concealed that pride.
I was not alone. Zuluness, as an aspiration, target and bloated field of study, has never been a lonesome project. From the 17th century on, the “image” of the Zulu has fascinated and frightened the colonial imagination. The British fascination with Zulus was all but cast in stone after that surprise party in Rorke’s Drift in 1879, when a breakaway column of Zulus attacked the Brits mercilessly.
The mythology afflicted other “natives”, who had been fed tall tales of Zulu cannibalism from Shaka’s time onwards. Beneath the conceit are tales of Zulus as half-human and/or colonial subalterns in service of the white superior.
The myth lives on in the form of u-Mantshingilane, the Zulu night watchman who is feared and loathed, especially by his fellow blacks.
The blinding, and binding, myth of Zulu power and unassailable pride had, by the end of the 19th century, and certainly in the mid-20th, morphed into a byword for African authenticity, eclipsing the Yoruba, or Mandinka, as the prototypical “negro”.
History is littered with stories in which Zulus are reduced to circus fare, or exhibition freaks: Zulus on display, Farini’s “Friendly Zulus” — portraits of young men and women photographed in “native” dress.
Ostensibly, the issue of authenticity evokes questions of “purity” and its cultural signifiers. It has never been a one-way affair in which Africans are always shaped by the gaze of the others.
Identity authenticity is perhaps a figment of imagination that the project of community-making cannot succeed without, and is by definition a contested affair.
For example there are now, as there have always been, groups within geopolitical Zuluness that exult at being “pure”, therefore “true”, Zulus.
IV
IT IS a fiction — and one that even some Zulus have bought into — that Zulus are inherently violent. The violent rapture of a fortnight ago, which could have happened anywhere (but did not, and perhaps will not at that scale) evoked the so-called Limpopo “heart of darkness”.
In 2016 Vuwani district in Limpopo exploded into violent protests that promised to go on forever.
Schools and private property were set on fire. It may be helpful, in the process of dealing with the political trauma of the winter of 2021, to note that the residents of Vuwani were not protesting for the release of a geriatric populist leader.
At the heart of their social breakdown was decades-old tribalism between Venda-speaking communities and their neighbouring Tsonga and Pedi neighbours.
Tribalism is rampant in the country, however hard we try to avert our eyes from it. Could it be that a critical feature of the recent riots was actually “ethnic mobilisation”, as President Cyril Ramaphosa charged, perhaps in frustration, inertia or political paranoia — before he was instantly forced to withdraw it?
Political analysts Moeletsi Mbeki and Sam Mkokeli have argued that it is reckless to blame the “Winter of Social Collapse” on Zulu tribalism, or associate Jacob Zuma with Zulu ethnic mobilisation. Of course I disagree, but only to an extent.
Zuma may well have mobilised latent frustration into what can be only called “insurrection” — which he then stoked — on the basis of Zulu pride or resistance.
Zuma’s siege mentality — from which he has derived and constructed an impressive underdog/outlaw hero heft, with “Man of the People” cachet — has always been dramatised on the basis that he, and people like him, “common men”, uncertificated, inarticulate, in the colonial English lens, “bumbling fools”, are denied a voice, and a platform, by the elite.
For the past decade Zulu nationalism had refashioned itself into an apolitical cultural sentiment built around the persona of King Zwelithini ka Dinizulu. But that was as toothless as it was potentially politically lucrative.
It was toothless because Zwelithini, like all traditional leaders, was essentially a state employee. But it is lucrative because of what a manipulative mastermind can utilise it for.
Moreover Zuma, a president who created a state within a state, a hydra beast with a parallel intelligence service at its head, understood long ago what traditionalists of all stripes do: that paternalism breeds infantilism.
It is disingenuous to scoff at a “Zulu mobilisation project”, though I understand why no-one wants to talk about “ethnic mobilisation”. It is part and parcel of the ANC’s denialism and self-delusion, crafted, understandably, to prevent the very ugly ghost of tribalism from rearing its head.
It is also part of the ANC’s obfuscation politics, which found fertile ground in an African society that thrives on metaphor and poking fun at hardship and the enemy by speaking in tongues, foregrounding the opposite to illustrate that which they are hurt by.
This is the politics not so much of erasure as of subversion. However, using it to speak no evil, and averting our gaze, won’t wish it away.
Tribal chauvinism and ethnic nationalism are a fact of our being. We live not in opposition to, but definitely with the tribalism, and/or ethnic problem my ancestors inherited from the Nats’ policies of divide and rule. That problem was federated into a nightmare by the ANC-led Government of National Unity in 1994.
It is as much the loose rope mapped around our necks as it is the ANC’s inherited poison gift to us. It is in how we speak about them, not denying them, that we will begin to understand ourselves anew.
We will never know lasting peace until KwaZuluNatal arrives at a spiritual and historical peace.
Often — and this became manifest with the uprisings last week— I dream about a different personal act, one at odds with my childhood cultural longing, my romance. I dream of walking away from it all.
And as I do, Chief Albert Luthuli’s liturgical words pursue me with a vengeance. But I cannot run anymore. And I am the wrong target. Those words should rather be haunting Jacob Zuma: let my people go.
We will never know lasting peace until KwaZulu-Natal arrives at a spiritual and historical peace