Dr Sibongile Zungu in the Mark Gevisser profile
Something quite miraculous happens to Dr Sibongile Zungu, nkosi of the Madlebe tribe, when she dons her chiefly regalia: the rather frumpish, prematurely-matronlike woman, swaddled in a faux-kente caftan, transforms into the coquettish ntombi; flirtatious and swaggering in equal measure.
Previously, sitting inside her classically bourgeois living-room — pink leather upholstery, state-of-the-art music system — she had been grave and shy; the very model of a township medical doctor. Now, standing on a precipice overlooking her chiefdom — the sprawling rural hinterland south and west of Empangeni — she brandishes her beaded knobkerrie at the photographer when he asks her to move into the light: “This is my territory,” she laughs. “You’re not supposed to tell me what to do. I give the orders around here.”
We’re in Madonna-land; Camille Paglia territory. Dressing up clearly makes Sibongile Zungu feel fabulous. She takes the knobkerrie, a phallic symbol of male authority and belligerence if ever there was one, and plays with it, waving it about but also reappropriating it; twirling it, baton-like, and resting her cheek contemplatively against it.
It’s a transformation of far more than style, for Sibongile Zungu is a Reborn Zulu. Depending on which way you look at it, she is the perfect synthesis of tradition and modernity or a mass of irreconcilable contradictions that tells you, in a nutshell, why the current position of traditional leaders is untenable.
She grew up in the starched anti-traditionalist environs of the Inanda Mission: “My childhood was about going to church and emphatically not doing those old traditional things. That was considered to be ‘not civilised’. We were civilised Zulus, living a civilised life.” Her mother is a nurse, her father a teacher; her grandfather, a graduate of Lovedale, is most certainly turning in his grave at the fact that she is now an nkosi.
How she got there is an epic tragedy of Shakespearean — or Shakan — proportions. It begins with a medical student being asked, by her boyfriend, for an urgent wedding: “He told me he needed to marry me so he could take his position. That was the first I heard about him being a chief. So you see! Women do have power under customary law. He would not have been able to inherit without a woman at his side.”
She moved with him to his tribal lands, got a job in the local hospital, and bore him two daughters. Then, while she was pregnant with his heir, a son, they were involved in a horrific car-crash in 1989 which left them both seriously injured. She survived and lost her child; he died.
His in-laws took her in, and, in the traditional way, gave her to his half-brother to marry. She refused, and ran away from their home. “It’s a good system, the one of finding a husband for a widow. I am sure many rural women, who are not breadwinners, appreciate being looked after in that way,” she says. “But I was independent, I was a breadwinnner, and so I left their home to make a
Certain family members sided with her, and, with the approval of the KwaZulu authorities, it was decided to make her the first female nkosi in patrilinear Zulu history. The half-brother, born out of wedlock, took her to the supreme court, and lost. And so, in 1991, after a two-year-long legal battle, Sibongile Zungu became the traditional leader of 70 000 people.
There is, she acknowledges, something of a cultural schizophrenia in her life. She would have friends around, “women who would come in, wearing pants, and start playing the radio or take a CD. Then an old man would come in on his knees, cupping his hands. There’ll be wine and beer on the table, and my friends will be embarrassed and leave. Meanwhile the old ones would come and tell me that I’m misbehaving and that I need to be disciplined.”
If she had to have her life all over again, she would not have taken the position. But “after my husband’s death I couldn’t accept the loss, and still felt I needed something to prevent the loss. I was so committed to my husband, I thought I had to help him finish what he had started, as a way to help him live on.”
Perhaps the grieving widow, with two little girls, found solace in the ritual and enforced community that customary society provides. Now she stays because she believes in the work she does. And — in a twist of irony that undermines the very system of traditional leadership she now upholds – – she has been accepted, even though she is an outsider and a woman, simply because she gets the job done.
Zungu notes that the women particularly “originally felt they couldn’t take a word from another woman”, and the men were more concerned, at first, with the fact that she was single and a professional. But she has come to be seen as a “unifier” she says, and the fact that she is unmarried is now seen as a plus “because I devote my entire attention to the tribe.”
Alone in the trouble-torn region around Empangeni, she has managed to remain publicly non-partisan in a region with a strong African National Congress-supporting minority. Her car has been bombed, her house razed to the ground and she has had to send her two infant daughters away to boarding- school. But she has brokered peace in her chiefdom, between IFP and ANC factions.
She is also one of those development-minded amakosi: “If the traditional system is going to be maintained, it has to be adjusted. We no longer have a society with few things to worry about. People need houses, water, electricity. An nkosi has to be able to provide these. He must be progressive if rural areas are going to remain rural and enjoy being rural.” Her point is this: unless traditional leaders get their act together, they will not be able to save rural values from the onslaught of the urban development juggernaut.
And here is where Dr Zungu gets controversial. The ANC would like to strip Tribal Authorities — non-elected products of apartheid — of their service-providing functions, and many traditionalists agree that the amakosi should be ceremonial and spiritual leaders rather than bureaucrats and functionaries. But Zungu believes, emphatically, that “the chiefs are the only ones with the capacity to develop the rural areas, and this capacity has to be extended.”
She takes it further: the current House of Traditional Leaders is a lame duck, she says, “because it is only allowed to deal with customary matters. In my view, as custodians of traditional values, they should deal with all legislation, as all legislation involves the people they lead.” She thus envisages something along the lines of the House of Lords.
But what, exactly, are these “traditional values” that are so important? Zungu speaks of the power of ritual and ceremony, but does not go much deeper. “Traditions should be practised for as long as it’s good for the people and doesn’t divide society, for as long as it brings people together at the same time to apply everyone’s mind to the same task and thus make a community psychologically complete. But as soon as it becomes divisive, it loses its
For this reason she is particularly perturbed by the rift in the Royal House, between the king and Chief Buthelezi. It is astonishing, listening to her, to realise just how much the uncertainty over the future of something as ritual as Shaka Day can disorient an entire community. “People can’t plan, we can’t collect money. They don’t know who to listen to. In the past, the chief minister [Buthelezi] would relay the king’s decisions to us. Now that that no longer happens, there is so much confusion.”
She wants, more than anything, for “the king to speak for himself. Then people would listen. The first loyalty of the amakosi is to the king, and it will always be that way.” But she also says that the rift is “a family feud that is dividing the whole nation. If the king and Buthelezi get together and resolve their differences, the people would have a big party.”
While she feels closer to the IFP “because of the way they treat traditional leaders and traditional issues”, she will not commit herself to support of any party. Observers note, however, that, particularly given that she is a woman and an outsider to her tribe, the KwaZulu authorities would not have accepted her accession if she were not “reliable”.
She has no truck, however, with the “warrior-nation” notion of Zuluness: “Some leaders,” she says somewhat caustically, “use the warrior thing because they want to have a war, so warriors are what they need.”
But she does not contest the IFP’s harnessing of history: “The IFP, just like any organisation, organises identity around a certain aspect of the past that will appeal to the minds of the people they want to draw. The IFP uses Zulu history; the ANC uses the liberation struggle; the Conservative Party uses the Voortrekkers.”
The fact is, she says, “there was someone called Shaka who did create the Zulu nation. If a Zulu nation exists, we must be proud of it. Must we discard it simply because it didn’t exist before Shaka? Prior to Shaka there is no history. For me, I don’t know what my family were prior to Shaka. So I’ll stick to Zulu. Otherwise I might as well be !Khoisan X!”
Once more, there’s a complexity to the role-playing in which Sibongile Zungu engages. When she was a child, she says, explaining why she appreciates the cultural nationalism brought in by the Inkatha movement, “all the traditions were lost. In those days you couldn’t put forward pride. There was no giving of the first crops to the king; there was no reed-dance.”
As the dusk mops light off the hills of Natal, she becomes coy, the ntombi again: “I never got to dance for my king.” Who knows, she might have been queen.