In 1835, the Xhosa King Hintsa was killed at Nqabara, near Willowvale in the Eastern Cape. The amaXhosa say that the king was treacherously cut down while escaping from a British army camp, where he had been negotiating terms of surrender after half a century of continuous war against the invading power.
The British side of the story is a little different.
The fatal shot was fired by one George Southey, a young man who had arrived in South Africa from his native Somerset with his parents, part of the 1820 settlement.
By Southey’s account, Hintsa was being escorted on horseback to talk surrender among the Xhosa chiefs when he attempted to escape. He was shot in the leg (by Southey) but ran off into the bush, in spite of his injury. He was pursued by British soldiers, and was finally cornered (again by Southey) in dense vegetation. According to Southey, the king raised his spear in an aggressive manner, intending to kill his pursuer. Southey then shot him in the head in self-defence.
This was an almost fatal trauma for the Xhosa nation. Hintsa’s son, Sarhili, was eventually appointed king, and it was he who witnessed the virtual annihilation of his people in the “national suicide” that followed the prophecies of Nongqawuse. Hintsa’s death had caused a profound psychological rupture.
Not much is known of what became of Southey. But his elder brother Richard became lieutenant governor of Griqualand West, where, among other things, he established a reputation for championing the cause of equal rights for the black diamond miners of Kimberley. He was knighted, but then removed from his post, and eventually established a cattle farm.
Sir Richard’s son, Charles, a boisterous man with a fine disregard for the defeated “Kaffirs”, as the Xhosa were known, made an unsteady start in the Cape civil service, then took a gamble on a couple of fierce breeding ostriches. The sale of ostrich feathers eventually made him a fortune, and he bought a farm near Middelburg in the Karoo. He continued to farm ostriches, and also bred sheep, cattle and racehorses. Sheep’s wool was riding high on the world markets at the end of the 19th and into the 20th century, and profits from wool sales enabled the Southeys to import the best racing stock from Europe, turning their farm into a renowned stud.
Fame and fortune brought influence. Charles Southey moved in the best political circles of the times. He hobnobbed with princes, generals and their consorts, received honours from the king of England, entertained Joseph Chamberlain and Lord Milner at the farm at Culmstock, and was on first-name terms with General Jan Smuts.
Ken Southey, Charles’s great-grandson, continues to farm the same land today. The fine, Cape Dutch house he has inherited would seem to be full of the ghosts of those imperial footsoldiers who paved the way for the present dispensation in South Africa. And yet Southey has done his best to free himself from the weight of that past. It is difficult to corner him into even talking about his ancestors.
“For me the present is more important. That’s why I have such a tenuous grasp of family history.”
Not quite as tenuous as he would like, perhaps. But his choice is a reminder that, in the uneasy landscape of the new South Africa, letting go of the past is as powerful a weapon of survival for some as holding on to it is for others.
For Southey, the soil itself has taken on a spiritual power that surpasses the ancestral claims of his predecessors. Not that he hasn’t tried to break clear of that cloying history by physically leaving the place. After a university education at Rhodes in the late Sixties, he spent a few years tending the family heritage with his older brother before moving into the world of high finance. He became an investment analyst on the stock exchange in Johannesburg. But after four years of this life in the fast lane, the farm, badly neglected in his absence, drew him back into its arms.
“They say the best manure for a farm is the farmer’s footsteps,” he says, with a self-deprecating smile. He had no choice but to continue being that farmer.
How to be a white farmer, in a democratic South Africa? The two concepts sound contradictory, given the constant visual reminders of what it has come to mean: the endless kilometres of fenced-off land in an empty landscape, set against the crushed squalor of squatter camps, and the images of stick- legged children without a discernible future.
The Southey farm was host to a very different breed of South Africans in the 1980s. While Southey was wrestling to make it make commercial sense in a changing commercial environment, he was also prepared to allow its use as a safe haven for meetings of black activists working among the rural farm communities.
He stuck his neck out, not too far, but far enough to risk imprisonment for his refusal to join the compulsory border commandos, along with a few other farmers in the region. He also continued to allow his farm to be used for quiet political gatherings.
“I got phone calls to tell me that people would be coming, that there was going to be a meeting and some people would need to stay over on the farm. I turned a blind eye and carried on with my farming. I didn’t think I was in too much danger of arrest because I had too high a profile. It’s a small area. If you like, I was a big fish in a small pond.” The state couldn’t afford to upset its fragile farming constituency.
Tacit agreement led to more active involvement, and he joined protest meetings and marches in the local townships. Sometimes, to his embarrassment, he found himself pushed to the front of the march, as a shield and as an example.
Today, his great regret is that this time of active involvement is gone. Rural activism is a thing of the past. The focus, since the triumph of the last elections, has been towards the higher-profile issues of urban South Africa, and the foreign investment that it draws. He feels that the new government has not delivered to the rural constituencies that sacrificed so much. The farm people, the small people, are almost forgotten.
Life on an African farm. White children and black children. White children have a future. Black children have farm schools.
In the old days, not so long ago, each farm had its own school for the children of farm labourers. It was a gesture by the white farmers and their wives, in the face of an endemic cycle of hard labour, disenfranchisement, and alcoholism.
There were a few kids who managed to spring out of the trap: Jakes Gerwel, Allan Boesak … Most didn’t.
The farm schools are a mirror of the black Eastern Cape: a tangle of children who grow up speaking Xhosa and Afrikaans with equal fluency. At a certain stage, they are separated according to their given identities: either to a Xhosa-speaking future, or to an Afrikaans-speaking one. It has been ordained.
At Schoombee siding, near Southey’s farm, two lower primary schools stare at each other across the railway tracks.
Schoombee Trust School is a brand new mini-complex that was built with funds from an international donor organisation and input from some of the local farmers, including Southey. It was built to replace the myriad farm schools for children of Xhosa- speaking farm labourers in the neighbourhood, a bringing together of many into one.
The little building on the other side of the tracks, converted from a disused farm store, is Schoombee Primary, the Afrikaans- medium school for the children of coloured farm workers. Somehow, when the new school was being built, entrenched positions came into play, and rather than making one school for all the children of the area, the enforced separation remained in place.
The children still play together, and indeed in many cases grow up on the same farms. Their fathers work together, drink together and speak to each other in the Karoo argot of Xhosa and Afrikaans. But the children are still attending separate schools.
It is an anomaly in the new South African dispensation. No one is prepared to say quite why it happened, four years into our age of liberation. The Afrikaans women who teach at the coloured school cite lack of consultation before the new school was built, and also have a sentimental attachment to their old building – and to their old understanding of the world, perhaps.
The headmistress of the new school, Constance Jokozela, says she has no problem with amalgamation, but it depends on a positive signal from the provincial government in Bisho. The Department of Education in Bisho also played its part, justifying the continued separation on the grounds of differing linguistic mediums of instruction.
It’s all a forest of miscommunication and old habits which refuse to die. The two schools will one day be united. But in the meantime, the children continue to sit separately at their tiny desks, living a separate reality that no longer reflects the world they have been born into. A small time warp in a huge and changing country.
The journey had begun early in the morning. King Xolilizwe Sigcawu, direct descendent of King Hintsa, had been collected from his farm just outside Butterworth, in the south of the Transkei, by Prince Xhanti, the king’s younger brother, and official representative for the Xhosa Royal Council. They drove north to Idutywa, where they were joined by the king’s First Lady, Queen Nondwe, who had in turn been collected from the Royal Great Place at Nqadu by Zolani Mkiva, poet laureate, praise singer to President Nelson Mandela, and Chief Executive Officer of the newly constituted Royal Council.
The royal procession proceeded northwards, and then turned off the winding N2 highway just south of Umtata, heading deep into the Transkei countryside along treacherous dirt roads.
At Ngqungqu, huge crowds, some in traditional dress, others in Western clothing, had already gathered. The military helicopter that had brought the president squatted on a field a few hundred metres from the huge marquee.
Inkosi Patekile Holomisa, president of the Congress of Traditional Leaders of South Africa, was to be installed as chief of the Ama-gebe.
It was an extraordinary event, bringing together a remarkable array of South African leaders, some traditional, some not. General Bantu Holomisa, uncle of the chief-to-be, was bustling around as chief organiser. For this occasion, his differences with Chief Kaiser Matanzima, the autocratic former leader of the Transkei whom Holomisa had deposed, and with Mandela, whose African National Congress had expelled him, were put aside.
Mandela and Matanzima also put aside their differences, two elderly gentlemen, princes in their own right, walking slowly arm in arm towards the marquee to take their places on the presiding platform.
King Mayishe of the Ndebele and Chief Sandile of the House of Rarabe both wore leopard skins. King Mota and Queen Mopedi, both of the Free State, were there, as was Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi of the Zulu. Among the commoners on the platform were ministers Valli Moosa and Sydney Mufamadi. Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane bestowed blessings on behalf of the Anglican Church.
The gathering was significant for the endorsement it gave to the concept of traditional leadership within the greater democratic dispensation. Patekile Holomisa is probably the only traditional leader whose prominence in both traditional and secular politics could have made this gathering possible. The ease with which, as a trained advocate, he straddles the often conflicting worlds of customary and Roman Dutch law has been a key factor in bringing the two systems closer together.
Mandela himself put the whole issue in context in his address to the gathering. Independence, he said, had brought with it the possibility of restoring the dignity of our traditional systems. Colonialism had done its best to destroy the authority of traditional law. Apartheid and its surrogates had attempted to establish corrupt versions of customary structures. In spite of all this, many traditional leaders had maintained the integrity of their positions as leaders and as articulators of the will of the majority of the people. True leaders, the president said, had managed to steer their people towards liberation, and as such had justified their continuing role in society.
It’s tricky stuff. Modernism and tradition are themes in constant conflict in every society. Traditional leadership all too often falls on the side of conservatism and reaction. At the same time, tradition, in the sense of a system of inherited norms and preservative morality, gives society its critical sense of continuity. The tension between conservatism and change, between young and old, is part of the mortar that binds society together.
“A king is a king because of his people, and a people is a people because of its king,” said King Mayishe. This neatly expresses the theoretically democratic nature of a true monarchy. All other things being equal, it is a relationship that depends on mutual respect, and a constant and organic flow of communication. This is how it would be in an ideal world.
The role of traditional leadership is only fully understandable when seen in its rural context. The ritual, the formality of speech, the sharp reproach in the witty riposte of the praise singer, these are all part of the rhythm of rural life. The reinventing of tradition is part of the slow, painful process of national reconstruction, particularly in that damaged and voiceless constituency of rural South Africa – the world of the villages and the farms.
“How’s the life in Johannesburg?” Prince Xhanti Sigcawu asks. I reply that Johannesburg is still its old, murderous self. Does he ever get up there?
“I used to live there,” he replies. “I was a public prosecutor at Randburg Magistrate’s Court. But one day I had a dream. A voice was telling me to come back home and work for my people, to restore the dignity of the Xhosa kingdom. So I got a transfer to the magistrate’s court in Idutywa, and here I am.”
As a child he was always aware of muttering among his elders about the restoration of the Xhosa kingdom, but these were never more than murmurs. As he became more aware of his history, this troubled him more and more. The dream was a turning point. He is now the representative for his elder brother, King Xolilizwe, and the Xhosa Royal Council.
Although he is modest about it, he is effectively the leader of the initiative to restore the monarchy to what he believes is its rightful place. There is evidence that there is strong support within the community of the rural Eastern Cape.
“I’m very excited about this,” says GG Mkiva, father of Imbongi ye Sizwe (praise singer to the nation) Zolani. “Xhanti is a quiet young man who focuses on the kingdom first and himself last. Previously the king had older, conservative advisers. They were not very active, and were more concerned with financial gain than with national matters. I am pleased that these younger men are taking the initiative now. The king is also happy that these young men are coming with a fresh approach.”
The Xhosa Royal Council has requested that the Ministry of Justice transfer Xhanti to the Great Place at Nqadu so that he can concentrate on Xhosa national affairs on a full-time basis, while remaining a civil servant.
In the meantime, operating without funding, Xhanti and his associates continue to effectively run the Royal Council.
It is a remarkable sign of the relevance of this restoration process that it is being motivated by young, well-educated South Africans. Like Patekile Holomisa, and like the dynamic Chief Mwelo Nonkonyana – another advocate, ANC luminary and Eastern Cape traditional leader – Xhanti is a trained lawyer. Zolani Mkiva, Xhanti’s close associate and a charismatic figure both in rural Transkei and on the national stage, has a humanities degree from the University of the Western Cape. They are young (Xhanti is 31, Mkiva is 27) they are well groomed, they are urbanised – and they are totally committed to the restoration of the spirit of King Hintsa.
The first priority is to restore the correct balance between the present king and the chiefs who are supposed to owe him allegiance. During the Matanzima era, says Xhanti, many of the other traditional leaders were elevated to the status of “paramount chief”.
The playing field was levelled to the point where it made no sense any more. For a traditional society to operate properly, there needs to be a clear hierarchy. The system as it stands is more like anarchy – too many chiefs, and not enough Indians.
It is not easy to dismiss this as an exercise in backward- looking futility. Nor is it about greed for power and position. The King, Xolilizwe, is a large, soft-spoken man who does not give the impression of self-serving ambition. He and the young men who are promoting his cause are quietly dedicated to healing the massive trauma that followed on from the killing of King Hintsa.
Like Southey, descendant of the man who killed that earlier king, a man engaged in a lonely battle to keep a Karoo farm alive, the descendants of Hintsa are working to pull the shattered fragments of the country back together.
In a strange and powerful way, hundreds of kilometres apart and not communicating directly with each other, they give a profound and compelling meaning to the spirit of reconciliation.