In May this year I went to St Helena to participate in its walking festival. St Helena is that tiny island in the middle of the vast South Atlantic which, even today, can be reached only by the last of the mailboats from Cape Town.
Yet, who should be the first islander I strolled into, but King Dinuzulu’s granddaughter? There she was, striding along. And as all the few thousand remaining saints know, she proudly calls herself “Princess Dinuzulu”.
I had meant to tramp the old volcano flat. But if ever the mists came down over the forbidding cliffs and craters, or the south-easter threatened to shift one-street Jamestown out of its ravine and into the churning billows, I could make a retreat. I haunted the local museum (open when the ship’s in), and the archives in the old Castle, to trace how a Zulu royal descendant could ever have ended up unacknowledged in such a remoteness.
Famous as the place of exile of Napoleon after his Waterloo of 1815, this island fortress is still visited by Bonapartists who grieve over his tomb. It lies in a valley rich in all-white endemic plants. The French flag flies nowadays over his last residence, superbly restored at Longwood.
Fewer tourists come to the bare field of Deadwood over the way, and to Broad Bottom, on another lush hillside, where up to six thousand Boer prisoners were encamped during the years 1900 to 1902. Thanks to them, I knew, the surviving breakwater was constructed. When peace was declared, some of them, like the Smith brothers, decided to stay on. The South African Navy maintains a chic cemetery on another mountain slope, with the graves of those Badenhorsts and Buitendags who died there.
The St Helena story is marked by such penal visitations, so that, between the French and the Boers, it was the advent of the first Zulu party (in 1890) that stuck in the memory. Their leader, the young pretender to the late Cetshwayo’s throne, was a mere 20 years old at the time. He was sentenced to 10 years for committing high treason against the new British power, while in the process of annexing his father’s broken kingdom.
Dinuzulu himself was rapidly taking to dandy ways, for he strode ashore in spats, a crop in his hand, as if he meant to gallop off to the residence at Rosemary Hall. His group of about 20 merely fell on dry land, his wives refusing to ride in the carriage provided. With him were also his sangoma, a midwife and the co-rebels: his two uncles, the head-ringed advisers Ndabulo and Shingana. (The latter name still survives on the island as a moniker.) They attracted the largest crowd that had ever thronged the harbour fortifications, with the regiment holding them back.
Almost every detail of Dinuzulu’s lengthy stay is recorded in official folders, and also in the weekly St Helena Guardian: how he learned English first thing, converted to Christianity, even taught himself to play the hymns in St James’s, the oldest Anglican church south of the equator. When his first two offspring — tiny Umomfino and Umohlozana — sickened, they were speedily baptised before decent burial in the white section of the cathedral, while deceased ex-slaves around Rupert’s Bay were just dumped in holes in threesomes. The young regent’s sartorial bill for top hats and gaiters soon came to rival the governor’s.
Because the Zulu entourage was controlled by a military translator, all their correspondence, necessarily confined to domestic matters, is on record. The attendant, Paul Mtimkulu, writes off to drought-stricken, locust-ridden Eshowe for his cow to be sold. (Mtimkulu is another persisting name.) Dinuzulu himself orders 30 cows to be sold off. “Au-au-au — our time on St Helena is very long,” he wails.
By 1892 he is already writing in his own fluent hand, in immaculate ink: “My dear Nondela, According to my promise I send some St Helena postage stamps. There are no old ones, as there is no local postage service, but I trust the ones I have send [sic] will be welcome.” His address changes to the rambling Maldivia Lodge, on to the palace built for him and his intimates up at Francis Plain (nowadays the showplace at Prince Andrew High School).
Riding out one day down to Rupert’s, this dashing swain met up with a certain Portuguese lady. She had the typical surname of Magellan and had recently been widowed, her mariner husband having been lost at sea. Now we are entering the folkloric order of knowledge. Fine local historians, such as Robin Castell and Barbara George, raise their eyebrows at this point, as we depart from the official records.
But we may deduce how Dinuzulu was kitted out: in the finest European garb, as Queen Victoria had forbidden his party to don tribal wear outside their own quarters. His granddaughter, when at last I came to interview her, reported that on that day he wore a pith helmet and long sash. Or he togged up in ducks, when he had been playing cricket at Plantation House. At any rate, he sure knew how to go out a-courting, as he had just managed to impregnate his two scullery maids as well.
My informant is the island’s Big Mama herself, otherwise known as Mrs Maglan Noden of Woody Ridge. For the island’s quincentenary celebrations in 2002, she devised a Zulu float, so that her home on the slopes has cowhide shields everywhere, tapestries of elephants and all the other African gear that can be purchased at the V&A Waterfront.
Although in 1897 two adoring Saints did quit the island with Dinuzulu for his home, when the king’s punishment was up, Noden has never visited her forebear’s realm. Nor did her illegitimate mother ever receive any support from there. Her mother was not the only one to be abandoned either, for, according to Noden, the Zulus left no less than seven offspring behind.
One of them I’d picked up on. Edward George Henry was nicknamed the Chief all his life and he, in turn, had a son called Johnnny Chief, and so on. All Henry had managed was to be a cowman on the even more inaccessible Ascension Island in his middle years, before retiring on welfare and Guinness.
Noden must have had a terrifying youth, as her mother then turned out to be one of the island’s three lepers. Perforce she was held in isolation. “Look at the king, queen and princess now,” Noden was taunted at school. Small wonder she left the poorhouse for the United Kingdom in her teens, working there as a nurse for the next 50 years.
She also used to tour there with a gospel and folk group (accordion, violin and kegboard), belting out the old island songs. “And I am not a quiet singer,” she informed me, now in her retirement (aged 71). Her favourite ballad: Rolling Home to St Helena.
And only Maglan Noden knew the other half of this forgotten Zulu island story, I discovered. Dinuzulu was returned to the then-Natal as the colonial government’s mere “induna and confidant of the supreme powers”. When he was implicated in the Bambatha Rebellion a decade later and sentenced to a second term, he had to see off the remaining 25 ringleaders. This time they were the ones destined for St Helena.
They arrived on this windswept bastion, an immense jumble atop a seamount in the churning blue, on June 13 1907. They were dressed in sacking; their ages 20 to 70. Their supply of mealie meal was unloaded with them. According to the Guardian reporter they were “in a half-starved condition so that they could hardly walk”. Every Sunday they were to have five ounces of meat each. All of them were sentenced to life with hard labour.
“They had no remission, like my grandfather did, and they built the road — the one with the hairpins up right to my house,” Maglan told me. Their graves are somewhere in that lonely subtropical entrepôt, unrecorded.
Because the big event for St Helena is the monthly ship’s departure, Noden was down to see us interlopers off. We passengers were disallowed shore leave, on account of choppiness, so there was no last confidence from the lovely Princess Dinuzulu. But there she was in my binoculars, frizzy hair aflame, clasping the last of her secrets to her bosom — striding out on the quayside, between breakers, striding out.
Getting there
The only mode of transport to St Helena is by ship. The island has its own mailship, the RMS St Helena, which provides services between the United Kingdom and Cape Town, among other destinations. Packages include a 12 nights sea voyage and up to 9 nights’ accommodation in St Helena, along with return flights to Cape Town from Europe. Other cruise lines such as the QE2 also visit. Visit www.sthelenatourism.com