Growing up in the village of Nwamitwa near Tzaneen, a little princess called Tinyiko, the only child of Queen Favasi and Chief [Hosi] Fofoza of the Valoyi tribe, wondered what it would be like to ride a calf.
Tinyiko was struck by the thought after seeing the village boys do it.
“It’s not for girls it’s for boys,” was the answer she got each time she asked about this fun activity.
One day, in cahoots with the boys and away from the glare of her strict father, Tinyiko managed to get on top of a calf. With little Tinyiko on its back, the beast made straight for the river and the boys could only watch helplessly as she headed for disaster.
“The boys knew how to hold the strings for it to stop, I didn’t know so I tried to jump over and fell right in front of the cow.”
There are two things Tinyiko Lwadhlamuni Nwamitwa Shilubana, now in her 60s, will never forget about that day: the slipped disc she sustained prevented her from carrying any of her three daughters on her back; and that she has always questioned rigid male and female roles.
Today Nwamitwa Shilubana will be installed as the first female Hosi of the Valoyi tribe, the official moment neatly book-ending women’s month. She will have 32 indunas and rule a tribe of about half a million people.
Shilubana, who has served four terms as an ANC MP, may choose her words carefully and wear her power lightly, but there is no denying her battle all the way to the Constitutional Court and deep into colonial, tribal and inner-family prejudices about women and chieftaincy.
When the Mail & Guardian team arrives at her house — or head kraal — her namesake village is buzzing with activity in preparation for the installation ceremony. The pot-holed dusty road leading to the kraal is being tarred and a landscape artist is working on the garden.
Shilubana welcomes us into the majestic living room of her modern double-storey house, which sticks out in this rural setting where her subjects still get water once a week, delivered by truck.
The new Hosi is optimistic that a new dam will soon be built. At night, she points out, one could almost mistake Nwamitwa village for a city as households switch on their lights, electricity once seemed a pipe dream.
She sits on a leather couch wearing a masterfully beaded black and red suit, minus her trademark hat, which she says, she’s been photographed wearing too often.
While her dress befits her role as the rightful Hosi, confirmed by the highest court, her shoes speak volumes about her place in the community. They are orange slip-ons made of plastic shopping bags.
Her face gleams with pride as she explains that everything she’s wearing has been “100%” locally designed and made by village women in a job creation project.
Between trying to ride a cow and her six-year struggle for her birthright as chief of the Valoyi tribe as her father’s natural successor, Shilubana taught — and encountered — a different kind of gender bias.
After getting a BA honours degree at Unisa, she spent her first year as a teacher at Fofoza Primary School, named after her father. Here she discovered that a less-qualified male colleague earned more than she did.
“I was flabbergasted. And I vowed there and then to stand up and challenge these things wherever I saw them.”
Shilubana was a teacher for 20 years and a schools inspector for another 10 in the former Gazankulu homeland.
The 60-year-old widow has a history of political and civic activism. A member of a women’s lobby group in Gazankulu in the early 1990s, she found herself thrust into the Codesa negotiations.
Ideological synergies, she says, led her group towards the ANC, and she worked for the party as a parliamentary backbencher, serving on several committees after 1994, including education.
This tough but self-effacing grandmother of 10 credits her forward-looking father, Hosi Fofoza, for the fact that she was educated.
An Adams College man himself, he went against established Tsonga and Shangaan custom, which dictates that royalty must not cross borders, enrolling his daughter in a missionary school in another district.
“Take this girl and give her an education,” Shilubana recalls him saying to Father Schneider who headed the school, “and treat her like everyone else.”
Perhaps this is why the Valoyi tribe seems to straddle comfortably the divide between modern and traditional leadership. Shilubana received overwhelming support from her subjects during the ascendancy battle.
Six years ago she showed her steely side when she took on her cousin, Sidwell Nwamitwa, who opposed her rise to the chieftaincy.
This, after the royal family, council and the traditional authority, had acknowledged her as the rightful heir to Hosi Fofoza’s throne.
The drama began in 1968, when Shilubana’s father fell ill. To fill the leadership vacuum the then native commissioner asked her uncle, Richard, to act in Fofoza’s place while the royal family picked a successor.
Shilubana described how the regent took advantage of the apartheid government’s support for male primogeniture to declare himself the new Hosi. This violated the Valoyi custom that “one woman’s womb cannot beget two heirs or kings”. Richard was Fofoza’s younger brother from the same great wife, NwaRikhotso.
The royal line was hypothetically restored to Fofoza’s descendants and, in 1997, the royal family passed a resolution — in keeping with South Africa’s new climate and Constitution — to allow a female chief.
Before his death in 2001 Hosi Richard formally returned the leadership of the clan to Shilubana. But a year later his son, Sidwell, interdicted moves to install his cousin and petitioned the Pretoria High Court to declare him Hosi instead.
Relying mostly on past Valoyi customs favouring male primogeniture, the court ruled in Sidwell’s favour.
Shilubana did not take the news lying down. “I said no, I’m not asking for any favours, it’s my birthright and I have the Constitution to back me.”
She petitioned the Supreme Court of Appeal — and lost.
Shilubana finally won her case — and the case for an evolving approach to traditional life — in June this year when Judge Johann van Der Westhuizen, writing for a unanimous Constitutional Court Bench, affirmed the right of the Valoyi people to develop their own customary laws to bring them in line with the supreme law of the land.
Said Van der Westhuizen: “The time when customary law had to be proved a foreign law in its own land is behind us.”
To celebrate the ruling, residents of Nwamitwa surprised their new Hosi by slaughtering several cows and throwing a feast.
A handful of detractors held a noisy protest in the village. Yet, says Shilubana: “One induna who was with them later stood up and said: ‘I am asking for forgiveness, because I can see everything is in shape, we see development, we see that a Hosi is truly born and not elected.'”