KING HINTSA’S EARS, AND THE KEI MOUTH RONDAVELS WHERE LOUIS TRICHARDT PROBABLY PLANTED THE FIRST WEED.

A friend asked me yesterday, in response to my claim to often reading the same books three times or more, which 10 books I would take from my rondavel if it caught fire like the sad fate that befell the historic Bale House in Bathurst recently. I have been asked this before about my book collection, and have made a list several times, and it has changed every time. Since its launch in 2004, The Sunburnt Queen has been in the Top 5 of my list and I think it will never leave my bedside. I haven’t found a more entertaining and informative perspective for the amateur historian, and the author’s story-telling talent is equal to the monumental amount of research that went into the book. Click here to read more about this author and what she is currently reading. I love the book, and all her other work. Hazel Crampton is one of my top author-crushes.

From my previous post about the history of Bathurst, the reader can only hope that Tessa King was employing a generous amount irony in her observation that “George Southey went on to become quite famous for killing the Xhosa Chief Hintsa.”[i] That matter was a great travesty of justice hidden from us in our history lessons, and the truth is well told in Appendix XI of Crampton’s invaluable book to dispel the myth around Southey. The descendents of King Hintsa are still trying to recover the body parts taken by Southey as souvernirs, and this is a source of ongoing resentment, truly a fitting example of the typo that ‘the penis mightier than the sword.’

Every year we undertook the long holiday trek to the Eastern Cape, unless we were going the other way, to Natal. My mother would say Oh it’s not a bloody holiday for me being in the car for three weeks with three little children. She didn’t really mind the travelling, on the contrary, twice-annual holidays were something she insisted on and which she herself-and her own mother-had grown up with, but she loathed the incessant parallel to my dad’s family-members’ lives that was their obsessive fascination with the Settlers, the classification system all Eastern Cape people had. We were Direct Lines, Ships’ Lists Surnames, and it informed the environment where my psychosocial development took place. We, the ‘Boats’ were a tribe with a special and unwritten set of rules, a code of conduct born of such a fuck up in history that it will never be untangled until it destroys South Africa.

Through all the prosperous little towns we passed I absorbed history as much on those trips as I did the tepid Coke from the plastic cups in the back of whichever car my father was driving that year. And their low conversation in the front seat, as he tried to figure out the movements of his branch of a new genealogy link. Everything would be different if Dingaan hadn’t killed Piet Retief…can’t trust French blood, you know…it had nothing to do with his French blood, look kids, ostriches…if Retief hadn’t left Grahamstown…pass me another one of those sarmies…look kids, I sea the sea, the sea sees me…where did the man say we should turn off this road, Rosalie? Look at the map again…

Our treks to the coast were tailored to his retracing the steps of his-our-1820 British Settlers for the two-day trip down, with a sleepover somewhere, via either the old road or the new highway, and the dreadfully long return allowing him only roadside stops for a quick snap of an Anglo-Boer War marker or monument, or a Voortrekker chapel intact since it was built during the Great Trek at the side of the road, as my parents faced the long slog of getting back home on a reduced budget after the holiday, and the prickliness that overtakes all parents after too much enforced togetherness and all children after too much tartrazine and lack of discipline after a month of running amok on a beach. You’re so tanned they’re going to think you’re a picanin at school.

Gravestones in ancient cemeteries, skipping over marble headstones on pebbled graves with plastic flowers inside glass domes. Sometimes we stopped and there would be strange, sombre people in the houses that seemed to be frozen in time. Stiffly arranged sitting rooms-they weren’t lounges, they were front rooms kept closed and sealed and polished for a people who feared visitors as ill winds for generation after generation. We would be given tea laced with resentful glances and the dampness of our sunburned legs ending in Bata slipslops, naked hatred in covert looks at my mother’s strappy sundress. We erupted into their structured lives like popping candy does into an unsuspecting toddler’s mouth. Banished out of the houses, we played under peach trees in harsh Karoo front yards, or in the enormous and fecund rambling terraced backyards of the more prosperous family members we stopped in at in the years of up and down decampment from Bloemfontein for Easter and Christmas. And always, either around the tea pot, or around a braai, intimate gossip about the history of South Africa. He was in the Hintsa War, whole lot of the Albany boys went, served under Sir Harry Smith… They say it will be like Magersfontein, we won’t know what hits us when our own Night of the Long Knives comes, Uncle Jimmy made his name there, did you know? His sister lost three boys at Delville Wood…a nurse at Kimberley…eloped to go with the Boers on the Great Trek … a coward at the Siege of Ladysmith…

…war war war fight fight fight battle battle battle look at all them pretty horses …

We’d stop where my dad took pictures of a single gravestone for three boys killed in different battles in the same war. There’s only two photos left on the spool, Christopher, for God’s sake. Keep them for taking photos of the kids on their first day back at school. And there we were, year after year, at the end of each Kodak spool, revealing the passage of our becoming ourselves.

All those holidays, all those houses and hotels and bars and beaches. I think that is when my insatiable shack-envy sprouted: I always have desperately wanted to stay behind when the holiday town empties. Oh Lordy, I digress. Let me go back to the houses.

I can’t describe the thrill I get from identifying a site in a modern environment from an ancient drawing or photograph, to stand and examine the seam in a wall of a building where history changed, or to connect the dots and imagine what could have been.

Later there were no longer first day of school pictures, but my brother is there, faded kodachrome, in stiff new army browns going off to do his army basics; or me awkward in a cotton skirt of faded pink and green palm trees on my first day of art school, heartsore after the end of a great holiday romance. And on the way there and back, all the way: the turquoise rondavels and rustic huts of the Transkei were dotted on the hillsides, so that we made up stories.

Yes, my dad said, indeed there are a lot of turquoise houses in the Transkei.  Look, there are also many pink ones.  All the water-pipes on the country’s mines are painted with that green paint which, when mixed with cheap white PVA, gives you all those shades of turquoise.  Look at that particular shade of pink on that house there; it is Universal Undercoat. Stolen paint from the mines. Ah, the effect of migrant labour on our rural landscape …but I made up a differenct story, all for myself…

Nombanda was afraid; she wanted to tell Uncle Mhlakaza that she had not seen the spirits.  She felt Nongqawuse was lying about the prophecy, or that the high sun had burned her eyes and made tricks with her eyes, so that the eland in the wheat looked like ghost-men.  The girls had not eaten, their empty bellies made them hear the screams of the Fish Eagle over the Gxarha river sound like words of warning from the ancestors.

For a year the blood of the slaughtered cattle flowed as Nongqawuse said it must, a river of blood that stained the earth.  The people waited, starving and sick, for the Day of the Red Sun, when all the houses would be bathed in promised scarlet wealth.

Nombanda knew that only she could put an end to the madness, for twelve moons she cried and collected the tears in a stone jug.

When the time came, Nombanda crept from the kraal in the moonlight and went to the top of the koppie.  She made a clearing and lit three fires in a triangle and placed Gogo’s ancient cauldron in the centre.    She filled the pot with the jug of tears and sent her mind to fetch the whitest dove and threw the colour of its feathers into the water, as it began to heat, she concentrated on the exact blue of dawn and added that also; and then the lightest green of budding corn.  The sun came and she stared it down.  She lay down and opened her body to absorb the red before it could move up to its dawning position. 

As the water reached its boiling point, Nombanda’s body was defeated by the last ruby ray.  Plumes of blue smoke swirled up around the pale sun, bathing the waking villages below in turquoise, the colour of hope.

The people have never forgotten Nombanda’s sacrifice.  And that is why there are so many turquoise houses in the Eastern Cape. ©Cindy Taylor 2009

The true story, of course, is that Nongqawuse (c. 1840s – 1898) was the Xhosa prophetess whose prophecies led to a millennialist movement that culminated in the Xhosa cattle-killing crisis of 1856–1857.

In April or May 1856, the teenaged Nongqawuse and her friend Nombanda went to fetch water from a pool near the mouth of the Gxarha River. When she returned, Nongqawuse told her uncle and guardian Mhlakaza, a Xhosa spiritualist, that she had met the spirits of three of her ancestors.

She claimed that the spirits had told her that the Xhosa people should destroy their crops and kill their cattle, the source of their wealth as well as food. In return, the spirits would sweep the British settlers into the sea; they would also replenish the granaries and fill the kraals with more beautiful and healthier cattle. At the time, many Xhosa herds were plagued with “lung sickness”, possibly introduced by European cattle, and many cattle were dying already.

Mhlakaza repeated the prophecy to Paramount Chief Sarhili. Sarhili ordered his followers to obey the prophecy, causing the cattle-killing movement to spread to an unstoppable point. The cattle-killing frenzy affected not only the Gcaleka, Sarhili’s clan, but the whole of the Xhosa nation, and it is estimated that the Gcaleka killed between 300,000 and 400,000 head of cattle.

Nongqawuse predicted that the ancestors’ promise would be fulfilled on February 18, 1857, when the sun would turn red. On the day, however, the sun rose the same colour as every other day and the prophecy was not realised. Initially, Nongqawuse’s followers blamed those who had not obeyed her instructions, but they later turned against her.

In the aftermath of the crisis, the population of British Kaffraria dropped from 105,000 to less than 27,000 due to the resulting famine; in at least one case, people were reportedly forced to resort to cannibalism. Nongqawuse was arrested by the British authorities and sent to Robben Island. After her release she lived on a farm in the Alexandria district of the eastern Cape, and died in 1898.[ii]

A personal memory, circa 1977, Kei Mouth:

The original rondavel* was probably more than a hundred years old.  Generations, one after the other, had tacked on rooms; higgledy-piggledy, with crooked passages and ceilings sloped so low in places that they left spaces that served only to house a stack of books, or storage space for a basket of eggs.

What eventually became the kitchen had been built around the old outside-oven; walls a meter thick resulted in window sills wide enough to serve as storage space for pots and pans, pots and pans battered and weathered, brought from the houses in the city, no longer acceptable for there, but perfectly suitable for making mussel chowder after a day at the beach.

A week before the families arrived from Johannesburg and Salisbury, the maiden aunt from East London would drive to Morgan Bay with two servants.  The key would be retrieved from under a stone at the water tank and every door and window would be opened.  Every piece of furniture would be carried onto the grass outside and scrubbed down with soapy water to slough off the sea grime.  Chests were opened and faded cotton sheets were hung on the washlines, flapping in the wind like flags heralding the arrival of royalty.

Trays and trays of bottles and jars were carried in from the car and stacked on the sideboard on the front verandah, which served as the dining room; ginger beer, curried beans, curried peaches, chutney, watermelon preserves … There were cake tins stacked high containing rusks, biscuits, coconut ice and fudge.

In the long, wide back verandah stood a row of metal-frame beds; eight or ten, I can’t remember.  This was the sleeping area for the tribe’s younger children.  Fishing rods and nets leaned against walls, here hung a rope of pumpkin shells and there was a tower of plastic buckets for building sandcastles. 

There was a garage of sorts, but it had become more of a storeroom; for beach toys and outdoor cooking paraphernalia, tool boxes and surfboards. And there was a pile of ticking-covered mattresses.  Because one never knew who was bringing a friend, a new fiancé or a lost soul who shouldn’t be left alone for the holidays.

I wonder if the house is still there?

* Rondavel:

The rondavel is a small building, usually round or oval in shape and is traditionally made with materials that can be locally found in raw form.

POSTSCRIPT

Long, long before Kei Mouth was a holiday resort, the lush and fertile land along the banks of the River Kei belonged to King Hintsa. It came to pass that a man, dissatisfied with his government in the Cape Colony, decided in 1934 that he would rather live alone with his family in a remote place free of nuisance and government. He loaded his wagon, wife and children. He could write, a rarity for a man of his time, and so he kept a diary as he went about making his new life. They went the wrong way; there were no maps. He came upon a place that looked perfect, and he made the acquaintance of the district chief and so they came to agreement that the man would rent this beautiful stretch of land from the chief. All went well, except for periodic wars which hardly affected him. His friend Piet Retief was close enough to visit occasionally, and relationships with the chief and his clan were amicable for a good while; our man was known far and wide as having the king’s protection, he kept his head down and other friends joined him in flight from the Cape Colony. The chief, King Hintsa, however was not so good about keeping his head down; he had been beset with trouble from all quarters: the battle of Amalinde in 1818 led to more and more skirmishes and the king was also attacked by the Thembu and Basotho, next thing news came in 1820 that British Settlers had come along, which the king was aware of, but he kept his own council and carried on. By 1835, however, the king was becoming peeved and next thing Sir Benjamin D’Urban barged in announced he was going to be running the territory from now on, and the king went off in a fit of pique to tell his tenant at Kei about it. The tenant agreed with his landlord that it was bullshit, and so he gave the king some guns. Our man at the Kei armed a small army for the king. It was a case of too little too late, of course, as we read in the extract above, and George Southey murdered the king. Our man at the Kei was very annoyed about this. He told his wife to pack, he gathered his children and they got on their wagons again. I will go as far as I can away from this place and these people, he said. I can never, ever get far away enough. I will make my own town, he said. He got as far as modern day Maputo, and died there in 1838. But his son followed through and their own town was built and still stands so that we will not forget his father’s name, one of the first Voortrekkers and the only VOORTREKKER who kept a diary of what became the Great Trek. The man, the town, is Louis Trichardt. (Source: House of Phalo 118, 238 fn83)

FURTHER READING AND SOURCES:
[i] https://www.eggsa.org/1820-settlers/index.php/home/76-articles/2-the-story-of-the-1820-settlers.pdf

[ii] Nongqawuse — Prophetess of Doom on Encounter South Africa

• Cattle-Killings (1856-57) on About.com
• Viehtötung der Xhosa – The Xhosa Cattle Killings on the German Wikipedia
• Peires, J. B. (1989). The Dead Will Arise: Nongqawuse and the Great Xhosa Cattle-Killing Movement of 1856-7. ISBN 0-253-20524-7
• Stapleton, Timothy J. (1991). “They No Longer Care for Their Chiefs”: Another Look at the Xhosa Cattle-Killing of 1856-1857. The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 24(2), 383-392.
• Welsh, Frank. (2000). A History of South Africa. HarperCollins.

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