Indaba, My Children: African Tribal History, Legends, Customs And Religious Beliefs - Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa

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and his crew

      PROLOGUE

      These are the stories that old men and old women tell to boys and girls seated with open mouths around the spark-wreathed fires in the centres of the villages in the dark forests and on the aloe-scented plains of Africa.

      Under the gaze of the laughing stars the Old One sits, his kaross wrapped around his age-blasted shoulders, staring with rheumy eyes at the semi-circle of eager expectant faces before him – faces of those who have taken but a few steps along the dark and uncertain footpath called Life – faces of the ones as yet oblivious to the pain of life’s bitter scourges – faces as yet unmarked by furrows of bitterness, ill-health and anger – the fresh, pure, open faces of . . . children.

      The fire dances in the middle of the round clay fireplace like a virgin revelling in the simple joy of being alive. It devours the dry twigs and logs that a little girl is constantly feeding it, leaving nothing but glowing ashes. It mocks the silent sky with a redly luminous column of smoke against its starry face and by sending up short-lived stars of its own.

      Suddenly the Old One feels a great burden on his shoulders – a heavy responsibility towards the young ones sitting so expectantly around him. Suddenly there is a visible sag to his thin, aged shoulders. He sighs – a harsh, rasping sound – and clears his throat, spitting and blowing his nose into the fire, as his father and his father’s father did before him. And he begins the story – the old, old story which he knows he must repeat exactly as he heard it so long ago, without changing, adding or subtracting a single word: ‘Indaba, My Children, . . .’

      It is through these stories that we are able to reconstruct the past of the Bantu of Africa. It is through these stories that intertribal friendship or hatred was kept alive and burning; that the young were told who their ancestors were, who their enemies were and who their friends were. In short, it is these stories that shaped Africa as we know it – years and years ago . . .

      True, the Black man of Africa had no mighty scrolls on which to write the history of his land. True, the Black tribes of Africa had no pyramids on which to carve the history of each and every crowned thief and tyrant who ruled them – on which to carve the history of every battle lost and won. But this they did, and still do!

      There are men and women, preferably with black birth-marks on either of the palms of their hands, with good memories and a great capacity to remember words and to repeat them exactly as they had heard them spoken. These people were told the history of the Tribes, under oath never to alter, add or subtract any word. Anyone who so much as thought of changing any of the stories of his tribe that he had been told fell immediately under a High Curse which covered him, his children and his children’s children. These tribal story-tellers were called Guardians of the Umlando or Tribal History.

      And I, Vusamazulu the Outcast, am proud to be one of these, and here I shall tell these stories to you in the very words of the Guardians who told them to me.

      ‘Indaba, My Children . . .’

      INTRODUCTION

      Many strange things have happened in Africa; things that have puzzled, disgusted and shocked the world, especially in recent years; things for which the world has had little or no explanation and things that can best be explained by first laying bare – to the rest of humanity – the strange working of the mind of the African.

      Many will find it hard to believe much of what I have revealed in this book, but I am not in the least concerned, because whether I am believed or not, everything I write here is true.

      Much of what I shall reveal here will shock and anger many people – most of all my fellow Bantu, who resent having their doings and secrets exposed to foreigners. By writing many of these things, I am becoming, in terms of our tribal laws, a traitor to my own race. And this is going to make me hold back much of what I should also reveal. Terrible as the stigma of traitor is, I shall risk bearing it in the belief that what I am doing here will help my people in the end. Only time will tell whether I am right or wrong. There has been much suffering and bloodshed in Africa in recent years – bloodshed that has led to hatred and still more suffering. And the most pathetic thing about it is that much of this could have been prevented had the White rulers of Africa had a better knowledge and a better understanding of the way a Black man’s mind works than they do, even now.

      Kenya’s Mau Mau uprising, Angola’s rebellion, the massacres in the Congo, riots and killings in South Africa – all soon to be written in blood permanently on the highway of human history, all soon to be written in bleached bones on the desert of time – all were started by one thing – the total lack of understanding between Black and White; the utter failure of one race of human beings to understand what goes on in the minds of the other race.

      The saddest thing is that the misunderstanding is mostly on one side – the more powerful side – the White man’s side. If any Black man with a little knowledge of English, French or Portuguese wants to study the White man – as I have done – all he has to do is to go into the nearest town and become a regular customer of one of the second-hand bookshops there. He must buy and read at least twenty different kinds of books and magazines a month for a period of no less than ten years. He must read classics, philosophical works and even cheap murder mysteries and science fiction. He must read Homer, Virgil, Aristotle, and the rest. He must turn the pages of Walter Scott, Voltaire or Peter Cheyney. He must read the newspapers with great care.

      Gradually, as the years pass, he will gain more or less a clear understanding of the White man, his way of life, his hopes and ambitions. But few White people have ever bothered to study the African people carefully – and by this I do not mean driving round the African villages taking photographs of dancing tribesmen and women and asking a few questions, and then going back and writing a book – a useless book full of errors, wrong impressions and just plain nonsense. Many of the books written by Europeans about Africans should be relegated to the dustbin.

      There are doctors, missionaries and scientists who have spent years and years among Africans – many of them can even speak the local language better than the indigenous people – but what they know about them as human beings amounts to nothing. Many have studied the African only to compare him with the White man – intellectually for instance. Many more have studied the African in order to find justification for the policies of the ruling group they work for and support.

      I once heard a well-known and respected White intellectual state that when Zulus perform a war dance before going into battle they are dancing themselves into a frenzy of rage and showing what they are going to do to their enemies on the battlefield. This statement, logical though it may sound, is as far from the truth as the Day Star is from the worm crawling on a rotten pumpkin.

      Another fallacy dear to many people, both overseas and in South Africa, is that Africans practise polygamy as a sign of wealth and prestige. And if that is so then I, Vusamazulu Mutwa, am the favourite ‘wife’ of the first High Chief of Ashanti! Ask any anthropologist in South Africa who was the greatest Zulu King and he will reply instantly: ‘Tshaka, of course’. That is not so; Tshaka (or Shaka) was not the great Chief White historians make him out to be.

      Thus you see what I am trying to achieve with this book: simply to lay the foundation for better understanding between two different types of human beings, by destroying wrong notions and false ‘facts’, and exposing much of what must be known at the risk of censure by both Black and White people.

      There is a saying dear to lawyers that justice cannot be founded on lies, and I think the same is true with human association and mutual trust and understanding. A marriage of persons who fear and distrust each other cannot long survive, nor can one where the partners hold false ideas about each other.

      The same is true between races in any country. There can be no real understanding between them so long as neither has a clear picture of the other: what it really thinks, believes in, hopes for, and why. You cannot found friendship on faulty guesswork because guessing breeds suspicion, hate and bloodshed. And there is much that is guesswork

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