LITMIR.BIZ

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Africa today can be traced back to foolish acts on the part of one or other of the two races in the past: acts that were the result of lack of understanding. Only by being presented with a full, clear and unvarnished picture of the African – seen from his worst as well as his best side – can the White man hope to avoid repeating the incredible mistakes he made in the past, blunders that have cost Africa a lot of suffering and close to three million human lives in the short space of ten years.

      Why, so great is the lack of understanding between White and Black that there are Africans – hundreds of them – who still believe, in this jet and sputnik age, that White people never mate as common human beings do; that White women do not bear their children in the painful way Black mamanas bear their piccanins . . . but that they lay shining glass eggs that hatch out little Bwanas a day after being laid! Surprising? Maybe, but it is true!

      Thousands of Black people in Rhodesia and Portuguese East Africa attribute godlike and terrible powers to Whites. They believe that White people are the sons of some great living flower that grows somewhere under the ‘restless, cold, passionless seas’ and that blond Europeans are half-human and half-plant (because, they argue, who ever saw yellow hair on a human head, yellow hair like that which one sees on the ‘head’ of a mealie cob?).

      So great is the lack of understanding between Black and White in Africa that there are White men who refuse to accept the fact that a Black man is a human being like the Indian, the Coloured, the Chinese and the European himself. They would rather die than accept the fact that there are Black artists, sculptors, builders, teachers and the like. These people believe nothing else about Africans but that they are lazy, stupid, stubborn creatures, something between an ape and a human being. In my travels through South Africa and beyond, I have met hundreds of such White men and women.

      Hence this book . . .

      ‘You cannot fight an evil disease with sweet medicine,’ is the saying popular amongst us witchdoctors. And one cannot hope to cure a putrid malady like inter-racial hatred and misunderstanding by mincing words. So I warn readers that they are in for a nasty shock. This is not a book for people who prefer hypocrisy to fact. In this book the love life of many African tribes will be openly and frankly discussed, as will their religious beliefs, their crafts, and so forth. In later chapters you will read about the African peoples of the present time, their strange and varied reactions to civilisation and also what they think about events in Africa today.

      You will read about many things that have been deliberately withheld from the world – things that are common knowledge to all African people within the shores of this continent.

      In offering this information to the world, I do not claim it to be the last word – the book to end all books. I intend this book to be the forerunner of many more to come, and one to pave the way for other African writers, some of whom may have amassed much more knowledge of our fatherlands in the course of their lives than I have done. As I also said at the outset, the second most important purpose of this book is to shatter many fallacies that have become accepted as facts through the years for the simple reason that nobody has ever questioned their accuracy or dared give the other side of the story, as, for instance, the facts in the case of the killing of the White Voortrekker, Piet Retief, by the Zulu King, Dingana (which I shall disclose in a subsequent chapter).

      In order to best understand this book, the reader should be given a glimpse into the life of the author.

      I am a Native of South Africa, a Zulu from the province of Natal. My father is a former Catholic catechist from the turbulent district of Embo in the south of Natal.

      My mother Nomabunu is the daughter of Ziko Shezi, an Induna and veteran of the battle of Ulundi, which ended the Zulu War. He was also a confirmed High Witchdoctor and a custodian of the relics of our tribe and Guardian of our Tribe’s History.

      Because my mother, a ‘heathen’, refused to be converted to Christianity, my parents parted just after I was born. I grew up under the protection of my grandfather, and was initiated as his attendant who carried his medicine bags for him, thus sharing some of his forbidden secrets.

      In 1928 my father came and asked permission of my grandfather to take me away and because of my being an illegitimate child and therefore a disgrace to Ziko’s family, my grandfather (Ziko himself) agreed, despite my mother’s protests.

      My father and stepmother, their three children and I came to the Transvaal in the middle of the same year. We lived on a farm beyond Potchefstroom, my father being a labourer there, and it was here in 1932 that my stepbrother Emmanuel died after being whipped by the farmer, my father’s employer, under circumstances which are best left undisclosed.

      For the next 20 years we lived on different farms and then lastly at the mine where my father still works today as a carpenter. This mine is in the southern suburbs of Johannesburg.

      In 1954 I found myself employment in one of Johannesburg’s leading curio shops, a shop specialising in African art. Except for six months when I was working in a pottery firm, I have been employed there ever since.

      Being an amateur artist of sorts, I have travelled quite widely in the country of my birth, first with Catholic priests in 1946 and 1948 and then with my present employer in 1958.

      On returning from Rhodesia that year I visited my mother and grandfather in Zululand after more than 30 years and, at their command, I renounced Christianity and underwent the ‘Ceremony of Purification’ in order to begin training as a witchdoctor and also in preparation for assuming the post of Custodian of our sacred Tribal Relics, in the event of my grandfather’s death.

      I have now completed my training as a medicine man, and have gained a lot of knowledge that I shall lay out in this book.

      In March 1960, a young Basuto woman whom I loved, and hoped to wed in place of my present faithless spouse, was among those who died when police fired on the crowd at Sharpeville, near Vereeniging.

      On the night before she was to be buried her parents, her brother and two sisters, and three of their children, cut off tufts of their hair and threw them into her still open coffin, swearing to avenge her if it took them a million years, even if they should die in doing so. I took what is called a ‘Chief’s Great Blood Oath’, cutting a vein in my hand (the left one) and letting ten drops of blood flow into one of the gaping bullet wounds that defiled her dark brown slender body, swearing to tell the world the truth about the Bantu people and so save many of my countrymen the agony of the bereavement we felt. I swore to do this, come imprisonment, torture or death, and even if the very fires of Hell or the cold of Eternal Darkness stood in my way.

      This book is only the beginning of the fulfilment of my oath, an oath whose keeping has become the only purpose of my intolerable life, and which will still be binding on my children and their children’s children. So, even if this manuscript is destroyed, I shall write other works like it until one of them does get published – be it after my death.

      Book One

      The Bud Slowly Opens

      THIS I CHOOSE

      Oh, give me not the strident, Demon wail

      Of penny whistle and tea-chest guitar;

      Nor give me tales of those who rode the trail

      Deep in the West of far America!

      Oh, not for me the songs and nonsense tales

      That thrill the modern rabble rout

      Who, leaving far behind their tribal vales

      With traitor zest, ape ‘culture’ from without!

      Rather than the modern crooner’s foreign voice,

      Or the loud howls of modern township jive,

      I shall leave far behind that mad’ning noise

      And hurry home where Tribal Elders live.

      There, ’neath baobabs or flat-topped munga trees,

      Where

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