A book that inspires more stories

By PHAKAMISA MAYABA

JUST WHEN you figure you’re mildly au fait with these matters, along comes a book that blows you out the water in sweet one-liners and bucolic revelations.
Sure, you’ve honoured the rituals, drank the umqombothi and daubed on the white limestone and red ochre. So how could a fella who’s not even black, let alone Xhosa, leave you squirming?
As in, ‘get the F… outta here, man’ – about your people’s history, no less. In his book Land Wars: The Disposession of the Khoisan and AmaXhosa in the Cape Colony, the South African historian John Laband brings this writer pretty close to such colourful exclamations.

The oral recollections of elders and those who are harrowed in this culture business often land in one’s ears. Then there’s the internet to trawl for academic papers. Sadly, the latter are often quite, well, academic – steeped in numbers, dates and scholarly trappings – while in the case of the former you have to strain your mind and ears long and hard, usually in one sitting, because you might not get another chance. People have things to do, and memory is hardly the most dependable of vaults.
And life has rolled on so unproductively, so pathetically, to no worthwhile conclusion, that even those most necessary and primal essentials like God, the Ancestors or History are hurled to the back seat of the mental minibus, behind the more critical rows of survival.

***
Then I click on the online version of Laband’s book, which has spent months idling unread on my phone, and I’m thrust into a read bursting with imagery. I see my people, the amaXhosa, before they called themselves that, on their tentative Thousand Years Trek alongside their Nguni cattle. From places as far-flung as modern-day Senegal, Nigeria and Cameroon, settling long enough in parts of the Mother Continent to leave behind distinct anthropological and linguistic traces. An industrial lot who smelted iron but also with sufficient self-awareness to sacrifice their prized herds to amathongo – the spiritual shades.

Along the way, they encounter the indigenous hunter-gatherers, intermingling with them for long enough to assimilate some of those click consonants we today associate with the Bantu languages. It is the San whom they encounter when they settle between the Mzivubu and Great Fish Rivers who most influence the isiXhosa dialect. Among them there is intermarriage (more about that later), trade, and often, in the quest for better lands, dispossession and bloodshed.

Of course, other developments are churning on in the West. The Dutch have long settled in the Cape, and the Trekboers are on an collision course with the Xhosa. But of significant, even selfish, personal interest are the lineages and clans that comprise the amaXhosa. There is nothing dearer to the Xhosa identity than this sacrosanct nomenclature. It is how one declares oneself: ‘ungumni?’ – which clan are you? – is a question a Xhosa will answer innumerable times in his or her lifetime. Naturally, when Laband touches on this, my interest is piqued.

As umCirha in the Karoo, I’d always fancied the clan to be insignificant in the bigger setup of the traditional organogram. Down here are a lot of amaJola, amaSukwini and all that, and our Cirha ranks are thin by comparison. In fact, in my native Colesberg I can scantily count no more than five families who carry that normative totem.

However, according to Laband, ‘The quasi-historical founder of the royal Xhosa lineage was Tshawe, who is assumed to have lived in the mid-sixteenth century. He overthrew his elder brother, Cirha, and established the amaTshawe as the royal clan of the amaXhosa.’ Aaah, Ncibane, Qhanqolo, uMtswetswe – as the praise names of my ancestor go. The man who would be king, or in this case, paramount chief, overthrown. It should be noted that the abaThembu, amaMpondomise and amaMpondo had long been established kingdoms by then.

‘In the later eighteenth century,’ Laband goes on, ‘a major fissure occurred within the Xhosa paramountcy. Its lineaments are frustrating to discern through the swirls of oral tradition, although there is no doubt that its principal protagonists were the rival sons of the paramount, Phalo, a shadowy figure whose Great Place was west of the Kei River.’

Two nuggets here: First, one of our clanial praise phrases is ‘isihlobo sikaPhalo’ – friend of Phalo. Often these oral introductions are gleaned randomly on the fly, or you swallow them verbatim out ‘in the bush’. Second, my ancestral home, the Eastern Cape village of St Marks, lies on the banks of the White Kei just across the road from Qamata Great Place, seat of Chief Kaiser Matanzima, late and long-standing leader of apartheid-era Transkei.

In a nearby cave there, once home to San chief Madoor, famous rock paintings have been discovered. They were published in a book by Dorothea Bleek, fifth daughter of the noted philologist Wilhelm Bleek. You’d remember Wilhelm as the German linguist whose collaboration with a certain Lucy Lloyd produced A Comparative Grammar of South African Languages which dwelt extensively on the languages of the indigenous IXam people.

***
But my interest lies a little closer to home. My late grandmother, a sallow, church-going woman who could’ve passed as ‘coloured’ in the racial order of the day, was born there. An unmarried old-school conservative, the question of who my grandfather was would often be swiftly settled with a stick to the buttock. Such topics were off the table, and she consequently took the answers them to her grave. But the subconscious has never quite let up: such a light-skinned woman in the heartland of Xhosadom– how? That the Xhosa and the San had then and now broken bread together in this village. Then there were the missionaries who built that landmark Anglican Church that rises gloriously as you approach along the R61.

In my minor travels through the country, I’ve never met anyone bearing my surname outside the village of St Marks, and ours is the only Mayaba family in my native Colesberg. If Google is to be relied upon, it seems likely that I’m the only person with my full name on the planet. But thanks to social media, the plot thickens. It would seem that this is a rather popular surname in Mpumalanga, KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng. The esteemed author and academic Prof Njabulo S. Ndebele writes of a certain Mayaba Street in his award-winning anthology of short stories, Fools and Other Stories.

Through these online acquaintances, I’m able to discern that they answer to the clan name of Jiyane. Ncibane (one of my praise names) and Jiyane? The resemblance in the pronunciation is way too coincidental not to arouse curiosity. Of course, these, pretty much like most African histories, will remain nothing but curiosities in one’s own mind. Unless one does precisely as Laband has: go out there and seek the truth, or scratch as close as one can get to it.

Might there be some indigenous or even foreign gene coursing through our veins? My late mother and uncle had my late grandmother’s fair features. Could a maternal ancestor have deflected from some other northern tribe called Jiyane, found himself amongst the Xhosa, and perhaps settled for the one clan name that sounded closest to his own, Ncibane? Was he alone? Running away from something?

***
With his book, Laband has planted a seed in my heart. In just a day, I’ve devoured at least half of this enjoyable tome, which, although academic, is a flowing read. The Trekboers and amaXhosa have met, rather, clashed, by now. Distrustful of one another, we know how the sad story eventually ends. But how the descendants of these people continue the history, that part only we can determine. Words like ‘heritage’ have become fashionable of late, and is there a more profound heritage and legacy that one can leave behind rather than to be the author of his own little story? Perhaps that is this generation’s true calling: to find the words that give feeling to stories yet untold.

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The Land Wars: The Dispossession of the Khoisan and AmaXhosa in the Cape Colony, by John Laband, is published by Penguin Random House South Africa.