Indaba, My Children: African Tribal History, Legends, Customs And Religious Beliefs. Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa
Rarati, my daughter.’
The beautiful queen of the Wakambi, the peerless Marimba, was walking through the forest with her handmaidens on her way to the riverside to bathe her body in the cool waters. Birds sang in the trees overhead and the forest was heavy with the scent of thousands of flowering shrubs. Myriads of butterflies and colourful insects were fluttering in clouds of white, blue and brown among the wild flowers and the buzzing song of nyoshi, the bee, was clearly heard in the blinding sunlight. Timid hares galloped through the long grass and the cooing voice of le-iba, the turtle dove, added yet more enchantment to an already enchanting day.
The sky was the purest of blue. Only a few clouds were to be seen in the eternal expanse of the heavens and these were as soft as wool and as delicate as the body of a Sun-maiden.
As the queen went through the forest, her great eyes were as alive as moon crystal. From the enchanting woodland scene she drank in inspiration as the grateful grass drinks the morning dew. Where the ordinary man sees only the trees, she saw them in their dignity and superb beauty; and where the ordinary man hears only the rustling of the breeze through the branches of the trees, and the senseless twittering of the numerous birds, she heard the soul-stirring verses of the Song of Creation.
She was not very far from the river when she saw a number of young boys gathered together above something that lay in the tall grass. The boys were talking and gesticulating excitedly and were all patting one amongst them on the back in obvious congratulation. Their voices floated through the scented air into the keen ears of Marimba and, as one might expect from this great woman, she left her retinue and went to investigate. What she saw there filled her with anger and disgust, and tears sprang unbidden into her eyes. One of these boys had invented a particularly vicious and cowardly kind of snare with which to catch young antelopes. He had tried it out and it had worked all too well. Lying on the ground with a cruel noose around her lifeless neck was a young steenbuck ewe which had fallen a victim of this fiendish trap, and the poor animal had only a few days to go before it produced young.
‘Which of you sons of night-howling, splay-footed, green-bellied hyaenas invented this thing?’ demanded Marimba hotly.
The boys made no reply. They just stared at their dusty feet in very frightened silence. Two of them wetted their loinskins at the same time, much to the amusement of the royal handmaidens.
‘I asked you a question, you mud-wallowing tadpoles!’ cried Marimba.
At last one of them said in a voice that was hardly a whisper: ‘I . . . I did, Oh Great One.’
‘You did, did you?’ cried Marimba in a burst of ecstatic fury. ‘Now indeed, you are going to suffer for your deed!’
‘Mercy please, Oh Great One,’ whispered the boy.
‘Marimba has no mercy for bloodthirsty little idiots of your kind,’ said the angry queen coldly. ‘Breathe into the nostrils of that animal and bring it back to life.’
The astonished followers of Marimba saw the boy lift the head of the dead buck and actually try to breathe life back into it. There was a gale of feminine laughter which the angry chieftainess quelled with a look of cold fury in her glittering eyes. A deep respectful silence settled upon the group of watching maidservants while the boy, with sweating face and inflated cheeks, and a heart that was almost stopping with cold fear, huffed and puffed in vain to revive the dead animal.
‘That animal had better come back to life, Oh little vermin,’ said the princess cruelly. ‘If it does not you will soon wish that you had never been born.’
The badly frightened boy tried his best. He tried everything he could while the queen watched him coldly and impassively, and the handmaidens watched with broad smiles on their faces.
‘Why,’ said Marimba at long last, ‘it seems to me as if you find it easier to kill an animal than to bring it back to life!’
‘I cannot make it live again, Oh Great Queen,’ stammered the boy. ‘It still wants to remain dead.’
‘Then you must surrender yourself to punishment,’ said the queen ominously.
‘Please do not kill me!’ screamed the boy in utter terror. ‘I am still too young to die . . . I do not want to die!’
‘The animal that you killed with the fruits of your evil brain did not want to die either,’ observed Marimba.
‘Please . . .’
‘Seize him!’ cried the princess to her attendants. ‘Seize and hold fast the pestilential horror!’
The giggling girls fell upon the boy and held him fast. He struggled and kicked and bawled in vain. He yelled to his friends to save him. But those loyal friends had proved their loyalty by vanishing into the sheltering bush, leaving him to face the music alone. ‘Bring him to the village – I want to deal with him properly in the presence of all the people.’
The gathered Wakambi were sitting in a great semicircle in the High Place of Justice at the very summit of the hill which was now known as the Hill of the Wakambi. The princess Marimba sat on her throne at the foot of an upright slab of rock that was known as the Rock of Justice. She was flanked on either side by two old men.
The old man on her left was known as the High Accuser and the one on her right was known as the Mercy of Heaven, and it was his duty to plead for mercy on the prisoner’s behalf – but not to defend him from the accusation.
Marimba was the one empowered to execute the prisoner after he had been found guilty. The power to execute was granted to all those people who had seen the prisoner actually commit the offence for which he was charged.
Trials were held only at the ‘rising of the moon’ among the Wakambi and everybody was waiting in silence, where even a whisper was strictly forbidden, for the rising of the heavenly orb. Night had fallen and the land was swathed in the dark mantle of obscurity, and in the scowling forests below the Great Village lions were roaring their fury at the glittering stars, while leopards coughed defiance to all and sundry.
The boy, Malinge, who had been caught by Marimba in the act of wantonly destroying living things, knew that the coming of the moon would also mean the coming of his own death, and he was numb with fear. He turned round and looked in the direction of his parents seated with the other villagers near one of the great Fires of Justice that had been lit in a semicircle to illuminate the High Place of Justice. There were seven such fires, each representing the Seven Gates of Creation that separate this material world from the bright bronze plains and crystal forests of Tura-ya-Moya, where the gods have birth and where Lizuli, the whore of eternity, dances nightly before the thousand eyes of the Most Ultimate.
These fires were not kindled with wood, but with the leaves of the mpepo plant and were fed with the bones of that kind of animal against which the accused had committed the offence. When a man was charged with murder, human bones were fed into the fires. On this occasion the bones of antelope were fed into the fires.
Malinge cast a pleading glance at the face of the grim and bearded warrior that was his father and found no mercy and no recognition there. Nor did his own mother and other brothers seem to know him at all. He knew he was alone – and lost. Then, with that breath-taking majesty that fills the eyes with tears, the moon rose above the distant mountains.
As it rose, a wild scream of naked terror was torn from the lips of the wretched Malinge and he tried to bolt out of the Place of Justice. But Mpushu and Kahawa seized him and held him fast.
‘Stand still and take your punishment like a man, Oh Malinge,’ said Mpushu. ‘Do not try to cheat the lion of justice of his juicy prey. Nothing very serious is going to happen to you. You will only be deprived of your nose and ears and then thrown to very, very hungry crocodiles. Something worth looking forward to, eh?’
‘Aiyeeee!’ shrieked Malinge in appreciation.
‘Malinge, the son of Katimbe,