Indaba, My Children: African Tribal History, Legends, Customs And Religious Beliefs. Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa
And do their worst they did. But never once did the brave young man cry out, even when his entire lower abdomen had become one bloody mess of spurting blood and tattered flesh. They held him down, but he never so much as attempted to struggle and at long last he opened his mouth and gave one long shuddering gasp.
‘Now you are going to squeal, my bush-pig. Come on, let us hear you squeal,’ Ojoyo cried.
‘No, you foul she-hyaena,’ gasped Chikongo. ‘I shall not cry out. But I am feeling very sorry for you all. Today you kill me, but tomorrow, or a few moons from now, you . . . you too shall be dying. You have fallen like trapped flies into the web of Death and soon he shall come and consume you all.’
With that, the son of Mburu, son of Timburu, died. He died as his valiant father had told him to die; he died as his grandfather Timburu had died so long ago – bravely, without a murmur.
‘He cursed us . . . he cursed us with his last breath,’ sobbed Vunakwe, who had taken no part in the ghastly execution. ‘We are all cursed.’
‘Be silent, you weak-bellied bitch,’ snarled Ojoyo. ‘Some of you bring out Lulinda quickly.’
Lulinda was dragged out of her hut and flung brutally upon her dead lover’s body and all eyes turned towards the tall masked form of the Tribal Avenger for further instructions.
‘Did you make the raft?’ snapped the Tribal Avenger to Gumbu, the son of Lumbedu.
‘Yes, Mighty One, we did.’
‘Then drag this adultress and this dead dog out of here to the riverside and tie them together face to face. Roll them on to the raft and tie them firmly to it. Then push the raft into the river – the scaly crocodiles shall deal with both dead and living. I have spoken.’
How long Lulinda drifted down the Zambezi she did not know; it seemed like aeons and aeons. Her body was numb and her brain was fast approaching the valley of madness. She kept her eyes tightly shut all the time because whenever she opened them she stared into the wide-open eyes of her dead Chikongo. The cruel leather thongs that tied her to the raft were biting into her flesh like red-hot copper knives, and the wake of blood – Chikongo’s blood – that the raft was leaving behind, was attracting whole tribes of ravaging crocodiles. Something huge, scaly and long-snouted clambered on to the raft and fastened its teeth on the dead man’s leg, towing the raft nearer to the south bank of the river. But just when Lulinda had given herself up for dead, she saw a canoe creep into her limited field of vision, a canoe that turned its prow and bore down upon her raft and the swarming crocodiles clustering about it. Lulinda saw that there was only one man in the canoe – she could see him clearly silhouetted against the last glow of the dying sun.
The darting canoe rammed the raft and tore it out of the crowd of crocodiles swimming around it. Then Lulinda felt a weapon of unbelievable sharpness cutting her bonds to pieces. She felt strong hands snatch her out of the very jaws of a crocodile. She had a glimpse of a smiling thin-lipped mouth, a straight nose and a pair of bright black eyes. She saw a face handsome in a strange alien way – a face she had seen before. It was the face of the odd man who had escaped from the Strange Ones at Lumbedu’s kraal. Lulinda passed into the vale of unconsciousness in the arms of the light brown-skinned foreigner.
The legends say the odd man took Lulinda away to the safety of the great forests in the south of what was in later years to be known as the land of the Varozwi people. There the odd man gathered all the small tribes and clans and welded them into one mighty tribe to which he tried to impart some of the arts and the knowledge of his faraway native land. Even today the tribe this tawny-skinned foreigner founded is known throughout the land of the Black Tribes as the only one that practises the strange art of fortune-telling by gazing at the stars. The Varozwi is the only tribe practising mummification of its chiefs. Before a young Varozwi prince can assume the headdress and kaross of chief, he is forced to spend four nights in a cave in which are the mummified bodies of his father and ancestors. He must pray to each of these desiccated corpses for strength and wisdom and demand from each a blessing and a spiritual light to show him the road of life.
But, apart from the fact that the odd man founded the Varozwi Tribe, no clear details of his adventures and eventual death have reached us from across the gulf of time and his is one of the few stories in the land of the tribes where the story-teller must speak but a few words and be silent, because there is no more left to tell, for Time, that devouring monster, has devoured the rest.
Gumbu, the rascally son of a rascally father, knelt before his fat parents Lumbedu and Ojoyo and gave them advice – advice that was to affect thousands of lives and change the history of the whole southern part of the land of the tribes; advice that was to lead Lumbedu along the downward path to the valley of undoing and a miserable death.
Gumbu told his parents that since they were the only people who knew what the Strange Ones wanted, they should be the only people to trade big baskets full of corn, yams and pots full of milk for the superior iron and bronze weapons of the Strange Ones. With these weapons, Lumbedu could easily seize power and rule the whole land as a High Chief. Gumbu pointed out with jackal-like cunning that a few men armed with these metal weapons could easily rout a whole army armed with bone-tipped spears and stone axes, as was the case with all the armies of the tribal chiefs at this time. It must be remembered that at this time the only metal that Black people knew was copper, with which they made ornaments and knives for stabbing only.
The selfish, ambitious old charlatan Lumbedu fell down on his hands and knees and actually kissed his son’s feet like a beggarly slave for the suggestion he had made and the next few days saw a brisk trade between Lumbedu and the ships of the Strange Ones, which came crawling like many-legged sea serpents up the Zambezi river. Lumbedu’s wives and daughters would put full baskets of corn or yams in a particular place on the bank of the Zambezi and then beat a tattoo on a big drum before retiring into the forest. The ship of the Strange Ones would then edge nearer to the bank and its occupants would pick up the baskets, leaving a pile of spears in exchange. Within five days, the witchdoctor had enough weapons to arm close to two hundred men and it was then that Gumbu gathered together a small army of ruffianly cut-throats and armed them with the deadly metal spears and swords. In one short, savage battle he overthrew the High Chief of the land, Chungwe, and slew him on the doorstep of his own Royal Hut.
Lumbedu became a High Chief in one day. The gross, whining and utterly selfish wretch suddenly found himself waddling like an overfed vulture at the head of twenty thousand subjects and the heady fumes of the mead of power and ambition made him drunk as yesterday’s nightmare. He wanted to conquer until he ruled the whole world and traded and pleaded with the Strange Ones for more weapons and still more.
His wild, undisciplined armies tore like wildfire across the shocked land and chief after chief fell before the new weapons of metal, and tribe after tribe was enslaved. Gumbu’s savage hordes swept southward into the land of the ancient people known as the Ba-Tswana who, blessed by the Great Spirit itself centuries earlier, had been living in peace for generations. Here, in this land, Gumbu demanded that the defeated tribal chief, Mulaba, should give him his daughter Temana as a wife and as a hostage, and he took this lovely maiden back home with him to Lumbedu’s kraal after leaving governors to hold the land in his father’s name.
On the way back, however, Gumbu was stricken by the eye disease called karkatchi and became totally blind in less than six weeks. Then one night Temana led the blind Gumbu to the very edge of a great cliff and pushed him over before leaping to her own death. The legends say that where Temana fell at the base of the cliff a cluster of tiny sweet-smelling red wild flowers soon grew, the origin of the letemana flowers which still grow there among the rocks to this day.
Meanwhile Lumbedu had become the undisputed chief of the biggest empire the tribes had ever seen – an empire that sprawled from the Inyangani mountains to the shores of the western ocean. What is so amusing about Lumbedu’s