Now suddenly Tungata’s knees began to buckle, and he felt his sphincter loosening. He fought his body, hating its weakness. Gradually, he brought it under control.
The Shona captain came to stand in front of him and said in English, ‘Good joke, hey? Heavy, man, heavy!’ and grinned delightedly. Then he turned and shouted, ‘Bring water, quickly!’
A trooper brought an enamel dish, brimming with clear water, and the captain took it from him. Tungata could smell the water. It is said that the little Bushmen can smell water at a distance of many miles, but he had not truly believed it until now. The water smelled sweet as a freshly sliced honeydew melon, and his throat convulsed in a spasmodic swallowing reflex. He could not take his eyes off the dish.
The captain lifted the dish with both hands to his own lips and took a mouthful, then he rinsed his mouth and gargled with it noisily. He spat the mouthful and grinned at Tungata, then held the dish up before his face. Slowly and deliberately he tipped the dish and the water spilled into the dust at Tungata’s feet. It splashed his legs to the knees. Each drop felt cold as ice chips and every cell of Tungata’s body craved for it with a strength that was almost madness. The captain inverted the dish and let the last drops fall.
‘Heavy, man!’ he repeated mindlessly, and turned to shout an order at his men. They doubled away across the parade ground, leaving Tungata alone with the dead and the flies.
They came for him at sunset. When they cut his wrist bonds, he groaned involuntarily at the agonizing rush of fresh blood into his swollen hands, and fell to his knees. His legs could not support him. They had to half-carry him to his hut.
The room was bare, except for an uncovered toilet bucket in the corner and two bowls in the centre of the baked-mud floor. One dish contained a pint of water, the other a handful of stiff white maize cake. The cake was heavily oversalted. On the morrow, he would pay for eating it in the heavy coin of thirst, but he had to have strength.
He drank half the water and set the rest aside for the morning, and then he stretched out on the bare floor. Residual heat beat down on him from the corrugated iron roof, but by morning he knew he would be shivering with cold. He ached in every joint of his body, and his head pounded with the effects of the sun and the glare until he thought his skull would pop like a ripe cream of tartar pod on a baobab tree.
Outside in the darkness beyond the wire, the hyena packs disputed the feast that had been laid for them. Their cries and howls were a lunatic bedlam of greed, punctuated by the crunch of bone in great jaws.
Despite it all, Tungata slept, and woke to the tramp of feet and shouted orders in the dawn. Swiftly he gulped down the remains of the water to fortify himself, and then squatted over the bucket. His body had so nearly played him false the day before. He would not let it.happen today.
The door was flung open.
‘Out, you Matabele dog! Out of your stinking kennel!’
They marched him back to the wall. There were three other naked Matabele facing it already. Irrelevantly he noticed that they had limewashed the wall. They were very conscientious about that. He stood with his face two feet from the pristine white surface and steeled himself for the day ahead.
They shot the three other prisoners at noon. This time Tungata could not lead them in the singing. He tried, but his throat closed up on him. By the middle of the afternoon, his vision was breaking up into patches of darkness and stabbing white light. However, every time his legs collapsed and he fell forward against his bound wrists, the pain in his shoulder sockets as his arms twisted upwards revived him.
The thirst was unspeakable.
The patches of darkness in his head became deeper and lasted longer, the pain could no longer revive him completely. Out of one of the dark areas a voice spoke.
‘My dear fellow,’ said the voice. ‘This is all terribly distasteful to me.’
The voice of Peter Fungabera drove away the darkness and gave Tungata new strength. He struggled upright, lifted his head and forced his vision to clear. He looked at Peter Fungabera’s face and his hatred came to arm him. He cherished his hatred as a life-giving force.
Peter Fungabera was in fatigues and beret. He carried his swagger-stick in his right hand. At his side was a white man whom Tungata had never seen before. He was tall and slim and old. His head was freshly shaven, his skin ruined with cicatrices and his eyes were a strange pale shade of blue that Tungata found as repulsive and chilling as the stare of a cobra. He was watching Tungata with clinical interest, devoid of pity or other human sentiment.
‘I regret that you are not seeing Comrade Minister Zebiwe at his best,’ Peter told the white man. ‘He has lost a great deal of weight, but not here—’
With the tip of the swagger-stick, Peter Fungabera lifted the heavy black bunch of Tungata’s naked genitalia.
‘Have you ever seen anything like that?’ he asked, using the swagger-stick with the same dexterity as a chopstick. Bound to the stake, Tungata could not pull away. It was the ultimate degradation, this arrogant mauling and examination of his private parts.
‘Enough for three ordinary men,’ Peter estimated with mock admiration, and Tungata glared at him wordlessly.
The Russian made an impatient gesture and Peter nodded.
‘You are right. We are wasting time.’
He glanced at his wrist-watch and then turned to the captain who was close by, waiting with his squad.
‘Bring the prisoner up to the fort.’
They had to carry Tungata.
Peter Fungabera’s quarters in the blockhouse on the central rock kopje were spartanly furnished, but the dirt floor had been freshly swept and sprinkled with water. He and the Russian sat on one side of the trestle-table that served as a desk. There was a wooden bench on the opposite side, facing them.
The guards helped Tungata to the bench. He pushed their hands away and sat upright, glaring silently at the two men opposite him. Peter said something to the captain in Shona, and they brought a cheap grey blanket and draped it over Tungata’s shoulders. Another order, and the captain carried in a tray on which stood a bottle of vodka and another of whisky, two glasses, an ice-bucket and a pitcher of water.
Tungata did not look at the water. It took all his selfcontrol, but he kept his eyes on Peter Fungabera’s face.
‘Now, this is much more civilized,’ Peter said. ‘The Comrade Minister Zebiwe speaks no Shona, only the primitive Sindebele dialect, so we will use the language common to all of us – English.’
He poured vodka and whisky and as the ice clinked into the glasses Tungata winced, but kept his gaze fixed on Peter Fungabera.
‘This is a briefing,’ Peter explained. ‘Our guest,’ he indicated the old white man, ‘is a student of African history. He has read, and remembered, everything ever written about this country. While you, my dear Tungata, are a sprig of the house of Kumalo, the old robber chiefs of the Matabele, who for a hundred years raided and terrorized the legitimate owners of this land, the Mashona people. Therefore both of you might already know something of what I am about to relate. If that is so, I beg your indulgence.’ He sipped his whisky, and neither of the other two moved or spoke.
‘We must go back a hundred and fifty years,’ said Peter, ‘to when a young field commander of the Zulu King Chaka, a man who was the king’s favourite, failed to render up to Chaka the spoils of war. This man’s name was Mzilikazi, son of Mashobane of the Kumalo subtribe of Zulu, and he was to become the first Matabele. In passing, it is interesting to note that he set a precedent for the tribe which he was to found. Firstly, he was a master of rapine and plunder, a famous killer. Then he was a thief. He stole from his own sovereign. He failed to render to Chaka the king’s share of the spoils. Then Mzilikazi was a coward, for when Chaka sent for him to face retribution, he fled.’ Peter smiled at Tungata. ‘Killer, thief and coward – that was Mzilikazi, father of the Matabele, and that description fits every member of the tribe from then until the present day. Killer! Thief! Coward!’ He repeated the in
sults with relish, and Tungata watched his face with eyes that glowed.
‘So this paragon of manly virtues, taking with him his regiment of renegade Zulu warriors, fled northwards. He fell upon the weaker tribes in his path, and took their herds and their young women. This was the umfecane, the great killing. It is said that one million defenceless souls perished under the Matabele assegais. Certainly Mzilikazi left behind him an empty land, a land of bleached skulls and burned-out villages.
‘He blazed this path of destruction across the continent until he met, coming from the south-west, a foe more bloodthirsty, more avaricious even than he, the white men, the Boers. They shot down Mzilikazi’s vaunted killers like rabid dogs. So Mzilikazi, the coward, ran again. Northwards again.’
Peter gently agitated the ice cubes in his glass, a soft tinkling that made Tungata blink, but he did not look down at the glass.
‘Bold Mzilikazi crossed the Limpopo river and found a pleasant land of sweet grass and clear waters. It was inhabited by a gentle, pastoral people, descendants of a race who had built great cities of stone, a comely people whom Mzilikazi contemptuously named the “eaters of dirt” and referred to as his cattle. He treated them like cattle, killing them for sport, or husbanding them to provide his indolent warriors with slaves. The young women of Mashona, if they were nubile, were mounted for pleasure and used as breeding-stock to provide more warriors for his murderous impis – but then you know all this.’
‘The broad facts, yes,’ the old white man nodded. ‘But not your interpretation of them. Which proves that history is merely propaganda written by the victors.’
Peter laughed. ‘I hadn’t heard it put that way before. However, it’s true. Now, we, the Shona, are the ultimate victors, so it is our right to redraft history.’
‘Go on,’ the white man invited. ‘I find this instructive.’
‘Very well. In the year 1868, as white men measure time, Mzilikazi, this great fat debauched and diseased killer, died. It is amusing to recall that his followers kept his corpse fifty-six days in the heat of Matabeleland before committing it to burial, so he stank in death as powerfully as he did in life. Another endearing Matabele trait.’ He waited for Tungata to protest, and when he did not, went on.
‘One of his sons succeeded him, Lobengula, “the one who drives like the wind”, as fat and devious and bloodthirsty as his illustrious father. However, at almost the same time as he took the chieftainship of the Matabele, two seeds were sown that would soon grow into great creeping vines that would choke and finally bring the fat bull of Kumalo crashing to earth.’ He paused for effect, like a practised storyteller, and then held up one finger. ‘Firstly, far to the south of his plundered domains, the white men had found on a desolate kopje in the veld, a little shiny pebble, and secondly from a dismal island far to the north, a sickly young white man embarked on a ship, seeking clean dry air for his weak lungs.
‘The kopje was soon dug away by the white ants, and became a hole a mile across and four hundred feet deep. The white men called it Kimberley, after the foreign secretary in England who condoned its theft from the local tribes.
‘The sickly white man was named Cecil John Rhodes, and he proved to be even more devious and cunning and unprincipled than any Matabele king. He simply ate up the other white men who had discovered the kopje of shiny stones. He bullied and bribed and cheated and wheedled until he owned it all. He became the richest man in the world.
‘However, the winning of these shiny pebbles called for enormous amounts of physical labour by tens of thousands of men. Whenever there is hard work to be done, where does the white man in Africa look?’ Peter chuckled and left his rhetorical question unanswered.
‘Cecil Rhodes offered simple food, a cheap gun and a few coins for three years of a black man’s life. The black men, unsophisticated and naive, accepted those wages, and made their master a multi-millionaire many times over.
‘Amongst the black men who came to Kimberley were the young amadoda of the Matabele. They had been sent by Lobengula – have I mentioned that Lobengula was a thief? His instruction to his young men was to steal the shiny pebbles and bring them back to him. Tens of thousands of Matabele made the long journey southwards to the diamond diggings and they brought back diamonds.
‘The diamonds they picked were the largest and the brightest, the ones that showed up most clearly in the washing and processing. How many diamonds? One Matabele whom the white police caught had swallowed 348 carats of diamonds worth £3000 in the coin of those days – say £300,000 in today’s terms. Another had slit open his thigh and pouched in his own flesh a single diamond that weighed 200 carats.’ Peter shrugged. ‘Who can say what its present value might have been? Perhaps £2,000,000.’
The old white man who had been aloof, even disinterested, during the first part of this recital, was now leaning forward intently, his head twisted to watch Peter Fungabera’s lips.
‘Those were the few that the white police caught, but there were thousands upon thousands of Matabele diamond-smugglers who were never caught. Remember, in the early days of the diggings, there was virtually no control over the black labourers, they came and went as the fancy moved them. So some stayed a week before drifting away, others worked a full three-year contract before leaving, but when they went, the shiny pebbles went with them – in their hair, in the heels of their new boots, in their mouths, in their bellies, stuffed up their anuses or in the vaginas of their women – the diamonds went out in thousands upon thousands of carats.
‘Of course, it could not last. Rhodes introduced the compound system. The labourers were locked up in barbed-wire compounds for the full three years of their contract. Before they left they were stripped naked, and placed in special quarantine huts for ten days, during which time their heads and pudenda were shaved, and their bodies minutely examined by the white doctors, their rear ends were thoroughly probed and any recently healed scars sounded, and if necessary, reopened with a surgeon’s scalpel.
‘They were given massive doses of castor oil, and finely meshed screens were placed under the latrines so that their droppings could be washed and processed as though they were the blue earth of the diggings. However, the Matabele were crafty thieves, and they still found ways to get the stones out of the compounds. The river of diamonds had been reduced to a trickle, but the trickle went northwards still to Lobengula.
‘Again you ask, how many? We can only guess. There was a Matabele named Bazo, the Axe, who left Kimberley with a belt of diamonds around his waist. You have heard of Bazo, son of Gandang, my dear Tungata. He was your great-grandfather. He became a notorious Matabele induna, and slew hundreds of defenceless Mashona during his depredations. The belt of diamonds that he laid before Lobengula, so legend tells us, weighed the equivalent of ten ostrich eggs. As a single ostrich egg has the same capacity as two dozen domestic hens’ eggs, and even allowing for legend’s exaggerations, we come to a figure in excess of five million pounds sterling in today’s inflated currency.
‘Another source tells us that Lobengula had five pots full of first-water diamonds. That is five gallons of diamonds, enough to rock the monopoly of De Beers’ central diamond-selling organization.
‘Yet another verbal history talks of the ritual khombisile that Lobengula held for his indunas, his tribal counsellors. Khombisile is the Sindebele word for a showing, or putting on display,’ Peter explained to the white man, and then went on. ‘In the privacy of his great hut, the king would strip naked and his wives would anoint his bloated body with thick beef grease. Then they would stick diamonds onto the grease, until his entire body was covered in a mosaic of precious stones, a living sculpture covered with a hundred million pounds’ worth of diamonds.
‘So that is the answer to your question, gentlemen. Lobengula probably had more diamonds than have ever been assembled in one place at one time, other than in the vaults of De Beers’ central selling organization in London.
‘While this was happening, Rhodes, the rich
est man in the world, sitting in Kimberley and obsessed with the concept of empire, looked northwards and dreamed. Such was the strength of his obsession that he began to speak of “my north”. In the end, he took it as he had done the diamond diggings of Kimberley – a little at a time. He sent his envoys to negotiate with Lobengula a concession to prospect and exploit the minerals of his domains, which included the land of the Mashona.
‘From the white queen in England, Rhodes obtained approval for the formation of a Royal Charter Company, and then he sent a private army of hard and ruthless men to occupy these concessions. Lobengula had not expected anything like this. A few men digging little holes, yes, but not an army of brutal adventurers.
‘Firstly, Lobengula protested to no avail. The white men pressed him harder and harder, until they forced him to a fatal error of judgement. Lobengula, feeling his very existence threatened, assembled his impis in a warlike display.
‘This was the provocation for which Rhodes and his henchmen had worked and planned. They fell upon Lobengula in a savage and merciless campaign. They machine-gunned his famous impis, and shattered the Matabele nation. Then they galloped to Lobengula’s kraal at GuBulawayo. However, Lobengula, that wily thief and coward, had already fled northwards, taking with him his wives, his herds, what remained of his fighting impis – and his diamonds.
‘A small force of white men pursued him for part of the way, until they ran into a Matabele ambush and were slaughtered to a man. More white men would have followed Lobengula, but the rains came and turned the veld to mud and the rivers to torrents. So Lobengula escaped with his treasure. He wandered on northwards without a goal, until the will to go on deserted him.
‘In a wild and lonely place, he called Gandang, his half-brother, to him. He entrusted to him the care of the nation, and, coward to the very end, ordered his witch-doctor to prepare a poisonous potion and drank it down.
‘Gandang sat his body upright in a cave. Around his body he placed all Lobengula’s possessions: his assegais and regimental plumes and furs, his sleeping-mat and head-stool, his guns and knives and beer-pots – and his diamonds. Lobengula’s corpse was wrapped in a sitting position in the green skin of a leopard and at his feet were placed the five gallon beer-pots of diamonds. Then the entrance to the cave was carefully sealed and disguised, and Gandang led the Matabele nation back to become the slaves of Rhodes and his Royal Charter Company.