tribesmen and women and asking a few questions, and then going back and writing a book – a useless book full of errors, wrong impressions and just plain nonsense. Many of the books written by Europeans about Africans should be relegated to the dustbin.
There are doctors, missionaries and scientists who have spent years and years among Africans – many of them can even speak the local language better than the indigenous people – but what they know about them as human beings amounts to nothing. Many have studied the African only to compare him with the White man – intellectually for instance. Many more have studied the African in order to find justification for the policies of the ruling group they work for and support.
I once heard a well-known and respected White intellectual state that when Zulus perform a war dance before going into battle they are dancing themselves into a frenzy of rage and showing what they are going to do to their enemies on the battlefield. This statement, logical though it may sound, is as far from the truth as the Day Star is from the worm crawling on a rotten pumpkin.
Another fallacy dear to many people, both overseas and in South Africa, is that Africans practise polygamy as a sign of wealth and prestige. And if that is so then I, Vusamazulu Mutwa, am the favourite ‘wife’ of the first High Chief of Ashanti! Ask any anthropologist in South Africa who was the greatest Zulu King and he will reply instantly: ‘Tshaka, of course’. That is not so; Tshaka (or Shaka) was not the great Chief White historians make him out to be.
Thus you see what I am trying to achieve with this book: simply to lay the foundation for better understanding between two different types of human beings, by destroying wrong notions and false ‘facts’, and exposing much of what must be known at the risk of censure by both Black and White people.
There is a saying dear to lawyers that justice cannot be founded on lies, and I think the same is true with human association and mutual trust and understanding. A marriage of persons who fear and distrust each other cannot long survive, nor can one where the partners hold false ideas about each other.
The same is true between races in any country. There can be no real understanding between them so long as neither has a clear picture of the other: what it really thinks, believes in, hopes for, and why. You cannot found friendship on faulty guesswork because guessing breeds suspicion, hate and bloodshed. And there is much that is guesswork between Black and White. Many of the so-called problems facing 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
