Kadimo,’ said she, ‘wake up, my love.’
For a long time after that Ojoyo and Kadimo sat side by side in a dark recess of the cave conversing in low voices. Ojoyo told the youth about what had happened in Lumbedu’s kraal that night and concluded by saying she feared Lumbedu had been killed.
‘Now you . . . belong . . . Kadimo, . . . all his,’ said the youth who could by then speak a few words of the language of Ojoyo’s tribe.
‘Yes, Kadimo.’
‘When dawn comes, we . . . go away . . . back to my village. You come . . . back with me.’
‘And Zozo too?’ asked Ojoyo.
‘No, Kadimo hates Zozo . . . Kadimo wants Ojoyo . . . alone.’
‘As you say, Kadimo.’
By midday of the day that followed Ojoyo and Kadimo were far away from the burnt-out kraal which Ojoyo had ruled with cruelty and insolence only the day before.
Ojoyo was beginning to become very afraid of Kadimo as his attitude rapidly changed from one of respect to insolence. He had now stopped calling her Queen and addressed her as ‘you’. He even threatened to beat her up if she tried to sit down and rest. But the greatest surprise was yet to come.
‘I’m tired, I want you to carry me on your back, you fat cow,’ he indicated in a broken tongue.
‘Fat . . . fat cow!’ gasped Ojoyo. ‘Did I hear you call me a fat cow?’
‘Yes . . . you fat cow,’ said the youth. ‘Now bend down . . . and carry me.’
‘Never!’
Kadimo’s great knobkierie thudded solidly against Ojoyo’s royal ribs many times. She screamed and writhed and rolled on the ground as Kadimo gave her the greatest beating of her life. At long last the pain became such that Ojoyo began to whimper like a child and to beg Kadimo not to hit her again.
‘Why are you so cruel to me?’ she sobbed. ‘I am your Queen.’
‘You are my supper . . . you are my edible queen!’
‘What, you mean that you are a cannibal!’
‘I am Kadimo . . . son of Dimo . . . son of Sodimo . . . my father . . . King of the Cannibals.’
‘But you can’t eat me, beloved one,’ pleaded Ojoyo. ‘I love you and I am still beautiful . . .’
‘You . . . more beautiful . . . in stewpot. Tonight . . . we come to father’s village. Come . . . carry me!’
How long Ojoyo carried the youth she did not know – it seemed like hundreds of years. When she stumbled and fell, throwing Kadimo, he always got up to beat her cruelly before getting on her back again. On and on she stumbled until the skies became as black as midnight and bolts of bluish lightning began to scourge the tortured heavens, while peal after peal of thunder shook the very roots of the earth. Kadimo prodded his human steed to the shelter of the forest where they found a small cave and in this cave Ojoyo found a chance to rest.
‘Not far from . . . father’s village. When arrive . . . Kadimo shall have . . . nice slice . . . for supper.’
‘Kadimo . . . I beg you . . .’
But she got no further as a squat, hunchbacked and incredibly ugly shape burst into the cave and seized Kadimo by the ankle, dragging him outside into the howling rains. There was a short savage struggle, a loud gurgling scream and silence. Then the bowlegged and hunchbacked monstrosity called Zozo, who had trailed them relentlessly across the plains and through the forests, entered the cave.
‘Zozo!’ cried Ojoyo. ‘You saved me – he was going to eat me!’
‘Yes, I saved you, but not for long. You knew Vunakwe?’ asked the hunchback.
‘Yes, I knew her very well; she fell into the Zambezi and . . .’
‘You lie shamefully . . . you killed Vunakwe, and Zozo is Vunakwe’s brother.’
‘Vunakwe had no brothers, I knew her father, her whole family.’
‘Father of Vunakwe . . . never owned that Zozo was his son, because Zozo a deformed thing. Zozo always lived alone. Now you die.’
‘No Zozo! You saved me . . .’
‘Die Ojoyo!’
A copper knife stabbed down fiercely . . . once . . . twice . . .
* * *
After Lumbedu’s death the Strange Ones came out into the open and took over the astonished land. Soon hundreds of people began to feel the sting of the slave-driver’s whip within the borders of their own native land. Dozens, scores of kraals and villages stood empty, their inhabitants having been forced into the Strange Ones’ ships and taken away across the seas, never to be seen again.
The shocked land saw sights it had never seen before – long lines of men, women and children tied together with chains like living beads on a string, hauling sleds of stones the Strange Ones used to build great forts all over the land as far south as beyond the Herero. The shocked land also saw thousands of its black sons made to dig into the bowels of the earth like so many ants, to bring up iron ore, copper, and the yellow ‘sun metal’. The Sacred Iron Mountain of Taba-Tsipi, or Taba-Zimbi, became a mass of tunnels in which tens of thousands of chained slaves worked and died.
Long trains of oxen and even tamed zebras began to wind their way eastward over mountains and across plains, heavily laden with gold, iron ore and ivory, to be loaded on to ships of the Strange Ones and taken across the sea.
Elephants and hippos – the animals hitherto regarded as sacred by nearly all the tribes – were butchered by the Strange Ones from one corner of the agonised land to the other, the elephants for their ivory and the hippos for their bones and blubber.
Many tribes fled from the wanton destruction and oppression of the Strange Ones and some of these tribes even reached that country which is now Swaziland.
Contrary to those who claim to know about the Black people, the Swazi people did not branch from the Nguni tribes that migrated into the lands south of the Limpopoma about eight hundred years ago. The Swazi and the Bomvana tribes came south of the Limpopoma much earlier than did the Nguni. When the Nguni came, they found the Swazi had degenerated to such an extent that they no longer built villages, but lived in trees like monkeys; hence the popular insult of ‘Tree Dwellers’ the Nguni (from whom the Zulus sprang) applied to the Swazis.
The Swazis adopted the culture and even the language of the Nguni, which they speak with a hissing accent. They even adopted the weapons and the battle tactics of the Nguni. The Swazi are well known for their habit of wearing their hair very long and even dyeing it red with clay and wild root juices. They still imitate the long hair of those long-dead White men who invaded the Black land more than
