command, I renounced Christianity and underwent the ‘Ceremony of Purification’ in order to begin training as a witchdoctor and also in preparation for assuming the post of Custodian of our sacred Tribal Relics, in the event of my grandfather’s death.
I have now completed my training as a medicine man, and have gained a lot of knowledge that I shall lay out in this book.
In March 1960, a young Basuto woman whom I loved, and hoped to wed in place of my present faithless spouse, was among those who died when police fired on the crowd at Sharpeville, near Vereeniging.
On the night before she was to be buried her parents, her brother and two sisters, and three of their children, cut off tufts of their hair and threw them into her still open coffin, swearing to avenge her if it took them a million years, even if they should die in doing so. I took what is called a ‘Chief’s Great Blood Oath’, cutting a vein in my hand (the left one) and letting ten drops of blood flow into one of the gaping bullet wounds that defiled her dark brown slender body, swearing to tell the world the truth about the Bantu people and so save many of my countrymen the agony of the bereavement we felt. I swore to do this, come imprisonment, torture or death, and even if the very fires of Hell or the cold of Eternal Darkness stood in my way.
This book is only the beginning of the fulfilment of my oath, an oath whose keeping has become the only purpose of my intolerable life, and which will still be binding on my children and their children’s children. So, even if this manuscript is destroyed, I shall write other works like it until one of them does get published – be it after my death.
Book One
The Bud Slowly Opens
THIS I CHOOSE
Oh, give me not the strident, Demon wail
Of penny whistle and tea-chest guitar;
Nor give me tales of those who rode the trail
Deep in the West of far America!
Oh, not for me the songs and nonsense tales
That thrill the modern rabble rout
Who, leaving far behind their tribal vales
With traitor zest, ape ‘culture’ from without!
Rather than the modern crooner’s foreign voice,
Or the loud howls of modern township jive,
I shall leave far behind that mad’ning noise
And hurry home where Tribal Elders live.
There, ’neath baobabs or flat-topped munga trees,
Where nestling birds with many tongues argue,
And flaming aloes bless the smiling breeze
With heady scent; and where the distant view
Of scowling mountains ’gainst the silver sky
With dread and reverence fill the misted eye!
Where, on the gentle slopes of ancient hills there browse
The bearded goats, the sheep, the shambling cows;
And loud above his lowing wives the bull
With awful bellow, dares the distant foe!
There I shall sit before Ubabamkulu
Who shall relate to me the Tales of Yore.
There I shall kneel before the old Gegulu
And hear legends of Those-that-lived-Before.
* * *
There I shall live, in spirit, once again
In those great days now gone forever more;
And see again upon the timeless plain
The massed impi of so long ago!
The words of men long dead shall reach my soul
From the dark depths of all-consuming Time
Which, like a muti, shall inflame my whole—
And guide my life’s canoe to shores sublime!
Clear with the soul’s time-penetrating eye
I shall see great empires rise, flourish and die.
I shall see deeds of courage or of shame
Now carved forever on the Drum of Fame.
With Shaka’s legions I shall march again—
A puppet knowing neither joy nor fear;
Which, trained to kill, heeds neither wound nor pain
And knows no other love save for its spear.
I shall feel once again the searing heat
Of love in hearts that have long ceased to pulse
And with Mukanda shall captain the fleet
Of war canoes; and storm Zima-Mbje’s walls.
Here, in these stories still told by the old,
I feel the soul and heartbeat of my race,
Which I cannot, in tales by strangers told—
For these, within my heart I have no place!
The tree grows well and strong, Oh children mine,
That hath its roots deep in the native earth;
So honour always thy ancestral line
And traditions of thy land of birth!
THE SACRED STORY OF THE TREE OF LIFE
THE SELF-CREATED
No stars were there – no sun,
Neither moon nor earth—
Nothing existed but darkness itself—
A darkness everywhere.
Nothing existed but nothingness,
A Nothingness neither hot nor cold,
Dead nor alive—
A Nothingness far worse than nothing
And frightening in its utter nothingness.
For how long
