Читать книгу Let My People Go - Albert Luthuli - Страница 7

The home of my fathers

AT ABOUT THE TIME when the Battle of Waterloo brought to an end the turbulent and disruptive career of the Emperor Napoleon, a man of similar ambition came to power in far off and little known Zululand. In a brief twelve-year reign, Shaka, undoubtedly the greatest of the Zulu kings, welded a number of bickering clans into a strong united nation.

Shaka achieved the feat of creating the Zulu nation by methods which were sometimes ruthless. All the same, his occasional ruthlessness was minor by comparison with that of modern dictators, and it was seldom, if ever, as calculated and sub-human as theirs.

Shaka has been much maligned by white South African historians. His outlook was that of his day, and when that is taken into account, and when all that can be said to his discredit has been said, this king of legendary physique emerges as a brilliant general, and a ruler of great courage, intelligence, and ability. Without the moral support of any precedent, he had the strength to withstand (and on occasion to expose) the power exerted over his people by wizards. His reorganisation of his army was enough to make it in his time the mightiest military force in Africa.

Nevertheless, Shaka did violate some of the customs of his people, and this was his undoing. In particular, he over-used his army, allowing his soldiers little time for the normal pursuits of peace. As the years passed, his ambitions got the better of him. That he could be despotic was probably no great matter, but his people expected their king to temper this with benevolence. Shaka’s rule grew harsher. Finally, he estranged himself from his people by setting up as an unqualified dictator. For a time his subjects submitted to arbitrary rule as loyally as they could. In the end, however, Shaka went the way of most tyrants. Even his army appears to have connived at his assassination by his half-brother, Dingane. The extent to which he had forfeited the allegiance of his subjects is seen in that no murmur was raised against his assassins. Shaka died unmourned by the nation which he had raised out of obscurity.

Dingane succeeded him, inheriting a kingdom which extended from Swaziland to the Transkei, and from the Drakensberg range to the Indian Ocean.

Within this realm, far to the south of the royal capital and fifty miles beyond the Tugela river, a small party of English traders had been admitted in the time of Shaka. They formed a tiny settlement in the neighbourhood of what is now Durban. For the moment they were allowed to remain there by permission of the Zulu monarch, a community in whose fortunes neither the Zulus nor the white government at the Cape were notably interested.

Europe was recovering from Napoleon. The Cape was pre-occupied with the beginnings of the Trek, and with frontier wars against the amaXhosa. Zululand was recovering from the later years of Shaka. Nobody at that time can have had any idea of what the coming of the whites to Natal was going to mean by way both of gain and of loss. Still hidden in the future lay both the rape of Zululand and the impact of Western enlightenment.

For a time after Dingane’s accession the white settlement consisted as in Shaka’s time of a handful of traders, hunters, and adventurers. The first appearance of a more benign element occurred in 1835. In that year the Church followed Trade – for the time being the Flag hung back.

In January, 1835, a British Naval Commander, Captain Allen Francis Gardiner, arrived in Natal. He had abandoned his career to come to work among the Zulus as a missionary pioneer. He was received by Dingane, and attempted to explain his strange mission to the Zulu monarch and his advisers. In the end he was told that the Zulus had no desire to learn his doctrine, but that he would be welcome to stay among them if he would teach them how to use the barrel-loading musket. Gardiner declined. Nevertheless, he was ultimately made induna, or headman, of Durban, which at that time the Zulus regarded as an outlying kraal. Then, in return for services in this capacity, he was given permission to found the first mission station1 north of the Tugela river.

In the meantime, independently, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions sent their first three men into the area. In the middle of January 1836 they arrived at Dingane’s capital, where they were received “with the utmost kindness and attention”. They formed a high opinion of the people. “We think,” one of them wrote home, “the Zoolahs have two most remarkable traits of character for a heathen community, honesty and chastity … So far as safety is concerned, with what I know of the Zoolahs, I would sooner trust a sister or wife alone, for days and nights, than in my own country.” Later in the year one of them, the Rev. George Champion, began work at kwaNginani. The other two, Dr Newton Adams and the Rev. Aldin Grout, gave their attention, for the time being, to those Zulus (about 3000) who had collected in the neighbourhood of the white settlement farther south.

Some time after this Grout left his work near Durban and, after failing to gain a foothold deep in Zululand, settled near the Umvoti river. Here he built his mission station, on a site today known as Groutville, or, more officially, the Umvoti Mission Reserve.

Groutville is my home, and the home of my fathers.

From the time when he began his labours here across the Umvoti, Grout’s missionary work began to show results. Before long it was obvious that Groutville was turning into a developing Christian community. One of the reasons for this was the intimacy of the relationship between missionary and people – an intimacy which has lamentably fallen away in more recent years.

The number of converts was initially small. But because the Christian life was being lived in the midst of the people, they had the chance to inspect and assess it over an indefinite period. An increasing number came to accept the truth of Christianity as time went on, while even those who did not accept it could see a part of its value and respect it. The attitude of the neighbouring chiefs was benign. They saw and allowed the development of this new society among their people.

The revolution which Christianity brought into the lives of converts was profound, as can perhaps be imagined. Conversion meant an entirely new way of life, a new outlook, a new set of beliefs – the creation, almost, of a new kind of people. They were still Zulus to the backbone – that remained unchanged except for a few irrelevant externals. But they were Christian Zulus, not heathen Zulus, and conversion affected their lives to the core.

The standard of early converts was high. A few members of the original Groutville Christian community did revert to heathen ways, the main reason being their desire to contract customary unions. But on the whole it would seem that the early converts lived closer to the tenets of their faith than many of their descendants do now.

If this is true it has possibly come about because missionaries have too easily become “supervisors of Native work” no longer identified with their people. Moreover, that missionaries are not usually representative of whites, and closer contact with most whites who claim to be Christians has brought disillusionment.2

But the worst impediment to the spread of Christianity and the maintenance of early standards nowadays is not even the fact that many white Christians are unwilling to practise what they profess. It is the recent glorification of the past, and the cry by the present government (with legislation to match) that Africans should “develop along their own lines.” That, indeed, corrupts Christian standards. The effort currently being made to pour us back into the mould of nineteenth-century African tribalism is detrimental to our advancement and to Christianity.

Augmented by a number of fugitives from the rule of a few anti-Christian chiefs farther north, the community grew, and with this growth came the need to have somebody in charge of secular affairs. In theory – Zulu theory, anyway – the local chief was in charge. In practice he tolerantly left the new community with its Christian ethos largely to its own devices, until Grout went to him and asked him to appoint a chieftain over Groutville.

Since the first man thus appointed was ill-attuned to the needs and customs of the new community, the arrangement came to an early end. The experiment was instructive, all the same, for when Grout asked for a new appointment to be made, the chief this time recommended a Groutville Christian for the office.

Among the few people who had shared Grout’s ups and downs was one man who had probably joined up with him soon after his arrival in Natal. This man, Ntaba Luthuli, was my grandfather, and it was he who became Groutville’s second head. I know little about him but, according to church records, he and his wife, Titisi, were Grout’s first two converts to Christianity. Both were zealous Christians whom, as the founders of the Luthuli Christian line, I deeply honour.

One of the few anecdotes which I recall about him suggests that on relations between church and state he was basically sound. Being a deacon (elder) of the Groutville congregation, he was asked, at a time of war between the Zulus and the British, to pray for the success of the Queen’s forces. The prayer stuck in Ntaba’s throat. “O God,” he prayed eventually, “protect the victims of whoever is the aggressor in this war!”

Partly (no doubt) because of his gifts of diplomacy, Ntaba remained at the head of Groutville affairs until his death. First his cousin, and then later my uncle, Martin, succeeded to the office. The interesting thing about Martin’s appointment is that it was, contrary to older Zulu custom, the occasion of a definite popular choice by the community. There was another candidate for the office, and the choice between the two was made by election in a democratic manner. I might add that, although four out of Groutville’s seven chiefs have been Luthulis, my family has never laid claim to any hereditary rights. The people of Groutville have found democratic methods effective and satisfactory. They have used these processes not only to elect chiefs, but on two occasions to replace them when their rule was felt to be not in the community’s interest. This has the advantage that the tribe need never chafe under harsh rule, the standard of rule must be reasonably high, chiefs need not fear the more traditional elimination by assassination or revolt, and the people understand the process fully.

In the time of Martin Luthuli’s chieftainship the Groutville community became more clearly established. Relationships between the reserve and the colonial administration became more fully defined, land boundaries were marked, and independence from surrounding non-Christian communities was accepted. The abasemakholweni (converts) were a people in their own right, a small settlement of peasant farmers eking out a modest existence on the soil. The authorities of the time accepted such mission settlements as examples to be encouraged. Recently, however, the attitude has altered. In some areas their line of development has been reversed by the government. Whatever motive inspires the Nationalist desire to return to the primitive, it is certain that they knowingly and deliberately destroy missionary influence in a heartbreaking way. Perhaps that is their motive.

In 1921 Josiah Mqebu succeeded Martin Luthuli as chief; and in 1935 I was elected to follow Josiah.