The covenant - James A. Michener [306]
Finally, after more than a year of this wandering, with two additional children being born to Nxumalo's wives and two to the other women, they came to a chain of low hills that looked much like the lovelier parts of Zululand, except that rivers did not flow through them. There were small streams, and Nxumalo began to think that beside one of them he might stop and build his kraal, and then one day as he came out of a valley he saw a pair of hills shaped like a woman's breasts, and they seemed a symbol of all the joys of the past and his dreams for the future: the deep love he had borne Thetiwe, his first wife; the tenderness he felt for his second, killed because of her cat; the passion he had known with Nonsizi of the Matabele; and the delight found in his two surviving wives, who had accepted the hardships of this journey without complaint. His six children were prospering and the men who had joined him in the flight had made themselves indispensable. The family deserved a halting place; it was with hope that he ascended the pass between the two hills, and when he reached the high point he looked down upon a lake and saw beside it the marked grave of the Hottentot Dikkop, buried there sixty years before by that wanderer Adriaan van Doorn.
'This has been the living place of men,' Nxumalo said, and with joy he led his people down the hill to take possession.
The Mfecane that raged through southeast Africa in the early decades of the nineteenth century produced excesses which went far in determining the development of an immense area.
The rampaging of the two kings, Shaka of the Zulu and Mzilikazi of the Matabele, set in motion sweeping forces which caused the death within a short period of time of huge numbers of people; chronicles unfavorable to blacks estimate two million dead within a decade, but considering the probable population of the area in those years, this seems grotesquely high. Whatever the loss, and it must have been more than a million, it was irremediable and accounted in part for the relatively weak defenses the surviving blacks would put up within a few short years when white men, armed with guns, began invading their territory. Starvation, cannibalism and death followed the devastation of the armies, while roving bands of renegades made orderly life impossible. Entire clans, which had known peaceful and productive histories, were eliminated.
The principal contributor to this desolation was not Shaka, whose victories tended to be military in the old sense, with understandable loss of life, but Mzilikazi, who invented the scorched-earth policy and applied it remorselessly. Why he slaughtered so incessantly cannot be explained. Nothing in his visible personality indicated that he would follow such a hideous course, and there seems to have been no military necessity for it. He killed, perhaps, because he sought to protect his small band, and the surest way to do so was to eliminate any potential opposition. Young men and male children became targets lest when they matured they seek revenge against the Matabele.
The widespread slaughter did not seem to alter Mzilikazi personally. His manners did not become rough, nor did he raise his voice or display anger. The young English clergyman who came out to Golan Mission in 1829 to replace Hilary Saltwood stayed there briefly, then, like his predecessor, felt obligated to move into the more dangerous northern territories, where he became a permanent friend to Mzilikazi; of him he wrote admiringly after the Mfecane had run itself out:
The king is a likable man of only medium height, fat and jolly, with a countenance so serene that it seems never to have known vigorous events or dangers. He speaks always in a low voice, is considerate of everyone, and has proved himself most eager to cooperate with