HEARING A FATHER'S STORIES

When we began work on this chapter, we knew that we wanted to start it with a story about a personal journey of discovery into the archive of South Africa's history in the period before European colonial rule took firm hold. We remembered the excitement we had felt on reading a newspaper article written by Nomalanga Mkhize, who was then a lecturer in history at Rhodes University in the Eastern Cape. In the article she tells of travelling, in her youth, with her father to visit her mother's family. During these long road trips, he told her stories about the past. These were stories that she had never seen in a book or heard of at school. We searched for a copy of the article in our files of source material for this book, and there we found it: ‘Education for the Elite Lacks Local Intelligence’, published in the Johannesburg newspaper Business Day on 26 January 2016. We re-read the article, and agreed that it was just what we were looking for; it had so many layers, so many stories of different journeys within it. So, with the permission of Professor Mkhize, who is now affiliated to Nelson Mandela University in Port Elizabeth and also to Rhodes University, and with acknowledgement to Business Day, we here republish her article.

I love the discipline of history and I know exactly why. It is because on long trips to my maternal clan home in Mpumalanga, my father would recount the histories of Southern Africa before full colonial conquest.

Every geographic feature we passed on the landscape triggered a story, one after the other. Each story had a backstory, an explanatory side-note that filled in the bigger picture.

To grapple with this history, my father would have to go through genealogies of numerous clans, their oral poetry, and all kinds of idioms to illuminate the social and political dynamics that were shaping the landscape of these Africans.

And it was on one such trip that I discovered that one of my clan ancestors, Zihlandlo kaGcwabe, was one of Shaka kaSenzangakhona's best friends.

Well, ‘best friend’ was the way I interpreted it as a child.

I could hardly believe it, that we had a history that directly linked our family to the powerful figure of Shaka.