The Leopard Hunts in Darkness (43 page)

‘He blazed this path of destruction across the continent until he met, coming from the south-west, a foe more bloodthirsty, more avaricious even than he, the white men, the Boers. They
shot down Mzilikazi’s vaunted killers like rabid dogs. So Mzilikazi, the coward, ran again. Northwards again.’

Peter gently agitated the ice cubes in his glass, a soft tinkling that made Tungata blink, but he did not look down at the glass.

‘Bold Mzilikazi crossed the Limpopo river and found a pleasant land of sweet grass and clear waters. It was inhabited by a gentle, pastoral people, descendants of a race who had built
great cities of stone, a comely people whom Mzilikazi contemptuously named the “eaters of dirt” and referred to as his cattle. He treated them like cattle, killing them for sport, or
husbanding them to provide his indolent warriors with slaves. The young women of Mashona, if they were nubile, were mounted for pleasure and used as breeding-stock to provide more warriors for his
murderous impis – but then you know all this.’

‘The broad facts, yes,’ the old white man nodded. ‘But not your interpretation of them. Which proves that history is merely propaganda written by the victors.’

Peter laughed. ‘I hadn’t heard it put that way before. However, it’s true. Now, we, the Shona, are the ultimate victors, so it is our right to redraft history.’

‘Go on,’ the white man invited. ‘I find this instructive.’

‘Very well. In the year 1868, as white men measure time, Mzilikazi, this great fat debauched and diseased killer, died. It is amusing to recall that his followers kept his corpse fifty-six
days in the heat of Matabeleland before committing it to burial, so he stank in death as powerfully as he did in life. Another endearing Matabele trait.’ He waited for Tungata to protest, and
when he did not, went on.

‘One of his sons succeeded him, Lobengula, “the one who drives like the wind”, as fat and devious and bloodthirsty as his illustrious father. However, at almost the same time
as he took the chieftainship of the Matabele, two seeds were sown that would soon grow into great creeping vines that would choke and finally bring the fat bull of Kumalo crashing to earth.’
He paused for effect, like a practised storyteller, and then held up one finger. ‘Firstly, far to the south of his plundered domains, the white men had found on a desolate kopje in the veld,
a little shiny pebble, and secondly from a dismal island far to the north, a sickly young white man embarked on a ship, seeking clean dry air for his weak lungs.

‘The kopje was soon dug away by the white ants, and became a hole a mile across and four hundred feet deep. The white men called it Kimberley, after the foreign secretary in England who
condoned its theft from the local tribes.

‘The sickly white man was named Cecil John Rhodes, and he proved to be even more devious and cunning and unprincipled than any Matabele king. He simply ate up the other white men who had
discovered the kopje of shiny stones. He bullied and bribed and cheated and wheedled until he owned it all. He became the richest man in the world.

‘However, the winning of these shiny pebbles called for enormous amounts of physical labour by tens of thousands of men. Whenever there is hard work to be done, where does the white man in
Africa look?’ Peter chuckled and left his rhetorical question unanswered.

‘Cecil Rhodes offered simple food, a cheap gun and a few coins for three years of a black man’s life. The black men, unsophisticated and naive, accepted those wages, and made their
master a multi-millionaire many times over.

‘Amongst the black men who came to Kimberley were the young
amadoda
of the Matabele. They had been sent by Lobengula – have I mentioned that Lobengula was a thief? His
instruction to his young men was to steal the shiny pebbles and bring them back to him. Tens of thousands of Matabele made the long journey southwards to the diamond diggings and they brought back
diamonds.

‘The diamonds they picked were the largest and the brightest, the ones that showed up most clearly in the washing and processing. How many diamonds? One Matabele whom the white police
caught had swallowed 348 carats of diamonds worth £3000 in the coin of those days – say £300,000 in today’s terms. Another had slit open his thigh and pouched in his own
flesh a single diamond that weighed 200 carats.’ Peter shrugged. ‘Who can say what its present value might have been? Perhaps £2,000,000.’

The old white man who had been aloof, even disinterested, during the first part of this recital, was now leaning forward intently, his head twisted to watch Peter Funga-bera’s lips.

‘Those were the few that the white police caught, but there were thousands upon thousands of Matabele diamond-smugglers who were never caught. Remember, in the early days of the diggings,
there was virtually no control over the black labourers, they came and went as the fancy moved them. So some stayed a week before drifting away, others worked a full three-year contract before
leaving, but when they went, the shiny pebbles went with them – in their hair, in the heels of their new boots, in their mouths, in their bellies, stuffed up their anuses or in the vaginas of
their women – the diamonds went out in thousands upon thousands of carats.

‘Of course, it could not last. Rhodes introduced the compound system. The labourers were locked up in barbed-wire compounds for the full three years of their contract. Before they left
they were stripped naked, and placed in special quarantine huts for ten days, during which time their heads and pudenda were shaved, and their bodies minutely examined by the white doctors, their
rear ends were thoroughly probed and any recently healed scars sounded, and if necessary, reopened with a surgeon’s scalpel.

‘They were given massive doses of castor oil, and finely meshed screens were placed under the latrines so that their droppings could be washed and processed as though they were the blue
earth of the diggings. However, the Matabele were crafty thieves, and they still found ways to get the stones out of the compounds. The river of diamonds had been reduced to a trickle, but the
trickle went northwards still to Lobengula.

‘Again you ask, how many? We can only guess. There was a Matabele named Bazo, the Axe, who left Kimberley with a belt of diamonds around his waist. You have heard of Bazo, son of Gandang,
my dear Tungata. He was your great-grandfather. He became a notorious Matabele induna, and slew hundreds of defenceless Mashona during his depredations. The belt of diamonds that he laid before
Lobengula, so legend tells us, weighed the equivalent of ten ostrich eggs. As a single ostrich egg has the same capacity as two dozen domestic hens’ eggs, and even allowing for legend’s
exaggerations, we come to a figure in excess of five million pounds sterling in today’s inflated currency.

‘Another source tells us that Lobengula had five pots full of first-water diamonds. That is five gallons of diamonds, enough to rock the monopoly of De Beers’ central diamond-selling
organization.

‘Yet another verbal history talks of the ritual
khombisile
that Lobengula held for his indunas, his tribal counsellors.
Khombisile
is the Sindebele word for a showing, or
putting on display,’ Peter explained to the white man, and then went on. ‘In the privacy of his great hut, the king would strip naked and his wives would anoint his bloated body with
thick beef grease. Then they would stick diamonds onto the grease, until his entire body was covered in a mosaic of precious stones, a living sculpture covered with a hundred million pounds’
worth of diamonds.

‘So that is the answer to your question, gentlemen. Lobengula probably had more diamonds than have ever been assembled in one place at one time, other than in the vaults of De Beers’
central selling organization in London.

‘While this was happening, Rhodes, the richest man in the world, sitting in Kimberley and obsessed with the concept of empire, looked northwards and dreamed. Such was the strength of his
obsession that he began to speak of “my north”. In the end, he took it as he had done the diamond diggings of Kimberley – a little at a time. He sent his envoys to negotiate with
Lobengula a concession to prospect and exploit the minerals of his domains, which included the land of the Mashona.

‘From the white queen in England, Rhodes obtained approval for the formation of a Royal Charter Company, and then he sent a private army of hard and ruthless men to occupy these
concessions. Lobengula had not expected anything like this. A few men digging little holes, yes, but not an army of brutal adventurers.

‘Firstly, Lobengula protested to no avail. The white men pressed him harder and harder, until they forced him to a fatal error of judgement. Lobengula, feeling his very existence
threatened, assembled his impis in a warlike display.

‘This was the provocation for which Rhodes and his henchmen had worked and planned. They fell upon Lobengula in a savage and merciless campaign. They machine-gunned his famous impis, and
shattered the Matabele nation. Then they galloped to Lobengula’s kraal at GuBulawayo. However, Lobengula, that wily thief and coward, had already fled northwards, taking with him his wives,
his herds, what remained of his fighting impis – and his diamonds.

‘A small force of white men pursued him for part of the way, until they ran into a Matabele ambush and were slaughtered to a man. More white men would have followed Lobengula, but the
rains came and turned the veld to mud and the rivers to torrents. So Lobengula escaped with his treasure. He wandered on northwards without a goal, until the will to go on deserted him.

‘In a wild and lonely place, he called Gandang, his half-brother, to him. He entrusted to him the care of the nation, and, coward to the very end, ordered his witchdoctor to prepare a
poisonous potion and drank it down.

‘Gandang sat his body upright in a cave. Around his body he placed all Lobengula’s possessions: his assegais and regimental plumes and furs, his sleeping-mat and head-stool, his guns
and knives and beer-pots – and his diamonds. Lobengula’s corpse was wrapped in a sitting position in the green skin of a leopard and at his feet were placed the five gallon beer-pots of
diamonds. Then the entrance to the cave was carefully sealed and disguised, and Gandang led the Matabele nation back to become the slaves of Rhodes and his Royal Charter Company.

‘You ask when this occurred? It was in the rainy season of the year 1894. Not long ago – barely ninety years ago.

‘You ask where? The answer is – very close to where we now sit. Probably within twenty miles of us. Lobengula travelled directly northwards from GuBulawayo and had almost reached the
Zambezi river before he despaired and committed suicide.

‘You ask if any living man knows the exact location of the treasure cave? The answer is yes!’

Peter Fungabera stopped, and then exclaimed, ‘Oh,
do
forgive me, my dear Tungata, I have neglected to offer you any refreshment.’ He called for another glass, and when it
came, filled it with water and ice and, with his own hands, carried it to Tungata.

Tungata held the glass in both hands and drank with careful control, a sip at a time.

‘Now, where was I?’ Peter Fungabera returned to his chair behind the desk.

‘You were telling us about the cave,’ the white man with the pale eyes could not resist.

‘Ah, yes, of course. Well, it seems that before Lobengula died, he charged this half-brother of his, Gandang, with the guardianship of the diamonds. He is supposed to have told him,
“There will come a day when my people will need these diamonds. You and your son and his sons will keep this treasure until that day.”

‘So the secret was passed on in the Kumalo family, the so-called royal family of the Matabele. When a chosen son reached his manhood he was taken by his father or his grandfather on a
pilgrimage.’

Tungata was so reduced by his ordeal that he felt weak and feverish, his mind floated and the iced water in his empty stomach seemed to drug him, so that fantasy became mixed with reality, and
the memory of his own pilgrimage to Lobengula’s tomb was so vivid that he seemed to be reliving it as he listened to Peter Fungabera’s voice.

It had been during his first year as an undergraduate at the University of Rhodesia. He had gone home to spend the long vacation with his grandfather. Gideon Kumalo was the assistant headmaster
at Khami Mission School, just outside the town of Bulawayo.

‘I have a great treat for you,’ the old man had greeted him, smiling through the thick lenses of his spectacles. He still had a little of his eyesight left, though within the
following five years he would lose the last vestiges of it.

‘We are going on a journey together, Vundla.’ It was the old man’s pet name for him.
Vundla
, the hare, the clever lively animal always beloved by the Africans. The
slaves had taken him with them in legend to America in the form of Brer Rabbit.

The two of them took the bus northwards, changing half a dozen times at lonely trading-stores or remote crossroads, sometimes waiting for forty-eight hours at a stop, when their connection was
delayed. However, the delay did not rankle. They made a picnic of it, sitting at night round their camp-fire and talking.

What marvellous stories old grandfather Gideon could tell. Fables and legends and tribal histories, but it was the histories that fascinated Tungata. He could hear them repeated fifty times
without tiring of them: the story of Mzilikazi’s exodus from Zululand, and the
umfecane
, the war with the Boers, and the crossing of the Limpopo river. He could recite the names of the
glorious impis and the men who had commanded them, the campaigns they had waged and the battle honours they had won.

Most especially, he learned from the old man the history of the ‘Moles who burrowed under a mountain’, the impi that had been founded and commanded by his greatgrandfather, Bazo the
Axe. He learned to sing the war songs and the praise songs of the Moles, and he dreamed that in a perfect world he would himself have commanded the Moles one day, wearing the regimental head-band
of mole-skin and the furs and the feathers.