CHAPTER XII
TRADITIONS AND HISTORY
Probable origin of the Yaos. The Makalanga. Undi. Migrations of the Angoni. The Tambuka.
The Yaos believe themselves to be descended from the same stock as the Anyanja, Anguru, and Awisa, while they count the Angoni as a different race, and do not profess to know whence they came. These four tribes, therefore, must have kept together till a much later period than that at which the Zulus separated from the main stock of the Bantu. The Yaos imagined the tribes with whom they acknowledged kinship to have started with them from Kapirimtiya, and gone in different directions.
The story of how Mtanga improved the Yao country in the beginning by moulding it into hills and valleys, seems to bear out the opinion that the mountainous region of Unangu was the early home of the race; but how long they lived there, before the raids of the Magwangwara sent them forth on their wanderings, is hard to say. Dr. M’Call Theal says: ‘There is not a single tribe in South Africa to-day that bears the same title, has the same relative power, and occupies the same ground as its ancestors three hundred years ago. The people we call Mashona are indeed descended from the Makalanga of the early Portuguese days, and they preserve their old name and part of their old country; but the contrast ... is striking.’
The more one studies the wars and migrations of the Bantu tribes, the more one is reminded of the state of things in our own island between (roughly speaking) 500 and 1000 A.D. We are apt to forget the length of time over which this process extended, and that though the Bantu, so far as we can tell, began it later, there seems no valid reason why it should not, in their case, have a similar termination. However, as we have to do with facts, not speculations, it seems futile to discuss a point which only posterity will have an opportunity of deciding.
The Makalanga speak much the same language as the various tribes comprehended under the general name of Anyanja, and may, at one time, have formed a homogeneous body with them. The kingdom of the Makalanga, as described by the Portuguese writers, would almost seem to have been something more than an ordinary African state; but their way of describing everything, so to speak, in terms of Europe, is somewhat misleading. Probably it was not unlike the ‘empire’ of Undi at a later date and fell to pieces much in the same way. These decentralised agricultural tribes either fell victims to internal quarrels, or to aggressive action on the part of some warlike neighbour—or, very possibly, to both together.
It is not known when the Zulus moved southward into the territory they now occupy, and where they must have been settled for some generations before the beginning of the nineteenth century, as the graves of at least four kings (some say eight), of earlier date than that epoch, are still to be seen at Mahlabatini, in the valley of the White Umfolozi. In 1687 they, and tribes allied to them, seem to have been in peaceful occupation of Natal and Zululand, living so close together that migration on a large scale was impossible. Yet, about the same time, the Amaxosa, or ‘Cape Kafirs,’ who are very closely related to them, seem to have been pressing on to the south; and they reached the Great Fish River soon after the beginning of the eighteenth century. However this may be, the Zulu king Senzagakona had, about 1800, risen to a position of some importance, though still subject to Dingiswayo, chief of the Umtetwas in Natal. His son, Tshaka, succeeded in 1810, and, after Dingiswayo’s death, assumed a paramount position, his career resembling that of Napoleon, or rather (since he may be said to have consolidated, if not erected, a nation), Theodoric or Charlemagne. But what chiefly concerns us here is the northward migration of the Zulus which took place in his time. Umziligazi, one of his captains, quarrelled with him and fled, taking his clan with him. These are the people now known as the Matabele, having settled in the early thirties between the Limpopo and Zambezi.
Another chief, Manukosi, seceded about 1819, and invaded the country about Delagoa Bay, gradually subduing the Tonga tribes. This branch of the Zulus is called Gaza; their last king, Gungunyana (Manukosi’s grandson), was deposed by the Portuguese in 1896.
Angoni Warriors