By Saul Gwakuba Ndlovu

IN our previous article on the recently reported secret coronation of a South African-born-and-based Zimbabwean Ndebele King, Bulelani Khumalo, we observed that one of the claimants to that crown, Peter Zwide KaLanga Khumalo, queried why the Ntabazinduna Chief, Felix Nhlanhlayemangwe Khayisa Ndiweni, was involved in the matter.
Khumalo was said to have also claimed that Ndiweni’s succession of his father as chief was being questioned by his brothers.
We need not get involved in that controversial matter of the Ndiwenis of Chief Khayisa’s family.
This article’s main thrust is to present the historical role of the Ndiwenis in the chieftainship of the Khumalos in Zimbabwe.
The Ndiwenis are a leading, if not the leading, family of the Amangwe cluster of the northern Ngunis whose original region of domicile lay between the Umgeni River to the south and the Phongola River in the north in what is now known as KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa.
The Khumalos belong to the AmaNtungwa group of the same Nguni stock who originally lived in the same geographical territory to the north of which resided the Ngwane whose royal family’s totem is Dlamini, originally from the Namwala area of Zambia.
Across the Umgeni River, on the western side, lived the Mpondomise, the Mpondo and the Bomvana, all of whom belonged to what social anthropologists refer to as southern Ngunis.
Oral history says Mzilikazi’s mother was of the Amangwe extraction, most likely of the Ndiweni totem.
Incidentally, the Ndiweni are of the same agnetic descent as the Mbambos (the Zwane lineage).
Two years after Mzilikazi’s death, his newly installed successor, Lobengula, sent a delegation to Natal to find his elder brother Nkulumane whose name was spelt ‘Nkulumana’ in official documents of that time.
Natal was by then a British colony and its secretary for native affairs was the historically well-known Sir Theophilus Shepstone, whose offices were in Pietermaritzburg (eMgungundhlovu, koNdukuzibomvu).
Lobengula’s diplomatic delegation comprised Nomandhla, who was the leader, and Murimu, also known as Adonis.
Murimu had been formerly a war prisoner, having been captured somewhere along the Limpopo River by Mzilikazi’s military forces some years earlier.
Nomandhla had succeeded his father as an envoy but, most unfortunately, his father’s name does not occur in any of the written records.
That delegation officially met Sir Theophilus in his office on August 16 1870 to present Lobengula’s message with which we are not concerned in this article.
What is of interest to us here is that Sir Theophilus Shepstone was quite convinced that Nkulumane was alive and had worked for him as gardener and stable hand for five years.
He (Shepstone) said it was a northern Nguni custom to send away an heir-apparent together with his mother, and to announce that the royal child had been killed on his father’s (the ruling king’s or chief’s) orders.
Shepstone said that had been done with Mzilikazi himself whose father, Matshobana, had sent him away while still an infant together with his mother to the Amangwe who took him back to his own people and rightful home later after Matshobana’s death, for him to succeed his father.
Mzilikazi had, however, to push out one of his half-brothers, Mvunhlela, who had already seized the Khumalo throne.
Before Mzilikazi, his father Matshobana had earlier been driven out while still a boy by his own father, Mangete, and went to live with the Amatshali (the Hlabangana people) from where he returned to claim the crown only after his father’s death.
He had to fight and defeat his half-brother Dwangubana who had already placed himself on the throne of the AmaTungwa.
Mangete himself was thrown out from the royal village by his father, Langa, before he was a teenager and sought refuge from an unidentified tribe in the region.
He returned to be king after Langa’s demise.
So, argued Sir Shepstone, Mzilikazi had sent Nkulumane packing in keeping with that royal tradition of the northern Ngunis.
The Ndiwenis played an important historical part by protecting Mzilikazi in his early life, and later promoted his ascension to the Khumalo’s highest royal position.
Some ethnographers say Mzilikazi’s mother was a Ndiweni.
In that case, he was under the protection and guidance of his maternal uncles, a somewhat similar role played by some Zimbabwean Amangwe in the promotion of Bulelani Khumalo’s campaign to succeed his great-great-grandfather to the Nguni throne in Matabeleland.
It is really obvious to observe that since November 1893, when Lobengula lost the war to the British South Africa Company (BSAC) of Cecil John Rhodes, there has been much political development in this country.
For a start, the author of this article is of the opinion that the armed liberation struggle’s aim was to bring about a modern political dispensation in which political leadership comes about by universal adult suffrage (one-person-one-vote) and not by accidents or incidents of births.
People have a constitutional right to elect their leaders in free and unfettered circumstances.
That is an inalienable constitutional right Zimbabweans acquired by supreme sacrifice and it is entrenched in the country’s fundamental law, the Constitution.
While elections enable voters to choose the best, births may give them anything ranging from the most acute mind to the intellectual poorest, in addition to which, elected leaders are regularly renewed or replaced, but those by birth are never renewed and may be replaced only by death and but also by birth.
What we are saying here is that leadership election is decided on merit, whereas leadership by birth is determined by sheer accident and is a remnant of a primitive bygone era that was characterised by the non-existence of social justice and basic human rights.
As formal education is globally becoming an inalienable right, more and more people become culturally transformed by it and demand the right to choose their own political, social and economic representation without let or hindrance.
That is why the vast majority of politically modern nations are republics and not kingdoms, a situation where their citizens belong to their nation collectively and not to an individual called a king or a queen.
Saul Gwakuba Ndlovu is a retired, Bulawayo-based journalist. He can be contacted on cell 0734 328 136 or through email. sgwakuba@gmail.com