Chapter One
July 1996
I am on assignment in Zululand for National Geographic magazine when
I get the news that my father is gravely ill.
It is night, and I am sitting around a fire with Prince Galenja
Biyela. I am sitting lower than he is to show due respect. Biyela is
ninety- something – he doesn’t know exactly – tall and thin and
straight backed, with hair and beard quite white. Around his
shoulders, he has draped a leopard skin in such a way that the tail
lies straight down his chest, like a furry necktie. A yard of
mahogany shin gleams between his tattered sneakers and the cuffs of
his trousers. His long fingers are closed around the gnarled head of
a knobkerrie, a cudgel.
“All is well,” he declares.
It is his only English phrase. He speaks in classical Zulu, his
words almost Italianate, lubricated by vowels at either end.
His tribal acolytes start chanting his praise names.
“You are the bull that paws the earth,” they call.
“Your highness,” they sing, “we will bow down to the one who
growls.”
Prince Biyela’s grandfather, Nkosani – the small king – of the Black
Mamba regiment, was the hero of Isandlwana, the battle in which the
Zulus famously trounced the mighty British Empire in 1879. Tonight,
the old prince wishes to revel in the glory days, to relive the
humbling of the white man.
He tells me how the British watched in awe as twenty- five thousand
Zulu warriors stepped over the skyline and began to advance,
chanting all the while, and stopping every so often to stomp the
ground in unison, sending a tremor through the earth that could be
felt for miles. He tells me how the impi, the Zulu regiments, were
armed with short stabbing spears, ixlwa, a word you pronounce by
pulling your tongue off the roof of your mouth, a word that
deliberately imitates the sucking sound made by a blade when it’s
pulled out of human flesh.
As the warriors advanced, he says, their places on the ridge above
were taken by thousands of Zulu women, urging on their army in the
traditional way by ululating, an eerie high- pitched keening that
filled the air.
Biyela tells me how the Black Mamba regiment was cut down by
withering gunfire until, he says, after nearly two hours, the force
“was as small as a sparrow’s kidney,” and the remaining men were on
their bellies, taking cover. And how his grandfather, Nkosani,
seeing what was happening, strode up to the front line, dressed in
all his princely paraphernalia – his ostrich plume headdress and his
lion claw necklaces – and berated them. Electrified by his example,
the young warriors leaped up and again surged forward, overwhelming
the men of the British line, even as Nkosani was felled by a British
sniper with a single shot to the head.
And in the final stages of the battle, when the handful of surviving
British soldiers had run out of bullets, a most unusual event
occurred. The moon passed in front of the sun, and the earth grew
dark, like night. And the Zulu impi stopped their killing while this
eclipse took place. But when the light returned, they resumed the
bloodletting.
Biyela tells me that night how his grandfather’s warriors, having
overrun the main British camp, dashed from tent to tent mopping up
the stragglers – the cooks and the messengers and the drummer boys –
until they crashed into one tent to find a newspaper correspondent
sitting at his campaign table, penning his report.
“Just like you are now,” he says to me, and his acolytes all laugh
until Biyela raises his hand for silence.
“They said to him, ‘Hau! What are you doing in here, sitting at a
table? Why aren’t you out there fighting?’ And this man, he was a
local white who could speak some Zulu, he said, ‘I am writing a
report on the battle, for my people.’
“‘Oh,’ they said, ‘all right.’ And they left him.
“But soon afterward, when they heard that my grandfather Nkosani had
been shot, they ran back to the tent and said to the journalist
there, ‘Now that our induna [leader] has been killed, there is no
point in making a report anymore,’ and with that they killed him.”
Biyela’s men nod. I keep writing.
At the end, according to the few British soldiers who escaped, the
Zulus went mad with bloodlust, killing even the horses and the mules
and the oxen. They disemboweled each dead British soldier so that
his spirit could escape his body and not haunt his killer. And if an
enemy soldier had been seen to be particularly brave, the impi cut
out his gallbladder and sucked on it, to absorb the dead man’s
courage, and bellowed, “Igatla!” – “I have eaten!”
And that night Biyela tells me how, once the battlefield fell quiet,
a great wail was heard from the retinue of the Zulu women, as they
mourned their dead. And this wail moved like a ripple through
village after village until finally it reached the Zulu capital,
Ulundi, fifty miles distant.
And here, Prince Biyela ends his telling, choosing not to dwell on
what followed the Zulu victory. For the eclipse of the sun was a bad
portent, and it drew down terrible times – the British reinforced
and quickly snuffed out the independent Zulu nation. But still their
spirit was not entirely doused. Their ferocity was merely curbed,
and there was a sullen dignity to their defeat. It is said that
before they would sign the surrender proclamation, one old induna
stood and said to Sir Garnet Wolseley, “Today we will admit that we
are your dogs, but you must first write it there, that the other
tribes are the fleas on our backs.”
Prince Biyela pauses to gulp another shot of the Queen’s tears, as
the Zulus call Natal gin, and the silence is jarred by a ring tone.
“uMakhalekhukhwini,” says one of his acolytes – it means “the
screaming in the pocket,” Zulu for cell phone – and they all grope
around in the dark in their jackets and bags. It turns out to be
mine. I reach in to cut it off, but it’s my parents’ number in
Zimbabwe, eight hundred miles to the north. They never call just to
chat. I excuse myself.
My mother’s voice sounds strained. “It’s your father,” she says.
“He’s had a heart attack. I think you’d better come home.”
(Continues…)
Excerpted from When a Crocodile Eats the Sun
by Peter Godwin
Copyright © 2007
by Peter Goodwin .
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Little, Brown and Company
Copyright © 2007
Peter Goodwin
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-316-15894-7
