The Promise of Justice. Book One. The Story: King Justice Mpondombini Sicau's struggle for the amaMpondo Kingdom

Chapter 1

The Place, the People and the Possibilities

That green coastline that is Eden yet

Being spared the ravages of dynamite and oil²

Before time.

There is a coastline in Africa that unmasks the soul.

Locked in an interminable contest, land and water connect and collide to create spectacular dances of white spray that owe their origin to a geological phenomenon that dates back millions of years when the African continent separated from the Falklands tectonic plate to create a buttress of cliffs. Subsequent erosion has flattened these except along a 5 km stretch where, in months of heavy rainfall, three rivers tumble directly over the cliff face into the welcoming sea spray that reaches up from heavy waves breaking against the rocks below. Only nine other instances can be found of rivers flowing over a coastal cliff to meet the sea in the entire 720,000 kms where land and sea abut on planet earth.

If one goes back in geological time conceivably there were several more, but in that place billions upon billions of gallons of water have flowed down from inland mountains to carve and etch the sandstone shelf to create deep river gorges. The waterfalls on these rivers have receded inland such that, in contrast to the vertical tumble of the three remaining ocean-plunging waterfalls, the consummation between river and sea water occurs horizontally within estuaries where sand, wind and tides add further majesty to the dance.

Within those deep river gorges verdant forests have taken hold, sheltered from the strong winds to create a bountiful ecology of botanical biodiversity of some 200 known endemic plants – and perhaps more, which have yet to be discovered and named.

At stretches where the continental cliff is at sea level, the much harder igneous rock resists the eroding effect of water more effectively than the sandstone. Incessant waves collide with a sheer vertical rock face to send sea spray shooting upwards in a spectacular show of waterworks. One can sit for hours, mesmerised as one wave upon another crashes against the unyielding rock face – an ancient prehistoric irresistible force pounding against an equally ancient prehistoric object.

Moving closer to the edge of contest, as the sea-spray curtain is tugged back by gravity to splash upon the rocks, one may glimpse a pod of dolphins surfing joyously in the advancing wall of water, moments before the clash of water against rock erupts another curtain of sea spray to obscure their enviable frolic. If one has ventured too close to the point of impact between earth and water, a refreshing shower of salty-sea drenches and delights, as gravity retrieves the white veil of foam that dutifully returns to the sea in myriad rivulets in the hard rock, sculptured over billions of years, long before homo sapiens appeared to marvel at the phenomenon, and to name the promontory Waterfall Bluff.

While cosmic tectonic energy trapped deep within the Earth continues to force continents apart and together in an ultra-gradual drift, the circling of Earth around Sun forces warm ocean currents to clash with and cold in an annual ritual to show forth the extravagant re-productivity of Life. Arising from the deep, cold South Atlantic ocean, nutrient rich plankton blooms are drawn up from the deep by global geo-thermal dynamics to feed the spawn of unimaginable magnitudes of fast growing sardines to break the deep winter fast of birds, seals, dolphins, sharks and whales hungrily arrayed along the southern African coastal waters and nesting sites.

The peculiar geomorphology of Waterfall Bluff prompts a swirling eddy of current and counter current that has become the threshold where the teeming billions of Piscean creatures become trapped and concentrated tightly against the coast by warm equatorial currents flowing down that coastline.

Predators from the air and sea feast upon the hapless creatures as they swirl around in diminishing bait balls. Sometimes the interactive contingencies of ocean currents, waves and weather systems push shoals into the shallow waters to be washed ashore to provide terrestrial creatures with a bonanza of welcome protein. Unsurprisingly a search for evidence of human presence on this stretch of African coastline will turn up remains of several shipwrecks. Historical enquiry will reveal hundreds more, each telling a harrowing tale of human vulnerability, the fallibility of sea captains and, often, the forlorn heroism of castaways struggling for survival.

The coast described above is appropriately named the Wild Coast, and is the place where this narrative of unmasking, and the Promise of Justice, occurs.

In Time: 1824.

When a youthful Henry Francis Fynn crossed the Mzamba River for the first time in 1824 the Mpondo had not yet resettled the 22km stretch of coastline that is the north-eastern section of the Wild Coast. He was the first white trader to venture toward Pondoland, and left a written record of his adventures.

Unsure of the route, he had hoped to trade beads and trinkets for provisions from locals along the way and be given directions. However early in their journey (somewhere around modern day Umgababa) they came across a homestead. He managed to obtain some directions.

‘I enquired of the man we had caught the distance to the amaMpondo, but could get no satisfactory information. He told me it would be three months on the road; that I must pass through a desert and, on the journey meet with only a few stragglers obliged, like himself to live on roots.’

The next day, long grass, intertwining briars and bushes compelled them to walk along the beach. The inhospitable terrain reduced their progress to a mere 16 km in the day.

He was shocked to find that the Zulu army had virtually obliterated human settlement. Without encountering any people to help him along the following day he aborted the trip and returned to Port Natal, then visited Shaka to confess his misadventure.

‘He laughed heartily on hearing the account. Moreover he wanted to know how I could expect to travel through those parts without his assistance, for obviously my troubles had arisen out of his having killed off the inhabitants of the surrounding countries. I had, therefore, got only what I deserved for attempting to travel among people whom it was impossible to reap any kind of benefit; indeed, I could only expect to be murdered by them or poisoned by bush Kaffirs.’

Fynn tried to justify his visit as a goodwill mission to forge mutually beneficial relations ‘by teaching them British manners and customs’, but admits ‘I might have saved my breath on this occasion as well as on many others, for I found I had to deal with a king who had no idea of the limit of his powers, and who was confident his commands were both lawful and strictly reasonable.’

Fynn didn’t waste any time before embarking on a second prospecting mission to see King Faku. With Shaka’s backing he was more successful.

The journey to the Mpondo people was still difficult but his spirits were clearly lifted upon crossing the Mzamba River. They must have been lifted further because he remarks in the course of the day’s tedious march we met several droves of elephants.

It took Fynn only 25 years to shoot the last elephant in Pondoland.

In Time: 1957.

Whereas in 1824 Fynn did not find many people living there, by 1957 the coastal stretch between the Umtamvuna and Mntentu Rivers was populated by the AmaDiba, one of fifty constituent chiefdoms of the Mpondo nation. Where elephants once roamed, the only memory of them was in the naming of the Umgungundlovu Komkhulu: The Great Place of the Elephants. This was the place where by customary law, the Amadiba coastal residents would gather to bring matters of communal concern to the tribal elders for resolution. Otherwise known as the Xolobeni area (because of a trading store that had been built nearby) in 1957 a kindling conflict commenced over land rights and the use and misuse of natural resources. The Pondo Revolt (also referred to as the Pondo Uprising or iCongo) still casts a long shadow on South African history. White minority rule was gaining momentum with the formalisation of apartheid. In the pretence of offering political and economic self-determination to the black majority, the apartheid government ruthlessly co-opted traditional African tribal leaders to enforce Bantustans upon their people.

Oxford University Professor William Beinart, the pre-eminent specialist on Mpondo history reports his interview with a local resident Leonard Mdingi, telling of the first spark of the uprising, which occurred in 1957 in the precise place that Fynn had spotted the ‘droves of elephants’.

‘There was a standoff in Amadiba Location, near Xolobeni store, where Mdingi’s father had been removed. One man was convicted and spent six months in prison.

‘The people were not consulted on anything now; people were being driven out of the land and they resented that ... at one stage the police went down and were attacked by the people there and had to flee. Those were the beginnings of this Congo movement, of this Pondoland revolt, 1957, 58, 59. The dispute was getting hotter and hotter ...’

In this context, the local educated elite such as Saul Mabude, a key member of the Bunga and advisor at the great place who lived in Isikelo location in Bizana came under strong criticism. The attack on his homestead in March 1960 signalled the beginnings of the revolt...

Saul Mabude had spent years at the great place as an advisor to Botha Sigcau.’

King Botha Sigcau was the King of amaMpondo ase Qaukeni, who had since 1938 ruled a nation increasingly divided.

In Time: 1996

Some 172 years after Fynn’s expedition and thirty-six years after the Pondo Uprising a latter-day prospector named Mark Victor Caruso from Perth Australia followed a similar path in his expedition. Along the same 22 km stretch of coastal dunes that Fynn had traversed, Caruso also found what he was looking for: titanium and other heavy mineral deposits, (ilmenite, rutile, zircon, pig iron, leucoxene). Subsequent analysis ranked his find as the tenth largest heavy mineral deposit in the world, with the ‘space-age mineral’ titanium being the most plentiful.

In Time: 2007

On 5th September 2007, exactly fifty years after Leonard Mdingi’s father had been forcibly removed from his homestead, King Mpondombini Sigcau, the son of Botha Sigcau, drove past the Xolobeni store. Ahead of them were two more vehicles, one transporting Commissioners from the SAHRC and the other with the Mayor of the O.R. Tambo District Municipality. All were headed for the great place of the elephants.

King Justice Mpondombini (the two tusked one) was coming to hear complaints from the Amadiba community against Mark Caruso’s mineral prospecting activities which had over the preceding decade caused havoc in the community, in planning the plunder of Mpondo natural resources.

The imbizo (public meeting) was an event of elephantine proportions.

As the motorcade came within view ten Pondo horsemen led by Jabulani Mboyisa, (the eldest son of one of the Pondo Revolt veterans), rode out to welcome the King, Queen and Crown Princess.

Riding in formation they escorted the Royal Family to be enthusiastically greeted by hundreds of cheering Amadiba residents led by stick-wielding veterans of the Pondo Revolt. Praise songs reserved only for Royalty were chanted with gusto.

Beyond Time:

If a soothsayer had fifty years beforehand told Madingi’s father that the above scene would come to pass, one can imagine that he would regard the soothsayer as hallucinating from having smoked too much of the controversial product for which the Wild Coast is famous.

It is only with hindsight that I am now able now to contrast these four moments, all having occurred at the same site but at different moments in history. Doing so tugs one to try to fathom and discern the timeless eternal truth about people, planet and possibilities for the future.

‘If I could ask one thing of a crystal ball’ a wise man once said ‘I would not ask what is wrong and how can I fix it? I would ask what is possible and who cares?’

From the one event to the next, had the Powers learned more about what had gone before, and thought more deeply what might occur in the future, they would have taken more care with the decisions they made. The possibilities of the place (the Pondoland Wild Coast) in combination with very special people (the AmaMpondo) who live there would have been so much more promising. The Story I tell would have been very different.

It is too late to change the decisions. But it is not too late to learn from history, so that different decisions may now be made. Then the future will be different.

Chapter 2

A strange idea of insecurity

‘I dare say that if we have so far been unable to eradicate poverty, it is because we know too much about it, without understanding the essence of its existence as well as the mechanisms of it’s origins.³

Manfred A Max-Neef.

I had a question I was dying to ask him. The man whose books I had read with religious devotion, the Chilean ‘barefoot economist’ , had finally arrived in South Africa.

Ask the wrong question, and you are always going to get the wrong answer. Ask the right question, and even if the initial answer is wrong, the rightness of the question keeps one going, albeit along a road less travelled, but one that leads to life.

The question I asked Professor Manfred Max-Neef on a spring day in Johannesburg in 1993, six months before the first democratic elections occurred, was the right question.

He was still jet-lagged from his long flight from Santiago Chile but the bed in his hotel room was too short for his large frame. We went to have a cup of coffee while hotel staff tried to find a solution. ‘Professor, in your development thinking about fundamental human needs were you influenced at all by biblical evolutionary concepts?’

He looked puzzled. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, reading your book through my theological spectacles I noticed that there happens to be a rather remarkable correspondence between your explanation of the gradual emergence of fundamental human needs over evolutionary time scales and the way the books of the bible are arranged.’

He took off his spectacles to rub his tired eyes. ‘This is very interesting. I was not aware of that. Explain some more.’

To fill in some background for readers, Max-Neef argues that fundamental human needs are few, finite and universal. If they can be said to have changed over time, it is only over long evolutionary time scales. It is developmental change that allows the progressive and cumulative realisation of innate potential. When our ancestors made the leap from Australopithecus habilis to homo habilis around two million years ago Max-Neef argues that Homo Habilis were motivated by seven fundamental needs: subsistence, protection, affection, participation, understanding, idleness (not laziness but the need to ponder in relaxed reflection) and creation. He writes;

‘Probably at a later stage of evolution the need for Identity appeared and, at a much later date, the need for Freedom. In much the same way, it is likely that in the future the need for Transcendence, which is not included in our proposal as we do not yet consider it universal, will become as universal as the other needs. It seems legitimate, then, to assume that fundamental human needs change with the pace of human evolution, that is to say, at a very slow rate. Therefore, fundamental human needs are not only universal, but also entwined with the evolution of the species. They follow a single