eMakhosini

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A king who comes to eMakhosini does not so much visit graves as stand in the open grass of a valley and call the roll. Zulu, Phunga, Mageba, Ndaba, Jama, Senzangakhona — the names are spoken toward the ground and the hillsides as toward elders in the next room, men who ruled the small chiefdom before there was a kingdom and who are held to hear still. There is little to see. No cut stone marks the places; the graves are known by memory and kept by the attendants and the households of the valley, and a stranger walking the slope would pass them without knowing. The power of the ground is not in what stands on it. It is in who is called, and in the fact that, within the world that calls them, the called ones answer.

The valley and its founding

eMakhosini — the name is the locative of amakhosi, the kings or chiefs, and turns in English as the Place of the Kings or the Valley of the Kings — is a broad, hot valley on the banks of the White Mfolozi (uMfolozi oMhlophe) in the Zululand interior of KwaZulu-Natal, roughly ten kilometers south and west of Ulundi, at about 28.41 degrees south and 31.30 degrees east. The country is thornveld broken by hills; the land falls from the high ground in the south-west, near a thousand meters, toward the river lowlands in the east, and it is dry enough that the river’s name — the White Mfolozi against its darker twin — is a fact of the landscape rather than a metaphor. Into this valley the Zulu tradition places its own beginning.

The genealogy is kept in the royal izibongo, the praise-recitals, and in the memory of the house rather than in any archive, and it reaches the written record late and at a slant. In the version that most sources carry, the line descends from Malandela through his son Zulu kaMalandela — the eponymous ancestor from whom the amaZulu, “the people of the heaven,” take their name, zulu itself being the word for sky — to Phunga and Mageba, to Ndaba, to Jama, and to Senzangakhona kaJama, whose son was Shaka kaSenzangakhona, the king who welded the scattered Nguni chiefdoms into a single kingdom in the years around 1816 to 1828. Their graves are held to lie in this valley, and it is on that account the Place of the Kings.

The record here is layered and it does not resolve cleanly. The seven kings said to rest in the valley are most often named as Zulu, Phunga, Mageba, Ndaba, Jama and Senzangakhona, with a queen, Mthaniya — remembered as the wife of Jama and mother of Senzangakhona — and a further figure, Nkosinkulu, “the great chief,” who appears in some rolls and is folded into Zulu’s own name in others. The pre-Shakan succession itself varies between recitals: in some tellings Phunga and Mageba are brothers, sons of one Gumede, rather than father and son; the dates assigned to these chiefs by later writers are reconstructions, spans of decades set against no document. The early twentieth-century missionary-historian A.T. Bryant gathered much of this genealogy from surviving oral informants, and his work — indispensable and unreliable at once — must be read as what it is: a reconstruction from praise-poetry and clan memory, compiled long after, and disagreeing with itself and its sources at the edges. What is not in doubt within the tradition is the valley’s standing. This is the ground where the house began, and where its founders were laid, and it has never in Zulu reckoning been anything less than the most sacred earth of the nation.

The valley was not only the founders’ resting-ground but the country of the house’s formation. Shaka is remembered to have passed much of his youth in and about this stretch of the White Mfolozi before the kingship came to him, and the small Zulu chiefdom that his forebears ruled here — a modest polity among many such Nguni chiefdoms — was the seed from which, in a single generation, the kingdom grew. The land itself is spare and unmonumental: broken thornveld, aloes on the ridges, the river cutting its pale bed through the low ground. Nothing about it announces what it is. Its meaning is carried in speech and in memory rather than in anything built, which is precisely the point of it — the ground is sacred because of who is in it and who still comes to it, not because anything was raised to mark the fact.

The graves are known and tended through the living memory of the royal house, its izinceku — the attendants of the person of the king — and the communities settled in the valley, not through excavation. No spade has gone into them and, by the wish of the monarchy, none is meant to. The larger landscape that now frames them, the eMakhosini Ophathe Heritage Park, was constituted in 2006, joining the older Ophathe Game Reserve — proclaimed in 1991, some 8,825 hectares — to roughly 13,000 hectares of heritage land, for a park of about 24,000 hectares running from the eastern lowlands near 270 meters to the south-western heights near 987 meters. The valley within it is a declared provincial heritage site.

What the valley holds

To grasp what eMakhosini is, one has to set aside the idea that a grave marks an absence. In the Zulu sacred world the dead of a line do not depart. Through the rite called ukubuyisa the one who has died is, after a season, brought home — fetched back from the bush where death leaves a person exposed and installed among the amadlozi, the ancestral shades of the house, who abide at the umsamo, the sacred rear of the dwelling, and about the cattle-byre, and who remain party to the affairs of the living. They send and withhold; they warn through dreams; they answer through the diviner and the omen; they are addressed by name and fed with the beer and the beast of offering. The ancestor is not a memory. He is a present elder whose displeasure is misfortune and whose favor is the ordinary running of a life.

What is true of any homestead’s dead is true at eMakhosini on the scale of the nation. The kings buried in the valley are the amadlozi of the ruling house — the greatest of the royal ancestors — and they are held to abide in the very ground where they lie. A king or a supplicant who comes to the valley and speaks to Senzangakhona, to Jama, to Ndaba, to Zulu kaMalandela, speaks to them as to living elders who still hear and still act: who guard the nation, who send or hold back the rain, who answer through sign and dream. This is remembrance in the strong sense the tradition gives the word — not the keeping of a record but the keeping of a relationship, address that expects a reply.

The form that address takes is the izibongo, the praise-recital. Every person of standing in this world carries a body of praises — a strung sequence of names and deeds and images built up over a life and delivered aloud, at speed and at pitch, by one who knows them — and a king carries the fullest of all. The praises are how a ruler is proclaimed among the living and how an ancestor is reached among the dead: to call Ndaba or Jama at the valley is to call him by his praises, to name what he was and did, and by that naming to summon his attention and his presence. The recital is at once the kingdom’s history, kept without writing, and the instrument of ancestral address; it is why the genealogy could survive across three centuries of a people who set nothing down, and why the roll of the kings and the reaching of the kings are, in the end, one act. To keep the names is to keep the relationship.

The valley thus carries the whole vertical order of the religion in one place. Below, in the earth of the graves, are the ancestral shades, reached by name and by praise. Around them are the rites of the household and of the royal house that keep the bond unbroken. And over the same landscape stand the powers of the sky: uNkulunkulu, the Great-Great-One who broke off from the reed-bed, the uhlanga from which the first people came, the source and origin of the nation; and uNomkhubulwane, the princess of heaven who gives the grain and the rain and to whom the girls of the country make their own observance. The ancestors in the ground, the rites that reach them, the heaven above — eMakhosini is the ground where all three are at once addressed.

The scholarship that describes this world — Krige’s 1936 account of the domestic and ancestral order, Berglund’s 1976 record of how the shades are understood to be present and to speak — treats the ancestral bond as the working center of Zulu religious life rather than as folklore surrounding it. The missionary-era record reaches further back and must be read more carefully. Henry Callaway’s The Religious System of the Amazulu (1868-70), assembled from named isiZulu-speaking informants, remains the earliest sustained testimony; but it is testimony gathered inside the mission encounter, its questions and its categories shaped by the man asking them, and it records disagreement as often as doctrine. On the ancestors close at hand, the sources converge. It is where they reach for the highest sky-power, and for what the missionaries made of him, that they part — a question that belongs to another ground than this valley.

The monument on the valley rim makes the whole of it visible in a single image. The Spirit of eMakhosini, raised on a hill above the valley — Khumba hill, on the R34 to the north of the old capital — was unveiled in 2003 by King Goodwill Zwelithini as a memorial to the spirit of the royal ancestors. Its center is a great bronze imbiza, the beer-pot that stands in every Zulu homestead, in which the sorghum beer of the ancestral offering is brewed and from which it is shared: the vessel of hospitality and of togetherness, and the vessel through which the shades themselves are fed. Around it rise seven large horns, one for each of the seven kings of the valley, and about the base run eighteen bronze reliefs of the scenes of Zulu life. The pot of welcome, the horns of the kings, the life of the people worked into the metal beneath — the whole religion set as one image on the hill, over the graves in the grass below.

History over the same ground

eMakhosini’s later fortunes tracked the fortunes of the kingdom whose founders it held. For a decade the sacred valley also carried the living seat of power. In 1829, Dingane kaSenzangakhona — who had taken the kingship after Shaka’s assassination in September 1828 — built his great capital, uMgungundlovu, in this same stretch of country: a royal town of some seventeen hundred dwellings set in a vast oval about the cattle and the parade ground, laid out to be read from the surrounding hills. It was there, at the killing-ground called kwaMatiwane, that the Voortrekker party led by Piet Retief was put to death in February 1838, after the negotiation over land whose terms are still disputed; the capital was fired and abandoned later that same year. That town is a distinct place with its own history, near the royal graves but not to be confused with them — the seat of a living king, not the resting-ground of the ancestor-kings.

Through the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 — through Isandlwana in January and the burning of Ulundi in July — and through the breaking of the kingdom into thirteen chiefdoms that followed, and through the long apartheid decades in which the region was made the KwaZulu homeland, the valley kept its standing in Zulu memory. The political landscape around it was remade more than once. The sacred character of the ground did not move. It remained what it had been: the earth where the house began and where its founders lie, addressed by the living monarchy and the households of the valley in the same terms as before. The forest country far to the south-east that keeps a later king, Cetshwayo — the Nkandla forest, where he died in 1884 — is another such ground; eMakhosini is the oldest of them, the first grave-country of the line.

The present is a season of deliberate reclamation. The Spirit of eMakhosini monument in 2003 and the constitution of the heritage park in 2006 were the first public acts of it. In 2025 the KwaZulu-Natal Heritage Resources Authority — Amafa, the provincial heritage agency — announced an R11-million program, of which some four million was set for the first year, toward conserving the royal graves and preparing a bid for inscription of the valley as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, with a declaration targeted for 2029. The intent stated by the authority is telling. The graves are to be conserved “in a manner that is similar to how they looked in history,” as the reporting of the program put it — kept as living and national heritage, not opened as archaeology. There is no plan to dig. The kings are to be left where they lie, and tended.

The people whose founders lie here now number some ten to twelve million, the largest single community in South Africa, and the great majority of them are Christian; the independent churches born on Zulu ground, the Nazareth Baptist Church of Isaiah Shembe and the many Zionist congregations, draw millions more. None of this has unmade the standing of the valley. The ancestral bond and the honoring of the royal dead have proved able to sit alongside the church for most who keep them, and the revived observances of the monarchy — the reclamation of the old rites and the raising of the monument among them — have been public acts of a living institution rather than the curating of a closed past. When the reigning king is installed, or when the nation’s affairs are grave, the ancestor-kings of eMakhosini are still the ones addressed.

So the valley is read today along two lines that do not cancel. It is a heritage park, mapped and administered and opened to visitors who come to see the monument on the hill and the game on the reserve. And it is sacred ground that the living monarchy and the communities of the valley still address in the oldest terms of the religion — where a king, in the reckoning of his people, may stand in the grass and speak to Senzangakhona and be heard. The bronze pot on the rim is a public memorial. The graves below it are not memorials at all. They are the dwelling of elders who have not left, and the roll of names spoken toward the hills is not a recitation of the dead but a greeting of the present.

The Spirit of eMakhosini monument on Khumba hill above the valley: a bronze imbiza (beer-pot) ringed by seven horns for the seven kings of the valley, unveiled in 2003. JMK, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

Looking east across the eMakhosini valley from the monument on Khumba hill, with the site of Dingane’s capital uMgungundlovu on a hilltop in the distance. JMK, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

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