uMgungundlovu

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From the viewing platform raised above the site today, the eye takes in at a glance what a herdsman on the surrounding ridges took in nearly two centuries ago: a shallow oval scored into the grass, better than a quarter-kilometer across, its long axis closing at the upper end where the ground rises against a hill. Little tall stands there now, and little tall stood there then. A settlement of grass and withes leaves no towers. Yet the plan carried its meaning in its outline — the huge ring of dwellings, the open floor at the center, the screened precinct sealing the head of the ellipse, and, on a ridge set a little apart to the northeast, the bare hill where the king’s killings were done. Anyone on the heights read the whole of it without being told: order, abundance, the singular person at the top, and the reach of his hand. The capital was built to be seen, and to be understood in the seeing.

The great place against Lion hill

uMgungundlovu was raised in 1829 by Dingane kaSenzangakhona, the year after he came to the kingship of the amaZulu — he had taken the throne in the wake of the assassination of his half-brother Shaka in September 1828 — and it was his principal ikhanda, the great royal military homestead from which he ruled. An ikhanda was not a village in any ordinary sense. It was at once the king’s residence, the barracks of the amabutho, the age-regiments quartered on the king’s service, and the theater of the state: the place where the regiments were mustered and reviewed, where the great seasonal gatherings were held, and where the king was seen by his people. Dingane set his in the high, broken thornveld of the eMakhosini uplands of what is now KwaZulu-Natal, against a hill the Zulu called Singonyama, the Lion hill, a little south of the White uMfolozi (uMfolozi oMhlophe) and bounded by two small streams, the uMkhumbane to the south and the Nzololo to the north, at roughly 28°26′ south and 31°16′ east. The country was already the most storied ground of the nation. A short way off lies eMakhosini, the valley where the ancestor-kings of the royal house are buried — the grave-country of the line, kept and addressed by the living monarchy, a distinct place with its own standing and not to be confused with the seat of a living king that Dingane built near it.

The name is read within the tradition through the oldest of the royal praise-figures, the king as the elephant. Indlovu is the elephant, and the elephant is the king; the settlement was the body gathered about that person. The Zulu phrase behind the place-name — rendered by the record as something near ungungu we ndlovu — turns in English as “the secret conclave of the elephant” or “the place that encloses the elephant,” the great enclosure understood as the casing around the royal person at its head. It is a name that already contains the plan of the ground.

The place reaches the record from three directions at once, and the three do not always agree. There is the living Zulu tradition, carried in the praises and in the memory of the house, in which uMgungundlovu is a name of the kings and the nation. There is the primary colonial record — the traders, missionaries, and Voortrekkers who came to Dingane’s court through the 1830s and wrote down what they saw. That record is indispensable and must be read critically, for each man arrived on his own errand and left with his own quarrel: the British missionary Francis Owen kept a diary at the royal town, the American missionary George Champion and the naval officer Allen Gardiner passed through and sketched, and the traders down from Port Natal had their own designs. And there is archaeology, because uMgungundlovu, burned and abandoned within a decade of its founding and never built over, became one of the most fully excavated of all the Zulu royal capitals — a plan recoverable from the earth itself, hut floor by hut floor.

An argument made in space

To stand inside uMgungundlovu was to stand inside an argument set out in ground. The settlement was an enormous oval — estimates run from about 1,400 to something near 1,700 huts, holding perhaps 5,000 to 7,000 people, the largest single settlement built anywhere in the region up to that time. The archaeologists John Parkington and Menán Cronin, working from the excavated plan and the eyewitness accounts, set out the size and layout of the great town in exactly these terms: the huts ranged six to eight deep in a great ring, palisaded around the outside, enclosing a vast central space given to the cattle and to the open parade ground where the regiments danced and the king appeared. The form was the standard form of any Zulu homestead, the ring of dwellings about the central byre — but swollen to the scale of a state, so that what in a common household was the domestic order became, here, the order of a kingdom.

At the head of the oval, closing the ellipse on the higher ground opposite the main gate, sat the isigodlo, the royal precinct: the king’s own quarters and the households of the women of the court, some one hundred and fifty dwellings screened from the common ground behind hedges of intertwined withes standing two meters high. The record and the excavation distinguish an inner and an outer part — the “black” isigodlo of the innermost women, a privileged company of a hundred or so, and the “white” isigodlo beyond it — a precinct that on its own held several hundred people. Within it stood the indlunkulu, the great audience hut, where the king received. Its excavated floor measured about ten meters across, and its ring of some twenty-two supporting posts had been sheathed in glass beads — a detail set down by the eyewitnesses Retief and Owen before the spade ever confirmed it, and recovered again by the archaeologists as beadwork collapsed into the floor. The wealth of the kingdom was made visible in the one dwelling where the king was met, the imported bead standing for the reach and the riches of the crown. Beside the great hut lay the king’s own private dwelling, the ilawu.

The oval was not a monument but a working town, and its work was the work of the kingdom. The huts around the ring quartered the amabutho, the regiments raised by age and held on the king’s service, and the great open floor at the center was where they were mustered, reviewed, and set to dance before the king. In its full season the population swelled and shrank as regiments came and went, which is why the count of its people is given as a range rather than a figure: five, six, or seven thousand, according to who was gathered. At the great annual assemblies the men of the kingdom converged on the capital, and it was there, on the parade ground under the eyes of the whole town, that the king was seen by his people and the unity of the state made visible in one place. The cattle that stood in the central enclosure were the same cattle that were the kingdom’s wealth, its bridewealth, its tribute, and the beasts of its offerings — so that the herd at the center of the plan was at once the treasury, the larder, and the altar of the place.

Cattle stood at the literal and moral center of it, as they stand at the heart of Zulu life and of the bond with the amadlozi, the ancestral shades who are held to abide about the byre and to be fed there with the beast of offering. The faunal studies of the royal enclosure bear this out at the level of the bone heap: the assemblages from the isigodlo document a heavy reliance on cattle, beef and the byre central to the running of the place, exactly as the tradition would lead one to expect of the household of a king. Here the excavated record and the tradition-internal meaning of the ground meet: the cattle at the center were wealth, food, bridewealth, and the standing-place of the ancestors all at once.

Northeast of the great oval, on a ridge set deliberately within sight of the capital, rose the hill called kwaMatiwane. It took its name from Matiwane, a chief of the amaNgwane put to death there with his people around 1829 or 1830 for defying the king, and it became the standing ground of the king’s justice and the king’s killings, the bodies left exposed on the slope. That it lay within view of the great place was not incidental. Power and its edge were meant to be read in a single sweep of the eye — the abundance of the byre and the parade ground at the center, the severity of the execution hill on the ridge beyond. The scholarship on Zulu society that came later — Eileen Krige’s The Social System of the Zulus (1936), Axel-Ivar Berglund’s Zulu Thought-Patterns and Symbolism (1976), Harriet Ngubane’s Body and Mind in Zulu Medicine (1977) — makes it possible to read the plan of uMgungundlovu not as a curiosity of layout but as a social and sacred order laid out in space: the ring and the center, the screened precinct, the cattle and the ancestors at the heart, the hill of judgment on the margin. A capital that spoke.

Nine years, and after

uMgungundlovu stood for only about nine years, and it is remembered above all for one February and one December. On 6 February 1838, King Dingane had the Voortrekker leader Piet Retief and his party — about a hundred men and servants — put to death at kwaMatiwane, days after a deed ceding the land between the Thukela and the uMzimvubu had been drawn up. The deed was dated 4 February and signed on the sixth. What actually passed between the two sides remains contested: whether a treaty was genuinely concluded, what each party understood a cession to mean, and why the king struck are questions the sources answer differently, and the honest position is to set the record down without adjudicating it. The missionary Owen watched the killing from his station above the town and recorded it; the deed was later recovered, it is said, from a pouch on Retief’s body. The record that survives is partisan on every side — the trekker accounts written to justify the war that followed, the missionary diary shaped by its author’s horror, the Zulu memory carried in a different key altogether — and the sober course is to report what can be established and to press the motive no further than the evidence allows. That a party of a hundred was killed on the execution hill on 6 February 1838, that a document ceding a great tract of land bore two dates around it, and that war followed within the year, is beyond dispute; what Dingane believed he was granting or refusing, and what he judged the newcomers to intend, the sources cannot be made to agree. What followed is not in dispute. After a Boer commando under Andries Pretorius — some 464 men behind a wagon-laager — broke a Zulu army of many thousands at the Ncome River on 16 December 1838, the fight remembered under both its names, the Battle of Blood River and the Battle of Ncome, with roughly three thousand of the king’s men left dead, Dingane withdrew north and had his capital burned behind him at his own retreat. Pretorius’s men reached the site about 20 December to find it already destroyed, and recovered and buried the remains of Retief’s party at the execution hill on the following day. Dingane, having lost the kingship to his half-brother Mpande, was killed in 1840.

The ground did not go silent with the burning. Because the town was never rebuilt or ploughed over, its plan lay preserved in the earth, and in the early 1970s the site was developed as a state-run site museum under the National Monuments Council. In 1974 and 1975 a University of Cape Town survey and excavation mapped 184 daga — earth — hut floors across the site and fully excavated thirty-six of them, recording hut floors between about 3.7 and 5.9 meters in diameter together with their hearths, postholes, and the sockets where storage pots had stood. The work made uMgungundlovu one of the best-understood of all Zulu royal sites: a royal capital whose social geography could be read not only from the contested written accounts but from the measured ground. The recovered assemblages — the glass beads, the faunal remains from the isigodlo, the debris of three smithing sites where iron was worked — are curated today by the KwaZulu-Natal Museum, whose chief curator of archaeology, Gavin Whitelaw, has led recent work reconvening the dispersed archive of the excavations. Much of that effort is gathered in the museum’s online exhibition, Pieces of uMgungundlovu, prepared by Justine Wintjes and Whitelaw with the Five Hundred Year Archive, which sets the beads and the bones beside the eyewitness drawings of Dingane’s court. The site now sits within the wider Zulu Kingdom Archaeology Project, which also studies oNdini, the later capital of King Cetshwayo.

For the amaZulu — now some ten to twelve million people, the largest single community in South Africa — uMgungundlovu remains a place of the kings and a name of the nation, whatever the political map has done around it. The modern district municipality that takes in Pietermaritzburg carries the name uMgungundlovu, and the neighboring grave-valley of eMakhosini is honored still in the calendar of the revived monarchy. Reading the site depends on holding the records together and letting none of them silence the others: the missionary-era testimony and the traders’ and travelers’ accounts of Dingane’s court, read for the encounter each of them was; the twentieth-century scholarship on Zulu society, which lets the plan of the place stand as a coherent order rather than a heap of huts; and the excavated ground itself, the beadwork in the floor of the great hut and the cattle bone in the royal enclosure. Set side by side, they return the capital to something like the legibility it was built for — a settlement that a herdsman on the ridge, or a missionary at his station, or an archaeologist with a measuring tape, could each in turn read from above and know at once what kind of place, and whose, it was.

The uMgungundlovu site (Dingaanstat) seen from the viewing tower, looking south — the shallow oval of the great ikhanda scored into the grass. JMK, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The rebuilt indlunkulu (great audience hut) and, to its left, Dingane’s private ilawu, in the black isigodlo of the royal precinct at uMgungundlovu. JMK, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

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