Nkandla Forest

← Encyclopedia

Under museum glass at Ondini, near Ulundi, lie the weathered timbers of an ox-wagon. It carried a body once. When King Cetshwayo kaMpande died in February 1884, his attendants loaded him onto a wagon and drew him up into the forest to be buried, and by custom the vehicle that bears a king’s corpse is not used again: it was left to stand over the grave and fall apart in the weather. What survived of it was later lifted and taken to the museum near the old capital, where it can be seen. So the two halves of the burial are kept in two places. The forest keeps the king. The museum keeps the cart that brought him. And the forest, unlike the museum, is not a display — it is a working ground, entered on terms, where the timbers still standing are living trees.

The forest and its name

The Nkandla forest cloaks the crown and south-western slopes of a high ridge in the Zululand interior of KwaZulu-Natal, in what is now the King Cetshwayo District. The ground rises between two rivers — the Thukela to the south and the uMhlathuze (Mhlatuze) to the north — to a spine standing roughly 1,100 to 1,300 meters above the sea, and it is high enough and wet enough that cloud settles on it for much of the year. That constant moisture is the making of the place. Some sixteen hundred hectares of climax mist-belt forest hold to the ridge, described by those who manage and study it as one of the most outstanding surviving examples of its kind in South Africa: a rare high, wet forest, thought to lie in a transition zone between mist forest and scarp forest, where high trees stand over a lush understory of tree-ferns and cycads. It sits some fifty-six kilometers north-west of Eshowe, the old colonial seat of Zululand, and about twenty kilometers south of the town of Nkandla, and the reserve that now protects its core is administered by Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife.

The name is a word about the body. In the living etymology it comes from the isiZulu verb ukukhandla — to exhaust, to weary, to wear a person out — and the story told to account for it fixes it on the founder of the kingdom. Shaka kaSenzangakhona, in the telling, came up over the steep hills and broken country of this ridge, and by the time he had climbed them he and his men were spent; he named the place for the fatigue of the climb. The cognate umkhandlu, an assembly of men gathered to deliberate, sits close beside it in the language, and the two senses shadow one another — a place that exhausts the body and a place where men come together. Both belong to the character the tradition gives the forest. It is hard country, not lightly entered, and it is a place of gathering and of counsel.

The forest reaches the record along three tracks at once, and the tradition holds all three without ranking them. There is the name, and the exhaustion it remembers. There is the physical forest — the botanists’ climax mist-belt stand, the reserve on the map, the 1,600 hectares of high wet forest with its rare and endemic plants. And there is the forest as a keeper of kings, which is the sense that has drawn the most to it and that governs how it is approached. The grave of the early ancestor Malandela is placed at Nkandla; the grave of Inkosi Sigananda kaZokufa, of whom more below, is there; and above all the grave of Cetshwayo, the last king of the independent Zulu kingdom, lies in a grove of trees on a ridge within the forest, near the meeting of the Nkunzane and Nsuze streams. Within the tradition the standing timber is less scenery than archive. It is a body of trees that keeps what was entrusted to it, and what was entrusted to it, in 1884, was a king.

The forest is a map of named places as much as a stand of trees. There is Manziphambana, the place where two water streams cross, and there is the ridge above the Mome waterfall where the king was sheltered, and there is the grove itself, set apart within the wider forest and known to those who keep it. The graves are not marked in the way a churchyard marks its dead. They are held in memory and in the charge of the families who tend them, so that the ground reads as significant only to those who already know what it holds — a grove that a stranger would walk through without seeing anything but forest. That the sites are unmarked is not neglect but form. The meaning of the place is carried in the knowing of it and in the observance made to it, not in anything raised over it, and the forest closing seamlessly over its graves is precisely the condition the tradition wants for them.

A dwelling, not empty ground

To the households of the surrounding country the forest has never been vacant land. It has been read, throughout Zulu history, as a dwelling of powers and of the shades — a place of mystery and a stronghold of retreat, a threshold one does not cross casually or for no reason. That reading is not decoration laid over a nature reserve. It follows from what the forest holds. A king’s grave is a place where the ancestors are near, and the near presence of the ancestors is the working center of the Zulu sacred world.

The dead of a line, in that world, do not depart. They become the amadlozi, the ancestral shades — idlozi in the singular — who are brought home after death by the rite of return and installed among the living concerns of the house, abiding at the umsamo, the sacred rear of the dwelling, and about the cattle-byre, present in dreams and in signs, addressed by name and fed with the beer and the beast of offering. What is true of any homestead’s dead is true at a king’s grave on the scale of a nation. Cetshwayo is not, in the reckoning of his people, a historical figure filed under a date. He is a royal shade in the ground where he lies, near and able to hear, and the forest that holds him is therefore a place where the living conduct themselves as they would at any place of the dead — quietly, with permission, without disturbance. The scholarship that set down this understanding at length — Eileen Krige’s The Social System of the Zulus (1936) on the domestic and ancestral order, and Axel-Ivar Berglund’s Zulu Thought-Patterns and Symbolism (1976) on how the shades are held to be present and to speak — treats the bond with the ancestors as the load-bearing structure of the religion rather than as folklore around it. At Nkandla that structure has a specific address. The greatest of the recent royal ancestors abides in a named grove, and the grove is tended for that reason.

The mist that gives the forest its name is itself part of the atmosphere of the sacred. The unbroken damp feeds a world of high canopy and tree-fern and cycad, and among that growth are the medicinal plants that healers gather under custom and with permission. The knowledge of those plants belongs to the izinyanga and the izangoma — the herbalists and the diviners of the ancestors, inyanga and isangoma in the singular, an old and exact distinction of office that colonial writing flattened and slandered under a single contemptuous word. That knowledge is theirs and their calling’s; it is named here only at the distance of the public record, as a fact about what the forest is used for, and not as anything that could be set down as a method. The forest is a pharmacopeia to those authorized to read it, and closed to those who are not. That, too, is part of why it is entered on terms.

The deepest thing the tradition says about Nkandla is the plainest. It keeps a king the way a will is kept — sealed, tended, and not opened. The grave is maintained and it is not excavated. No spade goes into it, by the wish of those who hold it. A visitor comes only with the permission of the inkosi appointed by the royal house, and when permission is given there are observances: intercessions made to the ancestors, praises spoken, the royal salute — Bayete! — raised at the grove. The standing forest is the outward guarantee of the arrangement. So long as it stands, kept and unbroken, what the amaZulu placed in its keeping remains kept.

The forest in the record

For as long as there has been a kingdom, the gorges and dense canopy of Nkandla have been a place the hard-pressed could enter and not easily be followed. The forest was a stronghold and a refuge across the whole span of the kingdom’s history, from Shaka’s time onward, and that role turns from military fact into something more enduring in the person of the last king.

Cetshwayo kaMpande, born about 1826, came to the kingship in 1873 and led the Zulu kingdom through the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 — the great Zulu victory at Isandlwana on 22 January and the burning of the royal capital at Ulundi on 4 July, after which the kingdom was broken into thirteen chiefdoms and the king taken into exile, first to Cape Town and then to London. He was restored to a portion of his country in 1883, but the settlement was unstable and civil war followed. On 21 July 1883 his rival Zibhebhu kaMaphitha, at the head of a mounted force, made a sudden descent on Cetshwayo’s rebuilt capital at oNdini and overran it; among the many killed was Ntshingwayo kaMahole, the commander of Isandlwana. Cetshwayo, wounded, escaped across the White Mfolozi and took refuge in the Nkandla forest, sheltered by Sigananda kaZokufa, the old chief of the amaChube, above the Mome waterfall. On the urging of the British Resident he later came down to Eshowe, and there he died on 8 February 1884, at about fifty-eight. The recorded cause was probably heart failure; a tradition that he was poisoned has attached to his death from the first and the sources note it without being able to settle it.

His people carried him back up to the forest to bury him. The grave lies in a grove of trees within Nkandla, and the broken wagon was left standing on it. Its surviving timbers, as the record has it, were later removed to the Ondini museum near Ulundi, where they remain. From that time the grave has been held under the custodianship of the Shezi family — keepers whose charge descends in the line of Inkosi Sigananda kaZokufa — and it is still kept so. In recent years the responsibility has passed down within the family across generations; the grove is entered only by permission of the chief, and under the protocol of praises and intercessions and the royal salute.

The colonial encounter came back to Nkandla a generation later, and the forest played the same part it had always played. In 1906, when the Natal administration imposed a poll tax and the country rose against it, the rebellion that took its name from the chief Bambatha kaMancinza made the forest its stronghold. Sigananda kaZokufa — by then very old, a man said to be nearing a hundred, and the custodian of the royal grave he had helped dig — sheltered Bambatha and the rebels in the forest he knew. The colonial columns hunted them through the Nkandla country and trapped them in the Mome Gorge on the forest’s flank on 10 June 1906, where Bambatha was killed and the rising broken. Sigananda was taken prisoner in the days that followed and died in captivity, an old man, before any sentence was carried out. Many later read the poll-tax rising and its crushing at Mome as an opening of the long modern struggle, and the record of the rebellion places the forest and its aged custodian at the center of it. The forest that had taken in the wounded king in 1883 took in the last of the old resistance in 1906, and closed over both.

Through the apartheid decades, when the region was made part of the KwaZulu homeland, and after, the forest kept its double character. It became a formally protected reserve — the Nkandla Forest Reserve, its core managed by Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife and logged in the international register of protected areas — and it is valued as a piece of natural heritage in its own right. Some 147 species of bird have been recorded in the forest complex; among its rare plants are critically endangered South African endemics such as Aloe saundersiae and Pachycarpus rostratus, and the canopy shelters endemic butterflies of the KwaZulu-Natal forests, the Karkloof Blue among them. The mist that made it sacred is the same mist that made it botanically singular, and the two claims on it — biodiversity reserve and grave-country — sit on exactly the same ground.

The heritage of the king has drawn its own official attention. The KwaZulu-Natal provincial heritage authority — Amafa, now folded into the province’s heritage agency — has funded markers for the sites of Cetshwayo’s death and his grave, and press reporting has periodically pressed the state over the neglect of a king’s resting place and the plainness of its keeping. But the essential arrangement has not been altered by any of it. The grave is not a monument raised to be looked at; it is a tended grove entered under protocol. The Shezi custodians still require a visitor’s permission from the inkosi, and the observances are still made. The forest is not managed the way the older royal grave-country to the north-west is managed — the valley of eMakhosini, where the ancestor-kings of the line lie and where a heritage park and a UNESCO bid now frame the graves — but the principle is the same in both places: the kings are left where they lie, and tended, and not dug up.

What the forest is, in the present tense, is two things that do not cancel. It is a reserve of rare mist-belt forest, mapped and studied and protected. And it is a working site of Zulu memory, where the last king of the independent kingdom lies among living trees, addressed as a shade who can still hear, kept by a family whose charge is to keep him. The cart that carried him is behind glass, finished, a thing that happened. The forest that received him is none of those things. It is standing, and wet, and closed except by leave, and the king it took in is, to those who keep his grave, still there.

King Cetshwayo kaMpande (born c. 1826, died at Eshowe 8 February 1884), photographed by Alexander Bassano in London during his 1882 visit to Britain; his attendants carried his body up into the Nkandla forest for burial. Alexander Bassano, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

→ Related: Unkulunkulu · Umvelinqangi · Nomkhubulwane · Amadlozi · Inkanyamba · Emakhosini · Mgungundlovu · Howick Falls · The Zulu · The Sangomas · Uhlanga