The Ingoma when sung by twenty or thirty thousand men
rushing down to battle must, indeed, have been a song to
hear.--EDITOR.] The spirit of this fierce Ingoma, conveyed by sound, gesture and
inflection of voice, not the exact words, remember, which are very rude
and simple, leaving much to the imagination, may perhaps be rendered
somewhat as follows. An exact translation into English verse is almost
impossible--at any rate, to me: "Loud on their lips is lying,
Rebels their King defying.
There shall be dead and dying, Red are their eyes with hate;
Lo! where our impis wait
Vengeance insatiate!"
It was early on the morning of the 2nd of December, a cold, miserable
morning that came with wind and driving mist, that I found myself with
the Amawombe at the place known as Endondakusuka, a plain with some
kopjes in it that lies within six miles of the Natal border, from which
it is separated by the Tugela river.
As the orders of the Amawombe were to keep out of the fray if that were
possible, we had taken up a position about a mile to the right of what
proved to be the actual battlefield, choosing as our camping ground
a rising knoll that looked like a huge tumulus, and was fronted at a
distance of about five hundred yards by another smaller knoll. Behind us
stretched bushland, or rather broken land, where mimosa thorns grew in
scattered groups, sloping down to the banks of the Tugela about four
miles away.
Shortly after dawn I was roused from the place where I slept, wrapped
up in some blankets, under a mimosa tree--for, of course, we had no
tents--by a messenger, who said that the Prince Umbelazi and the white
man, John Dunn, wished to see me. I rose and tidied myself as best I
could, since, if I can avoid it, I never like to appear before natives
in a dishevelled condition. I remember that I had just finished brushing
my hair when Umbelazi arrived.
I can see him now, looking a veritable giant in that morning mist.
Indeed, there was something quite unearthly about his appearance as
he arose out of those rolling vapours, such light as there was being
concentrated upon the blade of his big spear, which was well known as
the broadest carried by any warrior in Zululand, and a copper torque he
wore about his throat.
There he stood, rolling his eyes and hugging his kaross around him
because of the cold, and something in his anxious, indeterminate
expression told me at once that he knew himself to be a man in terrible
danger. Just behind him, dark and brooding, his arms folded on
his breast, his eyes fixed upon the ground, looking, to my moved
imagination, like an evil genius, stood the stately and graceful Saduko.
On his left was a young and sturdy white man carrying a rifle and
smoking a pipe, whom I guessed to be John Dunn, a gentleman whom, as it
chanced, I had never met, while behind were a force of Natal Government
Zulus, clad in some kind of uniform and armed with guns, and with them a
number of natives, also from Natal--"kraal Kafirs," who carried stabbing
assegais. One of these led John Dunn's horse.