Faith and Courage

Praying with Mandela

Thabo Makgoba

• Editorial: SPCK Publishing
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780281080601
• Categoría: Teología y religión
• Categoría: Biografías religiosas

We thank you for the inspiration and strength that you have given to Madiba, enabling him, over so many years, to draw out the best in others, rousing us always, by word and example, to seek the highest good for every child of this nation.So prayed Archbishop Thabo Makgoba with Nelson Mandela in his home in 2009, in response to the request of Madiba's wife, Graça Machel. This moment marked the beginning of a moving relationship between southern Africa's Anglican leader and Mandela until his death in 2013.Join Archbishop Makgoba on his journey towards faith - from his boyhood in Alexandra Township, Johannesburg, as the son of a ZCC pastor, to Bishopscourt and spending time with Nelson Mandela. Archbishop Makgoba reveals his pastoral approach to this iconic figure, and writes eloquently about the influence Mandela had on his ministry to church and nation.What was praying with those nearest and dearest to Mandela like? What was Madiba's spirituality? In trying to answer these fascinating questions, Makgoba opens a window on to the spiritual life of South Africa.

1

Makgoba’s Kloof

My ancestral home lies in South Africa’s northernmost province, Limpopo, in a place we call Makgoba’s Kloof. Afrikaans–English dictionaries translate ‘kloof ’ as a ‘gulf’ or ‘ravine, but Makgoba’s Kloof is far more than that – it is a huge slash cutting through the Great Escarpment separ­ating our high-lying interior plateau, the Highveld, from the plains below, the Lowveld. It is best known to travellers by the name ‘Magoebaskloof’, a distortion of our name by the settlers who dispossessed us of our land in the nineteenth century.1 It’s been more than 20 years since our liberation, yet the official names database still calls the area Magoebaskloof. We have approached the South African Geographical Names Council to correct the database formally.

Makgoba’s Kloof is a land of mountains, valleys and rivers falling down the escarpment before they merge with the Great Letaba River, which – after it runs in turn into the Olifants River (the Rio dos Elefantes in Mozambique) – empties into the Indian Ocean. It’s a land of thick, lush riverine vegetation and what geographers call Afromontane forests. And it’s a land of mists: Afrikaners call a nearby mountain Wolkberg (Cloudy Mountain) and travel books call the kloof Valley of the Mists or Land of the Silver Mists, which is how the local tourist industry now markets the area. For travellers today, says Getaway magazine, the ‘Magoebaskloof Pass’, which plunges 558 vertical metres over 6.5 kilometres, is ‘reminiscent of a funfair ride, the series of twisting S-bends and hairpins . . . offering plenty of thrills for motorbikers as well as drivers’.

For me, Makgoba’s Kloof is a land of great joy, but also of great pain. The joy comes not only from its beauty but also from reflecting on our heritage. We Makgobas speak Sepedi, the country’s third biggest indigenous language after isiZulu and isiXhosa. But we don’t draw our primary ancestral identity from the baPedi polity or its powerful nineteenth-century king, Sekhukhune, famed for his resistance to colonial occupation. If you ask me to describe my identity, my reply is that I am South African first and a member of the Tlou clan second. We baTlou, who consider ourselves as quite distinct from baPedi, are named after our totem, which in English means elephant.2 We say that we are from Bolepye, the land in the Letaba Basin where the great elephants roam peacefully. I see myself as moPedi third and as a Makgoba after that.3 The Makgobas have a praise poem, which goes like this:

Ke Makgoba a sefara (Makgoba of the shoot)

A Sefara sa molapong (The shoot of the valley)

Ke Tlou (Elephant)

Tloukgolo ditswa Bolepye (Great elephants from Bolepye)

Bolopye Ba tlhaku di a liwa (Bolepye where there is abundance)

A gee Tlou! (Hail Elephants!)

baTlou intermingled with baTlhalerwa (whose totem is variously described as a wild dog or a leopard), so in the African way, we identify ourselves as being part of this clan too. As happens across the world, identities in our parts are often contested, and some people – notably one of our local historians, Tlou Setumu – use baTlhalerwa as the principal clan name for our most famous ancestor.4 We are also occasionally called baTlokwa or part of baKolobe, said in some accounts once to have belonged to baLobedu ba gaModjadji – the Lobedu people of the fabled nineteenth-century rain queens, all named Modjadji, who lived in seclusion in an area to the north-east of us, and whose magical powers and rain-making abilities were revered by kings across southern Africa. A moLobedu historian says we once owed our allegiance to baLobedu and paid tribute to them.5 For those interested in British imperial history, popular legend has it that the writer Rider Haggard based the mysterious white African queen in his classic novel She (or ‘She-who-must-be-obeyed’) on the second rain queen, Masalanabo Modjadji II. But a recent paper by a British historian seems to debunk this; Haggard is reported to have said that he had never heard of the Lobedu when he wrote his book.6

Early colonial records say that, in the 1750s, baTlou were living about 20 kilometres from Makgoba’s Kloof, over the mountains to the north-west, but that we moved to the kloof in about 1800.7 Going back in time beyond the eighteenth century, a DNA test tells me that I also have Zanzibari and even East European ancestry. This is explained by our clan’s oral history, which says first that over perhaps hundreds of years, our forebears gradually migrated south from East Africa, through Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Botswana, and finally to South Africa. Second, the European genes could well be from missionaries – local folklore is that, apart from trying to convert us, some missionaries were also creating fair-skinned Makgobas, and it is true that some of us are lighter in complexion than others.

Our best-known ancestor is my great-grandfather, Kgoši (King) Mamphoku Makgoba. We have no record of exactly when he was born, but he was living in the kloof in the 1860s and 1870s when the first whites arrived in the area as woodcutters and prospectors for gold.8 Although the first Boer9 trekkers had come north from the Cape to Limpopo and the surrounding provinces in the first half of the century, and established their whites-only republic, the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek (ZAR), in 1852, they were for decades a tiny minority in our area.10 It was only after the British annexed the ZAR in 1877 that Sekhukhune, the most powerful ruler in our part of South Africa, was crushed – with the help of 8,000 Swazi allies. And the Boer republicans began to win control over our territory only after defeating the British in an armed rebellion in 1881.11 The pain of Makgoba’s Kloof begins then. The re-established government of the ZAR in the capital, Pretoria, wanting to attract more white settlers, promulgated a law the name of which is translated as ‘The Occupation Act for State Land’, which allocated land free to farmers, provided they occupied it permanently and were willing to be conscripted for part-time duty as military commandos.12 A year later, a proclamation established the Woodbush Goldfields in the district. Although the gold rush was short-lived, the seizure of land for ‘occupation farms’ and the building of a village for the miners at the top of the kloof opened the way to expanded white settlement.13

Kgoši Makgoba’s resistance to these incursions began in 1888, when beacons were erected to demarcate land for settler use on his territory14 and the ZAR levied taxes on him.15 He ordered his people to destroy the beacons and resisted paying the taxes. A fine was imposed, he refused to pay that too and the local ‘native commissioner’, a Danish settler, jailed him in an ‘iron fort’ on his farm 60 kilometres away. An unusual portable contraption designed by an Austrian-born artillery officer, the fort had walls and a roof made up of armoured plates,16 but it was placed on bare earth, so one night Makgoba simply dug his way out. When his jailers next came to see him, he was gone.

The war against Kgoši Makgoba was finally triggered, in the words of a current-day local historian, Louis Changuion, ‘when the government started applying forced removals in the 1890s’.17 An attempt by the ZAR to recruit more settlers in 1891 to boost the number of armed men to serve in commandos failed to attract more than about 30. Many of those were German – including one by the name of Heinrich Altenroxel. In response to petitions from the settlers, complaining that Pretoria was not offering them enough security, the ZAR tried to round up the people of about eight chiefdoms into what the government called ‘locations’, a word that was used well into the twentieth century by both Boer and British colonizers for the areas to which they confined black South Africans. In 1892 a ZAR ‘location commission’ told baTlou that our clan was too small to have our own location and we had to choose a bigger clan on whose land we would have to live. Makgoba refused, as did other local leaders facing similar ultimatums. In 1892, the chair of the commission said we should be driven out of Makgoba’s Kloof, down to the Lowveld and over the Great Letaba River. ZAR records show that one of Makgoba’s brothers, whom they called ‘Januarie’, appeared before the commission on 5 August 1892, and declared: ‘Makgoba has nothing more to say and he refuses to do what the Commission desires of him.’18

With Makgoba and the baTlou playing a leading role, half a dozen local clans launched attacks on farms, Altenroxel’s among them, driving many ‘occupation farmers’ off the land. The ZAR seriously considered abandoning the district, but after two years of skirmishes, decided to send against us the chief of their army, Commandant General Piet Joubert, a hero of the war that had expelled the British in 1881.19 Joubert sent Kgoši Makgoba an ultimatum on 1 March 1894, telling him to leave the kloof and move across the Letaba by 1 April.20 Makgoba refused. Soon afterwards, other leaders were given similar ultimatums. We won a short respite when Joubert was sent far to the north-west to fight Kgo ̆s i Mmalebôhô of baHananwa, who was accused of not paying taxes to the ZAR and suffered a long siege in a mountain fastness. A month after defeating and jailing Mmalebôhô, Joubert turned his attention to our district.

During August and September 1894, Joubert raised commandos against not only Makgoba but also Modjadji II and a number of the smaller chiefdoms: Mmamatlhola, Maušuti, Mogoboya, Maupa, Tsolobolo and Maphita. He crushed most of them relatively quickly, although Modjadji offered considerable resistance and surrendered finally only after her home had been surrounded. The commandos who rallied against us were twice delayed by rain, but eventually reached Makgoba’s headquarters and razed the village after a fierce fight. But in the words of a 1950s’ government history, ‘this brave and intrepid chief managed to escape in the thick forests’. For months afterwards, Makgoba and his troops launched raids on farms – one of them a farm owned by Altenroxel.21

Having failed to defeat us – and with the summer rains beginning, the commandos needing to return home to plough and dissension growing in their ranks – Joubert had to find another way to contain us. He embarked on a fort-building programme, beginning with two forts and eventually surrounding us with six.22 But, says Louis Changuion, although many attacks were repulsed, ‘the forts did not improve matters’. In April 1895, Joubert convened a war council to plan a campaign against Makgoba, who at this point is described by Changuion as the ‘Lion of the Houtbosberg’ (Woodbush Mountain). Commandos from six districts right across the ZAR were called up. ‘Native commissioners’ from four districts were each instructed to raise a corps of loyal African troops. The State Artillery from Pretoria, made up of full-time professional soldiers as opposed to farmers conscripted into the com­mandos, was summoned. It took nearly three months, from April to June, to raise the force needed.23 By the time Joubert was fully mobilized, he had a force variously estimated by historians as numbering between 800 and 1,000 commandos, supplemented by the State Artillery, and between 3,000 and 6,000 African auxiliaries conscripted under an 1876 ZAR law. A force, therefore, of at least 4,000 was judged necessary to suppress a clan the ZAR authorities believed numbered no more than 500 families, including 250 troops.24 Joubert told a local missionary to warn other African leaders not to support Makgoba, and also to publicize an offer of 30 cattle, plus expenses, to anyone who brought him in, dead or alive. He then summoned representatives of local leaders – including Dikgosi,25 Mmamatlhola and Maušuti – to a ZAR war council on 29 May, where he threatened to remove them from their land if they gave Makgoba or his people any help. From the same war council, Joubert sent Makgoba a final warning, saying that, if he did not give himself up to be dealt with under the law, ‘no quarter or pardon will be granted’. The Dutch translation of what is recorded in the ZAR archives as Makgoba’s reply – written on the back of the envelope carrying...

Índice

• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1 Makgoba’s Kloof
• 2 Alexandra
• 3 Soweto
• 4 Science, politics or theology?
• 5 Into a boiling pot
• 6 Hard graft and gunfire
• 7 Bishopscourt
• 8 ‘Religion is in our blood’
• 9 The quietening years
• 10 Facing the setting sun
• 11 Go forth, revolutionary and loving soul
• 12 Madiba’s legacy
• 13 A young Palestinian on a donkey – reflections for the Anglican Communion
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• Appendix 3
• Appendix 4
• Appendix 5
• Appendix 6
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• Index