A Host Of People Came South Poem by Gert Strydom

A Host Of People Came South

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According to tradition
at the beginning
of the seventeenth century
the tribes of Zulu, Xhosa,
Swazi and Pondo people
who have a related language
and similar culture
and now live in Southern Africa,

migrated from the north
from a legendary place
they call eMbo
somewhere at the great lakes
in central Africa.

As part of a large group
under command of chief Dlamini
the vanguard under chief Nguni
went ahead and discovered
the rivers and hills of Zululand
splitting away from the host
where they killed the local Bushmen hunters
and a metal working offshoot
of the Karimba tribe
and to them these other people
is nothing more than phantoms
spooking in the cliffs,
the caves and in the reeds
near to the river.

Then the followers of Nguni
divided up into different clans
search for the best valley to settle.

One of these people
was a man named Malandela
and they settled near to a river
that they called the forceful one,
building beehive huts
and on Malandela’s death
his two sons divided
the followers and possessions
between the two of them.

The younger son was named Zulu
which means heaven
and he went with his mother
and followers
to find a place of his own
near a basin in hills
at the Mkhumbane river
and his people planted
a euphorbia tree over his grave
and from then on referred to it
as the place of the great chief
and all the earlier chiefs
except Shaka are buried
in that valley.

Believing that their spirits
and that of Shaka haunts this place
the Zulu army before battle
went to this valley
to pray at ancestral graves
and thundering out the salute:
“Because of us, war.”

COMMENTS OF THE POEM

You seem to have dÓne your research my good sir, I am honored, It comes to my attention that you regard Dlamini older than Nguni, which at some stage contravens the fact that Nguni himself gave birth to Xhosa, Zulu, And Swazi, and Dlamini on the other hand is a descendant of the Swazi people, that at a later stage migrated and scattered themselves to the other to tribes (Xhosa, Swazi) , me (The_African_Son) being one of the youngest generation of the Dlamini descendants, I have always been told by so many elders that, I came from eMbo, however, some speculations rose, and that it came differently that I ended being Xhosa (but Dlamini by birth) because of the fact that a zulu king known as Shaka kaSenzangakhona, attacked almost a large number of sub-tribes that belong under the Swazi nation during the wars of Imfecane, my tribe (the AmaZizi, descendants and sub-tribes of Dlamini) then migrated to the south along the Cape, were there were xhosa people, which is why I enÐed up being Xhosa, I respect the manner in which you know such histoty. Sir Strydom The_African_Son

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Gert Strydom

Gert Strydom

Johannesburg, South Africa
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