[1257] The Birth of Shaka

Guest poem sent in by David McKelvie <david@>

His baby cry
was of a cub
tearing the neck
of the lioness
because he was fatherless.

The gods
boiled his blood
in a clay pot of passion
to course in his veins.

His heart was shaped into an ox shield
to foil every foe.

Ancestors forged
his muscles into
thongs as tough
as water bark
and nerves
as sharp as
syringa thorns.

His eyes were lanterns
that shone from the dark valleys of Zululand
to see white swallows
coming across the sea.
His cry to two assassin brothers:

"Lo! you can kill me
but you'll never rule this land!"

	-- Oswald Mtshali

I found this poem in The Penguin Book of Modern African Poetry. Mtshali is a
South African poet.  I know very little about him, only what the small
biography in the anthology says: born in Natal, South Africa in 1940,
published his first collection in the early 1970's.

I've long had an interest in South Africa because I spent my childhood there
in the 80's. As a white Scottish boy there I was aware of discrimination:
white only benches in parks, black only buses, my parent's identity cards
with lists of various racial types, the gigantic difference in social
conditions. One ridiculous example (almost laughable if it weren't so
shocking) is when a white family ordered their daughter out of a swimming
pool because a black girl got in... One thing I couldn't know, however, was
the anger and rage felt by many black people. This poem gives some sense of
that.

Shaka was a Zulu chief of the 19th Century who built a giant empire in
Southern Africa. He became known in Europe as the Black Napoleon. A lot of
myth and folklore has surrounded his life and that's what this poem builds
on. Shaka was killed by his half brothers. The Zulu empire crumbled soon
after when the British Army turned their attentions to them.

David

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