Are We There Yet? (15 page)

A couple of kilometres down the track, half-a-dozen giraffe loped across the road. Improbably long-legged with tapering necks and lithe torsos, their gait has an effortless elegance made all the more beguiling by their mottled complexion. In Afrikaans they are called
kameelperd,
which literally and rather succinctly translates to camel horse.

These seemingly passive giants can make life hell for a hunting cat. Because of their height, the usual feline tactic of leaping onto a prey's hindquarters to knock it to the ground is foolhardy. One well-directed kick can shatter a lion's jaw, thus condemning it to starvation. Instead, the highest degree of pride work is called for. Using stealth and surprise, their tactic is to give the giraffe such a fright that it loses its footing and life in quick succession.

A roadside sign informed me that the exit gate was twenty kilometres away and I was promptly suffused with the same sort of feeling that schoolkids are burdened by on Sunday evenings. I didn't want the experience to end. So rather impulsively I swung the car in the direction from which I had come and made it back to Letaba in time to join a guided bushwalk.

A dozen participants piled into a Land Rover truck and in twenty minutes we were standing by a ramshackle building in the bush which was once used by soldiers running insurgency raids into Mozambique. At ground level Kruger offers a world beyond that which can be viewed from a car. The baked soil seeped heat through my soles as our twentysomething rifle-toting guide Edgar, bearing the understandable smile of a man with the world's best office, lead us across a flood plain. The air buzzed with cicadas; the sharp blades of knee-high grass sliced at my shins, and the ground tremored as a dozen zebra took off in a dust storm after spotting us. They were the only animals we saw before stopping for a lunch of fruit juice and cheese sandwiches – with a side serve of mopani worms. A staple for local tribesfolk, these plump buggers are harvested off the tree that gives them their name, piled into hessian sacks, then dried before being fried with onions and tomatoes. For all intents and purposes, they taste and look like gnocchi.

The second half of the walk delivered more zebra, a smattering of kudu and an up-close view of an animal that has not changed in twenty million years. The white rhino Edgar spotted thirty metres to our left had no clue we were there. Despite assurances that this breed is far more chilled out than its darker, smaller counterpart, it is still a creature of rare menace. It's built like a Humvee complete with armour plating and sports a spike that looks far larger and deadlier in the flesh than it ever could on a TV screen. It is also not white at all – the name stems from a mistranslation of the German word for “wide” which was used to distinguish the shape of its mouth from that of the black rhino. When sufficiently motivated, these animals can hit forty kilometres an hour. No mean feat when you tip the scales at 2300 kilograms.

Shifting his rifle from shoulder to hand, Edgar instructed us to follow as he inched towards the rhino. We had travelled about fifteen metres, roughly one-third the distance between our original viewing point and the animal, when the dweeby Belgian in front of me trod on a twig that snapped with a crack. The rhino swivelled in our direction; his mouthful of grass might have bestowed an almost comical moustache effect were it not for the fact he was wondering whether he should amble away or puree us camera-toting interlopers. The stand-off was as brief as it was thrilling and he lumbered off in the direction of a dry riverbed.

My Kruger experience was now complete. I had seen four of the Big Five (one at ground level), watched the sun rise over multitudinous herds of leaping springbok. My work here was done. Besides, I had a conjurer of storms to track down.

Chapter 7

Long May She Rain

The road northwest to Tzaneen was a grey ribbon that rose and fell gently as if being flicked by the skilled wrist of a rhythmic gymnast. On either side lay dense mopani forest, randomly interrupted by hills comprised of bus-sized boulders that appeared precariously stacked and resembled the Jenga set of the gods.

Troupes of chacma baboons congregated by the side of the road; vervet monkeys leapt between tree limbs, and the low olive hillocks that rose from the savanna grasslands ceded to lusher gradients as I climbed towards the ancestral realm of Modjadji VI, Rain Queen of the Lobedu. Securing an audience with the only female tribal ruler in modern-day South Africa is fraught with challenges. Tribal lore mandates that she dwell deep in a mist-swirled forest on a mountain, ensconced behind foreboding barriers of powerful juju.

The tale of the Modjadji is one of bloodshed, magic and a double dose of incest. The line is descended from the powerful royal house of Monomotapa, which ruled over the Kalanga people in Zimbabwe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Back on a lazy 1589 afternoon when the Internet was down and the cricket had been rained out leaving nothing to watch on TV, one of the tribe's princesses got jiggy with her brother, eventually delivering a child whose father was her uncle. The new dad's half-brothers wanted to kill the baby to stop him from becoming king one day. Wary of having a civil war on his hands, old man Monomotapa gave the child's mother, Dzugundini, a magic horn for making rain and advised her to take the child plus some loyal followers further south to establish a kingdom.

Over the next 200 years the Dzugundini became a substantial tribe. In around 1800 their chief, Mugodo, was warned by the ancestral spirits that his sons were plotting to overthrow him. He killed them all and promptly impregnated his daughter, saying it had been supernaturally decreed that a dynasty of women would be founded as a result.

When she gave birth to a son, the baby was quickly strangled. Her second child, however, was a girl who signalled the inception of the female line. When Mugodo popped his incestuous clogs, the grand-daughter Modjadji became queen.

Modjadji's life was spent in seclusion in the forest where she performed precipitation rituals which were famous throughout Southern Africa. She was called the Rain Queen and supplicants came from far and wide to beg for her moist blessing.

For traditional African societies that based their wealth on cattle, rain was the most precious of commodities, so in a land where storms were sporadic, unpredictable and varied wildly in terms of duration, anyone who could make the sky cry at will wasn't worth getting offside. Even if she was merely a meteorological prodigy who could predict rainfall with sopping accuracy, you wanted her on your team.

The rain queens' powers faded with age and the first few obligingly took their final bow with a poisonous cocktail extracted from the brain and spinal cord of a crocodile. After which their decaying bodies were stored for weeks and water poured over them to create a rain-making potion. As you do.

Practically every chief in the southern half of the continent, including those with an insatiable lust for conquest such as supreme Zulu warrior Shaka, attempted to ingratiate themselves with the early Modjadjis. In times of drought, caravans of gifts were sent up to her village, also called Modjadji. This seat of power undoubtedly appeared all the more mystical thanks to the fact that it is a climatic anomaly. Set on dry slopes above a drier plain, it squeezes enough rain from the clouds blown off the Indian Ocean to maintain a predictable fertility in the midst of barren surroundings.

Interviews with the Rain Queen, which cost around $50 a pop with a further $50 fee tacked on for photographs, could apparently be arranged via a tourist office in Tzaneen. Despite my enthusiasm for a brush with royalty, I took the long way into town through the cool silence of the pine forests of Magoebaskloof which soared towards swathes of cyan sky like tent poles supporting a white-flecked canopy.

The conifer canyons were eventually usurped by mango and peach farms where the trees clung to steep-sided hills and drooped under the weight of pendulous purple fruit.

Tzaneen itself was equally picturesque. Located along a latitude that lent the entire town the kind of lush tropical lustre resorts frequently sport, it gleefully gave the conventional notion of grid town planning the old chuck you farlie by cuddling into the jade hills from which it rose.

At the best of times, wandering into the local tourist office in Tzaneen and requesting an audience with the local regal climate controller was tantamount to tapping a Swiss guard on the puffy shoulder and asking whether JPII was in. What made my timing even worse was that the Lobedu were apparently between queens.

When Modjadji V died of renal failure in 2001, the royal family was faced with a succession crisis the likes of which it had never seen. Only two days earlier her daughter Princess Maria Modjadji had also passed away, with the next in line being twenty-three-year-old grand-daughter Makobo Modjadji. Unseasonable rains fell hard and heavy for days.

It was only after three years of intense tutelage that Queen Modjadji VI's coronation date was announced – roughly a month away from my requested interview date, rendering said chat all but impossible. I was, however, welcome to drive to the royal compound nearby.

The Rain Queen's home was fifty kilometres away down single-lane tracks that skirted the banks of the Molototsi River and climbed into foreboding hills cloaked in vegetation so dark it looked black from a distance. Asphalt yielded to red dust as the road meandered by villages of mud huts topped with corrugated-iron roofs. The sound of my approaching vehicle prompted scatterings of scuff-kneed children who would wave cheerily then put out their hands for coins, yet did little to deter the goats who would blithely wander into the road, oblivious to the fact that I could turn them rapidly into cashmere.

The entrance to the compound was marked by one of those council-built blocks that could be anything from a public toilet to a library. I was told to follow a path up the hill to an information centre. Here the previous queen's coronation throne – a high-backed wooden affair emblazoned with a bush-pig carving – was displayed along with the leopard skin that signified her divine position.

“Any chance of meeting the queen-in-training?” I asked after rousing the woman on duty from a deep desk-draped slumber. She gave me that “I'm afraid not, son” look most frequently seen on parents' faces in response to the question “Is Scamp coming back from dog heaven?” then added I might be interested in wandering around the village.

It was much like any other rural South African shtetl: some brick bungalows, a handful of thatch-crowned ronda-vels, a series of baked-earth pathways, outcrops of flourishing corn and citrus trees, and locals who grinned as they threw a
“Kunjani baba?”
– the local equivalent “Howyagoin mate?” – my way. What set it apart, however, were two rows of wooden staves that formed a columned walkway to the royal compound.

I was about to enter the square from which a power was wielded that brought Africa's fiercest warriors barefoot and on bended knee, clapping their hands in deference and toting gifts so lavish that the Modjadji's domain became known as Lo Bedu, the land of offerings. For a zenith of mysticism, it was thoroughly underwhelming – not least for the fact that most of the villagers seemed to be crowded into an adjoining building watching the local version of
Big Brother.

I struck up a conversation with a teenager in a New York Yankees baseball cap who'd come out for a smoke break and my day brightened dramatically when he offered to introduce me to the lady herself. “You must take a gift,” he added. “R100 will do fine.”

Just as I was retrieving the note from my wallet, an older woman popped her head around a door and unleashed a tirade of venom on my would-be guide that sent him slouching off to the opposite side of the square.

“That boy is a
tsotsi
[thief],” she bellowed, apparently as angry at me for falling for his ruse as she was at him for attempting it. “Besides, Her Royal Highness isn't here. She's gone to the dentist in Pretoria.”

Brilliant.

Before 1996, when a decision was taken to make the Rain Queen more accessible – mostly in the interests of tourism – she was seldom, if ever, seen in public. Even when protocol was relaxed sufficiently to allow the queen to attend important functions, she could still never mingle with guests, no matter how exalted. If the function was in a university hall, for example, she would sit it out in an adjacent building with no more than one or two members of the royal circle to keep her company. Guests would be informed that the queen was present, but they'd never see her.

Still, I shouldn't hold it against Modjadji VI as she had some mighty sandals to fill. Her battleaxe of a predecessor was a formidable figure and everyone from staunchly racist former prime minister PW Botha to Nobel Prize winner FW de Klerk dropped by the kraal to pay their respects.

When Nelson Mandela expressed his desire for some quality time, she not only kept him waiting but apparently demanded a new Lexus and a four-wheel drive as part of the deal. When she eventually relented, he was permitted to address her through an intermediary and could only speak when spoken to. The relationship eventually thawed in the face of the famed Madiba charm, but it was conducted by her rules until the day she died.

With the Rain Queen mystique set to turbo wane, I started off down the mountain in a light drizzle that seemed scheduled to mock my impudence.

Few regions of South Africa can rival this area when it comes to tribal mysticism and my next destination was the heartland of the Lemba tribe, who proudly regard themselves as the Black Jews of South Africa. Intrigued, I had set up an interview with a tribal elder and was directed to the small house a few kilometres out of town.

Arriving at her immaculate single-storey brick house, I was warmly greeted by Dolly Ratsebe, a fifty-something widow who was glad of some daytime company since both of her children were now studying – accountancy and medicine – at universities in Durban and Pretoria.

She greeted me with “Shalom”, followed by hot cups of tea and pound cake, then proceeded to convince me that we were of the same stock. According to their oral tradition, the 70,000-strong Lemba migrated from Judea to southern Africa between 2000 and 3000 years ago. Culturally, the similarities are evident. For a start, all Lemba males are circumcised. Unlike many other tribes, the Lemba refuse to intermarry and refer to outsiders as
wasenshi
(the gentiles). They do not eat pork, fish without scales or any creature prohibited by kosher law. They also never mix milk and meat in accordance with Jewish custom. Furthermore, they will only eat animals ritually slaughtered, and non-Lemba women wishing to marry into the tribe undergo a strict conversion process.

This was all information that Dolly clearly enjoyed sharing but felt compelled to interr upt with questions as to whether or not I was married, the kind of living that could be made through journalism, whether or not my partner was planning to take up what she described as “the way of the chosen people” and perhaps – most tellingly – how frequently I contacted my own mother during this trip to reassure her of my safety. It was as if she was constantly a syllable away from telling me to take a jacket in case.

Until recently the Lemba's claims of Semitic ancestry have been treated with a fair degree of scepticism, but recent DNA testing has strengthened their case. Analysis carried out in South Africa and Britain has found that Lemba males display an unusually high incidence of a particular Y chromosome, the Cohen Modal Haplotype (CMH), which is frequently found among Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews, the two primary groups that emigrated from biblical Judea into the wider world. Although CMH is also found in other Middle Eastern populations, the incidence of this chromosome among Lemba men is 8.8 per cent – similar to that found among Jewish men in general.

Hanging out with Dolly was like taking tea with a long-lost aunt, and burdened by both regret and four slices of cake, I eventually hoisted myself from the armchair and took my leave. As she walked me to my car, Dolly asked how my Hebrew was. I tried to make light of the question by replying that it was on a par with my Lemba, but she was having none of it. Instead, she fixed me with a glance of unspoken disappointment.

The Lemba are not the only remarkable tribe in the region. Over the hill is a sacred lake whose waters are plied by a vengeful python god. The surrounding forest is an ancient chieftain burial ground guarded by a ferocious white lion.

The region is called Venda, which translates as Pleasant Land. It is the traditional home of the VhaVenda people, whose culture incorporates such a phalanx of spirits, gods and lesser sprites that it makes the ancient Egyptians look like dedicated monotheists. So deeply entrenched in water is their belief system that the VhaVenda will not eat any aquatic animal for fear that the rivers will run dry. Perhaps their most revered spiritual rite is the annual ceremony in which a child of the chief is chosen to place an offering on a rock in the sacred lake. A vine is tied to the child and if the offering fails to be accepted by the gods, malevolent water spirits known as
zwidutane
will cut the cord and the child will disappear into the opaque depths. If, however, the offering is accepted, the child walks on water. Sound familiar?

Evil aquatic nymphs aside, the lake is also known to be teeming with crocodiles the length of minibuses. According to the VhaVenda people, the forest that bounds this body of water is also home to the phoenix-like Ndadzi that soars on thunderous wings, carries rain in its beak and shoots lightning bolts from its eyes.

The ancient nature of the land, its inhabitants and their practices imbue the home of Modjadji, the Lemba and the VhaVenda with a spirituality that transcends religion. It simply feels sacred: a sense heightened by the hospitality, kindness and joyful nature of people who live in valleys of infinite charm under bountiful skies.