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Sekhukhune was known for building up the Pedi kingdom through his cunning and tenacity against the Boer and English settlers, writes Michael Morris.
Cape Town - Southern Africa was a rough neighbourhood in the late 1800s and the life and fate of Sekhukhune - perhaps one of the least acknowledged kings of the region of the time - is a grim confirmation of the costs.
He was neither saint nor man of peace, having forcefully seized power at the death of his father, King Sekwati, at the expense of the legitimate heir, his half-brother Mampuru, underlining his resolve by having umpteen of Mampuru’s councillors murdered.
But he is acknowledged as having built up the Pedi kingdom, incorporating other societies through conquest and marriage, and defending his realm with single-minded cunning and tenacity. If he was, by descent, an illegitimate ruler to begin with, he won his legitimacy through power and his will to exert it.
There is some irony in the fact that while he spent much of his life and energy fighting the mounting depredations of settler and colonial expansion - Boer and British arms and administration, along with the, in his view, doubtful virtues of Christian missionary zeal - it was colonial justice that avenged his death by murder under the orders of his aggrieved brother, Mampuru, who was hanged for his trouble in Pretoria in 1883. Pretoria Central Prison was named after Mampuru in 2013.
Sekhukhune was born Masile, probably in 1810, at Mogokgomeng on the Thubatse (Steelpoort) River. He had a taste of regional upheaval as a teenager when, over four years from the late 1820s, his father, Sekwati, was harried by Mzilikazi’s impis.
Two decades later, he gained the name by which he is best known when, with his father’s forces besieged by Boer attackers in 1852 and deprived of access to water, Masile led a party of women under Boer fire to fetch water from the river. Sekhukhune is derived from the Pedi verb “khukhuna”, to creep. As he gained in stature, however, and grasped power at his father’s death in 1861, it was clear there was nothing supine in his character.
With considerable foresight, he encouraged Bapedi men to seek work on the mines, and even in far-away Port Elizabeth, the earnings being taxed to enable Sekhukhune to buy more cattle and enlarge the kingdom’s wealth, but also to buy guns from the Portuguese in Delagoa Bay.
Bapedi relations with their Transvaal neighbours, initially amicable, and defined by the terms of a treaty Sekwati had signed, deteriorated from the late 1860s over conflicts about land and taxes. Tension was heightened by the alliance the Boers forged with the Swazis, rivals for resources with the Pedi kingdom. A boundary dispute led to the first major Boer-Pedi clash (Swazis, led by Mampuru, siding with the Transvaal) in 1876, which Sekhukhune notched up as a victory.
More conflict was to come. The Transvaal left the defence of the border to a mercenary outfit, the Lydenberg Volunteer Corps, commanded by a German, Conrad von Schlickmann (killed later that year in a Pedi ambush).
Sekhukhune, reportedly anxious about the approaching sowing season, sued for peace, and a treaty with the Transvaal was concluded in February 1877. He remained defiantly truculent, refusing to hand over 2 000 head of cattle as the treaty dictated, and even refuted the idea he had signed any treaty of subservience. If that spelled trouble, however, it would be larger events that would impinge on the Pedi king, as much as on the Transvaalers.
It is no coincidence that Sekhukhune’s fate matched Zulu king Cetshwayo’s, and at much the same time. For both kings, the precursor was Britain's interest in fashioning a confederation of southern African states, and forcing the issue if need be, which it did without much ado, though at initial humiliating cost, in Natal in 1879.
In Sekhukhune’s case, the first target of British ambitions in the region was the Transvaal republic itself. Senior colonial official Theophilus Shepstone, a long-time holder of various posts in the area of “native affairs”, was given a special commission by secretary of state for the colonies Lord Carnarvon in late 1876 to explore the possibility of annexing the Transvaal.
This he did in a doubtless tense round of talks with the Boers in Pretoria between January and April the next year.
In what is held to have been a premature move, Shepstone, backed by 25 mounted policemen, proclaimed the annexation on April 12, 1877. It has been suggested the republican government’s failure to subdue Sekhukhune was considered by Shepstone a prime risk to the region, and one of the factors that prompted his annexation proclamation.
One result, as Wikipedia notes, was that it “(fomented) a sense of national consciousness in the Transvaal which years of fractious independence had failed to elicit”. It led to the First Boer War, which ended in 1881 with the second humiliation of Imperial forces in South Africa in three years, the first being Isandlwana.
What mattered for Sekhukhune in 1877 was that the annexation brought Sir Garnet Wolseley to the Transvaal as the new governor and high commissioner (he also covered Natal). In the Zulu case, the razing of Ulundi in July 1879 and the subsequent capture of Cetshwayo cleared the way for Wolseley’s splitting the kingdom into 13 chiefdoms.
In the Transvaal, Wolseley lost no time in tackling the Pedi realm. In late November 1879, he led an army of 8 000 Swazis and two British regiments against Sekhukhune who, like Cetshwayo, managed to escape the battlefield, but was captured days later.
He was imprisoned in Pretoria, and evidently spent some time (before his release by President Paul Kruger in 1881) at the castle in Cape Town.
The British appointed his half-brother, Mampuru, as chief over the subjugated Bapedi.
Matters came full circle for Sekhukhune in 1882, when, while living in the small kraal of Manoge on the western slopes of the Lulu Mountains, he was stabbed to death one night in the second week of August under Mampuru’s orders.
A lasting portrait of Sekhukhune is left by Major DR Hunt, who was a Native Commissioner in “Sekukuniland”. The king’s death, he wrote, “was violent just as his life had been”.
Describing the king as “a thin, fierce-looking man”, he noted: “As a child he had seen the Matabele invasion; he had been with his father Sekwati in the northern Transvaal and had known no peace during those four years; neither did he find peace when his father returned to Sekukuniland. He first shows up as a leader when a young man at Phiring, and his seizure of the chieftainship at Mosega is typical of his energy, resource and cunning.”
Finally, Hunt wrote: “His struggle against the rising tide of White occupation and rule was as hopeless as, in those days, it was inevitable.”
* A statue of Sekhukhune, along with statues of early Cape interpreter and resistance leader Doman, and kings Cetshwayo and Langalibalele will be unveiled at the Castle next month as part of the 350th anniversary of the stone fort's construction.
Cape Argus