BAMBATHA

Bambatha (circa 1865-1906), chief of the Zondi, a small branch of the Zulu people, was the leader of the 1906 Zulu revolt in Natal, also known as the Bambatha rebellion.

The story of Bambatha is the concluding episode in the century-long saga of the royal house founded by Shaka, the first great Zulu king. Bambatha’s exploits were associated, in the public perception, with the receding fortunes of the last Zulu king of note, Dinuzulu. Aged about 15 in 1884, when he gained the accession. Dinuzulu had been hidden for a while in the vastnesses of the Nkandla forests in central Natal, a stronghold from which Bambatha was later, in 1906, to launch his revolt.

Bambatha became chief of the Zondi in 1890. He lived with his followers on white-owned farms in Natal, where they experienced many difficulties with their landlords, who were mostly Afrikaners. By 1895 Bambatha himself had been tried and exonerated for cattle-stealing. Subsequently, between 1901 and 1906, he was involved in 30 separate and financially crippling criminal and civil actions, mostly arising from his failure to pay rent. He acquired a reputation among the whites of Greytown, in south central Natal, of being “Bellicose Bambatha.” In the midst of these troubles, he visited Dinuzulu’s headquarters at Nongoma, leaving his pregnant wife and children there.

In February 1906 two white police officers, who had been enforcing a new poll tax on Zulu males, were killed, it was said on orders from Dinuzulu. There had also been several acts of defiance against magistrates attempting to collect the tax. For the next six weeks the British troops marched through the lands of Africans reported to be defiant or restless, burning crops and dwellings, confiscating cattle, and deposing chiefs. Thus it was that, when Bambatha returned home he discovered that he had been deposed as chief of the Zondi people and replaced by his uncle Magwababa.

In April 1906 Bambatha attacked and captured the new chief, and would have killed him but for the timely intervention of a friend. A few days later using Dinuzulu’s war-cry, Usuthu, to avoid reprisals he ambushed a party of police. He then repaired to the Nkandla forests, from which he issued a call for other chiefs to join him in the “Bambatha Rebellion.” Martial law was declared by the administration in May. Bambatha then pursued guerrilla warfare with some success. But before two of Bambatha’s guerrilla armies could coalesce, they were routed on June 10, 1906 by white troops, and between 3,000 and 4,000 of the rebels, including both leaders and followers, were killed. Bambatha was among them. His head was cut off for purposes of identification. By mid-July, active resistance was over. Only about 24 whites had been killed.

Revolts such as the Bambatha Rebellion throw much light on issues relating to “liberation movements.” They illustrate the various options open to those opposing conquest, ranging from radicalism to accommodation; the determinants for participation or non-participation; the enormous human cost that is often paid for armed uprising; and the momentum that was given, after the suppression of the rebellion, to the alternative of forming western-type political organisations. In the Bambatha Rebellion there were enormous expectations that were linked to the hope that Dinuzulu would sanction the revolt to give it impetus.

Whether he did or did not is not clear. In the aftermath of the rebellion he was, however, charged on 23 counts of treason, and convicted on three of them, involving his association with Bambatha and his family. In November 1908 he was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment. He died in exile in 1913.

Another outcome of the uprising was that in 1912, in consequence of the great suffering which the Africans of Natal had recently undergone, John Dube, who had been sympathetic to Bambatha’s cause, was elected as the first president of the African National Congress. At the same time, Dinuzulu was invited to become honorary vice-president of the Congress, an invitation which, from his exile in the Transvaal, he accepted.

WANDILE F. KUSE